VP Kamala Harris and the VP of the Confederacy Alexander Stephens are both telling you the truth about slavery

Today's GOP is whitewashing history

A firestorm rightfully exploded after Florida’s GOP controlled Board of Education recently approved new standards for how Black history is taught in schools. These new education requirements, compelled by Fla. GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis “anti-woke” legislation, specifically required instruction for middle school students to include "how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit."

The idea that enslaved people somehow personally benefitted from slavery is an abomination. And thankfully we’ve seen a tsunami of criticism directed at the GOP’s efforts to whitewash this crime against humanity.

But in addressing this issue, I believe that the words of two different vice-presidents are powerfully compelling in summing up the unfiltered truth about slavery. The first is current Vice President Kamala Harris while the other is the former Vice President of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens.

Vice President Kamala Harris headed to Florida twice last week to slam these new “education” mandates as part of the GOP’s efforts to “replace history with lies.”  During her speeches, the Vice-President detailed exactly how barbaric and evil chattel slavery was, explaining, “It involved rape. It involved torture. It involved taking a baby from their mother.  It involved some of the worst examples of depriving people of humanity in our world.” An impassioned Harris added, “It involved subjecting to people the requirement that they would think of themselves and be thought of as less than human.”

A fiery Harris continued, “So, in the context of that, how is it that anyone could suggest that in the midst of these atrocities, that there was any benefit to being subjected to this level of dehumanization?!”  

She is 100 percent correct. And the Florida educators must know this given that Florida was not only a slave state in the years leading up to the Civil War, but was marked by “plantations and farms that echoed the wealthiest precincts of the Old South cotton kingdom.” As historian’s note, middle Florida’s entire economy was based on slavery. In fact, by 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, “44 percent of Florida’s 140,400 residents were slaves.”

Preserving slavery was the very reason cited by the Florida delegates when they voted to become the third state to secede from the Union, after South Carolina and Mississippi. For example, during the special session on secession, John C. McGhee, who was elected president of the convention, declared:  "At the South, and with our People of course, slavery is the element of all value, and a destruction of that destroys all that is property."

Florida’s flag after secession with three stars since Florida was the third state to secede

But it’s the words of another Vice President, Alexander Stephens, that are so telling as to how people of the South viewed the enslaved that makes it laughable that there was an effort to teach them skills to benefit themselves.

Stephens had a long career in Southern politics, beginning in 1836 when he was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives. From there, he would be elected to Congress in 1842, where he made a name for himself fighting any proposed legislation that would restrict the expansion of slavery.

Stephens, though, did not support secession—instead he wanted to reach a legislative solution to protect the institution of slavery. He even voted “no” as a delegate to Georgia’s special convention on secession when the vote came to leave the Union.

Despite his questioning of the wisdom of seceding, his vehement support for slavery and the fact he was a respected Southern statesman led to him being chosen to be the first vice president of the Confederate States of America during the Confederate Congress in February 1861.

It was a month later in March 1861, that Stephens would deliver his infamous—yet brutally honest—“Cornerstone Speech” in Savannah, Ga.  When you read his words about slavery and Blacks, you understand that any skills the enslaved learned were not for their own benefit as the Florida GOP wants you to believe but solely for the benefit of the white slave owner given that they saw the slaves as not only inferior--but in essence as livestock.

In his “Cornerstone speech,” Stephens first criticized the U.S. Constitution as erroneous for resting “upon the assumption of the equality of races.” In contrast, Stephens explained, “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man,” adding, “that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.”

The Confederacy’s Vice President continued on to brag that, “This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.” 

From there, this icon of the South mocked those in North who opposed this view: “They assume that the negro is equal, and hence conclude that he is entitled to equal privileges and rights with the white man. If their premises were correct, their conclusions would be logical and just but their premise being wrong, their whole argument fails.”

He then literally dubbed those opposed to slavery as suffering from a mental illness: “Those at the North, who still cling to these errors, with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics. All fanaticism springs from an aberration of the mind from a defect in reasoning. It is a species of insanity.”

Later in his speech, Stephens made an appeal to lower class whites his words: “With us, all of the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye of the law. Not so with the negro. Subordination is his place.”  (This was a sneak preview of how after the Civil War the white right would appeal to poor whites to join with them in oppressing Blacks during the Jim Crow era.)

Very instructively, the Confederacy’s VP even touched on the need to teach skills to the enslaved noting that the only way to “civilize” the “barbarous tribes of Africa” was by “teaching them to work, and feed, and clothe themselves.”

As Stephens was making clear, forcing the enslaved to learn a skill was not about bestowing a “personal benefit” upon the slave—but rather as part of “civilizing” these barbaric people. In reality, though, there was no noble goal here. Rather, as The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson noted in his recent powerful op-ed, his great-great-grandfather, enslaved in Charleston, S.C., was “compelled” to learn to be a blacksmith. Robinson added, “he had no ability to “parlay” anything, because his time and labor were not his own. They belonged to his enslaver. He belonged to his enslaver.”

The skills that the enslaved were forced to learn—on the pain of torture or death—were for the sole benefit of the white owner. And as Stephens and others made clear, they believed slavery would last in perpetuity—meaning the enslaved would be their property until death. They even fought the Civil War to preserve this.

The Florida GOP mandating children be taught that slavery somehow benefited the enslaved is all part of the GOP viewing itself as the defender of white supremacy--and on some level furthering Stephen’s vision of the racial order.  The GOP’s ban on books and subject matter under the guise of “Critical race theory” are nothing more than their effort to both erase Black achievements—since it undercuts the myth of white superiority—and whitewash the history of whites committing brutal and inhumane crimes against the Black community.

That is why Vice President Harris put it so well with her words Friday in Florida about this new “slavery wasn’t that bad” curriculum: “They insult us in an attempt to gaslight us.”  She is 100 percent correct. In fact, I bet Stephens would agree with her—that is, assuming he could even speak after his shock of seeing a Black woman serving as Vice President of the United States of America.

---