Yep, We Wanted to Destroy Your Way of Life

I just had the delightful experience of reading an essay about antebellum (white, male) Southern ideology. Specifically this article tried to link the inegalitarian pro-slavery ideology with the more broadly inegalitarian philosophy of Southern life as a whole, particularly as it related to women. In the course of the article you really get a sense of how repulsive this culture was. I particularly love the quotes from Southern politicians talking about how abolition of slavery would just be the thin end of the wedge, and once the North had managed that change they'd soon destroy all of the relationships upon which a proper Christian-republican society rested. The Northerners weren't just coming for slavery, they warned, they were coming for the entire Southern way of hierarchical life.

Yep! Or, if we weren't then, we certainly should've been and are now. The antebellum Southern social structure sucked! In many ways and on many levels! Millions upon millions of people were treated like dirt, and if not, it's because I'm being unfair to the way we treat dirt. The oppressive nature of marriage in the antebellum South needed abolishing every bit as much as slavery. So did the oppressive nature of parenting. It was just an oppressive sort of place. Southern society, at least insofar as it was defined by that oppression (and I think it was defined pretty far by that oppression), needed to be destroyed wholesale.



Oh, and as an aside, the way these antebellum Southerners talked about defending their way of life against liberal reformers is identical to the way modern conservatives talk about the same thing. At the very least if you take them at their word, modern right-wingers don't actually want to return American public policy to an antebellum state, and I think I'm prepared to give them credit for not actually wanting to reinstate racial slavery. Maybe I'll even admit that many do not even want to negate the 15th or 19th Amendments, even in their heart of hearts, although I bet quite a few do, since they keep trying to disenfranchise as many people in left-wing demographic groups as possible without saying that's what they're doing. But the general culture of hierarchicalism, where the right kind of person is enshrined as a master class and the wrong kinds of people are subordinate in some way or another, is something they very much want to defend and restore. The Civil War is not over year.