Robert Lewis Dabney

“ But now, when the negro is grasping political equality, when he is no longer an inferior and in servitude, when his temper is assuming and impudent in many cases, when in many sections he outnumbers the whites, it becomes both Church and civil society to guard this danger with tenfold as much jealousy as when they were our servants.
Are we then shut up by principle to this most repugnant thing? Do the Bible and our standards require us in consistency to introduce black men into all our Church courts as our equals, and as spiritual rulers of the laity of the superior race? ”

“ Domestic servitude, as we define and defend it, is but civil government in one of its forms. All government is restraint; and this is but one form of restraint. As long as man is a sinner, and his will perverted, restraint is righteous. We are sick of that arrogant and profane cant, which asserts man's 'capacity for self-government' as a universal proposition; which represents human nature as so good, and democratic government as so potent, that it is a sort of miraculous panacea, sufficient to repair all the disorders of man's condition. ”

“ Upon Colonel Baldwin's portraying the sentiments which prevailed among the majority there, Lincoln said querulously: "Yes! your Virginia people are good Unionists, but it is always with an if! I don't like that sort of Unionism." Colonel Baldwin firmly and respectfully explained, that in one sense no freeman could be more than a conditional Union man, for the value of the Union was in that equitable and beneficent Constitution on which it was founded, and if this were lost, "Union" might become but another name for mischievous oppression. ”

“ And, if it shall appear that this Africanizing of our Church is not duty, then, how wretchedly untimely is the policy of fixing the odium of it on Presbyterianism, at this time, of all others, when the whole American people are so manifestly beginning to array themselves on the issue between the white man's party and black man's party when this one issue is so completely absorbing all others; when the party of the white man's supremacy is gathering in such resistless might, and is so surely destined ultimately to sweep its opponents out of existence. ”

“ It is a plausible ground of opposition to slavery, to charge it with the guilt of the slave trade. It is argued that unless we are willing to justify the capture of free and innocent men, on their own soil, and their reduction from freedom to slavery, with all the enormous injustice and cruelty of the African slave trade, we must acknowledge that the title of the Southern master to his slave at this day is unrighteous; that a system which had its origin in wrong cannot become right by the lapse of time ”

“ Lincoln's administration chose to regard as the heresy of secession! The Government would still hold the Union and the Constitution as perpetual, and the separate attitude of the seceded States as temporary, while it relied upon moderation, justice, self-interest of the Southern people, and the potent mediation of the border States to terminate it. "Only give this assurance to the country, in a proclamation of five lines," said Colonel Baldwin, and we pledge ourselves that Virginia (and with her the border States) will stand by you as though you were our own Washington. ”

“ For this would be equivalent to saying, that the religious consciousness of a negro, because he is a negro, is a so much truer vehicle of the mind of the Spirit, than that of a white man, that the assumption of any black candidate for the ministry is better entitled to credit as the voice of the Spirit, than the refusal of a whole church of educated, pious, enlightened, white Presbyterians. The force of abolition frensy could no farther go. No, sir, there is no adequate proof of God's call, until the church freely recognizes and seconds it. ”

“ Any such thing as a privileged class in the State is a fraud upon the others; for "all men are equal." The limitation of the right of suffrage, by property or sex, is a crime against human right; for the non-voting classes are ruled without their own consent; but consent is, according to them, the source of rightful authority. Thus are condemned at once the three branches of the hoary and honoured British constitution, kings, lords, and commons; under which men have enjoyed regulated liberty longer, and to a greater degree, than under any government on earth. ”

“ It is high time now that the government were revolutionized and consolidated, and these irksome 'States' rights' wiped out. We need a strong government to dispense much wealth and power, to its adherents; we want permanently high tariffs, to make the South tributary to the North; and now these Southern fellows are giving us precisely the opportunity we want to do all this, and shall Seward sing his silly song of the necessity of avoiding war? War is the very thing we should hail! ”

