The Reactionary Confederacy – Medievalism in the Old South – Part 2

Southern Aristocracy

“The South remained bound by traditional values and networks of family, kinship, hierarchy, and patriarchy. The North… hurtled forward eagerly toward a future of industrial capitalism that many Southerners found distasteful if not frightening, the South remained proudly and even defiantly rooted in the past.”

James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom

According to Southern writer and theologian, R.L Dabney, it was the: “British institutions, Kings, Lords, and commons, under which men have enjoyed regulated liberty longer, and to a greater degree, than under any government on earth.” Under the medieval hierarchy, liberty flourished. Democracy is the antithesis of hierarchy. In The Screwtape Letters, C.S Lewis wrote of the inevitable “movement toward the discrediting, and finally elimination, of every kind of human excellence… Allow no preeminence among your subject… Cut them down to a level; all slaves, all ciphers, all nobodies. All equals.”

Rather than seeking equality and democracy, the South maintained a hierarchy. As much as the South hated democracy, the North hated the Southern aristocracy. When the Republican Party announced its name, it declared it was set up “against the schemes of aristocracy.” According to Northern abolitionist Thaddeus Stephens, the South seceded to, “Justify the establishment of an empire admitting the principle of King, Lords, and slaves.”

The South maintained much of medieval society mixed with Victorian England. The South is best understood as the Protestant version of a medieval society. It was notable in its devout Christian faith and feudalistic political aristocracy, with planters replacing lords they sought to replicate. In a letter to John Adams, Thomas Jefferson declared that a natural aristocracy is: “The most precious gift of nature for the instruction, the trusts and government of society… that form of government is the best, which provides the most effectually for a pure selection of this natural aristoi into the offices of government.”

As I demonstrate in my book, Missing Monarchy: Correcting Misconceptions About The Middle Ages, Medieval Kingship, Democracy, And Liberty, Medieval Europe, under the feudal monarchies system, has been much misportrayed. Adequately understood, the feudal monarchies were the most decentralized, libertarian, devout Christian period ever known. Its populace was devout in their faith, and Christianity impacted every sector of society. Kings had very little power and were limited by local customs, traditions, and laws. Kings and lords did not create but were under the law. Each local lord controlled autonomously or nearly autonomously within his sphere, allowing for thousands of little diverse customs and laws. Yet, every lord and king were also under the law and tradition that existed before them. Each area was controlled not by landless masses bent on tyranny but by aristocratic nobles protecting their realm. There was no state or regulatory body of elected politicians. Self-government, personal oaths, and true liberty were the rules; compacts, not cohesion, were the norm. Society was built from the bottom up based on choice, not top-down based on coercion. It was not until the 14th century and the Renaissance that absolute monarchies appeared; kings became more powerful, and political power centralized. Kings began to declare as they willed. The Founders rejected this and desired to return to the older system of governance as existed in the early and high Middle Ages. Historian Thomas Woods summarized this as, “The colonists held fast to an older view of British Constitutionalism, according to which a proposed measure was constitutional only if it conformed to customary practice” instead of the later “will of parliament.” In other words, a return to feudalistic governance and a rejection of absolutist kings like George III or elected officials. The medieval peasant was freer than any citizen in a republic or democracy. The closest one comes, and it was indeed close, is the old South.

“Its social pattern was manorial, its civilization that of the Cavalier, its ruling class an aristocracy coextensive with the planter group—men often entitled to quarter the royal arms of St. George and St. Andrew on their shields, and in every case descended from the old gentlefolk who for many centuries had made up the ruling classes of Europe. They dwelt in large and stately mansions… Their estates were feudal baronies… their social life a thing of Old World splendor and delicacy… wholly dominated by ideals of honor and chivalry and noblesse the home of a genuine and fully realized aristocracy.”

W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South

It was the aristocratic lords of the Middle Ages who negated the power of the king (central power) and maintained the rule of law and local customs. Like the medieval lord, the Southern statesman kept the federal government from becoming tyrannical. Likewise, loyalty to the local lord or state was more vital than loyalty to the king or the federal in the Middle Ages and the Old South. Dabney said the South was: “The true conservative power of American government, the most solid type of the old English character.” In Why the South Will Survive, the authors wrote, “Southern political tradition… It consisted of a belief in republics guided by the best talent of the community.” An aristocracy ruled the South.

“The institution of domestic slavery is an element of inestimable value in our political system. It naturally consigns the whole power of government to the hands of those who are best qualified to use it…It is eminently proper that society should contain an aristocracy–of virtue, of intellect, of blood and wealth, and worth; and they alone should control the powers of government, because they are most deeply interested in the public wealth, and are best qualified to conserve it…It is eminently conservative and eminently suited to the wants of the Southern people. It opposes, on the one hand, the despotism of the individual, which appears in a lawless democracy like that of the United States; it opposes, on the other, the despotism of the mass, which appears in an empire like that of Russia it presents the truthful anomaly of a free republican government, resting upon the rightful paradox–liberty and slavery.”

