Confederate "Heritage" Month 2009, April 7: South Carolina's Declaration of Secession

The last two days' posts discussed a presentation by the Hon. Christopher Gustavus Memminger of South Carolina to the Virginia legislature early in 1860 cataloguing the grievances of the South against the free states.

The Honorable Gentleman later in 1860 a key player in the South Carolina secession. The Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union was adopted by a secessionist state convention on 12/24/1860. It spells out the state's motivation for secession along the same lines as his speech to the Virginia legislature did 11 months earlier.

The General Government, as the common agent, passed laws to carry into effect these stipulations of the States. For many years these laws were executed. But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution. The States of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa, have enacted laws which either nullify the Acts of Congress or render useless any attempt to execute them. [my emphasis]

The reference here is to laws passed by various free states to impede the enforcement of the federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1850: South Carolina justified its secession on the grounds that free states were asserting states rights to impede the national government in its task of defending slavery.

In many of these States the fugitive [slave] is discharged from service or labor claimed, and in none of them has the State Government complied with the stipulation made in the Constitution. The State of New Jersey, at an early day, passed a law in conformity with her constitutional obligation; but the current of anti-slavery feeling has led her more recently to enact laws which render inoperative the remedies provided by her own law and by the laws of Congress. In the State of New York even the right of transit for a slave has been denied by her tribunals; and the States of Ohio and Iowa have refused to surrender to justice fugitives charged with murder, and with inciting servile insurrection in the State of Virginia [accused supporters of John Brown]. Thus the constituted compact has been deliberately broken and disregarded by the non-slaveholding States, and the consequence follows that South Carolina is released from her obligation.

The ends for which the Constitution was framed are declared by itself to be "to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity."

These ends it endeavored to accomplish by a Federal Government, in which each State was recognized as an equal, and had separate control over its own institutions. The right of property in slaves was recognized by giving to free persons distinct political rights, by giving them the right to represent, and burthening [sic] them with direct taxes for three-fifths of their slaves; by authorizing the importation of slaves for twenty years; and by stipulating for the rendition of fugitives from labor escaped slaves].

We affirm that these ends for which this Government was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been made destructive of them by the action of the non-slaveholding States. Those States have assume the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions [slavery]; and have denied the rights of property [in human beings] established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign [remove] the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.

For twenty-five years this agitation has been steadily increasing, until it has now secured to its aid the power of the common Government. Observing the forms of the Constitution, a sectional party has found within that Article establishing the Executive Department, the means of subverting the Constitution itself. A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States [Abraham Lincoln], whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that "Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free," and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.

This sectional combination for the submersion of the Constitution, has been aided in some of the States by elevating to citizenship, persons who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens [African-Americans]; and their votes have been used to inaugurate a new policy, hostile to the South, and destructive of its beliefs and safety.

On the 4th day of March next, this party [Lincoln's Republicans] will take possession of the Government. It has announced that the South shall be excluded from the common territory, that the judicial tribunals shall be made sectional, and that a war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States. [my emphasis]

Of course, Lincoln at the Republicans had no intention of waging a "war against slavery" in the states where it existed. That was just a lie.

Contemporary documents like this show many times over how ridiculous it is for advocates of the Lost Cause dogma to claim that the Confederate states seceded from the Union not over slavery but over the cause of states rights. As South Carolina's declaration shows, slavery was not only the cause of that state's secession. But a large part of their pro-slavery litany of grievances had to do with free states asserting "states rights" against slavery.

If one reads the South Carolina declaration closely, it's pretty clear from the passage just quoted that it takes the position that it was against the meaning of the US Constitution in the Slave Power's reading of it for any state to outlaw slavery within its own borders: those states "have denied the rights of property [in slaves] established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution."

It also contains a protest based on the Supreme Court's atrocious Dred Scott decision when they complain that free states have been "elevating to citizenship, persons who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens". The Dred Scott decision had held that African-Americans had no rights under the Constitution that whites were bound to respect.

Tags: christopher gustavus memminger, confederate heritage month 2009, slavery,south carolina, us civil war

Congressional war powers

Republican Senator Jacob Collamer of Vermont

In the course of my research for my annual series of Confederate "Heritage" Month posts, I came across this speech of February 21, 1859, as recorded in The Congressional Globe (official record of Congressional speeches before The Congressional Record) by Republican Sen. Jacob Collamer of Vermont. He was speaking in opposition to the push by the slave states, encouraged by Democratic President James Buchanan, to seize Cuba and more of Mexico and perhaps other territories in Central America.

