Petition Seeks to Remove Denton Confederate Statue

Petition Seeks to Remove Denton Confederate Statue(Denton County, Texas)DENTON - While to some the statue of a Confederate soldier that stands before the Denton County Courthouse represents a piece of history, others say they believe it just represents hypocrisy. That stand has incited two University of North Texas students to start a petition for the removal of the historical landmark, a statue of a Confederate soldier holding his gun to represent the South in the Civil War. "It's really very frustrating that so many people would look at this and clap," said Aron Duhon, one of the students behind the petition. Duhon said the statue, with its two separate fountains, is a standing ovation to racism. The two fountains were originally made separate for whites and blacks. "A confederate soldier who took up arms in defense of a regime based on slavery is the farthest thing from a hero possible," Duhon said. The word "HERO" was etched in the memorial nearly 90 years ago. "We live in a diverse population," said Jason V. Waite, another student behind the petition. "We have the University of North Texas here. We have lots of foreign students, lots of commuters and this only puts a damper on entrepreneurial interests in Denton." Denton County Judge Mary Horn said the students' petition is the third time the confederate statue issue has caught the attention of the commissioners court. "We did take it up with the Texas Historical Commission and their feeling is it is part of history and it does need to stay," Horn said. There are those who agree. "When I see a Confederate soldier memorial, I got to stop to have a picture of that," said Sandy Kolls, a self-professed historical buff. Kolls came across the statue while visiting Texas from Illinois. "I'm a northerner and I honor the soldiers who fought for the Confederacy, okay?" she said of the statue. "So, I get a good feeling." There are also others who disagree. "I believe it represents hatred," said Coby Williams. "That's just like having, I guess, like a slave owner with a whip," agreed Leah Herford. The UNT students say they will collect signatures now and throughout the summer to try to convince the Texas Historical Commission to remove the statue. In the past, the Commission has stood firm on keeping the memorial standing on public ground. E-mail ddenmon@wfaa.com Print this story Email this story

I'd suppose that many of your 90% who didn't own slaves either didn't vote, being women or children or slaves themselves or voted against secession.

Well, I guess we need to clarify a bit. The numbers parse, and I'm quoting those numbers. I'm talking about franchised white men.

Here are some relevant passages from Fehrenbach, from p. 316 passim:

By the late '50's, the discussion and miasmic fear of a slave revolt had reached almost hysteric proportions in some regions of Texas. Rumors -- always false -- of massacres in adjoining counties arose. No planter was willing to believe his own chattels were at the point of revolt, but most held an underlying fear that his neighbors' Negroes were lusting for white blood.

This incipient hysteria was strengthened, if not entirely caused, by abolitionist agitation in the North, which at this time, with almost lip-smacking satisfaction, was prophesying chaos and murder in the South. It did not affect just the planters; in fact, it seemed to affect them least.....

[p. 335ff] John Brown, at his trial, threw up a facile, self-serving line of argument that was accepted at face value by some, because if they could not quite condone Brown's murders, they hated slavery more.....[despite mass condemnation] there was an amazing reaction from what could only be considered the moral and cultural elite of the North of that time. This took the line that Brown might have been "insane", but his acts and intentions should be excused on the grounds that the compelling motive was "divine."..... Ralph Waldo Emerson described Brown as a "saint." Henry Thoreau, Theodore Parker, Longfellow, Bryant, and Lowell, the whole Northern pantheon, with the exception of Walt Whitman and Nathaniel Hawthorne, took the position Brown was an "angel of light," and not Brown, but the society that hanged him was mad. The late, falling-leaf intellectuality of New England in the 19th century seems to have become infused with a newer, strikingly intolerant puritanism......Never far from the moral question of slavery was a deep and growing hatred of the American planter class in the industrial North, probably based in a revived puritanism, an almost Roundhead fervor. Garrison said bluntly, "Every slaveholder has forfeited his right to live." The planter had become an enemy class.....

On the day Brown died church bells tolled from New England to Chicago; Albany fired off one hundred guns in salute, and a governor of a large Northern state wrote in his diary that men were ready to march to Virginia.

