It is hard to express how radically different the thinking of many Southerners was during the Civil War from anything we would recognize in the United States today. We may point, however, to this 1863 article by George Fitzhugh, which was published in the Southern Literary Messenger, the nearest thing the Confederacy had to a canonical journal of Southern opinion. Fitzhugh completely repudiates the Declaration of Independence and all the principles embodied in it, and lays down a doctrine of absolute tyranny. Down with bills of rights; down with religious toleration; down with the consent of the governed; down with human equality; it would have been better had those ideas never been formed. The same issue, by the way, included an article—long enough for a substantial book—proving that the good free people of the South were racially different from Yankees. In the era after the Civil War, Southerners developed the comforting myth that they had rebelled for the sake of things all Americans agree on—freedom, self-determination, and so on. It may have been so for some, but the secession was led by men who had much more radical opinions.
The Revolution of 1776 was, when subjected to the searching analysis of learned and comprehensive philosophy, the commonest thing in nature. The birth of a child, or the weaning of a calf, excites no wonder, and stirs up no fanatical ardor, because of their frequent occurrence; yet the birth of a nation, or the separation of a colony from its parent stem, are events quite as much in the order of nature as the birth of a child, the weaning of a calf, or the dropping of the ripened apple from its parent stem. The Revolution of 1776 had nothing dramatic, nothing novel, nothing grand about it. Every child and every chicken, that, getting old enough and strong enough to take care of itself, quits its parents and sets up for itself, is quite as singular and admirable a spectacle, as that of the thirteen adult States of America solemnly resolving to cut loose from the state of pupilage and dependence on their parent, England, and ever thereafter to assert and enjoy the rights of independent manhood. It was an exceedingly vulgar, common-place affair; it had nothing poetic or dramatic about it. A birth, a christening, a circumcision, or the induing of the “toga virilis”—in fact, anything that marked an epoch in life, was quite as admirable as this weaning of the American calf from its trans-Atlantic dam.
Colonies are sure to set up for themselves when strong enough to do so, and had been thus setting up for themselves since the world began, and excited no wonder by the procedure. So well aware were the Greeks of this fact, that they anticipated and obviated this weaning process, which whether it occur with Colonies, calves or chickens, occasions heart-burning, family quarrels, scratching and pecking and fighting—that they sent out their Colonies as full-fledged and independent nations. Declarations of Independence were unknown then. Nothing so pompous, so mal apropos and so silly is to be found in history, until our Revolution of ’76. A hundred guns are fired when a Prince is born in France, yet all the artillery in the world, fired simultaneously, could not make the birth or the weaning of a baby or a nation a grand or imposing event. Either occurrence is decidedly vulgar and common-place, and Columbian Orators, or fourth of July orations, and lengthy Columbiads, in endeavoring to celebrate and dramatise them, only serve to render them more ridiculous.
All the bombastic absurdities in our Declaration of Independence about the inalienable rights of man, had about as much to do with the occasion, as would a sermon or an oration on the teething of a child or the kittening of a cat.
Glendower. …At my nativity
The front of heaven was full of fiery shapes,
Of burning cressets; and at my birth,
The frame and huge foundation of the earth
Shak’d like a coward.
Hotspur. Why so it would have done
At the same season, if your mother’s cat had
But kitten’d.
[King Henry IV, act 3d, scene 1st.
It would have been well for us, if the seemingly pompous inanities of the Declaration of Independence, of the Virginia Bill of Rights and the Act of Religious Toleration had remained dead letters. But they had a strength, a vitality and a meaning in them, utterly uncomprehended by their charlatanic, half-learned, pedantic authors, which rendered them most potent engines of destruction. Our institutions, State and Federal, imported from England, where they had grown up naturally and imperceptibly, and adapted to our peculiar circumstances by like natural growth and accretion, might, and would, have lasted for very many ages, had not silly, thoughtless, half-informed, speculative charlatans, like Jefferson, succeeded in basing them on such inflammable and explosive materials as those to be found in the instruments which we have mentioned. The doctrines which they contain are borrowed, almost literally, from Locke’s Essays on Government—Locke distinguished himself in pure metaphysics—deceived and led astray the philosophic world, for two centuries, by a system of materialism and consequent infidelity, which he himself did not comprehend, or at least, the necessary deductions from which he did not foresee. A professing Christian himself, he is the father of all modern infidelity—infidelity in religion, in morals, in everything. Rousseau borrowed from him, and sowed his infidel and anarchical principles broadcast throughout Christendom. Locke’s metaphysics ignored all innate ideas, all instincts, all intuition and involuntary faiths, beliefs and opinions. Man, according to his doctrine, is a mere reasoning machine, and derives all his knowledge and all his judgments and opinions from impressions made upon his mind, through the medium of his senses, by external objects. It is not our business now to refute this theory nor to follow it out theoretically or historically, into its materialistic, infidel and anarchical consequences. We have only to do with him as a political pedagogue: as a presumptuous charlatan, who, as ignorant of the science and practice of government as any shoemaker or horse jockey, attempted to introduce his false and infidel metaphysics into the field of politics.