“ They know that where the ruling mob is, there must be the demagogue; even as the vulture comes where the carcass is; and they know the bottomless subserviency of the demagogue. They understand the ever increasing assumption of the negro's character, growing by its indulgence. Hence the safe calculation, that when once political equality is confirmed to the blacks, every influence will tend towards that other consummation, social equality, which they will be so keen to demand, and their demagogues so ready to grant, as the price of their votes. ”

“ In defending her, I have virtually defended the whole South, of which she was the type; for the differences between her slave institutions and theirs were in no respect essential.
The most fearful consequence of the despotic government to which the South is now subjected, is not the plundering of our goods, nor the abridgment of privileges, nor the death of innocent men, but the degrading and debauching of the moral sensibilities and principles of the helpless victims. The weapon of arbitrary rulers is physical force; the shield of its victims is usually evasion and duplicity. ”

“ Now, by what right can any man, black or white, assume that he is unquestionably commissioned of God to teach and rule in this church, when this church distinctly demurs that her God, whose Spirit is as much in her heart as in the man most certainly called, has not prompted her to accept and prefer that particular man's teaching? By what right will any man on this floor assume that the body of our pious and enlightened laity has rejected God's voice in this thing, and has wickedly mistaken an old caste prejudice for a scriptural disqualification ”

“ For it is a covenant; but a covenant broken by one party is broken for both. Now, who believes that a single unconstitutional act of the ruler voids the whole allegiance of the aggrieved citizen? Where would be the government which would not be plunged into anarchy?
Last, all commonwealths have found it necessary to arm the magistrate with some powers, which individuals could not have conferred by a social compact, because they never possessed them. One of these is the power of life and death. No man's life is his own: it belongs to God alone. One cannot bargain away what is not his own. ”

“ It is enough for us to place ourselves on this impregnable stand; that the relation of master and slave is recognized as lawful in itself by a sound philosophy, and above all, by the Word of God. It is enough for us to say (what is capable of overwhelming demonstration) that for the African race, such as Providence has made it, and where He has placed it in America, slavery was the righteous, the best, yea, the only tolerable relation. Whether it would be wise or just for other States to introduce it, we need not argue. ”

“ It is a result which, we well know, the astute architects of our ruin clearly foresee and intend; and for the procuring of which they provide, when they implore the political equality of the negro, with a cunning inspired by their own master, the devil. They know mankind, in its weaknesses and baseness. They have measured accurately the degrading effects of subjugation, of poverty, of grinding oppression, of despair, upon a people once chivalrous. ”

“ Is it wonderful that the industry of a people thus swindled and plundered should languish? Who does not know the power of abundant capital, and especially of ready money, in stimulating enterprise and facilitating industry? Yet, under all this incubus the South has more than kept pace with its rapacious partner. When, therefore, the Yankee abolitionist points to any unfavourable contrasts in our condition, as evidence of the evil of slavery, he adds insult to falsehood: his own injustice has created the misfortune with which he taunts us, so far as that misfortune exists at all. ”

“ The Northern States have been "all things by turns, and nothing long," save that they have been ever steady in their devotion to their plans of legislative plunder. The South has been a stranger to mobs, rebellions, and fanaticism. When, for instance, the wicked crotchet of Know-nothingism was invented, it seized the brains of the North like an infection. It carried all before it until it came to Virginia, the first of the Southern States which it essayed to enter, when the old Commonwealth quietly arose and placed her foot upon its neck, and the monster expired at once. ”

“ And the same government is to-day avouching every word of the above argument, by justifying itself, from a pretended political necessity, for placing the white race of the South under a much stricter bondage than that formerly borne by the negroes; a bondage which places not only labour and property, but life, at the irresponsible will of the masters. If slavery is wrong, then the abolitionists are the greatest sinners; for they have turned their own brethren into a nation of slaves. ”

“ It may be asked: "When you claim that slavery is literally and simply a righteous relation, in itself, if it be not perverted and abused; do you mean that this is the normal and perfect relation for the labouring man; that this is to be the fullest and most blessed social development of Christianity: that it ought to subsist in the best states of Christian society, and will endure even in the millennium?" We reply, that one uniform effect of Christianity on slavery, has been to ameliorate it, to remove its perversions and abuses, just as it does those of the other lawful relations among men ”