Further, a terrible suspicion of widespread conspiracy in the North to foment a hideous slave insurrection in the South grew out of the investigation by Congress into the Brown affair.....[description of the Secret Six, four of whom were Harvard graduates]...It could be explained only in the sense that fanaticism was clouding American decency, confusing ends and means. This acceptance of civil violence by intellectuals still throws a somber light over American history....

The notion that the entire North was determined to bring about bloody revolution not only paralyzed the planters, who were half convinced against their better judgment, but inflamed the average white. A Negro insurrection would not just affect the gentry; it would kill and burn out all white people in the counties......

[Southerners] lived in a sort of self-imposed intellectual exile. This, and the eroding effects of a continual physical and psychological insecurity, now fired hysteria. Ready to believe the worst, Texans reacted with characteristic violence.

An inferiority and insecurity complex gripped almost the entire white frontier farming middle class. An old American practice, the "witch hunt," was revived.....It was thought the South was honeycombed with traitors, and that every Negro was bloody-minded and ready to rise and kill.....Newspapers reported "abolitionists" were trying to burn out the South; horrible atrocity tales of slave risings, poisonings, and political murder -- for which there was no basis in truth -- pervaded the western counties of the heartland. At Dallas a large mob hanged three unfortunate Negroes, for no known cause. Three white men were lynched in Fort Worth, on the suspicion they had "tampered" with slaves.....but noticeably, the wildest rumors and violence were confined to the white regions, west of the "black belt." ...

Similar violence and panic was occurring in some degree across the whole South; the wildest rumors seem to have begun in Texas, but they rapidly spread northward as far as the Potomac. In Virginia and Mississippi, many people believed Texas was in a state of chaos, induced by Northern conspiracies. One historian compared this mass delusion and mass fear with the "Great Fear" that seized France in 1789; in any event it precipitated political crisis.

The great American tragedy was that in both Texas and in Northern states otherwise decent men had come to believe in diabolism and depravity on the other side. There were ugly aspects on each side. The repellent slavering by intellectuals over John Brown's body was matched by editorials in Texas advocating the restoration of the slave trade and violence against anyone who disagreed. Abolitionists ranted that the South must be "cleansed by fire" while Southerners grimly determined that the "higher law of self-preservation" was the only defense against the higher law defying their institutions and property rights preached by the Abolitionists. The failure of the North to condemn John Brown unequivocally produced a psychology of lynch law......

[Emphasis supplied.]

So there you have it, the beginning of wholesale racial lynching and mob violence as a commonplace among Southern whites, who previously had never been insecure enough to embrace them. If they had feared their planter neighbors' slaves, they had confidence in the law and militia to restrain them. But the idea of a slave revolt backed by the resources of an ideologized, newly vicious Northern clerisy pushed them over the edge. They really were in danger, and they went nuts.

Quote him. Quote Madison like I quoted Madison.

I've done a quick scan back on this thread and I can't find where you actually quoted Madison. However, I could be wrong...or you could be referring to an earlier discussion. It's so hard to keep your stuff straight.

Let me digress for a moment and quote Madison on one of your favorite topics, that whole sovereign-states-nobody-above-us arguement you love. In an October 1787 letter to Thomas Jefferson outlining the Constitution that came out of the convention, Madison wrote:

"It was generally agreed that the objects of the Union could not be secured by any system founded on the principle of a confederation of Sovereign States. A voluntary observance of the federal law by all the members could never be hoped for. A compulsive one could evidently never be reduced to practice, and if it could, involved equal calamities to the innocent and guilty, the necessity of a military force, both obnoxious and dangerous, and, in general, a scene resembling much more a civil war than the administration of a regular Government.

Hence was embraced the alternative of a Government which, instead of operating on the States, should operate without their intervention on the individuals composing them; and hence the change in the principle and proportion of representation.

