The Reactionary Confederacy – Medievalism in the Old South – Part 1

“We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man. There is nothing progressive about being pig-headed and refusing to admit a mistake. And I think if you look at the present state of the world it’s pretty plain that humanity has been making some big mistake. We’re on the wrong road. And if that is so we must go back. Going back is the quickest way on.”

C.S. Lewis, The Case for Christianity

After studying the South and the Civil War, it appears that the Old South was a Protestant form of Medieval Christendom and, in many ways, not just conservative but reactionary. The war and the actions of the progressive North further intensified the Southern withdrawal and movement – not “ahead” into the future, but “backward” into the prior times of the Middle Ages and, in part, a dismissal of previously accepted American ideas from the Renaissance and later the influence of massive European immigration and the French Revolution.

In every way, the North was accepting modernity and “progress,” economically, religiously, politically, and culturally. In every instance, the North was “moving forward.” Progressivism, Jacobinism, democracy, centralization, secularism, materialism, socialism, naturalism, and other philosophies mixed with a heavy dose of New England puritanism produced Northern society. The Old South is better described as reactionary rather than conservative. The Bible, remnants of medieval political ideas, and the Enlightenment influenced the American Founders and the U.S. Constitution. The Confederacy was, in part, a reaction to and repudiation of the Enlightenment aspects and the later instructions from the French Revolution. By 1860, they realized where the presumptions of the Enlightenment would lead, and they returned to older ideas.

The French Revolution’s enemies were monarchies, feudalism, hierarchy, decentralization, Christianity, liberty, law, tradition, and anything leftover from the Middle Ages. In contrast, Western tradition, a devout Christian faith, and feudalism mixed with the Reformation produced the South. The South is the last real holdout of the Western tradition and Christian orthodoxy. W.J. Cash described the South as the “Last great bulwark of Christianity.” Rev. Thornwell writes, “We have been eminently conservative in our influence upon the spirit of the age” in The Rights and Duties of Masters, “We are old-fashioned at the South,” said James Hammond. Virginian author Edward Pollard said, “The South was recurring to the past rather than running into new and rash experiments, and exhibiting a spirit of Conservatism that the world had seldom observed.” The change came slowly in the South, if at all. Yet, they were not only conservative, holding to traditions the North and modernity were eradicated, but also reactionary, not just defending but “progressing” in the way C.S Lewis suggests we do, by returning to former ways. Let’s look at a few ways the South bore many similarities to the Middle Ages and rejected modernity.

Democracy

“The majority means to plunder and wrong the minority. They mean to make the weaker section their tributaries. Between a representation incompetent to protect, and no representation, there is no difference… what use is the right of suffrage, when, if every man in the oppressed section should vote against the candidate of the stronger section, (as the Southern States did in the late Presidential election) they cannot prevent his election… By the forms of a free government, therefore, a many-headed despotism may be established by a stronger section over a weaker section, far worse than the despotism of one man. One man may have a conscience; but men acting in masses, seldom exhibit conscientious scruples. Individuality and responsibility, are lost in numbers. That “a corporation has no soul,” is the proverbial aphorism of English law, indicating the unscrupulousness of men acting in masses. A single despot has no motive to oppress one portion of his people, more than another; but here, one half of a country rises up to plunder and oppress another half.”

Report on the Committee of Foreign Affairs C.S.A 1861- Provided by the Abbeville Institute

The North had accepted democracy and the philosophies of the French Revolution. In Lincoln’s first inaugural address, he said, “Why should there not be a patient confidence in the ultimate justice of the people? Is there any better or equal hope in the world?… If the Almighty Ruler of Nations with His eternal truth and justice, be on your side…that truth and that justice will surely prevail by the judgment of this great tribunal of the American people.” In other words, the majority opinion was the method to discover God’s will. I can’t help but wonder if Lincoln would have claimed God elected Stalin.

Man, or the majority of men, was elevated above the law. R.L. Dabney wrote, “Both the French and the Yankee Jacobins, deriving from it an impious deification of the will of the mob which happens to be larger, as the supreme law.” In a message to the Provisional Congress on April 29, 1861, Jefferson Davis stated, “So utterly have the principles of the Constitution been corrupted in the Northern mind that, in the inaugural address delivered by President Lincoln in March last, he asserts as an axiom, which he plainly deems to be undeniable, that the theory of the Constitution requires that in all cases the majority shall Govern.”

