British Whigs in the mid-nineteenth century were not democrats—and not that anti-slavery: John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton (1866): "In a great speech... Mr. Stephens, the Vice President of the Confederacy, spoke these words:
The corner stone of our new government rests upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. Our new government is the first in the history of the world based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth...
...Here, then, was a society... more aristocratically constituted than those of feudal times.... The decomposition of democracy was arrested in the South by the indirect influence of slavery.... In the United States... the work of emancipation... has been an act of war, not of statesmanship or humanity.... They have not protected the white man from the vengeance of barbarians, nor the black from the pitiless cruelty of a selfish civilization.... Slavery... [was] by one part of the nation it was wickedly defended, and by the other as wickedly removed....
The spurious liberty of the United States is twice cursed... by exhibiting the spectacle of a people claiming to be free, but whose love of freedom means hatred of inequality, jealousy of limitations to power, and reliance on the state as an instrument to mould as well as to control society, it calls on its admirers to hate aristocracy and teaches its adversaries to fear the people. The North has used the doctrines of democracy to destroy self-government. The South applied the principle of conditional federation to cure the evils and to correct the errors of a false interpretation of democracy...
#noted