This ground-work being laid, the great objects which presented themselves were: 1. To unite a proper energy in the Executive, and a proper stability in the Legislative departments, with the essential characters of Republican Government. 2. To draw a line of demarcation which would give to the General Government every power requisite for general purposes, and leave to the States every power which might be most beneficially administered by them. 3. To provide for the different interests of different parts of the Union. 4. To adjust the clashing pretensions of the large and small States. Each of these objects was pregnant with difficulties. The whole of them together formed a task more difficult than can be well conceived by those who were not concerned in the execution of it. Adding to these considerations the natural diversity of human opinions on all new and complicated subjects, it is impossible to consider the degree of concord which ultimately prevailed as less than a miracle."

I would say it's clear from that that your viewpoint of what is meant by state sovereignty and Madison's idea are not even close.

But you asked what Madison had to say on unilateral secession. Well, to begin with there is the famous 1833 letter to Daniel Webster following Webster's attack on secession. Madison wrote:

"I return my thanks for the copy of your late very powerful Speech in the Senate of the United S. It crushes "nullification" and must hasten the abandonment of "Secession." But this dodges the blow by confounding the claim to secede at will, with the right of seceding from intolerable oppression. The former answers itself, being a violation, without cause, of a faith solemnly pledged. The latter is another name only for revolution, about which there is no theoretic controversy. Its double aspect, nevertheless, with the countenance recd from certain quarters, is giving it a popular currency here which may influence the approaching elections both for Congress & for the State Legislature. It has gained some advantage also, by mixing itself with the question whether the Constitution of the U.S. was formed by the people or by the States, now under a theoretic discussion by animated partisans."

Madison uses the term 'secede at will' but it is evident from his other writings that he is referring to a state seceding without the consent of the other states, what I refer to as unilateral secession. I'm open to using either phrase. But in any case, Madison makes it clear that in his view unilateral secession, or secession at will, is "a violation of a faith solemnly pledged.

At about the same time, Madison wrote a letter to William Cabell Rivers. In one of the paragraphs, Madison makes it clear who is supreme over whom: "The words of the Constitution are explicit that the Constitution & laws of the U. S. shall be supreme over the Constitution & laws of the several States, supreme in their exposition and execution as well as in their authority. Without a supremacy in those respects it would be like a scabbard in the hand of a soldier without a sword in it. The imagination itself is startled at the idea of twenty four independent expounders of a rule that cannot exist, but in a meaning and operation, the same for all."

Madison continues: "The conduct of S. Carolina has called forth not only the question of nullification, but the more formidable one of secession. It is asked whether a State by resuming the sovereign form in which it entered the Union, may not of right withdraw from it at will. As this is a simple question whether a State, more than an individual, has a right to violate its engagements, it would seem that it might be safely left to answer itself. But the countenance given to the claim shows that it cannot be so lightly dismissed. The natural feelings which laudably attach the people composing a State, to its authority and importance, are at present too much excited by the unnatural feelings, with which they have been inspired against their brethren of other States, not to expose them, to the danger of being misled into erroneous views of the nature of the Union and the interest they have in it. One thing at least seems to be too clear to be questioned, that whilst a State remains within the Union it cannot withdraw its citizens from the operation of the Constitution & laws of the Union. In the event of an actual secession without the Consent of the Co States, the course to be pursued by these involves questions painful in the discussion of them. God grant that the menacing appearances, which obtruded it may not be followed by positive occurrences requiring the more painful task of deciding them?"

Madison is clear. Secession without consent of the Co States is not something to be considered. The effects would clearly be, in Madison's view, disasterous. States cannot merely 'violate its engagements' merely because it wants to.

But Madison states his positions most clearly in a letter written about a year earlier in response to two essays which were written by Alexander Rives. And in it he minces no words: "But the ability and the motives disclosed in the Essays induce me to say in compliance with the wish expressed, that I do not consider the proceedings of Virginia in ’98-’99 as countenancing the doctrine that a state may at will secede from its Constitutional compact with the other States. A rightful secession requires the consent of the others, or an abuse of the compact, absolving the seceding party from the obligations imposed by it.

A few paragraphs later, Madison makes his point even more plain: "The case of a claim in a State to secede from its union with the others is a question among the States themselves as parties to a compact." In other words, a matter for the states to discuss, not for a single state or state to perform unilaterally.

