Southern Apologetics – “Whipped Peter,” and the Problem of Human Gullibility

Some short time back, I was in a (mostly one-sided) email conversation with a blogger-correspondent from the Keystone State, with whom I’ve corresponded through that medium on a regular basis, dating back to about 2009-10. The conversation was initiated by my correspondent’s posting of an interesting interview conducted with an 82-year-old black woman and former slave named Millie Barber at her blog. The (slightly edited) contents of which exchange, I thought readers of this site might derive some small benefit from reading in full, if only to further confirm what you already know to be the truth. Here is my initial email to my correspondent from the exchange in question.:

Hello, [name redacted]

I wish to commend you for posting Millie Barber’s interview, as well as for adding the link to the entire collection. I did not before know this particular collection existed, but believe with you that it must be, as you say, a national treasure.

There is a similar (extensive) collection of interviews that is part of the broader Oklahoma Historical Society database that were conducted during the same timeframe [1936-38]. There are interviews with former slaves contained in that collection as well, but it mainly consists of interviews conducted with the early pioneer settlers (white and Indian) of the pre-statehood Indian Territories now known as Oklahoma. That collection too is a treasure that I read from time to time, and almost always glean some new knowledge or insight from.

You wrote in your preface to Millie’s interview that,

“The most egregious part of her colorful narrative relates to her parents being separated on different plantations.“

Which, with all due respect, seems to be more an emotion-based reaction to that aspect of Millie’s story than a particularly reasoned one. Dr. Dabney (among numerous others from the period) writes fairly extensively about these unfortunate situations in his book, A Defense of Virginia and the South, wherein he explains that, in the vast majority of such cases, the father was separated from the family because of his (and/or his wife’s) abusive and violent nature and tendencies; that in many such cases, it was simply a life or death situation for all involved (father, mother, children and grandparents) that their masters tried to solve and enforce within such families in the best way they could with the means available to them. And of course, we know by first-hand experience living in the imperfect world we all inhabit that these same scenarios play out on a daily basis, even in our “utopian” world.

The obvious difference being of course that we, in our infinite wisdom and (conceited) moral superiority, do not separate these dysfunctional families by a distance of five miles and a strict system of visitation passes issued or denied at a given master’s discretion. No; what we do instead is to put the most egregious offenders in prisons many miles away from their families, and for terms of many years. We then put them back in for extended stays when they almost invariably re-offend some short time after release.

Unless we are willing to hold ourselves and our modern methods of dealing with these unfortunate situations to the same standards we apply to Southern plantation owners from days gone by, we should probably be very cautious about leaping to conclusions and judging their actions too harshly, and as though their decisions in these matters were obviously wrong and unjust. The separation of Millie’s family and strict enforcement of visitation rules may be said to have been “egregious,” only if that action taken by their overseers was unjustifiable. I’m not saying it wasn’t unjustifiable necessarily, but I am ‘going with the odds’ so to speak and asserting that that action was *likely* justifiable in her family’s case as well as many many others…

My correspondent wrote back to me:

Thanks, Terry.

That is a big subject. I just saw the other day a book on it, can’t recall the title now, but I think it was bashing slave owners for this.

Will check out Dabney.

I replied:

Yes, it is a big subject – deep and broad!

I’m wondering who John Lomax was, and intend to find out. The Lomax family was quite the prominent Virginia family during the colonial period through pre-Civil War times. Virginia Lomax wrote an interesting account of her time as an inmate in the Carroll Ward at the Old Capitol Prison. Indeed, that is the title of her book – The Old Capitol Prison and its Inmates. Miss Lomax was a political prisoner there with the likes of Mary Surratt, Belle Boyd, Mrs. Greenhow, etc., during the WBTS. My guess is that John was the son of one of Virginia’s brothers, her nephew.

By way of explanation of the above message, my correspondent had brought out the fact that John Lomax, a native Virginian, was the editor in charge of overseeing the conducting and recording of the interviews in question. I will also add here that my correspondent would do well to make good on her promise to “check Dabney out.” As Prof. Smith at The Orthosphere has said to me numerous times in our discussions of similar topics over the years, “Dabney was the real deal!”; “he is strong meat on this and so many other subjects!” Indeed he is, and not just in the book I mentioned to my correspondent in the above exchange, but in virtually everything he ever wrote post-WBTS.

That aside, well, aside, the following is what I wrote my correspondent in a couple of follow-up messages per the same subject and subject matter:

… I freely admit that my *default position* is to defend my ancestors and their (Southern) compatriots against (mostly unfounded) accusations of harsh treatment of various forms towards their slaves. I believe that between the two positions or extremes – those whose default is to love and defend their ancestors vs. those whose default is to hate and condemn them – mine is at least the more natural one. It also seems to me to be the more scripturally obedient, and therefore Christian, one since we are explicitly commanded by our Heavenly Father to honor our fathers and mothers, with no justification given for disobedience of the command. I take the position of, “If we dishonor them, we dishonor Him by default.”

Roughly thirty years ago, I was in a conversation with a group of several people concerning the “evils” of slavery and slave holding, in which someone or other among the group claimed that blacks inherited white surnames by way of illicit sexual trysts between white slave masters and their young female slaves. While I defended my people in the conversation as best I could at the time, pointedly asking the person who leveled the accusation how she’d come to that conclusion, I wasn’t very well prepared to answer the accusation in any meaningful way back then. Her less than adequate answer to my query, btw, was that “it is common knowledge.” Which was and is “true” as far as it goes. It is “common knowledge” because we are systematically taught this so called “knowledge” from cradle to grave. All the while never receiving even a mite of evidence that such was the case. Which it most certainly was NOT the case. [*]

Millie’s interview you posted in your article is just one of literally dozens of original or primary sources I have personally read that answers the question of how blacks got their white surnames, while simultaneously corroborating the witness of many other sources on point. During the early days of “Reconstruction,” the Freedman’s Bureau issued an order stating that the then newly freed slaves must adopt surnames belonging to a family to whom they had previously been connected. The blacks were given some small latitude in choosing surnames for themselves in this matter; for example, they could choose the surname of their more immediate master, or they could reach farther back in time and choose a name from a previous owner of their ancestors if that was more to their liking.

