“No great change takes place in human institutions without involving amongst its causes the law of inheritance…”
Tocqueville well-grasped the tumult of his day and its dire implications. He saw what was at stake back of the Abolitionist movement—our civil government, our communities, our institutions, our families—even our children.
“[T]he destiny of the negroes is in some measure interwoven with that of the Europeans…The most formidable of all the ills which threaten the future of the Union arises from the presence of a black population upon its territory; and in contemplating the cause of the present embarrassments or of the future dangers of the United States, the observer is invariably led to consider this as a primary fact…”
Though he was himself inclined to both New England Unitarianism and Abolition, Tocqueville was nonetheless a candid Race Realist. He thought that the very presence of Negroes in America represented ‘the most formidable of all the ills which threaten[ed] the future’ of our nation. This he considered a ‘primary fact’ of America’s future.
Condoleeza Rice has recently spoken of Negro inequality as America’s “Birth Defect” but Tocqueville considered the Negro presence in America to be the nation’s true ‘Birth Defect’.
“[T]he settlers, who all belonged to the same European race, had the same civilization, the same laws, and their shades of difference were extremely slight…”
This is an echoe of John Jay’s words in Federalist #2, “…that Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people--a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs…” And it was by this rationale that the very first act of the Continental Congress regarding immigration and citizenship was to restrict the right of citizenship to “Free Whites” alone. America was founded as a distinctly European ethnicity.
“You may set the negro free, but you cannot make him otherwise than an alien to the European…His physiognomy is to our eyes hideous, his understanding weak, his tastes low; and we are almost inclined to look upon him as a being intermediate between man and the brutes…
If it be so difficult to root out an inequality which solely originates in the law, how are those distinctions to be destroyed which seem to be based upon the immutable laws of Nature herself?...”
Evident to him was the reality of innate inequalities between the European and the African. So too did he surmise the impossibility of social parity between these races.
“I despair of seeing an aristocracy disappear which is founded upon visible and indelible signs. Those who hope that the Europeans will ever mix with the negroes, appear to me to delude themselves;…”
Despite his Abolitionism, he lamented the passing of the social hierarchy of the Old South because he took it for an ill-omen of things to come.
“[T]he prejudices of the Whites against the Blacks seem to increase in proportion as slavery is abolished…
[W]herever the whites have been the most powerful, they have maintained the blacks in a subordinate or servile position; wherever the negroes have been strongest they have destroyed the whites…
[T]hey very justly look upon the states in which the proportion of the negroes equals or exceeds that of the whites, as exposed to very great dangers;…”
It’s hard to fathom that his pen-hand was not seized by paroxysms as he hypocritically referred to the Whites’ resolution to self-defense as ‘prejudices’. Nonetheless, he concedes the fact that all historical manifestations of Negro liberation have resulted in the genocide of Whites; be it North Africa, the Belgian Congo, the West Indies, Haiti, Rhodesia, or modern South Africa, the results of Negro integration have played out the exact same way in every circumstance—an unrestrained descent into barbarism in which the European population is consumed by feral rape, and cannibalistic murder. He therefore knew that the Southern Whites were without alternative—slavery, or at the very lest, social subordination of the Negro, must persist atleast until some equitable means of relocation presented itself. Any alternative is a hellish proposition.
“In the South, where slavery still exists, the negroes are less carefully kept apart;…although the legislation treats them more harshly, the habits of the people are more tolerant and compassionate…In the North the white no longer distinctly perceives the barrier which separates him from the degraded race, and he shuns the negro with the more pertinacity, since he fears lest they should some day be confounded together…”
And of course, being wholly unfamiliar with the modern Manichean mythos of an enlightened pluralistic North against the clannish dogmatism of the Southern Bible-Belt, he notes the genial and even paternal attitude of Southern Whites toward their Negro subjects as superior to the ostracism of Northern Abolition.
Where law maintains the requisite boundaries Whites and Blacks live at greater ease with one another; where such legal bounds are lacking, it falls to the people to maintain the separation necessary for their safety. This was, in large part, the policy divide between North and South in regard to the Negro.
“[T]he South might indeed, rigorously speaking, abolish slavery; but how should it rid its territory of the black population?..."
Like Jefferson before him, he considered the optimum result of any emancipation to be a total relocation of all Blacks to some outlying territory beyond the reach of mixture.
