God and the American Writer by Alfred Kazin

Author:Alfred Kazin [Kazin, Alfred]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8041-5122-1
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-09-18T00:00:00+00:00

Of course such moral sloth in the upper class of New York City (no dependable friend to the Union during the Civil War) was nothing compared with the positive violence of Southern opinion when it did not defend slavery by Scripture. George Fitzhugh, the bellicose Virginia lawyer who thought slavery would be easier on white workers than laissez-faire, was demonstrably race-mad. He explained that the Puritans in the North were descended from Saxon serfs, a natural slave race, while the “Cavaliers, Jacobites and Huguenots” who settled the South were Mediterranean descendants of the Romans, natural rulers. “The Saxons and Angles, the ancestors of the Yankees, came from the cold and marshy regions of the North; where man is little more than a cold-blooded, amphibious biped.”

To defend slavery by Scripture was a great exercise for Southern ministers. The star in this endeavor was the South Carolina Presbyterian James Henley Thornwell, who in December 1861 justified the secession of Southern Presbyterians from their national assembly:

The only rule of judgment is the written word of God. The Church knows nothing of the intuitions of reason or the deductions of philosophy, except those reproduced in the Sacred Canon.… She … has no right to utter a single syllable upon any subject except as the Lord puts words in her mouth.… Her creed is an authoritative testimony of God and not a speculation.…

The general operation of the system, is kindly and benevolent; it is a real and effective discipline, and without it we are profoundly persuaded that the African race in the midst of us can never be elevated in the scale of being. As long as that race, in its comparative degradation, coexists, side by side with the white, bondage is its normal condition.

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