Feasting from Dabney's Discussions, vol 4

Ivanhoe · #1 (**permalink**) 08-18-2007, 10:39 PM

It is my contention that following The Late Unpleasantness (1861-1865), Robert L. Dabney, while perhaps becoming embittered, saw what the rise of an American Empire would do to the spiritual and legal heritage of these United States. The following are the finest gems from the mine:

from "The New South," delivered at the Annual Commencement of Hampden Sidney College, June 15, 1882:

Thus the task which duty and Providence assigned us was, to demonstrate by our own defeat, after intense struggle, the unfitness of the age for that blessing we would fain have preserved for them...

Our Fathers valued liberty, but the liberty for which they contended was each person's privilege to do those things and those only to which God's law and Providence gave him a moral right...

Here in a word, is the safe pole-star for the "New South;" let them adopt the scriptural politics, assured that they will be as true and just under any new regime as under the one that just passed away: "That righteousness exalteth a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people."...

The only sure wealth of the State is in cultured, heroic men, who intelligently know their duty and are calmly prepared to sacrifice all else, including life to maintain the right....

There are those pretending to belong who exclaim: "Let us bury the past..." We rejoin: "Be sure that the former issues are really dead before you bury them! There are issues which cannot die without the death of the people, of their honor, their civilization and their greatness. Take care that you do no bury too much, while burying the past...

Ambrose · #2 (**permalink**) 08-18-2007, 11:32 PM

Here's my favorite excerpt from that same address:

Quote:

The time was when manufactures were literally domestic - the occupations of people in their homes. The industrious producing citizen was a “free-holder,” a name whose vital significance to British liberty our times have almost forgotten. He dwelt under his own roof-tree. He was his own man; he was the fee-simple owner of the homestead where his productions were created by the skill and labor of himself and his children, apprentices, and servants. Now all this is changed; the loom is no longer heard in the home; vast factories, owned by the monopolists for whom the cant of the age has already found their appropriate name as “kings of industry,” now undersell the home products everywhere. The axe and hoe which the husbandmen wields, once made at the country forge, the shoe placed on his mule’s feet, the plow with which he turns the soil, the very helve in his tool, all come from the factory. The home industry of the housewife in brewing her own yeast can hardly survive, but is supplanted by your factory “baking powders,” in which chemical adulterations may have full play. This production is centralized. Capital is collected in commanding masses, at whose bidding the free-holding citizen is sunk into the multitudinous hireling proletariat. Conditions of social organization are again produced, fully parallel to the worst results of feudalism, in their incompatibility with republican institutions.

From these changes have resulted the extreme inequalities of fortune, expenditures and luxury which now deform American society.

~ R. L. Dabney, “The New South”. A Discourse delivered at the Annual Commencement of Hampden Sidney College, June 15, 1882. Discussions, Vol. IV - Secular.

Puritan Sailor · #3 (**permalink**) 08-19-2007, 01:25 AM

Interesting. I wonder what he would think today.

Ivanhoe · #4 (**permalink**) 08-19-2007, 02:48 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Puritan Sailor

Interesting. I wonder what he would think today.

I will let Dabney answer in his own words. Speaking of a future Northern victory, and its implications for society, Dabney wrote

Quote:

"The history of human rights, that their intelligent asserters usually learn the true grounds of them "in the furnace of affliction"; that the posterity who inherit these rights hold them for a while, in pride and ignorant prescription; that after a while, when the true logic of the rights has been forgotten, and when some plausible temptation presses them to do so, the next generation discards the precious rights bodily, and goes back to the practice of old tyranny."

From The Practical Philosophy, page 394. He wrote that in 1898. If anything, he understated the issue.

Dabney also prophecied the rise of Happy Clown Candy Centers.

Ivanhoe · #5 (**permalink**) 08-21-2007, 10:12 PM

Benjamin Morgan Palmer, in some of the most moving words I have read, issues a similar charge to the cultured sons of the South:

Quote:

I charge you, if this graet Republic like a gallant ship must drive upon the breakers, that you be upon the deck, and with suspended breath await the shock--perchance she will survive it--but if she sink beneath the destiny which has devoured other great kingdoms of the past, that you save from the melancholy wreck of our ancestral faith, and work out yet upon this continent the problem of a free, constitutional and popular government. And may the God of destinies give you a good issue!

Wow, it is clear he is speaking to the supporters of Ron Paul.