"It is evident that the most Southern States of the Union cannot abolish slavery without incurring very great dangers, which the North had no reason to apprehend when it emancipated its black population…
[T]hey have no means of perceptibly diminishing the black population,…
It is more easy for them to admit slavery, than to allow several millions of citizens to exist under a load of eternal infamy and hereditary wretchedness…”
In radical tension with his own espoused Abolitionism, Tocqueville sympathizes with the Planters’ situation. He knows they have little recourse.
“[T]here are but two alternatives for the future; the negroes and the whites must either wholly part or wholly mingle. I have already expressed the conviction which I entertain as to the latter event. I do not imagine that the white and black races will ever live in any country upon equal footing…A despot who should subject the Americans and their former slaves to the same yoke, might perhaps succeed in commingling their races; but as long as the American democracy remains at the head of affairs, no one will undertake so difficult a task; and it may be foreseen that the freer the white population of the United States becomes, the more isolated will it remain…”
Only a Despot would attempt the amalgam of the races because free Christian Whites would strictly be inclined to segregation. A free America is a segregated America and integration is a tyranny which undermines what Blackstone called “the primary right of self-defense”. Integration, to the extent that it has occurred, has been against the will of the people as they have generally considered such to be ‘unequal yoking’.
“The pride of origin, which is natural to the English, is singularly augmented by the personal pride which democratic liberty fosters amongst the Americans: the white citizen of the United States is proud of his race and proud of himself…”
Our folk have long had about them a mimetic deference to our ancestors—a sense of honor for our fathers and mothers as proscribed in the fifth commandment. And the distillation of conservative thought which founded the American colonies also vested us with a certain sense of mission—this great Dominionist ambition was perceptible as much in the individual as in the corporate body. A Christian man felt his connectedness with, and even a certain responsibility for, his own people; this tribal solidarity is the stuff of ‘Manifest Destiny’ and the right of self-determination back of it.
“If I were called upon to predict what will probably occur at some future time, I should say, that the abolition of slavery in the South will, in the common course of things, increase the repugnance of the white population for men of color…”
Tocqueville’s Abolitionist sentiments are belied in his sheepishness; he demures here from validating the foment of White antipathy toward fourteenth amendment citizens [sic] and the palpable threat which they posed to all white men, women and children alike.
“[I]t is impossible to foresee a time at which the whites and the blacks will be so intermingled as to derive the same benefits from society; must it not be inferred that the blacks and whites will, sooner or later, come to open strife in the Southern States of the Union?...
The fate of the white population of the Southern States will, perhaps, be similar to that of the Moors in Spain. After having occupied the land for centuries, it will perhaps be forced to retire to the country whence its ancestors came, and to abandon to the negroes the possession of a territory…
The danger of a conflict between the white and black inhabitants of the Southern States of the Union—a danger which, however remote it may be, is inevitable—perpetually haunts the imagination of the Americans. The inhabitants of the North make it a common topic of conversation, although they have no direct injury to fear from the struggle [as Negroes were largely illegal in those parts]; but they vainly endeavor to devise some means of obviating the misfortunes which they foresee. In the Southern States the subject is not discussed: the Planter does not allude to the future in conversing with strangers; the citizen does not communicate his apprehensions to his friends; he seeks to conceal them from himself; but there is something more alarming in the tacit forebodings of the South, than in the clamorous fears of the Northern States…
When I contemplate the condition of the South, I can only discover two alternatives which may be adopted by the white inhabitants of those States; viz., either to emancipate the negroes, and to intermingle with them; or, remaining isolated from them, to keep them in a state of slavery as long as possible. All intermediate measures seem to me likely to terminate, and that shortly, in the most horrible of civil wars, and perhaps in the extirpation of one or other of the two races. Such is the view which the Americans of the South take of the question, and they act consistently with it. As they are determined not to mingle with the negroes, they refuse to emancipate them…
[C]an they allow their slaves to become free without compromising their own security? And if they are obliged to keep that race in bondage in order to save their own families, may they not be excused for availing themselves of the means best adapted to that end?...”
What is Tocqueville’s forecast for America? Race war. He considered this eventuality ‘inevitable’. Like ripples in the sea, he considered the early transport of Negroes to these shores to have set in motion a chain of events which would eventually culminate with the swell of a tidal wave, the destructive capability of which might sweep away all that was.
As he says, he was not alone in this opinion—Americans, North and South, were all quite cognizant of the societal apocalypse on the horizon. But they were radically at odds as to how to mitigate such circumstances. As Dr. Thornwell said in 1862: “They who join the unhallowed crusade against the institutions of the South will have reason to repent, that they have set an engine in motion which cannot be arrested, until it has crushed and ground to powder the safeguards of life and property among themselves.” If Tocqueville was prescient, Thornwell was prophetic.
