History of Slavery Part 2

Two features of the Democratic apologia for the plantation stand out to distinguish this mode of thinking from anything that came before. First, slavery was defended not as a necessary evil but rather as a “positive good.” Typical of this rhetoric is Democratic congressman James Henry Hammond’s 1936 speech in Congress: “Sir, I do firmly believe, that domestic slavery, regulated as ours is, produces the highest toned, the purest, best organization of society that has ever existed on the face of the earth.”

Hammond and others insisted that slavery was not only good for the master, but also for the slave. Slaves were happier under slavery that they would have been as free laborers. The Democratic propagandist George Fitzhugh—who remarkably enough regarded himself a socialist—declared slavery so good for the slaves that he thought it might be worth trying not just on blacks but also on whites and all laborers worldwide. The sheer audacity of these claims is worth noting. No previous slave community dared say such things. Evil as the Nazis were, they didn’t have the chutzpah to claim that what they did to the Jews was somehow good for the Jews.

Second, leading Democrats rejected the principles of the founding, including the Declaration of Independence. According to Democratic senator John C. Calhoun, founding documents like the Declaration provided “an utterly false view of the subordinate relation of the black to the white race,” and his fellow Southerners like Jefferson should be blamed for “admitting so great an error” into the South, which was now suffering its “poisonous fruits.” Needless to say, Calhoun’s defense of slavery was constructed on the premise of white supremacy.

Calhoun acknowledged that the mood in the South fostered by the Democratic Party in the nineteenth century was quite different from what it had been in the founding era. “Many in the South once believed that it was a moral and political evil; that folly and delusion are gone; we see it now in its true light, and regard it as the most safe and stable basis for free institutions in the world.”

The Democrats were the majority party in the Jacksonian era. Yet it took more than Southern Democrats to defend the plantation; the Northern Democrats too did their part. Through their leader Stephen Douglas, they concocted a second, entirely independent pro-slavery philosophy, one equally imbued with racism and one that identified the cause of slavery with the cause of democracy itself. This was Douglas’ doctrine of “popular sovereignty.”

Working in concert, the Northern and Southern Democrats didn’t merely secure slavery and fight for its expansion into the territories. The pro-slavery ideologies of the Democratic Party made slavery seem, morally and politically, beyond reproach. Thus in the wake of mounting political criticism of the plantation, these ideologies produced a political intransigence in the planter class that led to—indeed caused—the Civil War.

Source: Death of a Nation: Plantation Politics and the Making of the Democratic Party (2018) by Dinesh D'Souza.