The Republicans: Southern Democrats Then and Today


As Donald Trump completes his nomination for the Republican party, a common consensus among pundits is that this is the death of the party of Lincoln. These five articles are dedicated to the idea that the Republican party in 2015, or even in 1960, had long abandoned the principles of Lincoln's Presidency. Though I admit this last one, number five, has very little to do with Lincoln.

The first article examined the transforming Republican Party Platform from 1860 to 1944.

The second article considered three crucial components of Lincoln's political philosophy, only hinted at in the 1860 party platform.

The third article briefly investigated the true inheritors of Lincoln's ideas, with a focus on Theodore Roosevelt.

The fourth article, returned to the era of the Civil War to evaluate the successes and failures of the Radical Republicans.

This fifth and final article in the series will look at the Southern Democrats and slavery.

In the Southern States of 1860, owning slaves was a fact of life, just as a family owning two cars is today. Of course, that doesn't mean that one-hundred percent of southerners owned a slave, just as not all American families own two cars.

To clarify, in the States of the Confederacy, (SC, GA, AL, MS, LA, TX, FL, VA, NC, TN, AR ), nearly one third of households owned at least one slave. This is, admittedly, only about half the amount of families in the United States that own two cars (57%), but both are (or were) important in their time.

While two thirds of white southerners did not own slaves, those who did were often the elite members of society. Slavery brought comfort, prestige, and greater economic opportunity for the master and his family. To own a slave was to expand ones production at a minimal cost. For this reason, slavery was a more efficient investment than almost any other, including railway bonds. Economists estimate that each slave generated a roughly thirteen percent return, which surpasses railway investment in 1860 (six percent). If slavery still existed, one would have made a larger profit in it, than investing in the United States stock market from 1950 to 2009. In those years an average investor earned roughly seven percent including inflation.

Owning a slave demonstrated to the community the owner's wealth and increased their standing. To own a slave, for those who meant to take full value of their investment by providing proper clothing, shelter, and sustenance, meant that one had to be able to provide for the slave. Once the owning and the maintaining were begun, then the master would have access to economic advancement, and if successful and ambitious, an expanding workforce of slaves. This would then require land, if land was not already owned, and the owning of more land would further expand the prestige of the owner.

But of course, the horror of enslaving a person and the atrocities beyond merely owning, convinced enough citizens to bring slavery to an end. Today, except for a small collection of fanatics (whose numbers seemed to have swelled in parallel to Donald Trump's success in the Republican Primary) the citizens of the United States view the history of slavery with disgust. More than disgust, it is seen as a terrible aberration, a horrible mistake that couldn't be repeated by a more civilized people.

In reviewing slavery, there are quite a few different ways to approach the numbers. As mentioned about almost one third of families in rebellion owned slaves, but since the white population of the South was five million, and the Northern population was twenty-three million (including slave owners in the border states), the total of slave owners was only about five to eight percent of all families. This does not even approach the amount of families in 2016 that own two cars (fifty-seven percent), a computer (probably high eighties, low nineties), but is near to the percent of adults that fly in a year (thirty-nine).

These numbers are relevant, because just as the people of 2016 look back on the 1860's with the profound disbelief that people could justify owning other people, the people of fifty or a hundred years from now may well look back on the early 2000's and be horrified of the enslavement that we enacted. Perhaps you're surprised. On consideration it may be possible to remember something from the news. But, this isn't about the lack of proper wages in the United States, or the near-slavery of Asian manufacturing from which Americans buy their consumer goods, or even sexual exploitation by illegal industries around the globe.

It's about how humanity has decided that the Earth is an object to conquer, subdue, and consume. Perhaps someone out there is rolling their eyes. Everyone's heard it before, but it is true. In the pursuit of the same prestige, wealth, and comfort of the Southern slave owner, most of the members of our society (myself included), are part of the conquest of the world. This isn't about some emotional nostalgia, some attempt to protect some cute chimpanzee in some distant forest, but about how we perceive the world, and also how future generations will evaluate us.

The human race is currently dedicated to one proposition. All the land is ours, and we'll use it for three purposes: to house people, to produce food, and to create gadgets and energy to power them. Almost all human use of land fits into these three categories. The first two are obviously intertwined. There needs to be space for humanity to live, and food for those people to eat. If land is not being used for either of these purposes, it is because it is unsuitable for them or people haven't gotten to it yet. As soon as a solution if found, a method by which to transform unproductive soil to a garden, it will happen. Since the ancient agricultural revolution began, humanity has never failed to expand, and to produce more food to support expansion. In the same manner, since the Industrial Revolution, humanity has never failed to produce more goods and enough energy to power them.

In its tri-part effort, humanity has devoured resources, destroyed habitats, and altered entire global systems of regulation that have kept the biosphere functioning for a few billion years.

Future generations will rightly judge us to be as societally selfish as the slave owner of 1860, but they will wrongly indict us as individually callous and wanton. We see about us all the incredible advancements of the last hundred years (we often forget how amazing they are), and are surrounded by them. How, we ask, can we deny them to ourselves, especially when the destructive effects are so individually minuscule and distant?

The question was the same for the men and women of the Confederacy in 1860. How could they deny themselves the benefits of slavery, when everywhere their society embraced it?

The answer is to propel the United States out of its destructive culture and into a sustainable future. But this requires a new, unlooked for solution.

And if we don't discover this solution in time, though there may still be many years, the failure may make the Civil War look reasonable in comparison.

I hope you have enjoyed this series. The series on the Republicans is over, but if you are just joining us - you're looking for the exit - but short of that you can read the previous four articles below.

The Republicans Series:

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Comments

  1. Great series, and very thoughtful. I think you did a nice job tying together historical and present day themes, it was well researched and written.

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