Confederate "Heritage" Month 2006 - April 7: La Guerra de Estados Unidos a México

La Guerra Mexicano-estadounidense de 1846-48 was yet another step in the intensification of sectional tensions over slavery. Among hardline opponents of slavery, it was a blatant attempt by the Slave Power to absorb Texas as a slave state and to expand the "peculiar institution" to an even wider area. For others it was a necessary war to secure the United States over the long term and to expand the Empire of Liberty.

The antislavery Congregational minister Theodore Parker definitely fell within the first group. He said in a speech against the war:

I maintain that aggressive war is a sin; that it is a national infidelity, a denial of Christianity and of God. ... Treason against the people, against mankind, against God, is a great sin, not lightly to be spoken of. The political authors of the war on this continent, and at this day, are either utterly incapable of a statesman's work, or else guilty of that sin. Fools they are, or traitors they must be. . . . Considering how we acquired Louisiana. Florida, Oregon, I cannot forbear thinking that this people will possess the whole of this continent before many years, perhaps before the century ends. ... Is it not better to acquire it by the schoolmaster than the cannon, by peddling cloth, tin, anything rather than bullets? ... It would be a gain to mankind if we could spread over that country the Idea of America - that all men are born free and equal in rights, and establish there political, social, and individual freedom. But to do that we must first make real those ideas at home.

When we annexed Texas we of course took her for better or worse, debts and all, and annexed her war along with her. I take it everybody knew that, though some now seem to pretend a decent astonishment at the result. Now one party is ready to fight for it as the other. ... Now the Government and its Congress would throw the blame on the innocent and say war exists "by the act of Mexico!" If a lie was ever told, I think this is one. Then the "dear people" must be called on for money and men, for "the soil of this free republic is invaded," and the Governor of Massachusetts, one of the men who declared the annexation of Texas unconstitutional, recommends the war he just now told us to pray against, and appeals to our "patriotism" and "humanity" as arguments for butchering the Mexicans, when they are in the right and we in the wrong!... How tamely the people yield their necks - and say "Take our sons for the war - we care not, right or wrong." (my emphasis)

(No, trolls, the fact that he said "aggressive war is a sin" did not make him an ally of The Terrorists.)

Bernard De Voto in The Year of Decision 1846 (1943) described this process by which much of the North rallied around what those like Parker saw as a slaveeowners' war.  And yet at the same time, the war increased their awareness that the interests of slavery and the slaveholders may not have been the interests of the nation:

By August [1846], ... the aimless crosscurrents of pure emotion had subsided enough to permit certain elementary perceptions, and as this war, like all wars, was seen to be something other than its beginning had made out, realism began to take the place of evasion. It was a surprising realism. It exploded in [Democratic President James] Polk's face and he felt that it was ominous. It was: far more ominous than he knew.

But meanwhile an exultant people had their glory, at little risk. They had drifted into war without understanding even their own assent, with a bland feeling that any war the Americans might want to fight was both an easy one to win and a righteous one in motive. They had doggedly evaded both its immediate and its collateral issues and had refused to look at its implications. But now the awareness that is the forerunner of realism began to disturb certain persons who would eventually find ways of making a nation look at facts it had refused to see and at necessary consequences.

Realism is the most painful, most difficult, and slowest of human faculties. Mr. Seward, who was some years short of discovering that there was a higher law than the statutes and that an irrepressible conflict was eroding the nation's core, condemned the new war but was in favor "of plenty of men and supplies once it was started." William Cullen Bryant found it "not practicable" to oppose the war, "though he detested its objects and tried to terminate it as soon as possible." They and their kind lacked Ulysses Grant's, and Ethan Allen Hitchcock's, soldierly forthrightness - but there were those who didn't. Something was beginning to get rearranged. A number who had loved the middle way, holding, they supposed, to the course of progress, were suddenly arm in arm with fanatics who, they had supposed, were impeding it. Men of goodwill who for a long time had been looking at a composite, a complex, of social irreconcilables were now beginning, a few of them, to understand what they saw. Human wills that had been divided by doctrine or theory found themselves blending.  With eager or reluctant hearts they achieved understanding and hardened toward purpose [in opposition to the war].(my emphasis)

In my own view of la Guerra de Estados Unidos a México, I think a good case can be made that annexing Texas and risking war with México was in the United States' national interest, even from an antislavery point of view.

But there are abstract justifications, and there's what really happened.  And what really happened was that Southern slaveowners wanted a new slave territory. And their friend in the White House, James K. Polk, was looking for a war with México to settle the question. Illinois Congressman Abraham Lincoln believed, as did Parker, that the war was an unjustified war of aggression. In his antiwar speech in Congress of 01/12/1848, Lincoln called into question the administration's claim that the war began in response to a clear-cut violation of American territory by the Mexican army.