Mr. President, the Constitution provides that Congress shall declare war. What is war? I say, forcible occupation of any part of any country by armies is war. You need not qualify it by saying it is an act of war, that it is hostility, or something of that kind - it is war. Sir, when the Emperor of Russia took possession of the principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia with a military force, merely on the ground claimed to give protection to the Greek church, all Europe declared that war existed. They made no more declarations. It was prosecuted as a war, and terminated as a war, after all its scenes of blood. When Mexico sent an army across the Rio Grande they were driven out, after the battles of Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma; but the act they did was to come over with an army, to cross the Rio Grande into a country which claimed; and what was done? Our Congress declared that war existed by the act of Mexico. So we ourselves have indorsed [sic] it, that the occupancy of any part of any country by a military force is war. Now, sir, I have merely this to say: when the Constitution says that Congress shall declare war, I take it, it necessarily implies this: that no war shall exist in this country by the act of the functionaries of this Government unless Congress has passed upon the constitutional causes of that war. When Power is given to them to declare war, there is given to them, and to them only, the power to judge whether there is occasion for a war; and it necessarily follows that if any war exists in this country, not declared upon us from abroad, but by the act of this country, if war exists by any other instrumentality than the declaration of Congress, it exists unconstitutionally.

The people of this country had been, long before the adoption of their form of Constitution, the colonists and descendants of the people of England. They had lived under a Government where the discretion of the king could involve the nation in war when he pleased; they had had enough of that; and accordingly, in the Constitution, they carefully reserved the power to make war to be alone in Congress. When it is said that really our people would be better protected abroad if it was known that the President could at once use force and make war when he pleased, that those Governments would be more careful in the treatment of our citizens, what does that mean? Why is means this: a monarchical form of Government with the power of war in the hands of the Executive, is a desirable Government, better than ours. It is a power needed, and it should be had, in the Executive. Sir, the Constitution is not so; the people thought it otherwise when they made it. But it is said the President can involve this nation in war whenever he pleases, in the exercise of his diplomatic power; he has nothing to do but to send an insolent correspondence to a foreign nation and involve the nation in war. Because the President may, by abusing the power that he has, make a war, is a miserable argument that we should give him the right to make war when he pleases without abusing anything. If he abuses his diplomatic power for such a purpose, he may be impeached. If you tell him he may use his discretion about going to war when one of our men is imprisoned in Mexico, he can go to war and cannot be impeached. It is no reason, because he has the power by abusing his diplomatic functions to involve this nation in war and subject himself to an impeachment, that, therefore, you shall give him the power to make war so that he shall do it without impeachment. [my emphasis]

Imagine having a Congress that could stand up to a President who wanted to, say, invade a country based on falsified intelligence, a country that was no threat to the United States, and an invasion sure to become a nightmare. Just to take a hypothetical example.

Today we have a President that just proposed a new defense budget that is wildly in excess of what is really required for national defense. But instead of exerting themselves to limit the President's and the Pentagon's proposals, they will most likely work hard to increase the budget. And Congressional oversight on the Iraq War, the Afghanistan-Pakistan War, and the various secret military projects that the Cheney-Bush administration had going on Lord-knows-where has been to put it mildly, pitiful.

Just to be clear: Obama does seem to be using his Republican Defense Secretary to start to at least clean up the predator-state style procurement and development processes that Rummy put in place. And that's a very good thing.

While I'm on the subject, I would sure like to see some real limits on the ability of companies to lobby for defense systems. The military budget should be to protect the country, not to provide self-developed markets for corporate boondoggles.

Tags: war powers

"Critical theory" and war

I found this academic news story interesting: Judith Butler: Thinking critically about war by Carol Ness Berkleyan 04/02/09. Judith Butler is a professor at the Univeristy of California-Berkeley in Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, and is described in the article as a philosopher. The latter designation presumably owes in large part to her 1990 book Gender Trouble. She just received a $1.5 million award from the Mellon Foundation, which she plan to use to set up a program called "Thinking Critically About War".

Her "thinking critically" concept refers in this case to "critical theory", the general body of philosophical, political and sociological thinking first developed by the Frankfurt School. She hopes to build on that project to persuade the University to set up a permanent Critical Theory Institute, but that's a longer-term project.

Ness reports on her vision for the Thinking Critically About War project:

The last decade has been rife with examples of the stifling of dissent by the powerful, be they institutions (like government and media) or individuals (like a university president), Butler says. And that raises important questions for public intellectuals like herself.

Among the most potent examples came after 9/11. The government and media decided in concert that the lives of the people killed in the twin towers could be openly mourned, Butler contends, while the lives of those killed when the United States went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq could not. Americans who criticized U.S. policy, who grieved Iraqi and Afghan losses along with America's, were called traitors.

"In the last years, we've had a whole question of what's the status of dissent within contemporary society," Butler says.

