Randolph Harrison McKim

McKim was an Episcopal priest who preached Sewanee’s commencement service in 1908, the same year he received his honorary degree. McKim, who had served in the Confederate Army, was the author of A Soldier's Recollections: Leaves From the Diary of a Young Confederate, with an Oration on the Motives and Aims of the Soldiers of the South, in which he argues heatedly that slavery was not a major motivation for Southern secession or participation in the Civil War.

McKim attempted to justify slavery in the Confederacy by arguing that historians would be hypocritical for judging southerners for holding slaves and not the Founding Fathers—as if holding both accountable for their actions was not an option:

"In the first place, I ask, If slavery was the cornerstone of the Southern Confederacy, what are we to say of the Constitution of the United States? That instrument as originally adopted by the thirteen colonies contained three sections which recognized slavery “...And whereas the Constitution of the Southern Confederacy prohibited the slave trade, the Constitution of the United States prohibited the abolition of the slave trade for twenty years (1789-1808)! And if the men of the South are reproached for denying liberty to three and a half millions [sic] of human beings, at the same time that they professed to be waging a great war for their own liberty, what are we to say of the revolting colonies of 1776 who rebelled against the British crown to achieve their liberty while slavery existed in every one of the thirteen colonies undisturbed? “Cannot those historians who deny that the South fought for liberty, because they held the blacks in bondage, see that upon the same principle they must impugn the sincerity of the signers of the Declaration of Independence?"

“McKim, Randolph Harrison, 1842-1920.” https://mds.marshall.edu/mckim_randolphharrison/ “Commencement Sunday Service,” The Sewanee Purple, July 3, 1908. Randolph Harrison McKim, A Soldier's Recollections: Leaves From the Diary of a Young Confederate, with an Oration on the Motives and Aims of the Soldiers of the South, 1910.