Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has attracted a lot of attention for renaming military bases after Confederate leaders and stripping the name off a Naval ship named after gay elected official Harvey Milk, is also getting attention for his relationship with Rev. Doug Wilson, a Christian Nationalist and the head of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), an alliance of conservative churches. Hegseth has been highlighting Wilson’s views an attending his church in Washington. This is the fourth article on Wilson’s defense of the Confederacy that looks at the reverend’s interpretation of the Civil War and theology.
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 previous articles I wrote, I went into Wilson’s claim that owning a slave was righteous under Christianity and that it may have been a spiritual improvement for the Black man and woman. In my third article I looked at how the Union effort in the Civil War was a war on Christianity. Now we will examine Wilson’s claim that slavery wasn’t really that bad.
Wilson writes:
“If slavery had been as.bad as the abolitionists maintained that it was, and as we have been reminded countless times on supposedly good authority, then why were there not thousands of rabid abolitionists demanding an end to the evil? Or, even more to the point, why were there not hundreds of slave rebellions? These questions have not been asked often or loudly enough. The answer would shock and dismay the vast majority of our nation who have been carefully schooled in abolitionist propaganda. As we have already mentioned, the “peculiar institution” of slavery was not perfect or sinless, but the reality was a far cry from the horrific descriptions given to us in modern histories, which are often nothing more than a hackneyed reworking of abolitionist propaganda.” [p. 22-23]
First, there actually were “thousands of…abolitionists demanding an end to the evil.” Abolitionists never approached a majority, but from the 1830s onward there were many organized Abolitionist groups throughout the North advocating immediate abolition of slavery. Some even participated in the Underground Railroad risking arrest and imprisonment to try to free Blacks. And while Abolitionism never enjoyed majority support in the North until after Fort Sumter, by the 1850s many Northerners endorsed the “Free Soil” ideology which did not call for the immediate abolition of slavery, but supported excluding slavery from new states. These Northerners also opposed the Fugitive Slave laws requiring the re-enslavement of escaped slaves even though they had come to the North. This movement gave rise to the Republican Party and the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860.
Wilson also seems to strike a dangerous pose as a disparager of Black-written articles and memoirs of escaped slaves describing what they had experienced as when they were enslaved. From Solomon Northrup’s Twelve Years a Slave to the speeches of Harriet Tubman to the autobiographies of Frederick Douglass, all have to be rejected under Wilson’s claims.
Wilson goes on to describe the advantages of Southern society played by slavery:
“…The Old South was a caste society, but not a compartmentalized society. There were specific roles for blacks and whites, and each “knew their place” as it were, but what is often overlooked is the high level of interaction between the races which was a common and everyday experience.” [p, 22-23]
So, the “Old South” gave each person a “place” within society. White men were slave masters or yeoman farmers or merchants, and Blacks were slaves obedient to their white superiors.
Wilson next makes the claim that Southern slave society was characterized by a “high level of interactivity” between the white master class and Black slaves. In fact, he says that because of its “patriarchal” control, Blacks performed their duties “based on…affection and confidence.”
“Slavery as it existed in the South was not an adversarial relationship with pervasive racial animosity. Because of its dominantly patriarchal character, it was a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence. There has never been a multi-racial society which has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world. The credit for this must go to the predominance of Christianity. The gospel enabled men who were distinct in nearly every way, to live and work together, to be friends and often intimates. This happened to such an extent that moderns indoctrinated on “civil rights” propaganda would be thunderstruck to know the half of it.” [p. 24-25]
Doug Wilson makes the claim that after slavery was ended, many former slaves looked back at their time in slavery as the best time of their lives:
“Affection for former masters and mistresses is expressed in terms of unmistakable devotion. Testimony to the good treatment, kindness, and gentleness of many so-called “heartless slave holders” abounds. Many of the old slaves express a wistful desire to be back at the plantation.
Slave life was to them a life of plenty, of simple pleasures, of food, clothes, and good medical care. In the narratives taken as a whole, there is no pervasive cry of rage and anguish. We see no general expression of bitterness and outrage. Instead we find, on page after page, expressions of affection for a condition which, in the words of one historian, “shames the civilized world.” The overwhelmingly positive view of slavery is all the more striking when one considers that the period being remembered by these former slaves could arguably be called the most harsh years of the institution… [p. 24-25 (citing Depression Era slave narratives)]
I won’t go through the “slave narratives” which were collected by out-of-work Southern whites during the Depression in the 1930s at a time of Jim Crow. I will leave you to research them directly.
Wilson finishes up his look at the behavior of Southern whites under slavery:
“There was mistreatment, there were atrocities, there was a great deal of wickedness on the part of some—but, as the Narratives make plain, these abuses came from a distinct and very small minority. The Narratives have the ring of truth because they present the mixed picture which might be expected in an examination of any human institution. The surprise for moderns is that the mixture contains such an overwhelmingly positive view of master/slave relations before the War.” [p. 26-27]
In the next article we can look at how this relationship of “trust” and “kindness” between masters and slaves played a role in the Civil War.
Follow Reconstruction Blog on Social Media:
1 thought on “Pete Hegseth’s Minister Says That Slavery Wasn’t All That Bad Part 4”
Comments are closed.