My Macon Ancestor's Irrational Rationalization is Quoted

It is a bit startling to run across your ancestor's name in a well-regarded book on the topic of race and slavery. Well, I suppose I shouldn't have been too surprised to bump into my Macon ancestor in The War Before the War, since my 5th great granduncle was, according to NCpedia, "the foremost public man of North Carolina in the early nineteenth century." Born to Virginia gentry parents who moved south of the Roanoke River in the 1730s, Nathaniel Macon (1758-1837), was an "Old Republican" and anti Federalist. He refused to participate in the Continental Congress . . . yet served in the U.S. Congress from 1791-1828. He could not abide government oversight of his life and property . . . therefore he had to participate in government in order to make sure progressives keep their distance from his business. Between the American Revolution and the Civil War, this medieval, old-gentry style was especially divisive and harmful to the future of the United States. North and South grew apart as they struggled to see Black people, non-Europeans, as humans. Earlier, they could not see the indigenous people of this continent as fellow human beings either. In each case, they concocted unrealistic reasons for their superiority and the inferiority of others.

The author of the The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America's Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War quotes Uncle Nathaniel to illustrate just this sort of dehumanization. The quote is an example of unrealistic reasoning concocted to defend slavery: Slavery was a Benevolent Institution. "Hard as it may be for us to fathom, decades after the Revolution, in a republic founded in the name of human rights, there was no consensus that slavery was outrageous or even anomalous. Speaking in Congress in 1820, Senator Nathaniel Macon of North Carolina made the amiable suggestion that all doubts about [slavery's] benignity could be dispelled if only his northern colleagues 'would go home with me, or some other southern member, and witness the meeting between the slaves and the owner, and see the glad faces and the hearty shaking of hands' . . . The same picturesque fantasy persisted to and beyond Gone with the Wind (1936), and no doubt lingers today in the minds of people unwilling to admit that they still believe it."

Uncle Nathaniel is a most quintessential example of that Southern gentleman who would defend slavery to the end. It was this "uppity" white-gentry belief system that was behind the war before the war. Slavery as benevolent institution would become one of several tenets of Lost Cause mythology. I urge you to read War Before the War to learn more about that period of history we white people of a certain age didn't learn about when we were in school. We simply didn't bother to think about it either (Fiddle-de-dee, said Scarlet) because we grew up thinking that the Lost Cause was not a myth. Next, read Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause, for more on how General Jubal Early laid out the tenets of the Lost Cause Myth. This one is a must read. I'm about two-thirds through and haven't seen a relative . . . yet. Unless you count the loose reference to men like my 2nd great grandfather who was among the bedraggled who walked home from Petersburg rather than follow Lee to Appomattox.