Simply interrogating the boundary between what's considered an acceptable viewpoint and what's not is risky — but it's essential, Butler argues, and Berkeley's interdisciplinary program in critical theory, a designated emphasis for graduate students in the humanities, was created for the task. It aims to develop a "critique" — not necessarily negative or positive, but an understanding — of the social structures behind politics, the arts, religion, and daily life.

Her article also includes a sidebar with definitions of "critical theory", including this one from the University's Townsend Center for the Humanities:

[T]he Frankfurt School intellectuals … established ... a form of social theory that was philosophically informed and also critically engaged with its own historic time ... a successor to the philosophical 'critique' that had defined the European Enlightenment. 'Critique' thus became an operation of a highly reflective consideration of society, offering ways to configure social life along alternative trajectories. Critical Theory sought to understand the social organization of politics, the arts, and ordinary ways of life, in order to imagine alternative social formations and to establish the grounds on which to dispute the value of some existing social forms, especially totalitarian and fascist socio-political regimes....The notion of critique forms a central component of any conception of the humanities and the social sciences committed, regardless of the pressure of the times, to safeguarding thoughtful, open, and grounded inquiry and debate on prevailing norms and values.

Tags: critical theory, frankfurt school

More on Simon Johnson and the IMFing of the US economy

Simon Johnson

"No sólo ha fracasado el neoliberalismo, sino una forma de funcionamiento del sistema mundial de los organismos internacionales." (Not only did neoliberalism fail, but also the functioning of the global system of the international mechanisms.) - Argentine President Cristina Fernández, March 2009

Continuing with my reservations about the analysis of former IMF chief economist Simon Johnson, The Quiet Coup The Atlantic May 2009 ...

Criticism of Johnson's article has been coming from a variety of Democratic/liberal sources, including Tim Fernholz at Tappped (Why the IMF approach? 03/30/09; More criticism of Johnson and the IMF 03/31/09) and Dani Rodrick (Simon Johnson's morality tale 03/30/09).

Thinking about Johnson's position some more, the key problem in his approach to the current financial system's crisis is that although nationalization (i.e., recognizing that some major banks are in reality insolvent) is considered a more liberal (left) position at the moment than the Geithner plan, he seems to be clinging to the IMF "neoliberal" faith in deregulation. He doesn't emphasize better regulation at all. He assumes that hedge funds and private equity funds will basically have no new regulations. And he proposes that the largest banks be reduced in size and kept that way through anti-trust legislation and enforcement.

He argues that banks too big to fail shouldn't be allowed to exist in the first place. He generalizes it even more: "Anything that is too big to fail is too big to exist."

I take this to mean that he thinks that through antitrust laws, not only in the financial sector, but in the rest of the economy, that we can adopt a policy of never bailing out failing companies in the future. Presumably, it also means that banks would be simply allowed to go bankrupt and close their doors in the future, rather than be taken over by the FDIC and kept in operation until they can be resold in a healthier form, or their assets and liabilities parceled out to other institutions.

This is very unrealistic, both in his faith in antitrust laws and in the neoliberal assumption that the state can stand on the sidelines and watch companies critical to the economy go down. It's neoliberal utopianism, as far as I can see.

And that's why his definition of the problem sounds so suspicious to me, even though it's clearly partly accurate. He is not only be diagnosing the financial problem. It seems to me that he's even more focused on defending the IMF's Washington Consensus form of neoliberal economics. So while parts of his diagnosis of the corruption of the American financial and political elite could fit comfortably into a left or even radical-democratic analysis, that's not really what he's up to. My reading is that he's presenting the Washington Consensus as being focused on combating elite corruption and crony capitalism, not on slashing social services and public infrastructure projects, which is what happens in reality with countries that become wards of the IMF .

And at least from what appears in the Atlantic article, he's not giving up his IMFish neoliberal faith in the miracles of deregulation of financial companies. He's just packaging it in a Progressive-era wrapping of of antitrust militancy. Dani Rodrick also dings him for his Pollyanna presentation of the IMF approach.

Strong and effective government regulations and honest, consistent enforcement of them are critical. And that is a major area in which the overly cozy relationships between the political and financial elites has been devastating. As Joe Conason argues in No More Refuge for Scoundrels PolitickerNY.com 03/31/09:

Massive fraud has been at the center of this crisis from bottom to top, as everyone paying attention must know. The criminal mind-set extended from the bankers and mortgage agents who made loans to unqualified borrowers and sometimes tricked them into signing agreements they could not fulfill. (Among the most industrious marketers were many with actual criminal records, whose entry into the mortgage industry was not blocked by the state regulators.) They marketed those same bad loans with false assurances of their soundness to convince investors to buy them—and somehow induced rating agencies to offer hollow testaments to their creditworthiness. Investors then resold the toxic packages to other investors both here and abroad. At every step, the inflation of the bubble was hastened by fraud, forgery and deception.