Later Madison asks a question that shows the whole lunacy of the idea of unilateral secession, and a quote I've posted many times: "The characteristic distinction between free Governments and Governments not free is, that the former are founded on compact, not between the Government and those for whom it acts, but between the parties creating the Government. Each of those being equal, neither can have more rights to say that the compact has been violated and dissolved, than every other has to deny the fact, and to insist on the execution of the bargains. An inference from the doctrine that a single state has a right to secede at will from the rest, is that the rest would have an equal right to secede from it; in other words, to turn it, against its will, out of its union with them. Such a doctrine would not, till of late, have been palatable anywhere, on nowhere less so than where it is not most contended for."

And Madison closes with an example: "A careless view of the subject might find an analogy between State secession and individual expatriation. But the distinction is obvious and essential. Even in the latter case, whether regarded as a right implicitly reserved in the original social compact, or as a reasonable indulgence, it is not exempt from certain conditions. It must be used without injustice or injury to the community from which the expatriating party separates itself. Assuredly he could not withdraw his portion of territory from the common domain. In the case of a State seceding for the Union, its domain would be dismembers and other consequences brought on not less obvious than pernicious."

How can unilateral secession meet any of Madison's requirements? It cannot be done without injustice or injury to the remaining states, as the South proved when they stole property and walked out on debts. It cannot be done without agreeing that some states had more rights than others, something Madison rejected. And Madison shows the lunacy of the idea by pointing out that if a state can leave unilaterally then it could also be turned out unilaterally. So it is clear from these four documents exactly how Madison felt on the idea of unilateral secession. He was completely, unequivocably opposed to the whole idea.

I'd suppose that many of your 90% who didn't own slaves either didn't vote, being women or children or slaves themselves or voted against secession.

In a state like Mississippi or South Carolina, where something like half the population had a slaveowner somewhere in the family, the vote for secession was higher than in states where slaves and slaveowners were rarer.

Here is a relevant quote:

In 1850 there were in all the Southern States only 170,000 men owning more than five slaves each, and they owned 2,800,000 out of 3,300,000. These men by their system rendered labor degrading -- they have driven out their non-slaveholding neighbors by hundreds of thousands to find homes and self-respect in the free air of the West.

-- Edward Atkinson, "Is Cotton Our King?" The Continental Monthly, Volume I, No. 3, March, 1862, pp. 247-256.

Fehrenbach quotes the figure of 182,000 black slaves in Texas in 1860, worth over $106,000,000 or 20% more than the value of all developed real estate in the State. He adds,

If the farmer class in Texas had absorbed different ideas and ideals of society from the planters, they also differed from Middle Western farmers in another striking way. The slave system created a terrible sense of insecurity in Texas and the South. The institution of Negro slavery was not really popular with the more than 400,000 white Texans -- 95% of the population -- who owned none, although they had grown up with it and considered it normal. What was sometimes not understood fully in the North was that the average white Texan feared a Negro insurrection as much as the slavemaster [or, as we have seen elsewhere, more -- LG], because a slave revolt threw all whites in danger. Also, the white farmers supported the institution of slavery vehemently, because virtually all of them were adamantly opposed to Negro equality......no Western farm states had much regard for the Negro as a man -- even after the conclusion of the Civil War many Northern states denied the franchise to freedmen. But the Wisconsin farmer did not feel insecure toward the Negro, because he did not live up against the slave horde......

....This was not unusual in any historical sense. It was a characteristic of all societies based on the subordination of one differentiated group to another, from Norman Sicily in the Middle Ages to Hispanic America. The Negro lived in another country from the white farmer; he was a faceless mass; he was hardly thought of as human. The men who owned, and even abused, slaves tended to think of them in more personal terms, as human beings, than those who watched and feared them from a short distance.

-- T. R. Fehrenbach, Lone Star, p. 328f.

