Charles Summer, speaking as the war wound down.^50
Illustrating “PUBLIC LIBERTY and PRIVATE RIGHT,” Nast shows the New
York City draft riot of 1863: white thugs are exercising their “right” to beat and
kill African Americans, including a child held upside down.
Ideas made the opposite impact in the Confederacy. Ideological
contradictions afflicted the slave system even before the war began. John
Brown knew that masters secretly feared that their slaves might revolt, even as
they assured abolitionists that slaves really liked slavery. One reason his
Harpers Ferry raid prompted such an outcry in the South was that slave owners
feared their slaves might join him. Yet their condemnations of Brown and the
“Black Republicans” who financed him did not persuade Northern moderates
but only pushed them toward the abolitionist camp. After all, if Brown was
truly dangerous, as slave owners claimed, then slavery was truly unjust. Happy
slaves would never revolt.
White Southerners founded the Confederacy on the ideology of white
supremacy. According to Alexander Stephens, vice president of the
Confederacy: “Our new government’s foundations are laid, its cornerstone
rests, upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man, that
slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal
condition.” Confederate soldiers on their way to Antietam and Gettysburg,
their two main forays into Union states, put this ideology into practice: they
seized scores of free black people in Maryland and Pennsylvania and sent them