He claimed that Polk was hiding the real causes of the war, because the nominal, official cause was insupportable. He suspected of Polk, he said, "that he feels the blood of this war, like the blood of Abel, is crying to Heaven against him". And he continued (from the text in the 1989 Library of America edition, Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings, 1832-1858):

That originally having some strong motive - what, I will not stop now to give my opinion concerning - to involve the two countries in a war, and trusting to escape scrutiny, by fixing the public gaze upon the exceeding brightness of military glory - that attractive rainbow, that rises in showers of blood - that serpent's eye, that charms to destroy - he plunged into it, and has swept, on and on, till, disappointed in his calculation of the ease with which Mexico might be subdued, he now finds himself, he knows not where. How like the half insane mumbling of a fever-dream, is the whole war part of his late message! At one time telling us that Mexico has nothing whatever, that we can get, but teritory; at another, showing us how we can support the war, by levying contributions on Mexico. At one time, urging the national honor, the security of the future, the prevention of foreign interference, and even, the good of Mexico herself, as among the objects of the war; at another, telling us, that "to reject indemnity, by refusing to accept a cession of teritory, would be to abandon all our just demands, and to wage the war, bearing all it's expenses, without a purpose or definite object." So then, the national honor, security of the future, and even' thing but teritorial [sic] indemnity, may be considered the no-purposes, and indefinite, objects of the war! (my emphasis in bold)

It's fascinating to see elements of more recent events foreshadowed by Lincoln's indictment of Polk. But I'm using the Lincoln quotation as an illustration of the intensity of the feelings that la Guerra Mexicano-estadounidense brought out, setting the stage for the next round of confrontation over slavery.

An Index to Confederate "Heritage" Month 2006 postings is available.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2006 - April 6: Contradictions of Jacksonian democracy

Sean Wilentz in Andrew Jackson (2005) gives a good summary of the contradictions of Jacksonian democracy that would eventually split the Jacksonian movement and the Democratic Party:


As Jackson noted in his farewell address, sectional divisions over slavery and democracy directly threatened his very conception of democracy. For Jackson, the confrontations were artificial, whipped up by ambitious demagogues in order to distract the electorate from the truly important division between the privileged few and the humble many. But slavery and its expansion were not artificial issues; they were redefining how Americans thought about the few and many; and these clashing views cut to the heart of how Americans thought about democracy. ...


Two decades would pass before the clash between the northern democracy [i.e., the Democratic Party] and the southern democracy shattered Jackson's Democratic Party in all but its name. Yet in the most profound irony of all, the widening of democratic politics that (as Herman Melville would later write in Moby-Dick) "didst pick up Andrew Jackson from the pebbles" and "thunder him higher than a throne" would also render that conflict irrepressible. By expanding popular politics and enshrining the popular will, Jackson and his followers exposed the political system to precisely the kinds of agitation they (and their Whig Party adversaries) hoped to keep forever out of national debates. Using all of the electioneering techniques pioneered by the Jackson Democrats, new movements, factions, and parties would arise and amass popular support over issues connected to slavery - and would elect candidates to national office dedicated solely to addressing whether slavery threatened or embodied democratic values.


Jackson lived long enough to feel these early tremors of the crisis of American democracy over slavery, and he would try to still them with all the strength he could muster. He would never fully comprehend how his own democratic achievements had brought them about, and lead his countrymen, North and South, to begin questioning whether democracy could endure in a nation half slave and half free, a house divided against itself.  (my emphasis)


Wilentz in his Jackson biography does anexceptionallygood job of describing how Jackson and his movement not only made consciously and deliberate choices.  But they also set processes and conflicts in motion whose implications they didn't comprehend and whose further results they could only dimly predict.


These passages from Wilentz are also reminders that in understanding the Civil War and the conflicts over slavery that led up to it, it's important for us to keep in mind that what may look to us like an inevitable process did not appear so to its participants.  Even for the strict Calvinists like John Brown, who believed that God at least had pre-ordained the entire course of human history down to the last detail.  God may have known the future.  But Andrew Jackson, John Calhoun and John Brown did not.


And on the issue of slavery, we are inclined today to view the issue as one of good and right (emancipation) versus evil and cruelty (slavery).  And indeed it was.  Nor is that an anachronistic view, reading current values and assumptions into the past.  There were many Americans and certainly many people in the rest of the world in the time of Andrew Jackson who viewed slavery as a sinful evil.


But the actual participants in the events of those years in the United States didn't have the luxury of making entirely clear-cut choices in the practical issues that slavery presented.  Jefferson, the staunch opponent of slavery, feared the implications of the Missouri Compromise because it was made under a series of assumptions very different that how he had always conceived states rights as a defense of democratic and personal liberties against a potentially tyrannical federal government.


Jackson never faced a direct choice of freedom versus slavery.  But when he found himself in a position in the nullification crisis where he had to defend democracy against a slaveowners revolt, he came down hard on the side of democracy.  His action didn't free a single slave.  But would a genuine opponet of slavery like Thomas Jefferson have been willing to take such a clear stand in asserting federal power against a state's claim to the right of nullification?


