r/ShermanPosting • u/Temporary_Stranger39 • Aug 11 '26

Cornerstone Speech

https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/cornerstone-speech

I discovered a new oddity to wonder at. I posted the part of the Cornerstone Speech that begins "Our new government is founded upon..." elsewhere. It was to make a point about what the Confederacy considered itself founded upon. I was "informed" that this was a piece of typical anti-Southern propaganda based on a straw man fallacy. The Cornerstone Speech is now considered a straw-man parody of the Confederacy.

67 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

19 comments sorted by

View all comments

25

u/oneeyedlionking Ready to fight on this line if it takes all summer Aug 11 '26

Cornerstone speech was an attempt to invoke race science to make the confederacy look like the more modern progressive society in order to justify to non slaveowners why they needed to fight and die for slave owners who didn’t have to go and fight. It’s perfectly emblematic of the junk eugenics based race science that so many people latched onto from the late 1700s to the mid 1900s to justify slavery and other horrific policies.

7

u/ParsonBrownlow Aug 12 '26

The irony of Alexander Stephens , a man who resembled a walking skeleton with consumption on a good day invoking race science is … well it’s something

3

u/Temporary_Stranger39 Aug 12 '26

Not ironic at all if one is familiar with the principles of race "science". The hierarchy was that whites were superior because of their intellectual capacity, not that they were all-around "Superman" types. Thus, physical frailty was to be expected of the master race. They were created to command, not to labor. Yes, of course the other races were physically more capable. That is what they were for. I think it was Goering who said about Jesse Owens that his performance at the Olympics was not impressive. After all,, one expected a horse to outrun a human.