‘Christian Patriots’: The Intersection Between Proto-fascism and Clerical Fascism in the Antebellum South

This article examines the convergence between clerical fascism and proto-fascism in the Antebellum South of the United States. The author employs Roger Griffin’s theories of palingenetic ultranationalism and clerical fascism to understand the worldviews of Southern intellectuals. The author argues that a cadre of Southern theologians rejected the liberal heritage of the United States and redefined the relationship between the individual and state. Southern clerical fascists reconceived of an alternative modernity that reflected God’s precepts. Slaves, laborers, and slave masters all had a mandate to guide secular and spiritual progress. Furthermore, these Southern clerics believed the best hope for securing God’s order was to be found in the birth of a new Southern society – the Confederate States of America. This study builds upon the works of other historians who discerned the illiberal and authoritarian qualities of the American South while also contributing to delineation of the protean qualities of clerical fascism.

The Blessing of Whiteness in the Curse of Ham: Reading Gen 9:18–29 in the Antebellum South

This essay examines the antebellum history of interpretation surrounding the curse of Ham in Gen 9:18–29. It explores how modern notions of scientific racism were read into the story as a de facto justification for the transatlantic slave trade and the institution of slavery in the antebellum South. However, more than simply being used as a prooftext for racist agendas, the curse of Ham provided a biblical foil for circumscribing a racial hierarchy where whiteness was positioned as superior in the figure of Japheth. By considering key features of the racist antebellum interpretation, I argue that the proslavery rationalization of Christian antebellum writers is rooted in a deracialized whiteness that was biblically produced and blessed with divine authority.

THE ARCHAIC ROOTS OF PATERNALISM: CONTINUITY IN ATTITUDES TOWARDS SLAVES AND SLAVERY IN THE ODYSSEY, XENOPHON'S OECONOMICUS, AND BEYOND

This article discusses differences and continuity in responses to issues of slave management in two texts from different periods of Greek history (Xenophon's Oeconomicus and the Odyssey) and compares these responses to those of slave owners in the Antebellum South, ancient Rome, and the ancient Near East. In particular, it examines different expressions of paternalistic attitudes towards slaves (a well-studied feature of slave-owning classes throughout history) that it finds are present in both of these examples. The article explores the possibility that intertextual links were responsible for these similarities but suggests instead that they are reflective of real Greek slaveholding ideology across hundreds of years, which primarily served to justify an exploitative system and disguise the cruelty and violence inherent in maintaining it.

Naturalizing affection, securing property: Family, slavery, and the courts in Antebellum South Carolina, 1830–1860

The scholarship on race and political development demonstrates that race has long been embedded in public policy and political institutions. Less noticed in this literature is how family, as a deliberate political institution, is used to further racial goals and policy purposes. This article seeks to fill this gap by tracing the foundations of the political welding of family and race to the slave South in the antebellum period from 1830 to 1860. Utilizing rich testimonial evidence in court cases, I demonstrate how antebellum courts in South Carolina constructed a standard of “domestic affection” from the everyday lives of southerners, which established affection as a natural norm practiced by white male slaveowners in their roles as fathers, husbands, and masters. By constructing and regulating domestic affection to uphold slavery amid the waves of multiple modernizing forces (democratization, advancing market economy, and household egalitarianism), Southern courts in the antebellum period presaged their postbellum role of reconstructing white supremacy in the wake of slavery's demise. In both cases the courts played a formative role in naturalizing family relations in racially specific ways, constructing affection and sexuality, respectively, to anchor the white family as the bulwark of white social and political hegemony.

Separation of Church and State, American Exceptionalism, and the Contemporary Social Moment: Viewing Church–State Separation from the Priority of Slavery

The contemporary social moment in the United States has affirmed the critical importance of racial justice, and especially claims to justice informed by the contributions of structural and institutional forces connected with the nation’s original sin of slavery. In this paper, I examine the contributions of strict church–state separationism to the maintenance of slavery in the antebellum South in comparison to the contributions various forms of religious establishment made to the successful abolition of slavery in the United Kingdom and the British Empire. Developing a deeper historical understanding of the ways the relationship between religious and governmental institutions influenced the abolition and maintenance of slavery can assist the contemporary quest for racial justice.