Lee's Young Artillerist

[Al Mackey]

New review.

https://studycivilwar.wordpress.com/2019/07/14/lees-young-artillerist/

 

[jgoodguy]

New review.

https://studycivilwar.wordpress.com/2019/07/14/lees-young-artillerist/

I wish I had more time to do justice to your posts.  I like this one particularly because of its description of how the ideology of slavery was ingrained in Southern Society. 

IMHO it one thing to say slavery was the motivation of Southern Secession and War.  Another to understand the underlying motivations. 

Religion justified White superiority over blacks and justified their enslavement. 

his fine book is Peter Carmichael’s first book and is a biography of William Ransom Johnson Pegram. Professor Carmichael tells us, “Pegram’s view of the Old South and the Confederacy as a religious society reflects his allegiance to the ethos of the planter class. Prominent theologians and secular thinkers alike had constructed a Christian defense of slavery as an extension of the master class’s ideology. Religious leaders offered a broader scriptural interpretation of society that emphasized human inequality between master and slave as part of a greater social hierarchy visible among all people–parent and child, man and woman, rich and poor. Support of slavery was thus viewed as a Christian duty for all white Southerners, and slaveholders duly used this Christian philosophy to justify governing their inferiors on the theory of mutual obligation. Not surprisingly, theologians and ministers exerted a tremendous influence on the everyday lives of Southerners.

Even members of the intellectual community took their religion seriously and recognized the importance of interpreting the South as a divinely sanctioned society. Professors, college presidents, academy principals, and teachers offered a defense of slavery and the South’s social relations that transcended class and religious divisions among Southerners. … Southern divines and moral and social philosophers defended slavery in terms of an ideological war with the North. The religious instruction he received from Charles F. E. Minnigerode at Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church in Richmond, coupled with the teachings of Albert T. Bledsoe and James P. Holcombe at the University of Virginia, influential defenders of slavery who warned of the evils of free labor and the rise of bourgeois democracy, must have contributed to Pegram’s hierarchical worldview and his belief in the moral superiority of his society.” [pp. 1-2]

[font=Bitter, Georgia,]Pegram not only rejected free labor, but in addition, he “looked upon the sizeable [sic] immigrant population in the North with disgust, fearing they had attained too much influence within the political system.”[p. 2] Pegram was virulently anti-foreigner. “Foreigners had polluted the North, Pegram claimed, and were ruled by men who represented ideas antithetical to the Southern way of life. After the Republicans seized the presidency in 1860, for example, Pegram described the vice president-elect, Hannibal Hamlin, as half-black and Congress as a body ruled by Germans. … Pegram accordingly saw the Republican party a menace to Southern rights and considered their designs against slavery in the territories as promoting radical change in the social, political, and moral order of the country.” [p. 3][/font]