Rev. William A. Hall, The Historic Significance of the Southern Revolution

Many Southerners believed liberty could be maintained because of a slaveholding aristocracy. Only upper-class landowners acting as aristocratic lords could produce gentlemen who had the time and energy to read literature and theology, learn proper hospitality, the arts, military, law, and become true Christian “Gentlemen” who could assist as public servants and be entrusted with the government. This is also a medieval understanding as it was believed that lords, knights, bishops, monks, and scholars need to be provided for to commit their whole life to their occupation of bettering society. Rev. J. H. Thornwell wrote, “Justifying Southern slavery, are the principles of regulated liberty – that in defending this institution we have really been upholding the civil interest of mankind – resisting alike the social anarchy of communism… we have been supporting representative, republican government against the despotism of masses.”

In the mind of leading Southerners like Thornwell, slavery was justified, in preserving liberty and a republican form of government against tyranny. They rightly prophesied that if the poor masses were allowed to vote, the overthrow of republican principles and liberty would result. James Hammond said, “Our slaves do not vote. We give them no political power. Yours (hourly workers) do vote, and being the majority, they are the depositaries [sic] of all your political power.” The landless masses, said Hammond, had more power than armies with banners to destroy liberty. Whereas in the South, slaves could take the place of the laboring masses of Northern cities, and liberty could be maintained. So common was this opinion in the South that when Confederate General Patrick Cleburne desired to free Southern slaves, he had to respond to what he perceived as a powerful argument against freeing slaves, that abolition would destroy liberty.

“First, the Southern planter was as kind-hearted and naturally philanthropic as any class of men found anywhere; then with us, he was usually a college-bred man and of liberal culture. Not a few of them were as noble Christian gentlemen as were ever produced by any civilization.”

R.Q Mallard, Plantation Life Before Emancipation

The South was led by a rural landowning aristocracy spread over vast areas resembling the lords of feudalistic Europe. This class produced the large majority of statesmen, writers, thinkers, generals, etc. The upper-class planters almost universally made up the elected officials at the state and federal levels. The aristocratic Christian gentleman was most honored in Southern society at the top of the hierarchy. As the lords of old, they were by and large examples of Christian gentlemen, which filtered down through all sections of society.

Farming was noble, and farmers were honored because, from the time of Jefferson and Washington all the best of Southern society were planters. Unfortunately, today’s top of our hierarchy tends to be morally degenerate. C.S Lewis said, “Where men are forbidden to honor a king, they honor millionaires, athletes, or film stars instead; even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.”

The South maintained franchise limitation to preserve liberty. For example, only prosperous landowners could vote in Virginia after the Revolution. And even then, they only elected the General Assembly. The assembly elected the Governor, who appointed the judges. Only the upper class learned Christian “Gentlemen” were allowed influence. The mob could not be trusted to not use the state’s coercive powers to their advantage. Everywhere we look and see, when an aristocracy devolves into a democracy, a drastic increase in state power, wars, the police state, taxation, regulation, loss of religious freedom, increased corruption, loss of morals, increased atheism, and loss of liberty follow. Most states outlawed non-Christians from office, for example

Tennessee (1796): “No person who denies the being of God, or a future state of rewards and punishments, shall hold any office in the civil department of this State.”

Mississippi (1861): “SEC. 5. No person who denies the being of a God, or a future State of rewards and punishments, shall hold any office in the civil department of this State.”

The Confederacy was a reactionary movement against democracy and a push for a stricter aristocracy. W.J. Cash wrote, “One of the most immediately striking and important changes the Civil War and Reconstruction had brought to the South was that they had irrevocably halted it in its march toward aristocracy.” Virginia reinstated qualifications for voters right before the Civil War. The qualification for voting in the South Carolina Constitution of 1861 was that you must be a freeman with 50 acres of land. And, “No person shall be eligible to a seat in the House of Representatives… unless he is legally seized and possessed, in his own right, of a settled freehold estate of five hundred acres of land and ten negroes: or of a real estate of the value of one hundred and fifty pounds, sterling, clear of debt. And he must be a free white man.” There was the same requirement for a seat in the state senate, and additionally: “He shall not be eligible unless he is legally seized and possessed, in his own right, of a settled freehold of three hundred pounds, sterling, clear of debt.” This planter class dominated Southern politics.

