Confederate “Heritage” Month 2020, April 20: Charles Sumner on the “Barbarism of Slavery”

Sen. Charles Sumner, Republican of Massachusetts, gave a famous speech in 1860 to the Senate that became known as the "Barbarism of Slavery" speech. In an introduction to a published edition of it (quoted here from The Barbarism of Slavery, 1863), he described the stakes in the Civil War then under way:

... there are two apparent rudiments to this war. One is Slavery and the other is State Rights. But the latter is only a cover for the former. If Slavery were out of the way there would be no trouble from State Rights.

The war, then, is for Slavery, and nothing else. lt is an insane attempt to vindicate by arms the lordship which had been already asserted in debate. With mad-cap audacity it seeks to install this Barbarism as the truest Civilization. Slavery is declared to be the "corner-stone" of the new edifice. This is enough.

The question is thus presented between Barbarism and Civilization; not merely between two different forms of Civilization, but between Barbarism on the one side and Civilization on the other side. If you are for Barbarism, join the Rebellion, or, if you can not join it, give it your sympathies. If you are for Civilization, stand by the Government of your country with mind, soul, heart and might!

Such is the issue simply stated. On the one side are women and children on the auction-block; families rudely separated; human flesh lacerated and seamed by the bloody scourge; labor extorted without wages; and all this frightful, many-sided wrong is the declared foundation of a mock commonwealth. On the other side is the Union of our Fathers, with the image of "Liberty" on its coin and the sentiment of Liberty in its Constitution, now arrayed under a patriotic Government, which insists that no such mock Commonwealth, having such a declared foundation, shall be permitted on our territory, purchased with money and blood, to impair the unity of our jurisdiction and to insult the moral sense of mankind. [my emphasis]

The rhetoric of barbarism and civilization was a key element of Western colonial thought at that time used as a justification for Europeans subjugating non-white people, including the settler colonialism in the Western Hemisphere directed against indigenous peoples. In the prof-slavery polemics, the South Peculiar Institution was defended as necessary to the maintenance of Civilization. Sumner here is making a polemical inversion of that argument, pointing out the cruelty and comparAtive economic backwardness as well as the deficiency of republican institutions in the Confederacy.

That use of "barbarism" is archaic now, though people in the wealthiest countries still find ways to make invidious comparison between themselves and other countries that are held to be "underdeveloped" or "less advanced". "Barbaric" and "barbarism" now are typically used in the kind of polemical sense Sumner was employing in the 1860s, to refer to cruelty and viciousness.