Back in August I posted several articles on Pete Hegseth’s religious advisor. Doug Wilson is the head of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC) of which the Secretary of War is a member. The denomination just opened a church near the White House where Hegseth has been in attendance and in the last month he was seen attending a talk given by Wilson. Rev. Wilson has attracted a lot of attention for his statements in support of the right of women to vote being taking away from them and his call for limiting the number of non-Christian immigrants allowed into the country. In my articles in August, I focused on Wilson’s historical analysis in support of the Confederacy and in support of slaveowners.
In the previous series, I looked at Douglas Wilson’s first book on United States history called On Southern Slavery As It Was published in 1995. In my previous articles, 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 enslaved man and enslaved woman. I also looked at how the Union effort in the Civil War was a war on Christianity, according to Reverend Wilson. I wanted to see if in the 29 years since he had written that book if he had moderated is views on slavery and the Civil War.
A decade after his first book, in 2005, he wrote another book that reaffirmed, and expanded, what he had said earlier in On Southern Slavery As It Was. The more recent work is titled Black & Tan: A Collection of Essays and Excursions on Slavery, Culture War, and Scripture in America.
Wilson did not go away at the end of August after he was interviewed on CNN, made appearances with Pete Hegseth, and was profiled in the New Yorker. In September and October he gained even more notoriety with an interview by the New York Times, and a bio in the Atlantic Magazine. So I read Wilson’s book and here is what it says.
Wilson begins his book by telling us why a Protestant minister is so interested in history:
“I am the pastor of a Reformed church in the Pacific Northwest, where I have served since 1977. As this ministry has developed over the years, I have to confess that history keeps getting tangled up in it. I have written two historical biographies for the general reader, and a number of years ago we began hosting an annual history conference that now draws about nine hundred people.”
Wilson says that any good minister must be an expert on history since they preach from a 2,000 year old book. In the modern age, with so many changes, history is particularly important. Wilson writes:
“If we want to understand the culture wars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, we must come to grips with the culture wars of the nineteenth century. In order to do this, it is necessary to get clear on the nature of American slavery, which was not what its abolitionist opponents claimed for it. If it had been, it is hard to see how the biblical instructions could have been applicable—for example, I would not cite 1 Timothy 6:1–4 to a person trying to escape from a Nazi death camp. “Obey the existing authorities!” But if antebellum slavery was the normal kind of sinful situation that Christians have had to deal with regularly down through history (e.g., one comparable to what Paul, Philemon, and Onesimus had to address), then the instructions in 1 Timothy 6 make perfect sense. We need to learn that the antebellum situation was one of Normal Sin, not one of Apocalyptic Evil.”
“That our nation did not remove slavery in the way it ought to have been removed helps to explain many of our nation’s problems in dealing with contemporary social evils. Those evils include abortion-on-demand, radical feminism, and rampant sodomy. In the pursuit of our constitutional rights, we have legally executed over forty million unborn children in this nation, and we are about to be oppressed with sodomite marriage. We have done this under the “protections” of the Constitution. When in our history did we take the wrong turn that allowed the Constitution to be abused in this grotesque fashion? Christians need to learn to argue that the events resulting in the cataclysm of 1861–1865 had something to do with it, which I believe is incontrovertible.”
Next, Wilson deals with the controversy aroused when his earlier defense of slavery was published.
“In the fall of 2003, a controversy erupted in the small town where I live in northern Idaho. The controversy concerned a booklet I co-wrote with Steve Wilkins in the mid-nineties entitled Southern Slavery as It Was.4 It was the contention of this booklet that the way in which slavery ended has had ongoing deleterious consequences for modern Christians in our current culture wars, and that slavery was far more benign in practice than it was made to appear in the literature of the abolitionists. We were not trying to maintain that slavery in itself was a positive good, like food, air, or sunlight. Our central interest was in defending the integrity and applicability of the Scriptures to our current cultural controversies, and we affirmed that Christians who apologize for what the Bible teaches on slavery will soon be apologizing for what it teaches on marriage. We wrote as Christian apologists, but not the kind who apologize for being Christians.”
