Clergy Dissent in the Old South 1830-1865

[Wild Bill]

I would not take the apologetic Southerner no matter his or her background too much to heart. It has a lot to do with the individual and here he or she lives in the South. I have done a lot of research in Texas and I found the "I'm sorry" attitude missing in whites of both sexes. I suspect a lot of this came from the Atlantic coastal region or the Border states. Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and Texas were vicious in their treatment of blacks before and after the Civil War, according to the primary sources I have read. As one Texan put it, their treatment of freed blacks after the war was no worse than while they were slaves and more justified now "that they had no jingle." That is, no monetary value to the whites.

They read different Bibles, or the Bible differently. They also preached different Bibles to the slaves. Preachers who did not were regularly runout of their parishes when they contradicted the system. Hanging and tar and feathering were also common to dissenters from the slave system. Their Yankee education or birth only increased their danger. All denominations split on the slavery issue before the Civil War, becoming Northern or Southern. It is old, but Clement Eaton's Freedom of Thought Struggle in the Old South examines all of this. Newspaper editors had to be especially careful and many editors suffered physical violence from during or mob action or had their type fonts thrown in the river. See the life of Cassius Marcellus Clay (not Muhammad Ali, but the white Kentucky cousin of Henry Clay), in David L Smiley, Lion of Whitehall for a good read.