![]() ![]() “We use them for our purpose, and call them slaves….I will not characterize that class at the North by that term but you have it it is there it is everywhere it is eternal. “It constitutes the very mud-sill of society.” Northerners consigned whites to this degraded status, but the South had “found a race adapted to that purpose” and built a society on the bedrock of black labor. Civil war hospital gordonsville va manual#According to Hammond, every civilization needed a class of manual workers: “In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life,” he proclaimed. A separate southern nation, he proclaimed, would thrive, thanks to its control over cotton production and its stable social order. ![]() “Mudsill” became a political catchword in 1858 thanks to an infamous speech by Senator James Henry Hammond of South Carolina. Especially illuminating was his triumphant reference to “mud sills,” a loaded term which connected wartime upheaval to antebellum politics. “Alas! for the pride and boasting of the chivalrous subjects of King cotton!” He described not one, but two intertwined revolutions unleashed as slavery collapsed and elite pretensions crumbled. Writing home from Alabama in November 1863, an Ohio cavalryman celebrated the overthrow of the Southern aristocracy: “The mud sills of the North roam at will over the plantations, burn rails, forage on the country, and the negroes flock into our camps, leaving their lordly masters helpless and dependent,” he rejoiced.
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