Most
shockingly, but unsurprisingly, paired
with the new practice of capitalist “piracy” or crime was the continuation of
West Indian slavery, plantation production, and its accompanying Herrenvolk, or master race ideology.
Southern agricultural capitalists and their “god of the slavemaster” disdained
even the thinnest veil of morality in favor of personal profit. Edward Kimber’s
accounts appeared in the pages of the London
Magazine in the 1740s. He toured through and commented upon the rough
American colonies and their crude methods. He pictured slavery in the form of
an African "under the Torture of the Whip, inflicted by the Hands, the
remorseless Hands of an American Planter.”[1] The report
of Brown University’s Steering Committee on “Slavery and
Justice” found that “Of the ten million or so people who crossed the Atlantic
before 1800, about eight and a half million – roughly six of every seven people
– were enslaved Africans.”[2]
The transfer of African peoples and culture grew immense. Sugar, slaves,
piracy, and American capitalism evolved in an even deeper sea of bloody,
fundamentalist religious, slavery-supporting rhetoric designed to salve the
soul - to justify the self-inflicted horrors that kept them up at night. They
created the white-supremacist “god of the slavemaster.”
Only the most foolhardy, arrogant, and durable souls
would brave disease, the sea, weather, and heat in such a rough and deadly
business. Also, it was immensely more profitable than any venture yet tried. It
proved the pecuniary value of ignoring morality which encouraged even further
separation from England and English tradition – including the god they claimed
to worship. This also encouraged a virtual separation from traditional
Christian virtues, especially the hated Catholicism of old Europe.
Human nature devolved into something less than
compassionate, natural and friendly. Instead, through demeaning rhetoric, it
became seen as inherently greedy and self-serving. This delusion supported
merchants’ needs for capitalization of these slaves and their work. Primarily
Southerners believed “Inherently lazy, listless” people, especially slaves,
deserved to be frightened into productivity.[3] Social
underlings must “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” to succeed or die
trying. Indeed, wealthy American merchants became cynical of their own species
by way of tautological and religious justification for their own convoluted
immoral methods – the vengeful Old-Testament “god of the slavemaster” reigned
supreme in the South. One might think that all of American society – both young
and old – continuously warred with one another – fighting for profit! And, it
would take many lives over the next century and a half!
The lines separating America from Britain grew into a
wall with thorny vines growing densely upon it and filling the remaining holes
– surrounded by Donald Trump’s alligator-filled moat and topped with spikes!
Americans would fight to maintain their unique culture on their side of that
wall – imperialistic and warlike – ideological royal domain of the Western
Hemisphere established by the “Monroe Doctrine,” similar to the earlier
Carolina charter of 1665. The isolationism, a war of radical liberal versus “godly”
conservative ideology, Whig vesrsus Tory, progressive versus fixed, began at
this point. And, as if warned by South Carolina’s John Routledge in 1789, the
ideologically similar “War Between the States,” existed since the founding of
Carolina and would never quite be decisive – a continuous war between
Americans. The days of old Stuart or West Indian values, indeed the values that
built early colonial America and continued in the Southern United States,
fortified in the Confederate States of America of the 1860s, would remain until
the present, converging with Republican Party conservative interests in 1968.
America could neither quite be brought to heel by her mother, nor by
themselves, always at each other’s throats like unruly spawn fighting over religion,
slaves, and states’ rights. Roughly half of Americans found the old ways too
severe. More northern colonies had the weakest connection to the brutal and
feudal West Indies plantationists; thus, the old Stuart ideology was best
exemplified and reified in the Deep South. Society there descended directly
from the Stuart-born West Indian ideology of Barbados, “an oligarchy of acquisitive, ostentatious
plantation owners” who modeled Carolina after Barbadian
society.[4]
It proved a stubborn and persistent presence.
Inferring a West Indies connection to Carolina and
Deep South culture, historian Richard Dunn said, “I
believe that a social analysis of Barbados and Jamaica, circa 1670, does tell us something about the Goose
Creek men and the
thrust they imparted to South Carolina.”[5]
Furthermore, Lindley S. Butler ominously
surmises that “The turbulent Carolina proprietary era covers the fascinating
first century of North Carolina’s history, its formative years, and sets the course
for the colony and state over the next three centuries.”[6] Carolina,
as the mother of the South, spread this same ideology throughout southern
America. Slavery and piracy wove themselves indelibly into the fabric of our
nation like a chronic violent disease.