I would add that your proportions appear to be sourced from an AOL Members website previously cited on FR threads on the subject, whose owner relies on McPherson and Foner, among other Unionists. I have to object to relying on those two Marxist agitators for any sort of summary or freighted statement, inasmuch as both of them have been guilty of playing politics by scraping up as much mud as possible to throw on white Southerners, which is the Clintonista Left's enemy class of voters, at whom they constantly point their crooked fingers and croak, "eeeeeevilll!!" for purely political purposes, Clinton himself engaging both of them to rewrite the National Park Service educational materials handed out to the public at Gettysburg with the desired political spin.

It is, as I review the AOL website owner's data, evidently the goal of the compilers to broaden as much as possible, among Southern whites, an attachment to "the slaveowning class", i.e. the enemy class of American history, insofar as the numbers will permit. How they arrived at a number for "families" that supposedly owned slaves, I don't know, but the intention to broaden ownership is evident from the language and categories used. The numbers might be different if we were to (somehow) count instead the number of suffragans who owned slaves, or simply the number of individuals who owned them. But one detects a tendency in the compilation that, given the sources cited, merits a cautionary note.

That said, and going by no better authority than my own recall of a lecture on slavery in Texas (which I heard assuming the lecturer was on the level with her audience -- which would change if I found out she were affiliated with a Left NGO, for example, like McPherson, and like another lecturer active in Texas archaeological circles who stated explicitly in her lecture that her thrust in researching slave life in Texas was political: to affirm black lives in the past and politics in the present [and presumably, then, to inculpate and denigrate whites qua whites betimes, n/w/s she is a white Leftist herself]), I think the numbers were slightly different than Fehrenbach's 95% proportion of whites not owning slaves, as he said. Rather, I recall that the proportion was more like 85/15% nonowners to owners, and it is a little fuzzy now whether that 15% was owners, or owners of more than one slave, which was a category which I believe was discussed.

There was demographic significance to that threshhold, by the way, insofar as a single slave, or two slaves, tended to live with the family in the house and work side by side with family members, whereas larger numbers were associated with institutionalized arrangements (quarters, factories, workshops, etc.). Which implies further that there was a middle ground not discussed by any of our sources, in which some whites lived with slaves in a far more personalizing situation that would tend to inoculate them against the kind of group anxiety and hysteria about slave revolts that were common in the rest of society; but these slaveholders of "family slaves" were a splinter group.

One last point. I think I've made and adequately supported my overarching point that support for secession was not sprung entirely from peculiar interest, contrary the munching Red termites who have advanced that politically loaded argument.

There were reasons of politics, reasons of race and pride, reasons of fear of both peaceful labor competition and armed violence, that impelled Southerners who did not own slaves to take up arms in defense of their States against Northern armies pouring into them, and the Abolitionist and sectionalist destroyers who stood behind those armies, ordering them into the South.

I would add that your proportions appear to be sourced from an AOL Members website previously cited on FR threads on the subject, whose owner relies on McPherson and Foner, among other Unionists.

I suspect that x does what I do, goes to the source. Specifically the 1860 census data available from the University of Virginia here. Coming up with x's figures is easy, since the census gives totals of slaves, slave owners, families, etc. Looking at the number of slave owners in each state, and assuming that virtually all of them had wives and children, the dividing the number of slave owners by the number of families gives a good indication of how widespread slave ownership was.

Here is a relevant quote:

By 1860 that total had risen slightly. According to the 1860 census only 216,276 slave owners owned 5 or fewer. That would mean about 178,000 owned more than 5 slaves. Regardless, what that shows is that slave ownership was very much a middle-class institution and not something restricted to the very wealthy. That would support the idea that the average Southerner either owned a slave, lived in family supported by slaves, or who's economic well-being was dependent on slave owners. Give the widespread dependency on slavery then why is it so surprising to you that they would rebel in order to protect it?

That said, and going by no better authority than my own recall of a lecture on slavery in Texas...

Well now there's a source we can take to the bank.

I think I've made and adequately supported my overarching point that support for secession was not sprung entirely from peculiar interest, contrary the munching Red termites who have advanced that politically loaded argument.

If you say so.

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