The quotes are also a reminder of how important to the future course of events Jackson's stand against secession in the nullification crisis was.  Jackson certainly didn't intend to set off a three-decades-long process of escalating tensions over slavery.  On the contrary, he aimed at calming such tensions down.


But the content of his actions went far beyond their intent.  By establishing the notion of Union and democracy as inseparable, he set the stage for the position that the defenders of democracy and American unity would eventually take when matters reached the point that either democracy or slavery would have to die out.


An Index to Confederate "Heritage" Month 2006 postings is available.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2006 - April 5: Westward expansion (2)

It would be silly to claim that Jackson was unaware or indifferent to the fact that the Mexican War had a great deal to do with slavery and with increasing the strength of the Slave Power.  It was part of the contradictory nature of Jackson as a political leader and of the broad movement of Jacksonian Democracy.  Sean Wilentz writes in Andrew Jackson (2005):

The most powerful contradictions generated by Jackson's presidency and legacy had to do with slavery, democracy, and American expansionism.

Jackson left office as President in 1837.  So he had long been out of office when the Mexican War began in 1846, and Jackson himself passed away in 1845.  That conflict is also called la Guerra Mexicano-estadounidense, la Guerra de Estados Unidos a México and the Mexican-American War.  Yes, trolls and nativist zealots, Spanish-speakers don't use the English name for the war exclusively!

Speaking of the developments around the Texas Revolution of 1835-6, Wilentz writes:

The difficulties that surrounded these developments, especially in Texas, also reinforced the stresses that were afflicting the country and the Democracy by the mid-1830s. The results deepened the tragic dimensions of Jackson's presidency, especially in his second term. To Jackson, westward expansion was chiefly a nationalist and democratic enterprise: filling in Thomas Jefferson's empire of freedom, pushing back any possibility of Old World meddling in America's affairs, widening the opportunities for ordinary, virtuous, hardworking Americans to prosper much as he himself, a westward migrant of humble origins, had prospered. Jackson's vision of invigorated expansion was closely tied to his attacks on monied privilege over banking and the currency: opening lands, he wrote, to "actual settlers" and checking western speculation would curb the rise of a class of nonresident landlords and land jobbers, among "the greatest obstacles to the advancement of a new country and the prosperity of an old one." His was a vision of western settlement as a patriotic and egalitarian fulfillment, free of strife, bloodshed, and the artificial hierarchies that Jackson believed had no place in a democratic republic. (my emphasis)

Before his death, Jackson did give his opinions and advice on the tensions that led up to la Guerra Mexicano-estadounidense.  In the debate over whether to annex Texas, which had applied for statehood, Jackson expressed particular concern about the hostile designs of Britain against the US, the schemes of his arch-enemy the secessionist John Calhoun and his old enemy John Quincy Adams.  Robert Remini writes in Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Democracy 1833-1845 (1984):

But all these [various partisan political] questions, important as they were, paled by comparison to the Texas problem. Jackson could not rest easy until he knew that it had been satisfactorily resolved. Once Congress reconvened in December, the General charged after its members with demands that they pass a joint resolution for immediate annexation and thereby execute the will of the people as mandated by Polk's election. At the same time he kept his nephew, Andrew J. Donelson, informed of all developments, instructing him on what he thought should be brought to the attention of the Texas officials. "This you will have to bring to their view," he wrote in one letter concerning the "secret designs" of Britain to reduce Texas to a colony. "Remember, the word reannex," he added, "this hold forth," namely the right of the United States to Texas under the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. As for the Florida Treaty of 1819 which renounced Texas, that was a "nullity, not having the approbation of France and the citizens of Louisia," no matter what "that old scamp, J. Q. Adams" says about it.

Early in the congressional session a joint resolution was introduced for immediate annexation. This resolution required only a simple majority in both houses. The friends of Calhoun and the Tyler administration insisted on a resolution that vindicated the rejected treaty with all its connotations about slavery. They also demanded a provision requiring that the United States absorb the Texan debt. Again, many voiced doubts as to whether Calhoun and his allies really wanted the resolution to pass, arguing that they actually preferred the dissolution of the Union. The House took up the resolutionfirst, and, after a lively debate, passed it on January 25, 1845. Obviously many congressmen believed with Jackson that the people had expressed their view on the subject and wanted Texas admitted to the Union posthaste. (my emphasis)

Given Jackson's position in the nullification crisis, his successful battle against the Bank of United States and its wealthy backers and his general commitment to expanding democracy, I'm willing to believe that democratic and national-security concerns were the primary elements of the issue for Jackson.  Although he did tend to personalize political disputes, so the fact that he saw dark designs of Calhoun and Adams in the matter also affected his position.

