So far as we know, no southern slaveholders read The Communist Manifesto. They did not have to: They saw for themselves the specter that was haunting Europe – and the North. “The great sore of modern society,” M. R. H. Garnett of Virginia's social and intellectual elite proclaimed, “is the war between capital and labour.” That war, according to the Reverend Thornton Stringfellow of Virginia, began in biblical times, often spun out of control, and invited military dictatorship. The proslavery preachers, teachers, editors, and theorists who shaped public opinion pondered the lessons of ancient and modern history, fascinated by the careers of Julius Caesar, Oliver Cromwell, and the two Bonapartes.

A letter to the editor of Virginia Literary Museum in 1829 listed the principal destroyers of liberty: Caesar, “listening to the suggestion of unprincipled ambition”; Cromwell, “under the show of asserting the rights of conscience”; and Napoleon, driven by the desire to create “universal and unlimited monarchy.” For Judge Joseph Lumpkin of Georgia, Caesar and Cromwell qualified as “scourges and destroyers of our species, and Napoleon resembled Nero, Caligula, Genghis Khan, and Tamerlane – a man whose life taught “the doctrine of man's fall and total depravity.” Well and good, but not good enough.