11/6/2023 0 Comments David blight civil war youtube![]() But when he crossed into Kentucky, he wrote this letter to his father. He spent at least two-thirds of his - more than, about three-quarters of his time - in the northern states. Tocqueville, you may know, didn’t spend a great deal of time in the South though he traveled all across the South. In Democracy in America there’s that famous passage, or passages, when Tocqueville crosses the Ohio River, from Ohio into Kentucky, from free soil into slave soil, free state into a slave state. In Alexis de Tocqueville’s great Democracy in America, which he published in 1831, or published in 1837, after his famous nine-month tour of the United States - the most famous book, travel book, ever written about America, by a foreigner. I tried to sound byte this and I ended up saying something silly like, “You know Pete, I’m teaching a whole course on this.” And I finally just ended that particular little exchange before he went on to rant at me about all that’s wrong with American education by saying, “Pete, it was slavery.” “Well Pete, you see, there was this free labor system and this slave labor system,” blah-blah blah-blah. ![]() The first question was, “So Professor, what was the Civil War about?” Now do that in a sound byte on a national radio station when you got two minutes to answer. called “Drive Time.” And the host was Harry or Pete or whoever he was - I’ve been on too many of these. But one of them was on a Nashville, Tennessee radio station, on a program at 5:30 p.m. ![]() Minnesota Public Radio does a fabulous hour-long program. King Day, I had the privilege of being on at least four radio programs about this new book I have out called A Slave No More, some of them quite terrific. A thousand times in a thousand ways anybody who studies the American Civil War period is inevitably asked, “so what caused this war?” It’s, of course, the question of the first third of this course. Now, I want to say one other quick thing before we get to the substance. Stephens delivering this Cornerstone Speech, declaring that, “Hey folks, it’s all about slavery and its preservation?” How did we get there? Today I want to talk about, we’re going to dwell on, ultimately, the Southern defense of slavery - the arguments over time that they developed, layer upon layer, drawing upon earlier arguments and building them into new ones - sometimes quite original - toward ultimately a virtually utopian defense of slavery as a perfecting, perfectible, if not perfected system. ![]() Our system, therefore, so far as regards this inferior race, rests upon this great immutable law of nature.” You always have to get worried in history when people start talking about how human beings or human behavior is rooted in nature.īut how do we get to 1861 and that secession crisis with Alexander H. He is not his equal by nature and cannot be made so by human laws or human institutions. Subordination to the white man is his normal condition. The quote goes on: “As a race, the African is inferior to the white man. Stephens, a Georgian, a slaveholder, an old friend and colleague of Abraham Lincoln’s, ironically, said the cornerstone of the Confederacy, the cornerstone of their political movement, was what he called “American Negro slavery.” It was the cornerstone on which they had founded their revolution. Stephens, gave a speech that became quickly known to history as his “Cornerstone Speech.” This is Spring, 1861. Professor David Blight: In a speech before the Virginia Secession Convention, in 1861, in late April, in the wake of the firing on Fort Sumter, the newly elected - sort of appointed - Vice-President of the Confederacy, Alexander H. The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877 HIST 119 - Lecture 3 - A Southern World View: The Old South and Proslavery Ideology
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