Still, it's important to remember that, although Jackson sucessfully defended democracy and the Union against the South Carolina secessionists, Jackson's notion of democracy was for white men only.  He did not see the expansion of slavery as such as being an undesirable thing.  To the extent that Jackson and the Jacksonians understood democracy as involving freedom for whites and slavery for blacks, it becomes hard to clearly distinguish to what extent support for western expansion in their eyes was also - or even primarily - support for the expansion of slavery.

An Index to Confederate "Heritage" Month 2006 postings is available.

Tags: andrew jackson, confederate heritage month 2006, neo-confederates

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2006 - April 4: Westward expansion (1)

Many of the specific controversies over slavery had to do with territorial expansion.  Not all of them. The Nullification crisis was fought ostensibly over the issue of tariffs. John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry was an explicit attempt to set up an ongoing guerrilla resistance and "slave-stealing" operation in the South.

But many of the specific controversies arose over territorial expansion, and whether slavery would be allowed in new territories. To a large extent, the national political dispute became channeled into that broad issue.

The Mexican War was one of those specific controversies. Abraham Lincoln famously opposed it. Henry David Thoreau's famous Civil Disobedience pamphlet grew out of his being jailed for not paying taxes in protest of that war. Many Northerners, by no means only abolitionists, saw the Mexican War as a Slave Power conspiracy to seize Texas and make it a new slave state.

They were not entirely wrong. The slaveowners and their representatives did hope for such an outcome.

But there was also a national security concern that also lay behind "manifest destiny", the dream to expand the borders of the United States from the Atlantic to the Pacific.  And the national security concern was in part a democratic goal of expanding the democratic republic and better securing its freedoms.

John Hope Franklin and Alfred Moss, Jr., wrote in From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African-Americans (8th edition, 2003):

Shortly before the beginning of the War of 1812 the people of the West expounded the doctrine that later came to be known as Manifest Destiny. R. M. Johnson of Kentucky, for example, said that he would not die happy until all of Britain's North American possessions were incorporated into the United States. Points of view like this came to be expressed more and more by inhabitants of the slaveholding states, though it is true that many Northerners shared the same ideas. One of the most important motives for expansionism was declared to be the extension of the area of freedom. The area of the United States must extended so as to make possible the development of a great "empire for liberty" in the New World. It was rather strange, therefore, to hear this doctrine expounded by those who held slaves and who saw little incongruity in their position as slaveholders and their pronouncements in favor of extending freedom democracy.

The extension of democracy was probably neither a primary motive of any the Southern expansionists nor even a secondary motive of many of them. Their preoccupation was with extending the area not of freedom, but of slavery. Many Southerners called for the annexation of new areas as a means of defeating politicians who were antagonistic to the rights of Southern states. Thus, Manifest Destiny became a platform from which the slaveholder could plead for an extension of the institution of slavery. White Southerners, in their thinking, had excluded blacks from their religious and moral conceptions of freedom and had evolved the new notion that the enslavement of blacks was essential to the freedom of whites. Manifest Destiny, therefore, one of America's most dramatic shibboleths in the nineteenth century, contributed substantially to the extension of slavery during the generation immediately preceding the Civil War. (my emphasis)

Franklin and Moss are making some broad generalizations here to give a quick summary of the role of westward expansion in the slavery controversies. The idea "that the enslavement of blacks was essential to the freedom of whites" developed in the Lower South during the early nineteenth century and became a founding principle of the Confederate States of America.  But the earlier notion that slavery would someday fade out as the allegedly "inferior" African race became civilized was still held by some slaveowners in the Upper South right up until the Civil War.

In the next post, I'll look again at the contradictory aspects of the Mexican War as viewed by Andrew Jackson.

An Index to Confederate "Heritage" Month 2006 postings is available.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2006 - April 2: When Old Hickory saved the Union (1)

Actually, he saved it at least three times, I would say. But the one I want to talk about here is his successful face-off with John C. Calhoun and the South Carolina secessionists.

I've written about this subject here before in Andrew Jackson, States Rights and the South 10/24/03. Here I want to draw on Sean Wilentz' Andrew Jackson (2005), one of the American Presidents series edited by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

The fight over the Tariff of 1828 became a testing ground for Calhoun and similar advocates of secessionist treason in defense of slavery. As James MacGregor Burns wrote in The Vineyard of Liberty (1981):

For rice and cotton growers, the 1820s were a time of rapid economic change, price and demand instability, credit squeezes, and depression, all tending toward a rising sense of social and economic insecurity, which in turn fostered a powerful parochialism and sectionalism. The Tariff of 1828 excited the worst southern fears; it was to them literally a tariff of abominations, to be despised and shunned. In a decade of peace they could no longer accept the tariff as a defense measure. Federal policy on internal improvements and other questions also continued to antagonize South Carolinians. But behind all the old issues always loomed the specter of northern interference with slavery. An alleged slave conspiracy, led by Denmark Vesey of Charleston, along with rumors of other planned slave revolts, aroused dread over threats from inside; the stepped-up efforts of the American Colonization Society [an anti-slavery group] in the North aroused fears over threats from outside. (my emphasis)

The South Carolina legislature passed the South Carolina Exposition and Protest in 1929, a document written by John C. Calhoun that defended the doctrine of nullifcation, the right of a state to declare a federal law void within that state. Calhoun at that time was Jackson's Vice President and tried to keep his authorship of the document secret.