The decisions of the G-20 summit this past week were yet another reminder of the massive failures of the IMF economic dystopia of privatizing everything that can be privatized, slashing government expenses to the bone, radical deregulation, hostility to labor and throwing the doors open to the international "free market" in capital and everything else.

Tags: simon johnson, us economy

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2009, April 6: Fears and assumptions, 1860

Runaway slave, 1837

We looked back to 1860 in yesterday's post to a message by the Honorable C.G. Memminger (Christopher Gustavus Memminger) on behalf of the South Carolina legislature to the Virginia legislature in 1860, encouraging them to join South Carolina in convening a Southern Convention in the event of Abraham Lincoln's election as President. His remarks were published in a post-election issue of the influential Southern journal, De Bow's Review Nov 1860, under the title "The South Carolina Mission to Viginia".

John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, even though it was a failure as a military operation and as a political operation in the sense that it was intended, set off real panic among Southerners. It can be hard to know in any individual case whether a particular speaker or writer believes his own claims. But the panic was widespread and real.

The Hon. C.G. Memminger was more than willing to fan the flames. And his language about Harper's Ferry and its implications offer some real insight into the fevered, paranoid defensive frenzy into which many Southerners were working themselves in 1859-60.

In the following passage, the Honorable Gentleman cites two events that pro-slavery agitators linked in their minds and their propaganda. One was Brown's Harper's Ferry raid and the aftermath. The other was the revelation that several leading Republicans in 1859 had decided to distribute excerpt's from the anti-slavery book by Hinton Helper, The Impending Crisis of the South: How To Meet It (1857). Memminger refers here to a controversy then very familiar, in which the Democrats had blocked the election of Republican Congressman John Sherman to the Speakership of the House of Representatives for the Session that began in December 1859, because Sherman had specifically endorse Helper's book. The Honorable Gentleman complains bitterly that their Northern enemies had refused to denounce John Brown, although leading Republicans politics had been denouncing him all over the place:

In our country, so far from there being any proper indication of disavowal [of Brown], the indications are the other way. Elections have taken place at the North since the Harper's Ferry invasion, in which the public sentiment has been exhibited. Those who maintain the abolition views have proved stronger than they ever were before. In New-York they have triumphed over the other parties combined together; and in Boston, notwithstanding an attempt to stay the tide, the same result has followed. In Congress, the same lamentable exhibition is afforded. More than one hundred members prefer to keep the government disorganized, rather than abandon a candidate whose recommendation of a book inviting a combined effort to introduce anarchy and servile war [slave insurrection] at the South, makes him obnoxious to the South: and of these some sixty have signed a recommendation of the same book; and there they stand, and have stood for more than six weeks, with unbroken front, refusing any kind of concessions to the outraged feelings of the South.

Although De Bow's Review doesn't give the actual date, Memminger delivered his message to a joint session of the Virginia legislature on January 19, 1860.

This undated paper by David Brown of Sheffied University, "We have whipped out Sherman and the Helperites": Hinton Rowan Helper, the Speakership Contest, and the Origins of the American Civil War, gives some background on the controversy over John Sherman's candidacy for the Speakership and the Helper book and on how the Harper's Ferry raid and the Republicans' support of the Helper book were so closely related in the fears of pro-slavery Southerners. Brown's paper as of this writing gives a misleading impression of Helper's phrase in the book about waging an "exterminating war" against slavery. It's clear he is speaking about exterminating the institution of slavery, not the slaveowners themselves.

Defenders of slavery were desperately afraid of two things, slave revolts and anti-slavery sentiment among Southern whites. Freedom of speech and the press for whites in large parts of the South had ceased to exist on the issue of slavery and everything touching it. Not only were abolitionist articles or books not allowed to be published or sold. But overt critics of slavery were persecuted harshly by both nominally legal and blatantly illegal means.

Fear of slave revolts, though largely unrealistic given the particular conditions prevailing in the South, had become endemic to the slave system. By compelling non-slaveowning whites to take part in regular "slave patrols", they were also trained in fear and hostility toward slaves. It was one method among others that the slaveowners used to try to maintain practical solidarity between slaveowners and non-slaveowning whites.