“[I]f they [Negroes] are once raised to the level of free men, they will soon revolt at being deprived of all their civil rights; and as they cannot become the equals of the whites, they will speedily declare themselves as enemies…
The negro race will never leave those shores of the American continent,… and it will not disappear from the New World as long as it continues to exist. The inhabitants of the United States may retard the calamities which they apprehend but they cannot now destroy their efficient cause…
If liberty be refused to the negroes of the South, they will in the end seize it for themselves by force; if it be given, they will abuse it ere long.”
Whether or not they were to be emancipated, Tocqueville was certain that they would ever consider themselves the enemies of our blood; and no remedial social engineering would put matters aright between these two peoples while we yet share this continent. He perceived that the more the Negro might be given, the more he would believe himself due. Such is and ever has been the nature of the black man in every country which he is found throughout history.
But Tocqueville’s Fatalism seems to border upon morbidity. While candidly appraising the Southern position as the best apparatus for staving off the coming blood feud which he believes may result in the annihilation of one or the other race, he still outrageously maintains his Abolitionism!
Now, considering the fact that he be not a man of meager intellect, one is left with few options as to how his cognitive dissonance is to be understood: Since he considers the conflagration ‘inevitable’, and that the Southern position impedes this eventuality more so than that of the North, one is left with scant clues as to why he would resolve himself to the cause of Abolition. Abolition, as such, seems, even from Tocqueville’s writing, like a compact with Death itself. So what would have inclined this otherwise prodigious white man to opt for the most misanthropic and Malthusian of all available choices? No matter how one might deconstruct Tocqueville’s position, one word is sufficient for it—that word is Madness.
This virulent mania is a hydra, which, in its more contemporary manifestations would not spare the candid Race Realism of Tocqueville (schizophrenic as it be) any more than the Segregationist philosophy of the Old South. It’s an all-consuming death sentence for the white race; and in this lies its only logical consistency—it will not treat even its dutiful white converts preferentially because in the end, egalitarianism is something found only in the bone yard.
Again, the sagely Dr. Thornwell stands as an oracle as much today as in 1862:
“They who join the unhallowed crusade against the institutions of the South will have reason to repent, that they have set an engine in motion which cannot be arrested, until it has crushed and ground to powder the safeguards of life and property among themselves.”
Tocqueville well-grasped the tumult of his day and its dire implications. He saw what was at stake back of the Abolitionist movement—our civil government, our communities, our institutions, our families—even our children.
“[T]he destiny of the negroes is in some measure interwoven with that of the Europeans…The most formidable of all the ills which threaten the future of the Union arises from the presence of a black population upon its territory; and in contemplating the cause of the present embarrassments or of the future dangers of the United States, the observer is invariably led to consider this as a primary fact…”
Though he was himself inclined to both New England Unitarianism and Abolition, Tocqueville was nonetheless a candid Race Realist. He thought that the very presence of Negroes in America represented ‘the most formidable of all the ills which threaten[ed] the future’ of our nation. This he considered a ‘primary fact’ of America’s future.
Condoleeza Rice has recently spoken of Negro inequality as America’s “Birth Defect” but Tocqueville considered the Negro presence in America to be the nation’s true ‘Birth Defect’.
“[T]he settlers, who all belonged to the same European race, had the same civilization, the same laws, and their shades of difference were extremely slight…”
This is an echoe of John Jay’s words in Federalist #2, “…that Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people--a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs…” And it was by this rationale that the very first act of the Continental Congress regarding immigration and citizenship was to restrict the right of citizenship to “Free Whites” alone. America was founded as a distinctly European ethnicity.
“You may set the negro free, but you cannot make him otherwise than an alien to the European…His physiognomy is to our eyes hideous, his understanding weak, his tastes low; and we are almost inclined to look upon him as a being intermediate between man and the brutes…
If it be so difficult to root out an inequality which solely originates in the law, how are those distinctions to be destroyed which seem to be based upon the immutable laws of Nature herself?...”
Evident to him was the reality of innate inequalities between the European and the African. So too did he surmise the impossibility of social parity between these races.
“I despair of seeing an aristocracy disappear which is founded upon visible and indelible signs. Those who hope that the Europeans will ever mix with the negroes, appear to me to delude themselves;…”
Despite his Abolitionism, he lamented the passing of the social hierarchy of the Old South because he took it for an ill-omen of things to come.