The confrontation between South Carolina and the federal government under Jackson brought the contradiction between a national Union founded on democratic principles and the reality of slavery into sharper contrast, as would the subsequent confrontations. Jackson was a slaveowner himself and, unlike slaveowner Thomas Jefferson, supported the institution of slavery. But, as Wilentz explains, Jackson was also a staunch Unionist, a democratic nationalist:

Political leaders, including Jackson, strongly suspected Calhoun's authorship of the Exposition, which they interpreted as an effort to consolidate southern support for a later run for the presidency. But Jackson also took the idea of nullification seriously - and as a piece of rank heresy. According to his strict reading of the Constitution, Jackson held that Congress had full and direct authority over the enacting tariffs, including dictating tariff rates. To deny the rights of the majority in Congress to govern as it saw fit was, in this instance, an absurd breach of the Framers' explicit intentions. Worse, talk of nullification, let alone secession, endangered the Union. In Jackson's mind, it was an outrageous affront to the glorious embodiment of the American Revolution. "There is nothing I shudder at more than the idea of the separation of the Union," he had written to a South Carolina leader before the 1828 election. "It is the durability of the confederation upon which the general government is built, that must prolong our liberty. ...[T]he moment it separates, it is gone." (my emphasis)

The confrontation unfolded over years. In 1832, Jackson supported a revision of the "tariff of abominations", without yielding on the critical principle of federal authority. That was the year Jackson won re-election for a second term as President, with Martin Van Buren as his Vice Presidential running mate this time. Calhoun returned to the Senate the following year.

There was also a legislative election in South Carolina. As Wilentz writes, Southern fears over slave revolts and doubts about the survival of slavery had been mounting even before Jackson's Presidency began. He writes:

Events during the early years of Jackson's presidency further convinced slaveholders that their property and their way of life were besieged. Anxiety mounted in 1829 and 1830, when officials in Charleston and other southern seaports intercepted copies of an incendiary pamphlet - written by a Boston-based free black, David Walker, and smuggled south - bidding the slaves to overthrow their masters. A few months later Walker suddenly died, in what looked to some like suspicious circumstances. A short time after that, a white Bostonian, William Lloyd Garrison, established a new radical newspaper, The Liberator, dedicated to bringing about slavery's immediate demise. Just as ominously, antislavery advocates in the Virginia legislature forced a debate over a gradual emancipation plan early in 1832. Although the proposal failed, that the Virginians even discussed abandoning slavery shocked slaveholders in the Deep South, and especially in South Carolina. [Virginia, one disgusted South Carolinian remarked, had become "infested" with "Yankee influence.") Threatened from without and within, slavery's defenders began to see any effort by the federal government to enact policies they deemed unfavorable to the South as part of a larger antislavery design. This included the protective tariff, which one state rights' party convention in South Carolina declared was intended to hasten "the abolition of slavery throughout the southern states." (my emphasis)

It's worth noting that the 1932 Virginia debate over abolishing slavery was the last time such a proposal was so widely discussed in the South. After that time, antislavery talk was increasingly suppressed in the slave states, a definite abridgment of the rights of free speech and the press for white Southerners. This also made the contradiction between a democratic national republic and slavery in the Southern states increasingly unavoidable.

The newly-elected South Carolina legislature pushed the confrontation further by calling a special convention, which in November, 1832 adopted an Ordinance of Nullification. The Ordinance declared the tariffs of 1828 and 1832 null and void in South Carolina and declared that the federal courts had no authority to intervene. The Ordinance also explicitly threatened secession if the Jackson adminitration tried to collect the tariff in South Carolina.

Jackson answered the challenge in December with a "Proclamation to the People of South Carolina" asserting federal authority. He followed it up by getting Congress to adopt the Force Bill in March, explicitly giving him the authority to use force against South Carolina if they attempt to block federal collection of taxes.

Seeing that Old Hickory was dead serious about strangling the secessionist baby in its cradle (as Churchill was later to suggest doing to Soviet Bolshevism), the South Carolina convention backed down and rescinded the Ordinance of Nullification.

Even though the immediate object of the struggle was the "tariff of abominations", it was clear then as it should be now that in this confrontation, the Union and the democratic republic won, slavery and secession lost. The outcome of most of the other slave state/free state confrontations - the Missouri question, the Mexican War, the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Dred Scott decision - represented surrenders to the Slave Power. Andrew Jackson's stomping the secession cockroach in South Carolina was a victory for democracy and the Union.

Tags: andrew jackson, confederate heritage month, neo-confederates, nullification crisis, old hickory

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2006 - April 1: The Missouri Compromise

The decade before the Civil War was a period of intense political battles - sometimes physical ones - over slavery. But even before then, controversies over slavery had produced repeated crises which led to a series of compromises between the free and slave states.