Brown's raid had sent many Southerners into a frenzy over both worries, slave revolts and anti-slavery white Southerners. The Honorable Gentleman's account of the intentions of John Brown's guerrilla group was factually false, but nevertheless revealing about the fears of many white Southerners. He described Brown's mission as follows. Reciting the glorious history of the state of Virginia and its contributions to America, he said:

... yet all this could not preserve her [Virginia] from the invasion of her soil, the murder of her citizens, and the attempt to involved her in the horrors of servile and civil war. That very North, to whom she had surrendered a territorial empire - who had grown great through her generous confidence - sent forth the assassins, furnished them with arms and money, and would fain rescue them from the infamy and punishment due to crimes so atrocious.

To estimate aright the character of the outrage at Harper's Ferry, we must realize the intentions of those who planned it. They expected the slaves to rise in mass as soon as the banner of abolitionism should be unfurled. Knowing nothing of the kindly feeling which exists throughout the South between the master and his slaves, they judged of that feeling by their own hatred, and expected that the tocsin which they sounded would at once arouse to rebellion every slave who hear it. Accordingly they prepared such arms as an infuriated and untrained peasantry could most readily use.

They also expected aid from another element of revolution. They did not believe in the loyalty to the government of Virginia of that part of her population which owned no slaves. They seized upon the armory, and they expected help from its operatives, and from the farming population; and to gain time for combining all these elements of mischief, as they conceived them to be, they seized upon a pass in the mountains [the town of Harper's Ferry], well adapted to their purpose. For months had they worked with fiendish and unwearied diligence, and it is hazarding little to conjecture, that the banditti who had been trained in Kansas, were in readiness to obey the summons to new scenes of rapine and murder, as soon as a lodgment were affected. [my emphasis]

Brown did expect slaves from nearby plantations to immediately come to join his band of fighters. But not as part of some general slave uprising. His intent was to steal weapons and ammunition from the federal armory at Harper's Ferry and to escape into the hills of Virginia where he would establish guerrilla bases and conduct raids to free slaves and thus further destabilize the slave system.

He wasn't counting on white Virginians to rise on his behalf, though.

But Memminger's claims present the obvious question: if the Slave Power was so confident of "the kindly feeling which exists throughout the South between the master and his slaves", and of the loyalty of non-slaveowning white Southerners to the slave system, why were they so terrified of slave revolts ("servile insurrection") and of free speech among Southern whites?

The answer is mostly likely that white Southerners were asked to pretend not to see the most obvious facts about their slave-states societies. And the Honorable Gentlemen was one of the most famous of those asking them to so pretend. Bertram Waytt-Brown writes in The Shaping of Southern Culture: Honor, Grace,a nd War, 1760s-1880s (2001):

In contrast to unfeeling masterhood, Christopher Memminger, a Charleston layman, offered the ideal, which steadily became the most popular rendering of regional self-congratulation: "The Slave Institution at the South increases her tendency to dignify the family. Each planter in fact is a Patriarch - his position compels him to be a ruler in his household," guiding children, female dependents, and slaves alike with steady hand and loving voice. Like the image of the Southern lady, gracious and ethereal, the model of the Christian slaveholder was a stereotype that served a cultural function. It celebrated the alleged disappearance of old barbarisms and offered a standard of behavior to which respectable folk were to aspire. The lines between what was and what ought to be were sadly blurred, but the instructional function remained. [my emphasis]

The Republican Party had no intention of mounting a war of liberation against the slave system in the South. They were operating on the idea that if the further expansion of slavery were blocked, it would die out as an institution in the South as it had in the Eastern seaboard states of the North. But there is one sense in which the worry about Republican incursion into the South was justified, the workings of the normal process of political parties. The Honorable Gentleman told the Virginians:

The immense patronage and spoils of the government, and the large interest involved in the public expenditures, and in discriminating tariffs, bring to the aid of the dominant party every selfish interest, and enable it to rivet its fetters upon the South; while the hope held out to Southern aspirants for office is used to corrupt our leaders and confound our people.

In other words, if the Republicans won the Presidency, the power of federal patronage would allow them to establish themselves as a party in the South. And that would bring the dangerous ideas of abolition into the immediate hearing of those loyal slaves and the non-slaveowning Southern whites who were so loyally dedicated to preserving the slave system.

The Honorable Gentleman strikes other themes of Slave Power propaganda, as well. Because representatives of the free states objected to the extension of slavery after the Mexican War, this meant that they wanted that "no Southern man should stand upon the conquered territory [of Mexico] upon the same footing with the Northern." This reduced the Southern white man to a lower status than the Mormon, the "Chinaman", the infidel, "the Sandwich-Islander, or the Zambo".

All those, he whined, were expected to enjoy "equal protection and right, but the most valuable property of the the Southern man must be left behind." This imagery, that the Southern white man would be reduced to inferiority - much like a slave - if the North would not support slavery was a common theme in secessionist and Confederate propaganda. To be deprived of the right to hold other human beings, most of them fellow Christian believers, as human property would be an awful humiliation at the hands of the Northern man, in this argument. "It is not surprising that the Southern States should have been fired with indignation at this attack," said the Honorable Gentleman.

