Nat Turner and Confederate Apologists

byron ed

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I’ve wondered if Confederate apologists had the same high school reading list we did, in particular the novel “The Confessions of Nat Turner” by William Styron, 1966. I understand required reading was not something high schoolers were likely to retain or even remember, but there it was for us -- surprisingly relevant insights in regards "Southern honor," meaning primarily the glorification of slaveowner culture in the Antebellum.

Here’s Styron’s Judge Cobb, his drunken lament about Virginia in front of the slave Nat Turner and Turner’s young master Putnam:


(from pgs. 68, 69) “...God, God, my poor Virginia, blighted domain! The soil wrecked and ravaged on every hand, turned to useless dust by that abominable weed. Tobacco we cannot any longer raise, nor cotton ever, save for a meager crop in these few southern counties, nor oats nor barley nor wheat. A wasteland! A plump and virginal principality, a cornocopia of riches the like of which the world has never seen, transformed within the space of a century to a withering, defeated hag! And all to satisfy the demand of ten million Englishmen for a pipeful of Virginia leaf! Now even that is gone, and all we can raise is horses! Horses!...Horses and what else, what else? Horses and pickaninnies! Pickaninnies! Little black infants by the score, the hundreds, the thousands, the tens of thousands! The fairest state of them all, this tranquil and beloved domain – what has it now become? A nursery for Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas. A monstrous breeding farm to supply the sinew to gratify the maw of Eli Whitney’s infernal machine, cursed be that blackguard’s name! In such a way is our human decency brought down, when we pander all that is in us noble and just to the false god which goes by the vile name of Capital! Oh, Virginia, woe betide thee! Woe, thrice woe, and ever be damned in memory be the day when poor black men in chains first trod upon thy sacred strand!...”
 
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Matt McKeon

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While Judge Cobb was somewhat over pessimistic about the future of VA agriculture, he was right about the "nursery" part.
 
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