Northerners and abolitionists felt, with good reason, that the compromises were a series of surrenders to the "Slave Power", as the pro-slavery bloc of states became known. In the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the free states agreed to admit Missouri to the Union as a slave state. But the slave state representatives agreed to a North-South dividing line above which slavery would not be allowed in the territories to be organized there in the future.

One of the complications which was to make particular difficulties for abolitionist politics is that the opposition to admitting Missouri as a slave state was centered in the Federalist Party. The Federalists stood for a conservative approach to government. The Federalists stood for a conservative approach to government that favored the wealthy and the privileged, a role was soon enough adapted by John Quincy Adams and the "National Democrats".

The advocates of broader democracy, include the more radical democrats who would rally behind Andrew Jackson's fight against the "money power", were drawn to Jefferson's Republican Party. (Jefferson's Republicans became known as the Democrats during Jackson's Presidency; today's Republican Party began as a separate party in the 1850s.)

Jefferson's own opposition to slavery endured until the end of his life. But he had relied on the rights of the states at key points in his career, in fighting the Alien and Sedition Acts during the John Adams administration and in countering a plot by some "High Federalists" to prevent him from taking office after his election in 1800 as President. To Jefferson, states rights provided support for democratic rights.

So he was distur by the part of the Missouri Compromise that seemed to restrict states rights in states above the Missouri Compromise line. On the other hand, Jefferson was no friend of secession. The Federalist Party had been widely discredited during the War of 1812 because of pro-British Federalists in New England, some of whom encouraged the idea of the New England states seceeding from the Union. Jefferson's Republicans had been genuinely disgusted by this treasonou sentiment, and were also happy to take advantage of it politically.

Still, Jefferson realized that the complex set of forces at work in the Missouri crisis could eventually split the Union, which to him would have critically endangered the progress of democracy. "It is the most portentious [question] which ever yet threatened our Union. In the gloomiest moment of the revolutionary war I never had any apprehension equal to what I feel from this source," he wrote.

He expressed the intensity of his concern in a letter to John Holmes, a Massachusetts state senator who had broken from the Federalist Party over their disunionist sentiments:

I regret that I am now to die in the belief, that the useless sacrifice of themselves by the generation of 1776, to acquire self-government and happiness to their country, is to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons, and that my only consolation is to be, that I live not to weep over it. If they would but dispassionately weigh the blessings they will throw away, against an abstract principle more likely to be effected by union than by scission, they would pause before they would perpetrate this act of suicide on themselves, and of treason against the hopes of the world. To yourself, as the faithful advocate of the Union, I tender the offering of my high esteem and respect.

At that point, the slave and free states were equal in representation in the US Senate. The Missouri Compromise admitted Maine as a fr ee state at the same time Missouri entered the Union as a slave state. This battle for one of the two sides to gain an advantage in Senate representation would be a central element in later such battles. The new states of California (free) and Texas (slave) which sought to enter the Union in the wake of the Mexican War would be key prizes in the disputes that led to the Compromise of 1850.

And with the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, the slave states and free states would fight a proxy war over the issue of slavery in the Kansas Territory. I'll be looking at that conflict in later posts this month.

But for now, I'll close this post by quoting John Quincy Adams, who was Secretary of State in the Monroe administration in 1920. Though his later Presidency would find him acting as the handmaiden of the "money power", his post-Presidential career as a Massachusetts Congressman would find him becoming an important anti-slavery advocate. Even at the time of the Missouri Compromise, Adams was realizing that the ultimate resolution of the slavery issue was inevitable. He wrote in his diary what he had learned about the Southerners who defended the Slave Power in this dispute:

The discussion of this Missouri question has betrayed the secret of their souls . . . they show at the bottom of their souls pride and vainglory in their condition of masterdom. . . . They look down upon the simplicity of a Yankee's manners, because he has no habits of overbearing like theirs and cannot treat Negroes like dogs.

Adams had also split with his father's Federalist Party over the issue of New England secession plotting during the War of 1812. But he clearly found the idea of the free states dissolving the Union to rid themselves of slavery to be a possibility:

I have favored this Missouri Compromise, believing it all that could be effected under the present Constitution, and from extreme unwillingness to put the Union at hazard. But perhaps it would have been a wiser as well as bolder course to have persisted in the restriction upon Missouri, till it should have terminated in a convention of the states to revise and amend the Constitution. This would have produced a new Union of thirteen or fourteen States unpolluted with slavery, with a great and glorious object to effect, namely, that of rallying to their standard the other States by the universal emancipation of their slaves. If the Union must be dissolved, slavery is precisely the question on which it ought to break.

His words proved to be prophetic. It was indeed the issue of slavery on which the Union broke.

An Index to Confederate "Heritage" Month 2006 postings is available.

