Mud Sill Speech Analysis

Judging from the latter half of the nineteenth century in the United States, the ideas of freedom for African Americans held by whites and blacks were varied and often in conflict with each other. Such a generalization results from, on the one hand, white ideas of freedom found in speeches from southern loyalists and Confederate leaders, as well as historical accounts of abolitionists, all in the period before the outbreak of the Civil War; coupled with black ideas of freedom found in speeches both before and as late as the end of the nineteenth century. From this selection of documents, one can see white ideas of black freedom range from, seeing black freedom as directly in conflict with the social, political, and religious institutions of

Hammond opens his speech by linking black freedom to an act of aggression against the cotton industry, which is at the economic center of Southern society: “You dare not make war on cotton. No power on earth dares to make war upon it. Cotton is king.” Abolition and African-American liberty is nothing less than a war against the South. The repetition of the word “dare” signifies that this attack will not go unanswered. Thus, black freedom threatens the entire South. He goes on to suggest that it is not only the Southern economy that is at stake, but the very fabric of Southern society including political freedom for whites: “the greatest strength of the South arises from the harmony of her political and social institutions. This harmony gives her a frame of society, the best in the world, and an extent of political freedom, combined with entire security, such as no other people ever enjoyed upon the face of the earth.” Thus, abolition and black freedom directly conflict with white liberty. Hammond is arguing that the “political freedom” of white southerners enjoy requires the oppression of African-Americans. Hammond later describes how in every society there needs to be a class of laborers in order for the upper class to exist and act as a catalyst for