One major reason for studying history is to learn lessons that shed light on contemporary problems and avoid repeating the same mistakes. As the historian Clyde Wilson has reminded us, “history is not a mathematical calculation or scientific experiment but a vast drama of which there is always more to be learned.”
Studying history involves more than creating lists of random facts. Reason and logic are essential in making sense of the past. Although the basic principles of logic may seem elementary, the prevailing narrative about slavery relies heavily on fallacies that often go unnoticed.
One major problem is the tendency to focus exclusively on the West when moralizing about historical injustice. Slavery in African and Arab countries is rarely mentioned in these debates. In the West, the discourse narrows itself further by zeroing in on the American South.
The premise underlying discussions of what is often described as “Southern Slavery” is that the South is uniquely culpable. Asking what makes it unique in the context of global slavery is dismissed as, at best, morally irrelevant. At worst, it is denounced as an attempt to shut down discussion of slavery.
In his book, American Dark Age: Racial Feudalism and the Rise of Black Liberalism, Keidrick Roy argues that “racial feudalism” is an American phenomenon invented and propagated by the South. He depicts racial prejudice and “race-based social stratifications” as doctrines forged by the Founding Fathers, in particular Thomas Jefferson.
Roy begins his analysis in the shadow of Abraham Lincoln’s war—which he calls “the Civil War”—from which Lincoln himself and his war generals, William Sherman and Ulysses Grant, have been virtually airbrushed out. Instead, the war is depicted as an attempt by Southern planters to entrench racial feudalism against determined opposition from black abolitionists led by the stalwart military heroine General Harriet Tubman.
Roy’s narrative aligns with the arguments of the Marxist historian Eric Foner, and journalists in the 1619 Project, that black people should be centered in the history of America. Roy centers blacks by giving them the key role in bringing enlightenment values to America and overthrowing “racial feudalism” through “black liberalism.”
In one illustration of his argument, Roy cites “an 1856 essay published in the popular Southern agricultural magazine De Bow’s Review.” He attributes to the Southern planter a desire to build America on a foundation of racial feudalism. He quotes one of the writers in that Review calling for a “war of races,” and links this rhetorically to “the tenets of a civil war already under way in the 1850s.” He also sees it as the evidence that “white supremacists” today are still intent on fomenting racial conflict.
The lesson is that racial conflict was deliberately introduced to America by the Southern planters, who then went on to launch a “civil war” as a platform for the race war foretold by Thomas Jefferson, and, thereby, to entrench a system of “racial feudalism” which they are still trying to restore. He argues that “today, in the third decade of the twenty-first century, the United States may be teetering on the brink of another conflagration.”
In this history—which reads more like dystopian fiction—no moral significance is attached to the New England states which dominated the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The institution of slavery in the North, and the fact that at least six of the states that fought on the Union side of Lincoln’s war were slave states, is deemed irrelevant. There is no mention of the constitutional concerns of Southern statesmen—long voiced in Congress by John C. Calhoun, Jefferson Davis, and others. These statesmen are reduced to cardboard cutout slavery defenders.
On the whole, Roy paints a fanciful picture of a Southern aristocracy whose only concern in life was to establish racial dominance over blacks even at the cost of sending their own young sons to die in a war whose sole purpose was to reenact childish European feudalistic dreams. He sees American history as a tragedy, as seen in his title American Dark Age.
In this morality play, white Southerners stand alone on the stage of history to answer for slavery. Roy specifically calls white supremacy “a vision of the American South.” The white Northerner is cast in the role of accuser and judge. Roy writes that,
Northern critics were quick to draw on notions of past nobilities and despotisms to chastise Confederate sympathizers for embracing a retrograde social order. During the Civil War, a pro-Union pamphlet argued that the United States was waging war “against treacherous and despotic designs of an armed Confederacy of monarchists and aristocrats.”
When he skips to the twentieth century to discuss what he calls the “resounding resurgence” of the Ku Klux Klan, Roy describes them as “Knights of the South.” He fails to mention—as noted by Britannica—that the twentieth century movement was distinct from the Reconstruction era movement. Yet, even the Southern Poverty Law Center—itself a great enthusiast of these types of “Southern Slavery” narratives—notes that the twentieth century Ku Klux movement was nationwide:
It was active in every state. It found support in many northern and western cities and was particularly powerful in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Kansas, Colorado, and Oregon, as well as the South. The Klan helped elect state and local officials and at least 20 governors and U.S. senators – from Maine to California.
The “Southern Slavery” narrative is a moral condemnation of American history. But for that to be fair, moral principles concerning slavery must be applied in the same way to all cases, without giving arbitrary exemptions to one region or another.
When challenged to justify their uneven moral standards, the “Southern Slavery” narrators circle back and rely on their own presumption that Southern slavery is uniquely worthy of censure. As W. Stanley Jevons would say, there is “a circle in the proof”: Circulus in probando.
In his book Elementary Lessons in Logic, Jevons begins his explanation of this logical fallacy with the following syllogism:
B is C,
A is B,
therefore A is C
Applying Jevons’s syllogism to the context of this discussion, we could say that B denotes slave states, C denotes immorality, and A denotes the South.
Slave states are immoral (B is C)
The South comprised slave states (A is B)
therefore The Southern states were immoral (A is C)
But the question posed here does not challenge the immorality of slavery or whether there was slavery in the South. Rather, it challenges the underlying focus on the South in moralizing about slavery. An unjustified focus on the South is built into the anti-slavery narrative without explanation.
The question is: why should other slave states—slavery being found in all 13 original states and indeed around the globe for many centuries—be of no concern to those intent on denouncing slavery? What is peculiarly immoral about slavery in the South, as distinct from slavery in ancient Greece or Rome or, indeed, Rhode Island or the Kingdom of Dahomey?
Roy’s narrative is infused with the presumption that slavery in the South is the only relevant slavery in understanding American history. Yet his project, which aims to show that the South was a feudal society founded on racism, presumes the truth of that very presumption as justification for its own chosen focus. There is a circle in the proof.
Jevons defines a circular argument as one “that consists in taking the conclusion itself as one of the premises of an argument.” He gives the following example:
C is B,
A is C,
Therefore A is B
The “Southern Slavery” narrative fits that logical form in presuming that moral analysis of slavery is justified in focusing exclusively on the South, but when asked why they chose that focus, they answer, “Well, duh, because the Southern states were slave states!” In Jevons’s formulation:
It is immoral to have slave states (C is B)
The Southern states were immoral (A is C)
Therefore, The South comprised slave states! (A is B)
Even though it is obviously correct that the Southern states were slave states, in this logical form the argument is presented to reiterate the very premise being questioned. It is deduced from a premise derived from the same syllogism that chose to focus only on the South in the first place. As Jevons explains, “it is plain that we attempt to prove a proposition by itself, which is as reasonable as attempting to support a body upon itself.”
In discussing global slavery, one could debate facts like the comparative numbers involved, the scale of the institution, the degree of displacement of victims, and the like. But these are not moral principles—they are descriptive facts that help us to understand the scale of a problem in its wider comparative context. Comparative analysis of a problem does not justify holding one case of slavery morally worse than another—especially when no sound reason for doing so is provided.