During its short life, the Confederacy pushed even more so to an aristocracy. In The Confederate States of America, historian E. Merton Coulter wrote, “An observant federal prisoner sensed Southern sentiment thus ‘They will tell you that what we want is an aristocracy. That’s what we are fighting for. That’s what our training and mode of life demands. That’s what we will have, and nothing short of that will satisfy the ambition of Southern chivalry.'” On July 23, 1861, the Daily Richmond Whig wrote, “The right of voting should be a high privilege to be enjoyed by those only who are worthy to exercise it… the South should be wrought into a high-toned aristocracy.” Robert Smith told the people of Montgomery, Alabama, that voting was a “High privilege,” unlike in the North; mobs would not rule the South. In 1863, Frank Alfred wrote, “The South… the character of an aristocracy… regulated liberty beyond the control of ignorant and fanatical mobs.” Historian E. Merton Coulter gave, I think, an accurate description of what kind of political system the South would have had if they achieved independence, “It would undoubtedly have developed more toward a conservative aristocracy.” Robert Fogel said if the South had won, it would have pushed worldwide efforts for a privileged aristocracy, enhanced “Forces of reaction everywhere” and “demoralized” democracy.

In the Confederacy, the president and vice president were the only nationally elected officers, and the mass of people did not elect them. Instead, the people of each state elected leaders from their communities to represent their states in the electoral college, equal to the number of senators and representatives of their state. Those leaders would then choose who to vote for. Neither did all state members have to agree on whom to vote for.

On October 28, 1863, the Athens, Georgia, Southern Watchman quoted a Southern white about the Confederacy’s increasing voter restrictions. He said it was, “An aristocratic government, tending towards monarchy.” Historian Ervin Jordan reported that one Virginia slave owner: “advocated a slavocracy of hereditary aristocratic Southern slave lords as the best form of Confederate government. He predicted a new regime based on a royal ruling class… and the establishment of ‘a limited or absolute monarchy.'” Earlier, I quoted Major James Randolph, who wrote the popular Southern folk song, “I’m a Good Ol’ Rebel.” A section reads, “I hates the Declaration, Of Independence, too.” The separation from a monarchy was not beloved by all those who saw democracy as the destroyer of limited government. As Coulter shows, some in the South even called for a monarchy during secession. Later, some wanted General Lee to be king or elect a royal family. In his book The Confederate War, Gary Gallagher quotes a Confederate artillerist as saying of Lee, “In fact, I should like to see him as king.” Other Southerners wished they had remained a colony of Great Britain.

Lt.-Colonel Arthur J. Fremantle, visiting the Confederacy in 1863, said of the Confederate troops, “The officers and men really sang uncommonly well, and they finished with ‘God save the Queen!’ and after dinner, the Queen’s health was proposed; and the party expressed the greatest admiration for Her Majesty and respect for the British Constitution. They all said that universal suffrage did not produce such deplorable results in the South as in the North; because the population in the South is so very scattered, and the whites being the superior race, they form a sort of aristocracy.” He spoke of the, “Excellent types of the higher class of… their manners and feelings resemble those of the upper classes in the old country.”

The Confederacy would have been led by Southern planters moving even more towards decentralization and libertarian policies. However, this gentleman class of aristocratic planters was targeted by the Red Republicans and wiped out during the war and Reconstruction. And with this class destroyed, so was the Old South’s political structure and culture. Everyone was brought down to the lowest common denominator, and Northern equality was achieved.

Was the South moving away from the Founders’ republic towards aristocratic lords? I think so, but democracy in the North proved to Southerners that it is the enemy of liberty. However, the Founders created a republic, not a democracy. Dabney said the Virginia state constitution was, “as distinctly contrasted with a leveling democracy, as any monarchy.” And as monarchist Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn writes, “Christian, monarchical forms of government belong, like the republic, to the good forms of government.” They are the only two forms God endorses in the Bible. The American Colonies resisted the Renaissance effects on European monarchies, increasing power and centralization as they left behind the medieval feudal system and became absolute monarchies. Yet Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, in Liberty or Equality; The Challenge of our Time, pointed out, “the Declaration of Independence in no way attacks the institution of monarchy, but merely disqualifies George III for his high office.” South Carolina delegate to the Continental Congress William Henry Drayton said, “George the Third has also broken the original contract between King and people.”

In New Views of the Constitution of the United States, John Taylor of Caroline (Virginia) objects to monarchy because he equated monarchy with centralized power in his day, not the feudal system. He also objected to all forms of centralization, writing, “every species of concentrated sovereignty over extensive territories, whether monarchical, aristocratic, democratic, or mixed, must be despotic. In no case has a concentrated power over great territories been sustained, except by mercenary armies, and wherever power is thus sustained, despotism is the consequence.” Furthermore, Taylor believed an absolutist monarchy would be the best of centralized governments.  As Taylor said, monarchy is the best of the worst, that is, centralized forms of government; likewise, decentralized monarchy and aristocracy are the best for preserving liberty.

