The Confederacy Is Dead

It has become fashionable in some circles to liken the Republican Party to the Southern Confederacy—the same Confederacy created out of the throes of sectionalism and secession to preserve racial slavery, and the same Confederacy that in 1861 inaugurated violent civil war against the lawful government of the United States. Recent essays in Rolling Stone and the New York Review of Books have given the clearest expression to this comparison. But the analogy is false, and it demands a corrective.

It is self-evidently false because no American today sanctions the buying and selling of persons in marketplaces as chattel. Such sights were common in the nation’s capital until 1850 and across the South into the 1860s. So ubiquitous was slavery in the antebellum South that, absent complete federal guarantees, the institution required rigorous protection in local law. Slavery was the bedrock and the figurative cornerstone of the Confederacy. This treasonous political experiment was dedicated not to the proposition that all men are created equal—a principle given expression by the authors of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, reaffirmed by the Republican Party at its founding in 1854, and celebrated today by Americans of good will irrespective of political party—but to the degradation of African-Americans.