This is the fifth article on the prominent Reverend Douglas Wilson views on slavery and the Civil War. Wilson is the leader of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s religious community. Douglas Wilson authored a book on the Civil War and the Emancipation of African Americans called On Southern Slavery As It Was in 1995. In the first article we looked at the religious leader’s broad overview of the Civil War and slavery and how to interpret those historical facts through a Christian lens. In the second article, I went into Wilson’s claim that owning a slave was righteous under Christianity. In my third article I looked at how the Union effort in the Civil War was a war on Christianity. In the fourth article we review Wilson’s claim that slavery was not all that bad.
Now, with this, the final article, we will look at Wilson’s conclusions about slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction.
Doug Wilson makes a fantastic claim for the superiority of the of the position of enslaved Black people over poor whites in the South. He writes, without any documentation supporting his claim, that:
Nearly every slave in the South enjoyed a higher standard of living than the poor whites of the South—and, had a much easier existence. [p. 30-31]
Why wouldn’t white people try to pass as Black, if this was the case?
Based on his “research” into how Blacks felt about their advantages under slavery, he also makes the claim that a higher proportion of Free Blacks owned slaves than white people did an that this made them into Confederates during the Civil War:
“Given this testimony, it is not surprising that most southern blacks (both free and slave) supported the Southern war effort. Some of course supported that effort from purely seltish motives. Fully 25% of the free blacks owned slaves.’* Most of these were quite wealthy, and knew that a Northern victory would bring economic and social ruin on them, which, of course, it did. But many Southern blacks supported the South because of long established bonds of affection and trust that had been forged over generations with their white masters and friends. They gladly supported the war effort with food, labor, and sometimes fighting. Their loyalty to the principles of the South rivaled and was sometimes even greater than that of some whites.” [p. 26-27]
Wilson makes an argument that “Black Confederates” filled the Southern armies. He says they “gladly supported” the Confederates. Wilson says that Blacks “loyalty to the principles of the South” was equal to those of white Southerners, even though the “principles” included holding Blacks in bondage.
Those of us who were brought up in the 1960s recall elderly whites opine that Black families were more stable under slavery than freedom. It is unusual for a person writing in the 1990s, after scholarly books had been published on slavery’s attack on the Black family, to say the same thing, as Wilson does:
One could argue that the black family has never been stronger than it was ‘under slavery. [p. 34-35]
Now lets be honest about this. In most states in the “Old South” marriages between slaves were illegal. Children could be taken from their parents and sold without regard to age. And, although elsewhere Wilson claims that the rape of enslaved women was a rare occurrence, slave narratives by women said it was common and modern testing of DNA shows it to have taken place many times.
Next Wilson presents an assessment the United States “After the death of the Old American Republic,” which means after the surrender of the Confederacy:
