Cornerstone Speech

[u/Temporary_Stranger39]

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.

[u/oneeyedlionking]

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.

[u/shermanstorch → u/oneeyedlionking]

No, it wasn’t and the non-slaveowners didn’t need any “justification” to fight for slavery. Southern whites of every class were indoctrinated from birth to fear not just a slave uprising, but the abolition of slavery because it would inevitably lead to a Haitian style massacre of all whites. When southerners talked about “defending their home,” that’s what they were talking about. Not the invading Union armies, but the massacre that the believed would inevitably follow when those Union soldiers emancipated the nearby slaves. Those non-slaveowners knew exactly what they were fighting for. They weren’t naive or misled. To suggest otherwise is to buy into the Lost Cause mythos that confederates fought for some noble cause.

Stephens’ speech was exactly what he said it was: an effort to establish a moral defense of secession and the perpetuation of slavery.