Tags: confederate heritage month, missouri compromise, neo-confederates

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2006 - April 1: The Missouri Compromise

The decade before the Civil War was a period of intense political battles - sometimes physical ones - over slavery. But even before then, controversies over slavery had produced repeated crises which led to a series of compromises between the free and slave states.

Northerners and abolitionists felt, with good reason, that the compromises were a series of surrenders to the "Slave Power", as the pro-slavery bloc of states became known. In the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the free states agreed to admit Missouri to the Union as a slave state. But the slave state representatives agreed to a North-South dividing line above which slavery would not be allowed in the territories to be organized there in the future.

One of the complications which was to make particular difficulties for abolitionist politics is that the opposition to admitting Missouri as a slave state was centered in the Federalist Party. The Federalists stood for a conservative approach to government that favored the wealthy and the privileged, a role was soon enough adapted by John Quincy Adams and the "National Democrats".

The advocates of broader democracy, including the more radical democrats who would rally behind Andrew Jackson's fight against the "money power", were drawn to Jefferson's Republican Party. (Jefferson's Republicans became known as the Democrats during Jackson's Presidency; today's Republican Party began as a separate party in the 1850s.)

Jefferson's own opposition to slavery endured until the end of his life. But he had relied on the rights of the states at key points in his career, in fighting the Alien and Sedition Acts during the John Adams administration and in countering a plot by some "High Federalists" to prevent him from taking office after his election in 1800 as President. To Jefferson, states rights provided support for democratic rights.

So he was disturbed by the part of the Missouri Compromise that seemed to restrict states rights in states above the Missouri Compromise line. On the other hand, Jefferson was no friend of secession. The Federalist Party had been widely discredited during the War of 1812 because of pro-British Federalists in New England, some of whom encouraged the idea of the New England states seceeding from the Union. Jefferson's Republicans had been genuinely disgusted by this treasonous sentiment, and were also happy to take advantage of it politically.

Still, Jefferson realized that the complex set of forces at work in the Missouri crisis could eventually split the Union, which to him would have critically endangered the progress of democracy. "It is the most portentious [question] which ever yet threatened our Union. In the gloomiest moment of the revolutionary war I never had any apprehension equal to what I feel from this source," he wrote.

He expressed the intensity of his concern in a letter to John Holmes, a Massachusetts state senator who had broken from the Federalist Party over their disunionist sentiments:

I regret that I am now to die in the belief, that the useless sacrifice of themselves by the generation of 1776, to acquire self-government and happiness to their country, is to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons, and that my only consolation is to be, that I live not to weep over it. If they would but dispassionately weigh the blessings they will throw away, against an abstract principle more likely to be effected by union than by scission, they would pause before they would perpetrate this act of suicide on themselves, and of treason against the hopes of the world. To yourself, as the faithful advocate of the Union, I tender the offering of my high esteem and respect.

At that point, the slave and free states were equal in representation in the US Senate. The Missouri Compromise admitted Maine as a free state at the same time Missouri entered the Union as a slave state. This battle for one of the two sides to gain an advantage in Senate representation would be a central element in later such battles. The new states of California (free) and Texas (slave) which sought to enter the Union in the wake of the Mexican War would be key prizes in the disputes that led to the Compromise of 1850.

And with the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, the slave states and free states would fight a proxy war over the issue of slavery in the Kansas Territory. I'll be looking at that conflict in later posts this month.

But for now, I'll close this post by quoting John Quincy Adams, who was Secretary of State in the Monroe administration in 1920. Though his later Presidency would find him acting as the handmaiden of the "money power", his post-Presidential career as a Massachusetts Congressman would find him becoming an important anti-slavery advocate. Even at the time of the Missouri Compromise, Adams was realizing that the ultimate resolution of the slavery issue was inevitable. He wrote in his diary what he had learned about the Southerners who defended the Slave Power in this dispute:

The discussion of this Missouri question has betrayed the secret of their souls . . . they show at the bottom of their souls pride and vainglory in their condition of masterdom. . . . They look down upon the simplicity of a Yankee's manners, because he has no habits of overbearing like theirs and cannot treat Negroes like dogs.

Adams had also split with his father's Federalist Party over the issue of New England secession plotting during the War of 1812. But he clearly found the idea of the free states dissolving the Union to rid themselves of slavery to be a possibility:

I have favored this Missouri Compromise, believing it all that could be effected under the present Constitution, and from extreme unwillingness to put the Union at hazard. But perhaps it would have been a wiser as well as bolder course to have persisted in the restriction upon Missouri, till it should have terminated in a convention of the states to revise and amend the Constitution. This would have produced a new Union of thirteen or fourteen States unpolluted with slavery, with a great and glorious object to effect, namely, that of rallying to their standard the other States by the universal emancipation of their slaves. If the Union must be dissolved, slavery is precisely the question on which it ought to break.

His words proved to be prophetic. It was indeed the issue of slavery on which the Union broke.

