SOUTH AFRICA AND THE AMERICAN SOUTH

...Even as the sound and fury of events make it appear that polarization is the order of the day in South Africa, many whites are tormented by their divided consciences on the "race question...

...This might go far toward explaining why the Confederacy lost a war it had excellent prospects of winning...

...The South was not exactly preoccupied with guilt, but some southerners were tormented, and much of the region's intellectual energy went into the effort to convince itself, and incidentally the world, that its peculiar evil was in reality good...

...But like the white American southerner, many South African whites are divided, not only among themselves, but within their individual selves, and seem incapable of an imaginative, forceful initiative toward solving their "race problem" without outside moral pressure...

...There is here a striking echo of some dimensions of life and mind from the pre-Civil War American South...

...They knew with William Lloyd Garrison, the dean of American abolitionism, that no oppressor class gives up its power voluntarily, and that antislavery might, in fact, very well have to have its victory on the battlefield...

...The old republican values—independence, individuality, liberty, equality—continued to haunt...

...According to a new public opinion poll conducted for the Sunday Times of London, "South African whites are increasingly unhappy with the apartheid system and a majority want the nationalist leader Nelson Mandela freed from prison...

...Many thought, however, that the battle would be less bloody because southern white hearts, after years of moral conflict, would not be fully in it...

...They did not do this to "punish" or so much with the thought that these measures would force southerners into reform...

...And it was here that abolitionists thought that they could make a dent in an otherwise powerful system sustaining a deeply entrenched social and economic elite...

...John C. Calhoun maintained that the value of the "positive good" argument lay in its ability to defend southern consciences against antislavery attacks, and thus against the possibility of southerners freeing their slaves themselves...

...This was mainly in response to the growing profitability of cotton growing...

...A significant number of reputable historians now agree that the defeatism prevalent in the Confederacy, the disproportionate number of desertions, and the general decline of morale, were related to feelings of uneasiness over a war for the defense of slavery...

...the increasing distance from the libertarianism of the revolutionary era...

...and as a defense against a small, but persistent and growing antislavery movement in the North...

...It may come to the battlefield anyway as it did in nineteenthcentury America...

...Indeed Southerners, too, believed that abolitionists could succeed by focusing on slaveowners' moral conflict...

...These included Robert E. Lee and Mary Chesnut, who wrote at the very beginning of the war, "God forgive us, but ours is a monstrous system of wrong and inequity...

...It is true that southern leaders would by the 1830s develop a "positive good" argument about slavery...

...perhaps the bloodletting will thereby be mercifully shortened...

...An important wing of the abolitionist movement recognized southern Zerrissenheit, and argued for moral suasion and against coercion...

...From early on white slaveowners expressed ambivalence about their "peculiar institution," referring to it, almost universally, as a "necessary evil...

...They sincerely believed that the strength of their wills, and their example of sacrifice (of cotton and sugar, and jobs and profits in the New England mills) would create a context for the manifestation of "true" southern white conscience...

...Many leading Southerners expressed relief when their "peculiar institution" was destroyed from the outside...

...If it comes to the battlefield after sanctions "fail," perhaps the white South African's heart will not be fully in it...

...Many of the advocates of sanctions against South Africa are, like the abolitionists, not seeking to punish or even to coerce, but are hoping to create a context within which those South African whites "increasingly unhappy with the apartheid system" might become a dominant voice...

...The "positive good" rhetoric, however, was no more than a thin veneer...

...Nonetheless these abolitionists advocated boycotts—sanctions if you will—the withdrawal of fellowship, the abolition of the interstate slave trade, and the abolition of slave sales in Washington, D.C...