“[T]he prejudices of the Whites against the Blacks seem to increase in proportion as slavery is abolished…
[W]herever the whites have been the most powerful, they have maintained the blacks in a subordinate or servile position; wherever the negroes have been strongest they have destroyed the whites…
[T]hey very justly look upon the states in which the proportion of the negroes equals or exceeds that of the whites, as exposed to very great dangers;…”
It’s hard to fathom that his pen-hand was not seized by paroxysms as he hypocritically referred to the Whites’ resolution to self-defense as ‘prejudices’. Nonetheless, he concedes the fact that all historical manifestations of Negro liberation have resulted in the genocide of Whites; be it North Africa, the Belgian Congo, the West Indies, Haiti, Rhodesia, or modern South Africa, the results of Negro integration have played out the exact same way in every circumstance—an unrestrained descent into barbarism in which the European population is consumed by feral rape, and cannibalistic murder. He therefore knew that the Southern Whites were without alternative—slavery, or at the very lest, social subordination of the Negro, must persist atleast until some equitable means of relocation presented itself. Any alternative is a hellish proposition.
“In the South, where slavery still exists, the negroes are less carefully kept apart;…although the legislation treats them more harshly, the habits of the people are more tolerant and compassionate…In the North the white no longer distinctly perceives the barrier which separates him from the degraded race, and he shuns the negro with the more pertinacity, since he fears lest they should some day be confounded together…”
And of course, being wholly unfamiliar with the modern Manichean mythos of an enlightened pluralistic North against the clannish dogmatism of the Southern Bible-Belt, he notes the genial and even paternal attitude of Southern Whites toward their Negro subjects as superior to the ostracism of Northern Abolition.
Where law maintains the requisite boundaries Whites and Blacks live at greater ease with one another; where such legal bounds are lacking, it falls to the people to maintain the separation necessary for their safety. This was, in large part, the policy divide between North and South in regard to the Negro.
“[T]he South might indeed, rigorously speaking, abolish slavery; but how should it rid its territory of the black population?..."
Like Jefferson before him, he considered the optimum result of any emancipation to be a total relocation of all Blacks to some outlying territory beyond the reach of mixture.
"It is evident that the most Southern States of the Union cannot abolish slavery without incurring very great dangers, which the North had no reason to apprehend when it emancipated its black population…
[T]hey have no means of perceptibly diminishing the black population,…
It is more easy for them to admit slavery, than to allow several millions of citizens to exist under a load of eternal infamy and hereditary wretchedness…”
In radical tension with his own espoused Abolitionism, Tocqueville sympathizes with the Planters’ situation. He knows they have little recourse.
“[T]here are but two alternatives for the future; the negroes and the whites must either wholly part or wholly mingle. I have already expressed the conviction which I entertain as to the latter event. I do not imagine that the white and black races will ever live in any country upon equal footing…A despot who should subject the Americans and their former slaves to the same yoke, might perhaps succeed in commingling their races; but as long as the American democracy remains at the head of affairs, no one will undertake so difficult a task; and it may be foreseen that the freer the white population of the United States becomes, the more isolated will it remain…”
Only a Despot would attempt the amalgam of the races because free Christian Whites would strictly be inclined to segregation. A free America is a segregated America and integration is a tyranny which undermines what Blackstone called “the primary right of self-defense”. Integration, to the extent that it has occurred, has been against the will of the people as they have generally considered such to be ‘unequal yoking’.
“The pride of origin, which is natural to the English, is singularly augmented by the personal pride which democratic liberty fosters amongst the Americans: the white citizen of the United States is proud of his race and proud of himself…”
Our folk have long had about them a mimetic deference to our ancestors—a sense of honor for our fathers and mothers as proscribed in the fifth commandment. And the distillation of conservative thought which founded the American colonies also vested us with a certain sense of mission—this great Dominionist ambition was perceptible as much in the individual as in the corporate body. A Christian man felt his connectedness with, and even a certain responsibility for, his own people; this tribal solidarity is the stuff of ‘Manifest Destiny’ and the right of self-determination back of it.
“If I were called upon to predict what will probably occur at some future time, I should say, that the abolition of slavery in the South will, in the common course of things, increase the repugnance of the white population for men of color…”
Tocqueville’s Abolitionist sentiments are belied in his sheepishness; he demures here from validating the foment of White antipathy toward fourteenth amendment citizens [sic] and the palpable threat which they posed to all white men, women and children alike.
“[I]t is impossible to foresee a time at which the whites and the blacks will be so intermingled as to derive the same benefits from society; must it not be inferred that the blacks and whites will, sooner or later, come to open strife in the Southern States of the Union?...