He used explicit emasculation imagery, as well: "The Delilah of the North had already cried out, 'The Philistines be upon thee, O Samson'."

But the object of the alleged desire of the Northern man to humiliate the humble slaveowner was always the same. "The generation which now has possession of the political power of the North has been regularly trained from childhood to the course which they are now pursuing. At their mother's knee they were taught that slavery was a sin." The Northern ministers contribute to this terrible desire to humiliate the Southern slavedriver: "The utterance of anathemas from the minister clothes the sentiment with the solemnity of religious truth. Slavery is denounced as a sin, and the conscience is misled to assume jurisdiction over Southern conduct."

Tags: christopher gustavus memminger, confederate heritage month 2009, slavery, us civil war

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2009, April 5: South Carolina's secession plea to Viriginia, 1860

The Hon. C.G. Memminger of South Carolina

One of the key arguments of Lost Cause pseudohistory is that slavery had nothing to do with the motivation of the Southern slave states to secede from the Union in 1860-61. The alleged fanaticism of abolitionists is held to blame for part of the problem. But in the Lost Cause version, even they were surely not motivated by real sympathy for the slaves but rather by their own perverse desire to subjugate the white people of the South.

What the Rebel leaders were saying leading up to secession and civil war was something very different. De Bow's Review, the leading Southern agricultural and opinion journal, in its December 1890 number presented the argument on behalf of the state of South Carolina by "the Hon C.G. Memminger" (Christopher Gustavus Memminger) to the Virginia state legislature, under the title "The South Carolina Mission to Viginia". Memminger (1803-1888) was a German immigrant who served as Secretary of the Treasury of the Confederate States of America from 1861 to 1864.

Memminger's argument had been presented earlier, on January 19, 1860, before the 1860 Presidential election was underway. The Honorable Gentleman was calling for Virginia to join South Carolina in calling for a convention of Southern state to consider secession. More specifically, as the Honorable Gentlement quoted from the authorizing resolution of the South Carolina legislature, "To request a conference of the slaveholding States, and the apointment of deputies or commissioners to the same on the part of Virginia." (my emphasis)

Memminger opens his plea by referring to a moment of solidarity between the two states a decade and more earlier, referring to 1851:

Four years before [1847], both States passed resolutions that they would not submit to the Wilmot Proviso [barring slavery in territory acquired from Mexico during the Mexican War]. In 1849 virigina had added to her declaration of 1847, that she would also resist the abolition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia. South Carolina concurred entirely in the sentiments of Virginia, and prepared to defend the position which had been taken, and which she supposed was the common position of the whole South.

The compromise measures adopted by Congress in 1850, so far from being satisfactory, in her judgment aggravated the injury. [my emphasis]

The reference here is to the Compromise of 1850 which further extended slavery in the United States. It also included passage of the odious Fugitive Slave Act, which required citizens of the free states under penalty of heavy fines to participate in posses to hunt down the human property that regularly escaped from the slave states. That Act notably overrode any consideration of "states rights", which the slaveowners were always willing to do in defense of the Peculiar Institution, slavery.

She regarded the admission of California, with a constitution prohibiting slavery, as in effect an enactment of the Wilmot Proviso; and the slave trade in the District of Columbia had been expressly probilited by one of the compromise acts of Congress. With these views, South Carolina proceeded to arm her people, and made the requisite arrangements for calling a convention to secede from the Union, or to adopt such other measures as the safety and welfare of the States might require. [my emphasis]

South Carolina secession agitation in the early 1850s, he said, was based on those two things: the admission of California to the Union as a free state, and the abolition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia, where it was a notorious disgrace to the country, taking place as it did within easy view of diplomatic representatives from all over the world. Those were the two things that drove the South Carolina legislature to consider secession a decade earlier.

Memminger goes on to recite the history of grievances of the South against the North. They include:

• The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 during the Articles of Confederation days prohibiting slavery in that portion of the country. Memminger recalls that at one point in the Congressionally appointed committee that drafted the orindance,there was a vote to strike out the prohibition on slavery with "every Southern State and every Southern delegate, except Mr. Jefferson, voting for striking out".

• The Nullification Controversy of 1833, in which South Carolina foolishly pursued a confrontation with President Andrew Jackson over the state's attempt to nullify a federal tarriff law within South Carolina. Although the tariff was nominally the topic of dispute, the ringleader of the action, John C. Calhoun, clearly understood it as a preliminary fight over the ability of slave states to defend slavery against federal action.

