Let there be no misunderstanding of The Confederacy, and its claim to State's Rights. The Confederate States Rights to what? The Confederacy embraced Civil War to maintain their right to make slaves of people of Africa and African descent; and with that the right to rule their entire lives, including their minds, their bodies, their children, and their perpetual future on this planet. Slavery was an incredibly profitable and thereby power supporting institution.
The free use of the labor, skill and talent of a people, and the right to physically and mentally brutalize and terrorize them from babe's to the aged, was the foundation on which the Confederate South, and the economy of our Western world was built. Insurance companies and slavers prospered on the insuring of the slave cargoes; and one could trade on slave futures in the stock markets of London. Millions of slaves produced the cotton, the tobacco, the rice and New England built and prospered from the slave ships that sailed to the African coast, decimating generations of vibrant communities, squeezing off their life force to the future.
As a primary resource on the Confederacy's protection of their prosperous institution, I give you the words of South Carolina's Senator James Henry Hammond, who delivered to the U.S. Senate,
March 4, 1858, his infamous "Mudsill" speech.
Speech by Senator James Henry Hammond to the U.S. Senate, March 4, 1858
"In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. That is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill. Its requisites are vigor, docility, fidelity. Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement. It constitutes the very mud-sill of society and of political government; and you might as well attempt to build a house in the air, as to build either the one or the other, except on this mud-sill. Fortunately for the South, she found a race adapted to that purpose to her hand. A race inferior to her own, but eminently qualified in temper, in vigor, in docility, in capacity to stand the climate, to answer all her purposes. We use them for our purpose, and call them slaves. We found them slaves by the common "consent of mankind," which, according to Cicero, "lex naturae est." [ full document on PBS online Africans in America]
"We do not think that whites should be slaves either by law or necessity. Our slaves are black, of another and inferior race. The status in which we have placed them is an elevation. They are elevated from the condition in which God first created them, by being made our slaves. None of that race on the whole face of the globe can be compared with the slaves of the South. They are happy, content, unaspiring, and utterly incapable, from intellectual weakness, ever to give us any trouble by their aspirations." [Hammond, full document on PBS online Africans in America]
Today, Hammond's perspective on the purpose, abilities and inferiority of people of African descent manifest themselves in various forms: bloody terrorism, daily overt or covert behaviors, institutionalized racism, a walk in the street, a church or a coffee shop, corporate headquarters, the arts world, the music world, the Internet, the playground, the classroom, a quiet moment with family. From cradle to the end, Hammond's words are with us. The subtle and barely veiled irritation,anger and doubt when African Americans break through Hammond's pronouncement of the inferiority of Black people flow around us daily. The faux political analyses and code-word-encrusted speeches insulting our current President of the United States of America's accomplishments for the country have Hammond resting in the commas and the headlines.
Our society, including governments and mainstream mass media( theoretically run by "educated" people) spent the immediate moments and days after the murder of 9 human beings in a prayer service of the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina on June 17, 2015, discussing whether the murder was or was not "terrorism" and what the institution- of- slavery-defending Confederacy's Confederate flag really represents.
It is more than just the Confederate flag in question here.
Stay tuned... the Confederate leaders were not ashamed to write down their thoughts. I will be sharing them with you. Maybe there are many healing by "forgiving," but we the people must never forget.