Under Lincoln and the Republicans, the North pushed drastically towards a pure democracy, something even the New England founders found deplorable, regarding democracy as tyranny. They also pushed toward centralizing power, which goes hand in hand with majority rule. The Republicans wanted centralized national power where a simple majority could control the government. This would endow them with far-reaching powers in states where they previously held no sway. They wanted power centralized in D.C., away from “we the people,” where they could persuade those in power to do their bidding. Then, from D.C., the most powerful national party could dictate their demands and compel dissenting groups to comply. To do so, the Republicans were centralists and nationalists who put sovereignty with the federal government. They desired a simple majority to rule who would be represented by the best-funded national party and their interest groups.

After existing as a confederacy, the United States, under the Constitution, formed a Union with a republican form of governance. However, the North moved towards the despotism of democracy, removing self-governance from the people and instead allowing central powers to have unhindered coercive measures. Instead of a collection of diverse self-governing states made up of like-minded people, we would all be thrown into the melting pot of America to fight it out politically, so no one gets their way but politicians and interests.

In the South, democracy was seen as the method used by politicians to remove limitations on themselves. It replaced limited government, law, and God, with legalized confiscation and regulation of others’ lives and fortunes. The true freedom and self-government that come with democracy are not given to us but to those in authority allowing them to hide behind the majority, whose opinions are easily swayed, manipulated, coerced, or purchased to justify totalitarian policies. They then have the freedom to enact greater power and control over us and abolish or ignore laws and customs that used to hold them in check; now, they only need 51 percent each election cycle to accomplish their will. Democracy is better understood as freeing politicians from the limitations of the South, law, and the Constitution.

The Florida causes of secession declared, “The majority section may legislate imperiously and ruinously to the interests of the minority section not only without injury but to great benefit and advantage of their own section…such a government must in the nature of things and the universal principles of human nature and human conduct very soon lead as it has done to a grinding and degrading despotism.” Confederate Admiral Raphael Semmes wrote, “Liberty is always destroyed by the multitude… the many-headed monster becomes more tyrannical than the tyrant with a single head; numbers harden its conscience, and embolden it, in the perpetration of crime. And when this majority, in a free government, becomes a faction, or, in other words, represents certain classes and interests the detriment of other classes, and interests, farewell to public liberty; the people must either become enslaved, or there must be a disruption of the government.”

In his 1863 work, A Southern Republic and a Northern Democracy, Southerner Frank Alfriend said, “The North is essentially and radically democratic in all its social and national characteristics.” He went on to write that in the puritan North, there was a “tendency to democracy,” and “Lincoln’s election was a complete triumph of democracy.” Other Southerners agreed. In 1861, Benjamin Palmer wrote that: “No despotism is more absolute than that of an unprincipled democracy.” According to Benjamin Palmer, democracy was a war against the law, the constitution, the family, and Church. In his inaugural address at Richmond in 1862, Jefferson Davis lamented that, “The experiment instituted by our revolutionary fathers, of a voluntary Union of sovereign States for purposes specified in a solemn compact, had been perverted by those who, feeling power and forgetting right, were determined to respect no law but their own will… to place us under the despotism of numbers…The tyranny of an unbridled majority, the most odious and least responsible form of despotism.” And on April 23, 1861, Vice President Alexander H. Stephens spoke to the Virginia Secession Convention, stating, “Under the latitudinarian construction of the Constitution which prevails at the North, the general idea is maintained that the will of the majority is supreme.”

Give me that Old Time Religion

Historian Samuel Smith believes the Southern “old-time religion” played a significant role in the South’s rejection of modernity. He said the “southern religion was anti-modern…it was and is antithetical to so-called progress.” He said the South was orthodox, God-focused, creedal, decentralized, and while Protestant, it was a kind of religion that in many ways “preceded the Protestant Reformation.” He said Southern “religious makeup, in many respects, was decentralist, medieval, and, in the earth.” Professor Richard Weaver wrote that Southerners wanted “something akin to the rituals of the Medieval Church.”

The Southern religion was an “old-time religion” in that it was orthodox and did not give way to progressive ideas. It was also a “High Church” similar to Catholicism. In Why the South Will Survive, the authors wrote, “The South, basically Protestant, thought it was still part of Europe.” The South’s preservation of the old-time religion against Northern puritanism and modernity could be viewed as akin to the Protestant and Catholic wars centuries before.