The fate of the white population of the Southern States will, perhaps, be similar to that of the Moors in Spain. After having occupied the land for centuries, it will perhaps be forced to retire to the country whence its ancestors came, and to abandon to the negroes the possession of a territory…
The danger of a conflict between the white and black inhabitants of the Southern States of the Union—a danger which, however remote it may be, is inevitable—perpetually haunts the imagination of the Americans. The inhabitants of the North make it a common topic of conversation, although they have no direct injury to fear from the struggle [as Negroes were largely illegal in those parts]; but they vainly endeavor to devise some means of obviating the misfortunes which they foresee. In the Southern States the subject is not discussed: the Planter does not allude to the future in conversing with strangers; the citizen does not communicate his apprehensions to his friends; he seeks to conceal them from himself; but there is something more alarming in the tacit forebodings of the South, than in the clamorous fears of the Northern States…
When I contemplate the condition of the South, I can only discover two alternatives which may be adopted by the white inhabitants of those States; viz., either to emancipate the negroes, and to intermingle with them; or, remaining isolated from them, to keep them in a state of slavery as long as possible. All intermediate measures seem to me likely to terminate, and that shortly, in the most horrible of civil wars, and perhaps in the extirpation of one or other of the two races. Such is the view which the Americans of the South take of the question, and they act consistently with it. As they are determined not to mingle with the negroes, they refuse to emancipate them…
[C]an they allow their slaves to become free without compromising their own security? And if they are obliged to keep that race in bondage in order to save their own families, may they not be excused for availing themselves of the means best adapted to that end?...”
What is Tocqueville’s forecast for America? Race war. He considered this eventuality ‘inevitable’. Like ripples in the sea, he considered the early transport of Negroes to these shores to have set in motion a chain of events which would eventually culminate with the swell of a tidal wave, the destructive capability of which might sweep away all that was.
As he says, he was not alone in this opinion—Americans, North and South, were all quite cognizant of the societal apocalypse on the horizon. But they were radically at odds as to how to mitigate such circumstances. As Dr. Thornwell said in 1862: “They who join the unhallowed crusade against the institutions of the South will have reason to repent, that they have set an engine in motion which cannot be arrested, until it has crushed and ground to powder the safeguards of life and property among themselves.” If Tocqueville was prescient, Thornwell was prophetic.
“[I]f they [Negroes] are once raised to the level of free men, they will soon revolt at being deprived of all their civil rights; and as they cannot become the equals of the whites, they will speedily declare themselves as enemies…
The negro race will never leave those shores of the American continent,… and it will not disappear from the New World as long as it continues to exist. The inhabitants of the United States may retard the calamities which they apprehend but they cannot now destroy their efficient cause…
If liberty be refused to the negroes of the South, they will in the end seize it for themselves by force; if it be given, they will abuse it ere long.”
Whether or not they were to be emancipated, Tocqueville was certain that they would ever consider themselves the enemies of our blood; and no remedial social engineering would put matters aright between these two peoples while we yet share this continent. He perceived that the more the Negro might be given, the more he would believe himself due. Such is and ever has been the nature of the black man in every country which he is found throughout history.
But Tocqueville’s Fatalism seems to border upon morbidity. While candidly appraising the Southern position as the best apparatus for staving off the coming blood feud which he believes may result in the annihilation of one or the other race, he still outrageously maintains his Abolitionism!
Now, considering the fact that he be not a man of meager intellect, one is left with few options as to how his cognitive dissonance is to be understood: Since he considers the conflagration ‘inevitable’, and that the Southern position impedes this eventuality more so than that of the North, one is left with scant clues as to why he would resolve himself to the cause of Abolition. Abolition, as such, seems, even from Tocqueville’s writing, like a compact with Death itself. So what would have inclined this otherwise prodigious white man to opt for the most misanthropic and Malthusian of all available choices? No matter how one might deconstruct Tocqueville’s position, one word is sufficient for it—that word is Madness.
This virulent mania is a hydra, which, in its more contemporary manifestations would not spare the candid Race Realism of Tocqueville (schizophrenic as it be) any more than the Segregationist philosophy of the Old South. It’s an all-consuming death sentence for the white race; and in this lies its only logical consistency—it will not treat even its dutiful white converts preferentially because in the end, egalitarianism is something found only in the bone yard.
Again, the sagely Dr. Thornwell stands as an oracle as much today as in 1862:
“They who join the unhallowed crusade against the institutions of the South will have reason to repent, that they have set an engine in motion which cannot be arrested, until it has crushed and ground to powder the safeguards of life and property among themselves.”
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Great Blog! Link is up at doctrinewars
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