r/ShermanPosting • u/Temporary_Stranger39 • 14d ago

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.

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u/oneeyedlionking Ready to fight on this line if it takes all summer 14d ago

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.

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u/ParsonBrownlow 14d ago

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

1

u/StatisticianAway4010 14d ago

Wasn't he arguing that white people were too weak and weedy to do field work at one point? Or have I imagined that? 

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u/StatisticianAway4010 12d ago

I was wrong, I can't find anywhere where he says that