The days of proprietary or private corruption
lingered, continuing Stuart days of imperialism. Plantationist Confederate land
barons embraced this same martial ideology in the Civil War and fired upon Fort
Sumter to announce their decision to fight their “brothers” and “sisters” for
it. They enjoyed smaller local control over larger federal control in a loose
confederation of the early British colonies – at one time seen as separate
“countries.” The South eschewed isolationism from the start – even before the
Revolution. The Civil War saw resurgence of these martial independent ideals in
the Confederacy, finally ending in their “Lost Cause” from which they claimed
they would “rise again” against the hated Yankees of the North. Essentially,
they attempted in that war to derail progressive radicalism in the form of
abolitionism, establish a god-centered government, and protect their lucrative
business of slavery. Compare these ideals to those of Jacobites of 1715 and the
Republican Party since Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” to bring in more
Republican voters in 1968! Like their Jacobite ancestors who fought against a
foreign “Dutch Dog” of a liberal king, the Confederacy literally betrayed the
United States, commited true treason
– as allowed by the U.S. Constitution – colluded with foreign governments, and
killed 600,000
Americans. These people were sacrificed to preserve that immoral, yet highly
profitable way of life – some say the figure was as high as 800,000! Make no
mistake, despite the rhetoric of a god-centered Confederacy, the South
attempted to maintain their immoral rights to enslave other human beings simply
for profit! Moreover, wealthy Southern plantationists prosecuting the war were
willing to kill more than half a million people to keep that right. They used
their “god” to justify it all! This bit of capitalism was certainly not in its finest moment – if indeed it
ever had one.
After losing the American Civil War of the
mid-nineteenth century, unrepentant ex-Confederates politically opposed Reconstruction or reform
efforts, vowing to “rise again.” Of course, not all Southerners can be blamed
for this crime – the 97% merely followed the lead of their “betters,” the 3%
wealthy elite – they deserved most of the blame. Their vengeance centered
primarily upon profit loss on their plantations and the loss of slaves –
indeed, considered their property! After incurring this perceived injustice
against their property rights and losing their economic dominance,
neo-Confederates following the war resisted any change – often out of spite.
This “Lost Cause” desire affected civil rights of ex-slaves and installed
racial segregation with Plessy v.
Ferguson in 1896. More directly and ominously, it initiated the
resurgence of conservative rule in North Carolina of 1898,
resulting in the only coup d’etat
in United States’ history, led by a former U.S. Congressman!
Wilmington’s Alfred Moore Waddell and his allies fought to prevent the
horrifying enforcement of “Negro Rule,” as they saw it, heavily enforced upon a
stubborn South, with their greatly wounded feudal pride. Plantationists sought
a redress of grievances to cure its wounded elite socially conservative
ideology – against another perceived invasion at the hands of federals and
liberal abolitionists – England come again! The Herrenvolk or master-slave mentality had been too well established,
first in the West Indies, and later in the plantation South for them to ever
seriously entertain a moral alternative. Again, the wealthy plantationists
perpetrated this crime – not the general populace.[7]
[1] Edward Kimber, Itinerant
Observations in America, ed. Kevin J. Hayes (Newark, Del., 1998), 49.
[2] Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and
Justice, Slavery and Justice, 7.
[3] Ralph E. Luker, The
Social Gospel in Black and White: American Racial Reform, 1885-1912 (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991),
120.
[4] Woodard, American
Nations, 82.
[5] Richard Dunn, “The English Sugar Islands and the Founding of South
Carolina,” South Carolina Historical
Magazine, Vol. 101, No. 2 (April 2000), 143.
[6]Lindley S. Butler, “Proprietary North Carolina: Politics, Shipping, and Pirates,” Queen Anne’s Revenge Shipwreck Project: Research Report and
Bulletin Series, QAR-R-07-03, August 2007
(Underwater Archaeology Branch, Office of State Archaeology, Department of
Cultural Resources, State of North Carolina), 5.
[7] For more on this period of American history, see LeRae
Umfleet, A Day of Blood: the 1898
Wilmington Race Riot (Raleigh: North Carolina Office of Archives and
History, 2009).
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