He became a founding father. He coveted his freedom. But for most of his political career, he turned away from talk of founding or fathering a new nation to secure his freedom.
As a South Carolina legislator, Christopher Memminger took a more moderate approach to secession in the 1830s and ’40s than Senator John C. Calhoun, the ironclad attorney general of South Carolina slaveholders. But in the 1850s, Memminger changed. He likely feared the growing resistance and density of enslaved Africans. He feared poor southern whites “would soon raise the hue and cry against the Negro, and be hot abolitionists—and every one of those men would have the vote,” as Memminger wrote. After John Brown’s insurrectionist antislavery raid on a federal armory in Virginia in 1859, after Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860, Memminger thought the freedom to enslave was slipping from his grip in the United States.
On Christmas Eve in 1860, South Carolina legislators adopted their declaration of independence from the federal union, drafted by Memminger. He based his justification of secession from the “non-slaveholding States” on those states’ “increasing hostility” to “slavery,” on their permitting of abolitionist societies “whose avowed object is to disturb the peace,” on their inciting of “thousands of our slaves to leave their homes,” on their “elevating to citizens, [black] persons who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens”—on their incessant “submersion of the Constitution.” The slaveholder’s constitutional freedom to enslave rang in every secessionist declaration that followed that winter, and it rang in the Provisional Constitution of the Confederate States of America, drafted by Memminger in early February 1861.
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Slaveholders desired a state that wholly secured their individual freedom to enslave, not to mention their freedom to disenfranchise, to exploit, to impoverish, to demean, and to silence and kill the demeaned. The freedom to. The freedom to harm. Which is to say, in coronavirus terms, the freedom to infect.
Slaveholders disavowed a state that secured any form of communal freedom—the freedom of the community from slavery, from disenfranchisement, from exploitation, from poverty, from all the demeaning and silencing and killing. The freedom from. The freedom from harm. Which is to say, in coronavirus terms, the freedom from infection.
The slaveholder’s freedom to seceded from Lincoln’s “house divided against itself”—divided between the freedom to and from. Memminger was named the Confederate secretary of the Treasury. Americans went to war. Americans are still waging this same war, now over COVID-19. There is a war between those fighting to open America back up for the sake of individual freedom, and those fighting to keep America closed for the sake of community freedom. A civil war over the very meaning, the very utility of freedom.
From the beginning of the American project, the powerful individual has been battling for his constitutional freedom to harm, and the vulnerable community has been battling for its constitutional freedom from harm. Both freedoms were inscribed into the U.S. Constitution, into the American psyche. The history of the United States, the history of Americans, is the history of reconciling the unreconcilable: individual freedom and community freedom. There is no way to reconcile the enduring psyche of the slaveholder with the enduring psyche of the enslaved.
Slaveholders hardly seemed to care that secession was going to condemn the non-slaveholding southern community to war, to mass injuries and death on battlefields and in contraband camps. Slaveholders hardly seemed to care that the Confederate States would have been a veritable hell for poor, non-slaveholding whites and the hell of hells for enslaved blacks. Too many Americans today hardly seem to care that withdrawing states from stay-at-home orders too soon would scarcely free their communities from the viral war, from mass infections, and deaths on hospital and bedroom beds, a veritable disaster for innumerable white Americans and a disaster of disasters for innumerable Americans of color.
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“They want their freedom. They want to be able to run their businesses and run their lives,” said Stewart Jones, a Republican South Carolina legislator.
Memminger, too, spoke for South Carolinians who wanted their freedom to run their lives and businesses unrestrained, unregulated, uncontrolled, uninhibited by any local or federal government. Damn community control if it is not supporting the freedom of the individual to harm the health and wellness of the community. Damn stay-at-home orders restraining the individual for health of the community. The individual is king.[…]
Continue reading: We’re Still Living and Dying in the Slaveholders’ Republic
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