Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of Abbreviations
- Prologue
- PART ONE CRADLED IN THE STORMS OF REVOLUTION
- PART TWO THE INESCAPABLE PAST
- PART THREE ANCIENT LEGACIES, MEDIEVAL SENSIBILITY, MODERN MEN
- PART FOUR A CHRISTIAN PEOPLE DEFEND THE FAITH
- PART FIVE AT THE RUBICON
- 21 Between Individualism and Corporatism: From the Reformation to the War for Southern Independence
- 22 Past and Future Caesars
- Epilogue: King Solomon's Dilemma
- Supplementary References
- Index
22 - Past and Future Caesars
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of Abbreviations
- Prologue
- PART ONE CRADLED IN THE STORMS OF REVOLUTION
- PART TWO THE INESCAPABLE PAST
- PART THREE ANCIENT LEGACIES, MEDIEVAL SENSIBILITY, MODERN MEN
- PART FOUR A CHRISTIAN PEOPLE DEFEND THE FAITH
- PART FIVE AT THE RUBICON
- 21 Between Individualism and Corporatism: From the Reformation to the War for Southern Independence
- 22 Past and Future Caesars
- Epilogue: King Solomon's Dilemma
- Supplementary References
- Index
Summary
“Extremes necessitate extremes” is axiomatic in the Science of Government. I have been pained and astonished to find how many are now willing to glide unhesitatingly into a dictatorship, a military despotism – even into a state of colonial dependence, with gradual emancipation as a condition for foreign intervention and protection. Hatred of Lincoln, not love of our liberties, principles and institutions now actuates the masses.
—Augusta Jane Evans (1864)So far as we know, no southern slaveholders read The Communist Manifesto. They did not have to: They saw for themselves the specter that was haunting Europe – and the North. “The great sore of modern society,” M. R. H. Garnett of Virginia's social and intellectual elite proclaimed, “is the war between capital and labour.” That war, according to the Reverend Thornton Stringfellow of Virginia, began in biblical times, often spun out of control, and invited military dictatorship. The proslavery preachers, teachers, editors, and theorists who shaped public opinion pondered the lessons of ancient and modern history, fascinated by the careers of Julius Caesar, Oliver Cromwell, and the two Bonapartes.
A letter to the editor of Virginia Literary Museum in 1829 listed the principal destroyers of liberty: Caesar, “listening to the suggestion of unprincipled ambition”; Cromwell, “under the show of asserting the rights of conscience”; and Napoleon, driven by the desire to create “universal and unlimited monarchy.” For Judge Joseph Lumpkin of Georgia, Caesar and Cromwell qualified as “scourges and destroyers of our species, and Napoleon resembled Nero, Caligula, Genghis Khan, and Tamerlane – a man whose life taught “the doctrine of man's fall and total depravity.” Well and good, but not good enough.
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- The Mind of the Master ClassHistory and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders' Worldview, pp. 680 - 710Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005