An Index to Confederate "Heritage" Month 2006 postings is available.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2006, missouri compromise, neo-confederates

Index to Confederate "Heritage" Month postings 2006

Introduction to Confederate "Heritage" Month postings 2006 04/01/06
The Missouri Compromise 04/01/06
When Old Hickory Saved the Union (1) 04/02/06
When Old Hickory Saved the Union (2) 04/03/06
Westward expansion (1) 04/04/06
Westward expansion (2) 04/05/06
Contradictions of Jacksonian democracy 04/06/06
La Guerra de Estados Unidos a México 04/07/06
The troubles in Kansas (1) 04/08/06
The troubles in Kansas (2) 04/09/06
The November 1854 election in Kansas 04/10/06
The March 1855 election in Kansas (1) 04/11/06
The March 1855 election in Kansas (2) 04/13/06
The sack of Lawrence 04/13/06
References on John Brown 04/14/06
John Brown and the Pottawatomie massacre (1) 04/14/06
John Brown and the Pottawatomie massacre (2) 04/15/06
John Brown and the Pottawatomie massacre (3) 04/16/06
John Brown and the Pottawatomie massacre (4) 04/18/06
John Brown and the Pottawatomie massacre (5) 04/18/06
John Brown in Kansas and at Harpers Ferry 04/19/06
John Brown in Kansas and Harper's Ferry 04/20/06
John Brown and antislavery Christianity (1) 04/21/06
John Brown and antislavery Christianity (2) 04/22/06
Bonus: The Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) today 04/22/06
John Brown and antislavery Christianity (3) 04/23/06
Was John Brown a terrorist? 04/24/06
Bonus: But I'm' sure they're happy and contented 04/24/06
Did John Brown accomplish anything against slavery? 04/25/06
John Brown, Southern bogeyman 04/26/06
April 27: Trivializing John Brown the "madman" 04/28/06
April 28: Reactions to Brown's raid 04/29/06
John Brown and American principles 04/29/06
April 30 (bonus): Steve Gilliard harshes on the neo-Confederates 04/30/06
"John Brown was right" 04/30/06

Tags: confederate heritage month, neo-confederates

Introduction to Confederate "Heritage" Month posts 2006

Yes, it's April again. And that means it's Confederate "Heritage" Month once more, the time when all loyal fans of the Lost Cause get a new "Heritage Not Hate" bumper sticker with the latest design - Confederate battle flag must be featured, of course - and talk jive about the Confederacy and the Civil War. Neither of which had anything to do with slavery, you understand, oh, no, nothing at all.

It's very appropriate that Confederate "Heritage" Month opens as always on April Fools Day. And, due to overwhelming popular demand, the vast research staff here at Old Hickory's Weblog will once again be celebrating the event with our third annual set of daily posts about matters Confederate.

As in the last two "Heritage" Month celebrations, I'm going to be concentrating of "reality-based" history of the Civil War, with an emphasis on the political battles that preceded the war. Just as we don't learn very much about the political significance and "meaning" of the Iraq War from the latest tales of IED's in Fallujah and car bombs in Mosul, studying the battles of the Civil War itself is limited in how much it tells us about the historical significance of the war.
I'm going to be posting quite a bit about John Brown this year. And I'll be talking about the political conflicts leading up to the Civil War as a way of positioning Brown in the context of those events.

Neo-Confederate ideology is significant today in a number of ways. One of them is that because of the popular fascination with the Civil War, neo-Confederate versions of history - which are often and dishonest as Holocaust denial, which is its illegitimate cousin - are one way in which pseudo-history gets perpetuated. And anti-democratic ideology along with it.

Neo-Confederate symbolism and cultural/political vocabulary have been increasingly popular among far-right hate groups in the US in recent years. As an illustration, check out the symbolism this murderous Florida neo-Nazi chose to announce his politics to the world: Did mistaken identity play a part in killing? by Camille Spencer St. Petersburg Times 03/26/06. See also Using love to counter flags of hate by Andrew Skerritt St. Petersburg Times 03/28/06.
This year's series of posts won't focus much on that aspect of it. But Edward Sebesta has made monitoring contemporary neo-Confederate developments a special project of his at this Temple of Democracy Web site and at his Anti-Neo-Confederate blog (which is currently dormant but he posted a couple of weeks ago that he plans to start blogging again soon). David Neiwert of the Orcinus blog is one of the best-informed and most astute observers of the far right in the US today, and he also pays attention to neo-Confederate outcroppings.

And the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) remains an invaluable source on American hate groups of all sorts. See, for instance: Uncivil War: The Sons of Confederate Veterans back in extremist hands by Heidi Beirich and Mark Potok SPLC Intelligence Report Summer 2005. Yes, there are far-right neo-Confederates and not-quite-so-far-right varieties.

The indexes to the two previous years' "Heritage" Month posts are at the following links:

Index to Confederate "Heritage" Month postings 2004 05/02/04Index to Confederate "Heritage" Month postings 2005 04/01/05