• The Louisiana Purchase of 1803. "The territory acquired was all slaveholding", Memminger explained, overstating the case extravagently. But more free states than slave states had emerged from that vast territory.

• The Missouri Compromise - not the compromise itself, but the fact that some representatives of the free states had objected to admitting Missouri as a slave state.

• The petition controversy in Congress beginning in 1835, when Congressman John Quincy Adams led the fight for Congress to simply formally acknowledge anti-slavery petitions being submitted to Congress by abolitionists, thus highlighting the increasing intransigence on the part of slaveowners to even debating their Peculiar Instistution. Stating the obvious as though he were revealing some dark secret, Memminger explain to the Virginia legislators that the aim of those anti-slavery petitions was to "adjust [apply] a lever which might reacht he institution of slavery within the States". Not only that: "such was distinctly understood to be the design of the movement"! Memminger declares the proper position for Congress to have taken against such a devious plan: "Stern rebuke, and unyielding rsistance, should have been offerd by Congress to all these attempts; and such was the course advised by Southern statesmen."

• The division of the Christian denominations into Northern and Southern branches. Memminger blames the damnyankees for this, though the Horable Gentlemen wouldn't stoop to such a vulgar term in addressing the Virginia legislators: "Inflamed with zeal, by imaginary wrong, and assuming as an article of the faith, that slavery was a sin, they denounced their brethren of the South as unworthy of meeting with them at the table of their common Maker." This was part of "the tidal wave of persecution" assailing the South from the North, the Honorable Gentleman whined, "and at each flow it surges higher and higer upon the South, without any interval of ebb."

• Yankees and foreigners griped about admitting Texas as a slave state, although that is what was done. The very fact that leading political figures like the Democrat Martin Van Buren and the Whig Henry Clay (Senator from Kentucky, a slave state) had opposed annexing Texas remained as a grievance in Memminger's presentation. Even though the "good sense of the country" which was "assisted by that appetite for territory which seems to belong to the Anglo-Saxon race" got Texas into the Union as a slave state.

• The Wilmot Proviso, which would have banned slavery in territory acquired from Mexico during the Mexican War, even though the Senate blocked its enactment into law.

• The settlement of Kansas territory by an anti-slavery majority: "It has ended in the complete delivery of Kansas to the North", in this case anti-slavery being synonymous with "the North" and pro-slavery with "the South". Even worse, he declares in outrage that "even the territorial legislature of Nebraska has ventured to pass an act excluding slavery from that territory. At every point, therefore, we are fairly at bay."

• The "outrage at Harper's Ferry", i.e., John Brown's raid of 1859, which Memminger declared was an "attempt to involve her [Virginia] in the horrors of servile and civil war". Fear of "servile insurrection" - slave uprising - had tormented the fears of white Southerners for decades. Memminger melodramatically expounds on that event at length.

Only one of those grievances, the Nullification Controversy of 1833, had nothing overtly to do with slavery. And even with that one, slavery was the main underlying issue. It's noteworthy that in 1860, the Honorable Gentleman had to go back 27 years to find such a North-South controversy that hadn't been overtly about slavery.

Not that he was particularly trying to do so. Lost Cause advocates today try hard, sometimes with notable imagination (of the pseudohistorical brand), to come up with such grievances. But the "fire-eaters" (secessionists) of 1860 knew very well that slavery was the issue over which secession was demanded. And they also knew that defense of slavery was the best marketing tool to persuade others to go along with them on secession.

There was another issue that occurred during Andrew Jackson first Presidential term, his most discreditable action as President, though it was a very popular one, on which there was a clear sectional alignment of North against South. The sectional alignment was even more pronounced than on the Nullification Controversy. That was the Indian Removal Act. And that one was even less about slavery than the Nullification Controversy.

But secessionists then and neo-Confederates now avoid using that example. Because in that case the Southern states backed Jackson's use of federal powers to override any consideration of "states rights", the legal fig leaf over the claimed right of secession. Also, the issue of Jackson's involvement with both issues was touchy for secessionists. Jackson's Party, the Democratic Party, had by 1860 clearly become the main vehicle for the politics of the Slave Power. And the memory of Jackson's Presidency, or at least a version of it, was still revered by many Southerners. So it was not convenient in invoking the Nullification Controversy as a grievance against the North to remind their audiences that Jackson had been a Southern President and a slaveowner who nevertheless put American patriotism and devotion to democratic nationalism above the defense of slavery.

It would have been even less convenient to remind people that in the Indian Removal Act, Southerners had backed the use of federal power over "states rights" to get what the South wanted, just as they had been doing in the previous decade since 1850 in using federal authority to defend slavery.

