Foote reports two separate arguments that detail the pervasive racism that united
southern society. In the first discussion, the debate within the Virginia legislature about
arming slaves, Aleck Stephens, Vice-President of the South, explained that slavery was
“the ‘cornerstone’ of the Confederacy, insisting that it made the nation’s citizens truly
free, presumably to establish a universal white aristocracy, by keeping the Negro in the
inferior position God and nature intended for him to occupy down through time” (III,
755). Thus, while fighting for his liberty, in Foote’s account, the southerner was forced
to confront the question of whether loss of liberty for the slaves was the cornerstone of
the new nation. And how could such an institution be defended as essential to the whole?
In the second discussion, the debate within the Confederate Congress, Foote
concludes the matter by quoting Robert Toombs, whom Foote calls the measure’s
strongest opponent. “In my opinion, the worst calamity that could befall us would be to
gain our independence by the valor of our slaves…The day that the army of Virginia
allows a negro regiment to enter their lines as soldiers they will be degraded, ruined, and
disgraced” (III, 860). It is a question just how far this opinion of Toombs represented the
rest of the Confederacy. But in this leading example of the opposition to the measure,
one sees an appeal to the racial superiority of whites so contradictory that the very virtues
of another race are a source of the whites’ degradation. Whatever southerners said and
felt about the cause of the fight, stopping as most did at the right to defend their liberty
against the invader, that liberty, in Toombs account, depended upon the continued
subjugation of a people capable of valor. Perhaps that is why Foote chose to end his
second narration of the law with the following ironic anecdote: “Some few [black
recruits] came or were sent forward to Richmond before the end of March; new gray
uniforms were somehow found for them, and there was even a drill ceremony in Capitol
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Convention