However, even those pushing for monarchy in the Confederacy would model it after the decentralized feudal order, not Taylor’s centralized absolute monarchies.

The plantation system resembled the feudal order in that land was power. Plantations were spread over vast acres like the castles of lords, with an agrarian population of peasant landowners. The South was “composed, primarily, of wealthy individuals, living aloof from each other on their respective plantations, isolated like feudal chieftains” observed Joseph Holt Ingraham. In I’ll Take My Stand, one of the authors wrote, “The Old South was a feudal society.” The Southern aristocratic master played the role of lord owning substantial wealth and land. The slaves played the part of serfs who rented their sections of the property and worked the shared land of the masters. A percentage of the produce would go to the master as payment for renting the land. In The Rights and Duties of Masters, Rev. J. H. Thornwell writes, “The right that the master has is a right not to the man (the slave is not owned) but to his labor. What he sells is not the man, but the property in his services.” Mallard writes, “all intelligent slaveholders agreed with Dr. Thornwell, that all that the owner was entitled to was the reasonable service of the slave, and control of time and person only so far as was necessary to secure that end.”

This is the feudal understanding of a lord and serf. The lord did not own the “unfree” serf, but he did own rights to his services. In the plantation system, the payment was for the free property, room, medical care, food, and protection of the slaves. Of course, feudalism had the advantage of the freedom to the serf in making and choosing his lord and customs. But even so, many slaves testified they would not have chosen another master [lord] or another mode of life. That is how a British observer viewed slavery. In his book, Myths and Realities of American Slavery, John C. Perry quotes a British observer: “There is a hereditary regard and often attachment on both sides, more like that formerly existed between lords and their retainers in the old feudal times.”

The position was inherited by the planter class of aristocrats led by the older families of Virginia and South Carolina. But the low-income families also could rise to this class if they so desired. Free blacks, former slaves, Native Americans, and poor whites did enter the upper-class planters and adopted their way of life and manners. Both feudal Europe and the South were self-sufficient agrarian systems where nearly everything needed was produced on-site. The rest could be purchased by the cash crops and bartered or traded. In both cases, the lord had servants enabling his leisure time to study and become an aristocrat. The lord lived with and was around his peasants creating a loyalty and bond between the two, and a close-knit family held together both the peasants to their lord, and slaves to their master.

Likewise, local laws overruled more distant laws. Speaking of state laws that did not recognize slave marriages, Fogel and Engerman write, “For most slaves it was the law of the plantation, not of the state” and “The latitude which the state yielded to the planter was quite wide.” If the state said slaves couldn’t learn to read or marry, the owners did not care and would do so anyway. They would protect their people from unjust laws. Fogel and Engerman continue, “Such duality of the legal structure was not unique to the antebellum South. It existed in medieval Europe in the duality between law of the Manor and of the Crown. It was a characteristic of the regimes under which the American colonies were governed.” So, we see local law was held above federal law, just as local law and customs in the Middle Ages overruled any unjust law a king might attempt. Just as the plantation kept the government from local whites, it did so with slaves as well, “Only a small proportion of the slaves ever had to deal with the law enforcement mechanism of the state,” writes Fogel.

The very culture of gentlemen and plantations also produced liberty-minded people. As a self-sufficient system, the plantations generated individualism already strong in the South, and the gentlemen class’s conduct and politics spread out to the whole of the South and were readily adopted. Cash wrote, “Seeing the planter not as an antagonist but as an old friend or kinsman, the common white naturally fell into the habit of honoring him as primus inter pares, of deferring to his knowledge and judgment, of consulting him on every occasion, and of looking to him for leadership and opinion—and, above all, for opinion in politics.” Voting on secession in a local Southern community was almost always heavily lopsided, because the aristocratic leaders of each locality influenced the majority.

As the lords under feudalism, the planters won favor for helping the community. They built and donated to churches, started schools, cared for the widow and orphans, and set an example for good manners and morals; they were the most educated and learned and had the most significant influence. Cash writes, “The common white, as a matter of course, gave eager credence to and took pride in the legend of aristocracy which was so valuable to the defense of the land. He went farther, in fact and… pretty completely assimilated his own ego to the latter’s—felt his planter neighbor’s new splendor as being in some fashion his also.” Virginia planter John Randolph of Roanoke said, “I am an aristocrat, I love liberty, I hate equality.”

I think we can see now why the plantation owners have been so demonized and vilified by all agents of centralization and government control. Outside of the medieval lords, the Southern plantation owners protected people’s liberty and resisted centralization better than any group. No two groups have been so misportrayed and demonized for the same reasons.

To be continued in Part 3…

-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.