It took me twenty of the thirty intervening years between the aforementioned conversation and my gaining a tolerable understanding of those and other relevant facts to do with the “slavery question.” The result being of course that I am much better prepared to answer those sorts of (hearsay) accusations now than I was thirty years ago, and am not the least bit shy about doing so. Dabney’s book also addresses the question of alleged illicit sexual trysts between master & slave extensively…

And,

One more thing:

As you know, the mass of people in any given society tend to be very gullible and uninformed as to the actual truth of a matter, vs. what TPTB want us to believe. If intelligent people have learned anything at all from the COVID 19 insanity, that fact ought to be it. People like you and me didn’t of course need COVID to convince us of the fact, but I digress.

As I iterated in one of our previous exchanges, I have written hundreds of items for my family that might all fall under the broad descriptive, “Southern Apologetics.” Among those items are dozens of write-ups in which I expose (or, attempt to expose) the preposterousness of certain kinds of media propaganda intended to incite hatred and violence between factions in the “good ol’ U. S. of A.”

The adage, “a picture is worth a thousand words,” is often cited in these little write-ups of mine. And I usually add to the saying something to the effect of, “especially when one is crafty enough to string together just the right combination of words to form the correct caption intended to elicit the perfect reaction from an unsuspecting gullible public.” The “perfect reaction” alluded to is the one intended by the issuers of these images and the creators of the content forming their captions. E.g., northern photos of “Whipped Peter” and the emaciated bodies of former prisoners held at Andersonville Prison, et al.

With regard to the former – “Whipped Peter,” it took me a long time to ‘get over myself’ and my initial reaction (sheer horror!) to viewing that photo, and to begin to come to the realization that there was likely more to his particular situation than ‘meets the eye’ and assaults the conscience at first glance. I think I had something of an epiphany concerning that photo in particular when I was watching one of those television documentaries about a “Super-Max” state penitentiary in Ohio or somewhere like that many years ago. After having watched that documentary (*I think*) my mind began to “connect the dots” back to the aforementioned Whipped Peter. It was a distinct possibility, I began to think, that “Whipped Peter” was very much like these violent felons we lock up in isolation chambers in Super-Max prisons for the rest of their natural lives; you know, the type who rape and murder to land themselves there, continue to rape and murder (or attempt to commit more rape and murder) early in their sentences, and then proceed to throw feces and urine and other unmentionable bodily fluids on their guards from their isolated chambers anytime the latter come within range.

The situation at Andersonville is another story entirely of course, but the same principle applies. Those sorts of photos were released to the Northern press for publication to drum up broad support for the war effort and the “Reconstruction” aftermath when it was otherwise waning. And they continue to work their “magic” to this very day. Precisely the same modus operandi is in operation today, and for precisely the same reasons and to the same purposes, as you well know.

Now, I could literally “go on and on and on,” quoting, along the way, from dozens of original sources regarding the question of antebellum slavery in the South, all in support of the “default” position I personally take in defending our noble, gallant and honorable ancestors concerning the subject and subject matter under discussion in the above exchange. I *could* go on and on about it, and I certainly *will* go on and on about it in future write-ups more or less “wordy” I’ll be sending out to my family group aforementioned, a small proportion of which write-ups will likely be submitted for broader dissemination here. If you don’t like what I write on these topics, you certainly are under no obligation to read any of it, and enjoy the autonomous privilege of simply dismissing it all out of hand. And I’m fine with that, really. My articles and essay-length submissions are intended for “those with ears to hear,” and none other; whether or not a given reader agrees with what I write is of no particular concern to me. You get that, right?

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[*] “When illicit cohabitation takes place between the whites and the blacks, nature tells the secret with infallible accuracy, in the yellow skin of the offspring. The census of 1850 distinguished the full blacks from the mulattoes, both among the slave and free. Of the slaves, one in twelve was mulatto, taking the whole United States together. Of the slaves in Virginia the ratio of mulattoes to blacks was about the same. In South Carolina there was only one mulatto to thirty-one black slaves! The explanation is, that the latter State, being less commercial and manufacturing than Virginia, and having a system of more perfect agricultural slavery, exposed her slaves less to intercourse with immigrant and transient whites. But taking the United States as a whole, the free mulattoes were more than half as numerous as the free blacks! In several of the slave States they are more numerous; and in Ohio, the stronghold of Black Republicanism, there were fourteen thousand mulattoes to eleven thousand blacks. Since the regular marriage of free blacks to the whites was as unknown at the North as at the South, these figures tell a tale as to the comparative prevalence of this infamous and unnatural form of uncleanness among the Yankees, which should forever seal their lips from reproaches of us. They also show that at the South the state of slavery has been far more favourable to chastity among the coloured people than that of freedom.” -R.L. Dabney, A Defense of Virginia and the South

“When the troops of the United States took possession of St. Helena, Port Royal, and finally of Beaufort, in South Carolina, early in the war, Northern chaplains wrote home letters, which were published, expressing their surprise that they saw no mulattoes or children of mixed races in that quarter.” -George Lunt, Origins of the Late War (1866)