Writing about Catholic author Hilaire Belloc’s book on Cromwell, Southern political commentator Matthew Anger said, “The Civil War of 1861-65 was in many ways a replay of events two centuries before, even down to the level of the material and doctrinal motivations. Permitting some degree of generalization, more traditional and agrarian interests were pitted against radical and moneyed urban interests. Both contests, while not overt struggles between Catholicism and its opponents, nevertheless ended in a decided victory for the anti-Catholic tendency. It was a further stage in the ongoing revolt against Christendom, which began with Luther and Calvin.”

Northerner Joseph Ingraham viewed a Sabbath in New Orleans, and watched as Catholics received the Eucharist. At the same time, many Protestants stood by, heads bowed in respect. In Catholics’ Lost Cause, Adam Tate writes, “Catholicism was a part of the Southern religious experience, not an exception to it.” In “The Older Religiousness in the South,” Richard Weaver writes, “There was much in the economic and social structure of the Old South to suggest Europe before the great plague and the peasant rebellions, so there was much in its religious attitude to recall the period before the Reformation.”

Weaver also wrote: “For although the South was heavily Protestant, its attitude toward religion was essentially the attitude of orthodoxy” going on to refer to the South’s “persistent medieval heritages.” Interestingly, it was not uncommon for some Protestant ministers of the antebellum period to have a copy of Saint Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae in their library, or for a Protestant family to have a copy of Thomas à Kempis’ The Imitation of Christ or some other Catholic devotional or two on the library shelf.

“The Catholic influence in American society was much stronger in the less populous South than in the North…In a region where family mattered, numerous leading families were Catholic…Many leading Southern families that were not Catholic had members who were…they tended to have a high regard and deep respect for the Church and her institutions, especially her schools…An example in this regard is Jefferson Davis himself, the eventual President of the C.S.A. His father sent him as a boy to Kentucky to be schooled by Dominicans. Davis embraced a form of Episcopalianism adhered to by many leading Southerners that was very “High Church,” very “Catholic” in its externals The Old South…had the only truly European civilization ever known in America. That is in the sense that it was a civilization rooted in its own soil. It was one that produced men who measured their success in life according to non-material standards, perhaps the chief of them being honor. It was an agricultural civilization, and a hierarchical one. That by itself was enough to make Pius [IX] or even most ordinary Catholics of the day sympathetic to the South. Certainly, the Catholic Bishops of the South were sympathetic. There is no record of any failing to support the Confederacy.”

Gary Potter, “Catholicism and the Old South“

Stonewall Jackson is an excellent example of a typical Southern antebellum American attitude towards Catholicism. During the Mexican-American War, Jackson almost joined the Catholic Church. The people’s devotion, along with their traditions, fascinated Jackson. He highly respected the Church’s symbolism, artwork, and history. But he found certain theological aspects not in accord with the Bible, so he could not join. Many Southern Protestants would fall in this category, with great respect and admiration for the Catholic Church but an unwillingness to join due to certain theological positions it maintained.

Knowing the philosophies of the French Revolution, and democracy would convert a Christian people to atheism, the South rejected it. Further, democracy was only the first step to socialism and communism imported from that revolution. In 1861, Benjamin Palmer said, “Democracy was a war against the law, the Constitution, the family, and Church.” Recalling the Civil War, Confederate chaplain James Avirett spoke of a “bitter and bloody antagonism to the law and order both of Holy Scripture and the Constitution,” Hunter McGuire said, “The French Revolution… turned a deaf ear to the great truth, in its blind worship of Reason, that Order is Heaven’s First Law… though strongly resisted by the conservative forces of Anglo-Saxon England… it threw its forces across the Atlantic and fortified them in Faneuil Hall, Boston.” Southerner Benjamin Palmer said Jacobins were abolitionists in disguise who had less impact on the South due to its Christian Orthodoxy. “Red Republicans” were what Southerners called the Republican Party. Dabney wrote, “Abolitionism… is a legitimate corollary from that fantastic, atheistic, and radical theory of human rights, which made the Reign of Terror in France, which has threatened that country, and which now threatens the United States, with the horrors of Red-Republicanism.”

To be continued in Part 2…

-By Jeb Smith

Jeb Smith is the author of Missing Monarchy: Correcting Misconceptions About The Middle Ages, Medieval Kingship, Democracy, And Liberty and Defending Dixie’s Land: What Every American Should Know About The South And The Civil War (written under the name Isaac C. Bishop). Smith has authored multiple articles on various blogs and websites, including The Postil magazine, History is Now Magazine and Medieval History. You can contact him at jackson18611096@gmail.com.