The controversy gained steam when a local newspaper reported that Wilson was preparing to host:
“a conference on the subject of slavery, and it was not long before many of the local leftists were screeching like so many progressive tea kettles. In the course of the ensuing controversy, I found myself accused of many amazing things, a number of which were as fully immoral as a decision by the United States Supreme Court. Naturally, I felt I needed to defend myself. Some accusations were slanderous, some were confused, and some were just half a bubble off. In this last category was the accusation that I am a neo-Confederate. This is close in one way, but at the same time it is not at all accurate. The tag neo-Confederate conjures up images of a handful of disillusioned yahoos setting up a tiny republic in a trailer park east of Houston somewhere. But it must be admitted that a more accurate name would require explanation as well. This is because I am not a neo-Confederate; I am a paleo-Confederate.”
Wilson says that he is an “unreconstructed” Paleo-Confederate:
“So I also take it as a given that the South was right on all the essential constitutional and cultural issues surrounding the war, and this is my reason for calling myself unreconstructed. I do not want to stick to my guns on this as a matter of pride, or because the issue is at the top of my list of priorities. It is not. But even so, I will not recant anything concerning that war, however trivial, simply because the current regime of intoleristas demands that I do so. Robert E. Lee is not at the center of my worldview or my theology. But when people start demanding that I treat him as an historical pariah, a peer in some way to Himmler, I am not going to do it. Lee was a gracious Christian gentleman, a brother in Christ, and an honorable man.”
Wilson says that owning a slave in the pre-war South should never have disqualified the slaveowner from being a Christian:
“But if our churches had existed in the antebellum South, and a godly slave owner who treated his slaves with kindness sought membership, I could not refuse him without seeking to be holier than Christ. Such a desire would be wicked, and this wickedness was at the heart of the radical abolitionist dogma.”
The reverend writes that the United States ended slavery the wrong way, by declaring war on the South. He says:
“As mentioned earlier, in our nation the logic of this would have worked its way out over time in a peaceful and Christian form of emancipation, without 620,000 slain.”
Nelson considers the morality of a Christian owning a slave in the South before the Civil War:
“The issue is whether a Christian man could have lawfully owned a slave in 1850 America without being necessarily guilty of a moral outrage. Was slave ownership malum in se, an evil in itself? The answer to that question, for anyone who believes the Bible, is that it was possible for a godly man to own slaves, provided he treated them exactly as the Scripture required. “
The book now looks at the question of “Black Confederates.” According to Nelson, “multiculturalists” impose historical hardships on African Americans. He writes:
“As a result, multiculturalism delivers a twofold insult to American blacks. In the first place they are saddled with a mandatory pride in bogus realities. Advocacy history in its “Afrocentrist” guise says that blacks taught Socrates everything he knew, blacks built the pyramids, and so forth. Intelligent blacks are embarrassed by the whole farce. “Kwandi Kweebe invented the light bulb? Oh, great. Now I feel empowered.” The second insult, worse because it has been far more successful as a slander, consists of withholding from blacks an important part of their genuine heritage, one in which they can and should take deep satisfaction and pride.”
What was withheld from Blacks was the story of “Black Confederates”:
“The Confederate States of America lasted as long as it did, against overwhelming odds, in part because of the great contribution made by many loyal Confederate blacks to her war effort. This contribution is probably one of the greatest untold stories in the annals of our nation’s history. Not only was it a “finest hour,” to use Churchill’s phrase, it was an hour which white America generally refuses to acknowledge—to this day. This was a valiant contribution not calculated to earn the praise of men. But even though it was not offered by men-pleasers, our duty of acknowledging this long-ignored heroism remains.”
