Talk:Ulrich B. Phillips

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In his highly influential essay "The Central Theme of Southern History" (1928) Phillips argued that white supremacy was the central theme, a position adopted by most historians ever since. He sais:

"Southernism did not arise from any selectiveness of migration.... It does not lie in religion or language. It was not created by one-crop tillage, nor did agriculture in the large tend to produce a Southern scheme of life and thought.... The South has never had a focus.... What is its essence? Not state rights -- Calhoun himself was for years a nationalist ... not free trade ... not slavery ... not Democracy.... Yet it is a land with a unity despite its diversity ... the white folk a people with a common resolve indomitably maintained -- that it shall be and remain a white man's country. The consciousness of a function in these premises ... is the cardinal test of a Southerner and the central theme of Southern history. It arose as soon as the negroes became numerous enough to create a problem of race control in the interest of orderly government and the maintenance of Caucasian civilization. Slavery was instituted not merely to provide control of labor but also as a system of racial adjustment and social order.... It was defended not only as a vested interest, but with vigor and vehemence as a guarantee of white supremacy and civilization.... The non-slaveholders of course were diverse in their conditions and sentiments.... Those in the black belts ... had their lives conditioned by the presence of the negroes; and they had apparatus of court days, militia musters, and political barbecues as well as neighborhood conversation to keep them abreast of affairs.... The white men's ways must prevail; the negroes must be kept innocuous.... In daily contact with blacks from birth, and often on a friendly basis of patron and retainer, the planters were in a sort of partnership with their slaves ... possessing a sense of security as a fruit of long habituation to fairly serene conditions. But the white toilers lived outside this partnership and suffered somewhat from its competition. H.R. Helper in his Impending Crisis (1857) urged them to wreck the system by destroying slavery.... The whole tier from South Carolina to Texas seceded spontaneously but no other states joined them until after Lincoln's call for troops.... The heavy negro porportions in their black belts, together with immaturity in the social order, made their people mor sensitive than those of Virginia to the menace of disturbance outside. Slavery questions, which had never been quite negligible since the framing of the Constitution, gained a febrile activity from the abolition agitation; and the study of the Congressional mathematics focussed the main attention upon the rivalry of the sections in territorial enlargement.... The North now had the strength of a giant; the South should strike for independence before that strength should grow yet greater and be consolidated for crushing purposes.... The tension of 1850 had brought much achievement.... 'Southern rights' had come to mean racial security, self-determination by the whites whether in or out of the Union.... Legal sanction for the spread of slaveholding, regardless of geographical potentialities, became the touchstone of Southern rights; and the rapid rise of the Republican party which denied this sanction, equally regardless of geographical potentialities, tipped the balance in lower Southern policy.... Many clergyment gave their aid, particularly by priasing slavery as a biblical and benevolent institution.... Various expressions in Northern papers, debates in Congress, and events in Kansas and elsewhere had fanned these flames when the stroke of John Brown fell upon Harper's Ferry. This event was taken as a demonstration that abolitionists had lied in saying they were concerned with moral suasion only, and it stimulated suspicion that Republicans were abolitionists in disguise. In December the South Carolina legislature when expressing sympathy with Virginia intimated that she was ripe for secession and invited all Southern states to meet in convention at once to concert measures for united action.... The October elections brought a virtual certainty of Lincoln's election.... If the Republican party should win the contest, its 'unnatural and feverish vitality' would reach exhaustion within a year or two.... Just before election day George Fitzhugh of Virginia wrote to the Charleston Mercury ... concluding: 'In the Union there is no hope for us. Let us ... quit the Union.' ... The upper South had votaries of independence no less outspoke than those of the cotton belt but ... none of these conventions took a decisive step until Lincoln's call for troops.... The sequel showed that the boundary of predominant Southern loyalty was not Mason and Dixon's line but a curving zone seldom touching that landmark.... The course of the Federal government during the war and after its close alienated so many borderers that in a sense Kentucky joined the Confederacy after the war was over.... Lincoln in his plan of reconstruction had shown unexpected magnanimity; the Republican party, discarding that obnoxious name, had officially styled itself merely Unionist.... Edward A. Pollard, a Virginian critic of Davis, chronicler of the war and bewailer of the 'lost cause', took courage in 1868 to write his most significant book, The Lost cause Regained. The folly of politicians, he said, had made the South defend slavery seemingly 'as a property tenure, or as a peculiar institution of labour; when the true ground of defence was as of a barrier against a contention and war of races.' ... A dozen years sufficed to restore white control.... By Southern hypothesis, exalted into a creed, negroes in the mass were incompetent for any good political purpose and by reason of their inexperience and racial unwisdom were likely to prove subversive.... White Southerners when facing problems real or fancied concerning the ten million negroes in their midst can look to the federal authorities for no more at best than a tacit acquiescence in what their state governments may do.... Political solidarity at the price of provncial status is maintained to keep assurance double, trebly sure that the South shall remain 'a white man's country.'"