Vindicating the Founders

In an earlier post I wrote about the ideals enshrined in this country’s founding documents. Recently, I’ve been reading Thomas G. West’s Vindicating the Founders: Race, Sex, Class, and Justice in the Origins of America; it’s a bit of a slog, so I don’t know if I’ll be able to get all the way through it, but I have found one passage (a quote from “Alexander Stephens, the Confederate vice president”, actually) that not only vindicates the founders but also puts the lie to the claim that the Civil War was about anything other than slavery:

Jefferson in his forecast had anticipated this [slavery] as the “rock upon which the old Union would split.” He was right. . . . But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. . . . These ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of the races. This was an error. . . .
     Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its corner-stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition.
     This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.

Thus, one can see that the Confederate States of America was based on the enshrinement of slavery; the United States of America was not.