Nelson warns us that modern thinkers can’t understand how slaves could defend the Confederacy. He says that they believe that Blacks were seething with anger against their masters and therefore could not be Confederates. But, he says, there were many disagreements among the white people with some white Southerners joining the Union Army and some white Northern Copperheads being sympathetic to the Confederacy. He notes of the motivations for Black men to join the Confederate Army that:
“Some wanted adventure, while others were fighting for self-preservation. Many of the free blacks in the South were well-to-do slave owners themselves and they knew a Northern victory would ruin them, which it did. But the majority of blacks who supported the cause did so in order to protect the way of life they had always known. Black Southerners were Southerners. Many of them were patriots. They were natives of a land at war, and their response to the invasion of their country should not be at all surprising. The wave of patriotic fervor which swept the South clearly included the black population. Across the South, blacks frequently and publicly offered their whole-hearted service to the cause of the Confederacy.”
Now of course, except in Louisiana, there were no large number of Free Blacks in the other Confederate states.
Nelson discusses the contributions of Blacks to the Confederate war effort:
“Of course the central issue is not how blacks felt about the war when it first began, because emotions always run high for everyone at such a time. What did Southern blacks do to contribute tangibly to the war effort “across five Aprils”? Three areas are worthy of mention. The first is that the infrastructure of the Southern war effort was heavily dependent upon faithful and loyal black labor. The South was thoroughly dependent upon its black population, and could not do anything, much less go to war, without black involvement and support. Speaking of slaves, Benjamin Quarles notes the obvious—that slaves were used in the Southern war effort: “Not far behind the lines, and frequently within them, were the military laborers who threw up the foundations for the artillery, built the forts and dug the entrenchments.”50 What is not so obvious, especially to modern eyes, is the fact that, under such conditions, such work could not have been accomplished without a significant loyalty and willingness to serve. On the home front, blacks manned the mines, the munitions factories, and kept the crops growing which in turn kept the army in the field. Many black slaves stepped into the vacated role of white overseers and served there diligently. Second, we must remember the numerous body servants who accompanied their masters to war, and who faithfully served them throughout the conflict.”
While most modern historians estimate the number of Blacks in the Confederate Army to be between a few hundred to a few thousand men, Nelson give an estimate that is not supported by evidence:
“One estimate places the number of black Confederate combatants at around 40,000. As noted above, this is a very small number comparatively—only about one percent of the black population. At the same time it is not insignificant. The first Union officer to lose his life in combat, Major Winthrop, was probably shot by a black man.”
Modern racism in the South is not descended from pre-war racism at the time of slavery when, Nelson says, it was at a minimum. It was imposed after the war by Northerners:
“We must recognize the nature of the racism that has afflicted many in the South since the war is partially the fruit of the Reconstruction and not necessarily the direct result of slavery and the war. Those southern whites who today despise blacks, far from showing ongoing resistance, are continuing to submit to that humanist nightmare which was first imposed at Reconstruction. Far better would be the attitude of Southern whites who fought and bled alongside alongside Southern blacks.”
One problem with Nelson’s depiction of Reconstruction is that immediately after the war, Southern legislatures passed laws called the Black Codes in the Fall of 1865 and the Winter and Spring of 1866 that imposed grave burdens on Freed People. These were legislatures elected by only white voters and made up entirely of white men. These Black Codes were not passed in response to Reconstruction Era policies from the North, they were put into place to keep the African American population as close to slavery as possible.
The next chapters is focused on Stonewall Jackson’s spiritual guide, Robert Lewis Dabney. He was born in Virginia in March, 1820 and died in 1898. Nelson says of Dabney:
“[He] was a great theologian, a powerful preacher, a successful farmer, a builder of two houses, a maker of his own furniture, a poet, a biographer, a skilled mechanic, an architect, a surveyor, an inventor and holder of some patents, a political economist, and a trusted military adjutant to one of the greatest generals in the history of warfare.”
He does not mention that Dabney was an ardent defender of white supremacy.
The end of this book is where Wilson takes on his critics in the theological right-wing who don’t see any purpose for him defending slavery and the Confederacy.
I do see his purpose.
Note: The photograph shows H.K. Edgerton in his “Confederate” uniform as found on Kevin Levin’s blog.
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