Aristotle had taught, and his teachings had been respected and heeded for two thousand years, that society or government, was natural to man; that he was born under government, born a member of society, and did not originate government and society; that men, like bees, and ants, and herds and flocks, were impelled into society by their natures, their wants, their instincts and intuitions; that, in fact, society and government, in their origin and grand outlines, were the works of God, and not of man. He taught further, that in all societies some were formed by nature to command and others to obey; that inequality, not equality, was the necessary condition of men, bees, ants and all other social and gregarious animals: for society can only exist as a series of subordinations. Hence, he (Aristotle) begins his treatise on government with a dissertation on the family, and on slaves as a natural and appropriate part of the family. Human inequality and the natural, God-made organ of society and of government are the distinguishing features of his political doctrines.
Human equality, and the origination and entire construction of society and government by man, are the distinguishing, and only distinguishing features of the would-be political philosophy of Locke. He teaches the doctrine of the social contract or compact, and distinctly explains it to mean, that men are not by nature social animals, but originally lived each adult separate, to himself, independent and self-governing. That society is an institution which in process of time grew out of positive agreement or compact, and that only those who entered into this agreement were bound by it. This is all absurd enough; but he is not content with this glaring fatuity. He adds, that not only originally did men become members of society by positive agreement, but that even now no one becomes a subject of government or a member of society except by express agreement.
His metaphysic drove him to these monstrous conclusions, for to admit that society was instinctive and not the result of reasoning from experience, was to admit the doctrine of innate ideas—the doctrine of Aristotle and the Peripatetics, which his philosophy was intended to refute.…
Locke’s doctrine of human equality, which was incorporated into the declaration of Independence, and put into active force in the Chicago Platform, is thus expressed in the beginning of his 8th chapter on Civil Government: “Men being, as has been said, by nature, all free, equal and independent, no one can be put out of his estate, and subjected to the political force of another without his own consent.” The only way by which any one divests himself of his natural liberty, and puts on the bonds of society, is by agreeing with other men to join and unite into a community for their comfortable, safe and peaceable living, one among another, in a secure enjoyment of their properties, and a greater security against any that are not “of it.”
This passage in Locke is almost literally copied into the first two sentences of the Declaration of Independence. First, “all men are created equal.” That is Locke’s doctrine. Secondly, “governments are instituted among men.” That is, man is not like other gregarious animals, born into society, born a member and subject of government; but society and government are human institutions and discoveries, not pre-ordained by God, like flocks, and hives and herds. This is an infidel doctrine of Locke’s and of the Declaration of Independence. Thirdly, “that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Now, men and horses, and all creatures subject to government, submit to be governed, but do not consent to be governed. A consent government is no government, for it implies that all shall think alike, “con-sentio.” But to constitute government at all, the rulers must think for those who are ruled. Those who consent are not governed, for to be governed implies that one is required and compelled to do, by a superior power, that which, left to himself, he would not do. He alone is governed, whose will is subjected and controlled by the will of another. He submits, but does not consent.
These doctrines of Locke put into distinct and imposing form, in the Declaration of Independence, and exported from America to France, acted like a torpedo shot into a magazine. They blew up first the French monarchy, and soon thereafter all the monarchies of Western Europe, but established in their stead, not the absurdity of a “consent government,” but the great military despotism of Bonaparte.…
We now come to the Southern Revolution of 1S61, which we maintain was reactionary and conservative—a rolling back of the excesses of the Reformation—of Reformation run mad—a solemn protest against the doctrines of natural liberty, human equality and the social contract, as taught by Locke and the American sages of 1776, and an equally solemn protest against the doctrines of Adam Smith, Franklin, Say, Tom Paine, and the rest of the infidel political economists who maintain that the world is too much governed, “Pas trop gouverner,” and should not be governed at all, but “Let alone,” “Laissez nous faire.” This reaction commenced in 1840, as we have said, under the lead of Calhoun, Tyler, and R. M. T. Hunter—Kendall, and Blair, and Benton, and their base, radical and destructive clique, were then ousted from their places as leaders of the Southern Democracy, and the States Rights Whig party took their places and controlled the action of the South. In truth, the Democratic party of the South became Whig and conservative, but retained its name and its offices. The reason of this new departure was, that it was perceived that the doctrines of Jefferson and of the other illustrious Fathers of the Republic were being successfully employed to justify abolition and to upset the whole social system of the South—besides, excluding her from equal or any participation in the public lands, most of which she had acquired against the protests of the North, that was now greedily and rapaciously seeking to monopolize them.…
Outside pressure will combine with inside necessity (slavery) to make us conservative, and to perpetuate our Confederacy and our State institutions. We must cling together, in order to be always prepared to resist, not only to resist the rapacity and fanaticism of the North, but to make head, if necessary, against the abolition machinations of the rest of Christendom. Conservatives by blood, feeling, choice and necessity, we may well hope and expect that our Confederacy will be of long and glorious duration.
——The Literary Messenger, November & December 1863.