Tags: andrew jackson, christopher gustavus memminger, confederate heritage month 2009, old hickory, slavery, us civil war

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Tags: bernardine dohrn, weather underground

Are we chasing phantoms in "Af-Pak"?

Obama is telling our NATO partners that Al Qa'ida is a greater threat to Europe than to the US. (Obama advierte de que Al Qaeda es un peligro mayor para Europa que para EE UU El País 03.04.2009)

If that's the case, then why is the US so much more insistent on carrying on an open-ended war in Afghanistan and Pakistan for the purpose of fighting "Al Qa'ida"?

Similar questions were asked about the Vietnam War, where the US was far more worried about the alleged threat than the immediate neighbors who were supposedly more threatened.

The US certainly has good reason to keep looking for Osama bin Laden and whatever group of followers he still commands. But carrying on a protracted war, already in its eighth year, primarily against Pashtun tribal warlords in Afghanistan and Pakistan - whether we label them "Taliban" or not - isn't a way to reduce the overall terrorist threat from Muslim extremists. The Afghanistan War has turned into a war in search of a mission. And we keep finding new ones.

Tags: afghanistan war

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2009, April 4: Jefferson and the Union (2)

In my previous post in this series, I described the argument historian Brian Steele makes in "Thomas Jefferson, Coercion, and the Limits of Harmonious Union" Journal of Southern History Nov 2008, that Jefferson's attitude toward federal power does not support the Confederate/John C. Calhoun position of state secession or the nature of the federal Union.

What Steele does not do in the article is to explain the political context of the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798-99, which are largely what secessionists seized upon to claim Jefferson in support of the theories they used to justify treason and rebellion in defense of their "sacred institutions of slavery and white supremacy".

He does mention near the end of his article:

If we look at Jefferson's political career as a whole, we see a kind of alternation between fear of the potentially negative consequences of centralized power, on the one hand, and a fear of national weakness and dissolution, on the other. During the Revolution, Jefferson joined other Americans in his resistance to arbitrary metropolitan authority. But during the Confederation period, Jefferson (along with many other leading figures) saw the greatest threat to American interests (and ultimately liberty) in the inability of Congress to compel member states to perform their obligations. During the 1790s, however, Jefferson understood the Federalists in charge of the national state to be exercising authority that was unauthorized by the original compact. The correction for this would be a restoration of the proper constitutional role of the state governments. During his presidency and the Republican ascendancy, though, Jefferson saw various threats to majority rule and to the legitimate powers granted to the national state posed by outlying states.

That description of Jefferson's position on the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions is inadequate to the point of being misleading.

The first government under the Constitution took office in 1789 with George Washington as President. Washington was re-elected in 1792 and established the long-standing precedent (now incorporated by Amendment into the Constitution) of Presidents serving no more than two terms by declining to stand for a third term. By the time of the 1796 elections, rudimentary forms of political parties had emerged, with John Adams being the head of the Federalists and Jefferson head of what was known as the Democratic-Republican Party.

The latter organization evolved into today's Democratic Party. But it can get confusing looking at early American history, because Jefferson's party was commonly called the Republican Party until the days of Andrew Jackson's Presidency, when it began to be called the Democratic Party, as it still is today. (It's pretty much only today's grammar-challenged Republicans have ever called it "the Democrat Party".) The Federalist Party more-or-less went out of existence after Madison's first term as President (1809-1813). Today's Republican Party came into existence in 1854.

John Adams' Federalist Party was on the whole more conservative than Adams himself, conservative. But Adams supported what was the first wave of nativist and anti-"radical" hysteria in the new nation's history - sadly, far from the last one. The bogeyman in this case was the French Revolution, which Christianists like Pat Robertson to this day still hold as a key turning point for the worse in world history. Under the pretext of preventing French subversion, the Adams administration persuaded Congress to pass the Alien and Sedition Acts allowing the President to imprison people on the basis of stating or publishing opinions the Federalists deemed to be subversive. In practice, enforcement of the law was directed almost exclusively at Republican (Jeffersonian) critics of the Adams administration, not at actual subversives. Jefferson himself as Secretary of State under the Washington administration had done more to counter actual French subversive actions (in what became known as the XYZ Affair) than the Adams administration ever did.

Jefferson biographer Dumas Malone gave a good summary of how this led to the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions in Thomas Jefferson: A Brief Biography (1933):

[Jefferson] had approved of the conduct of James Monroe as minister to France, which aroused much hostile Federalist comment, and believed that the bellicose spirit [against France] which swept the country after the publication of the "XYZ dispatches" was aggravated by the Hamiltonians [Federalists], with a view to advancing their own interests and embroiling the United States on the side of the British. He himself was sympathetic with Elbridge Gerry, the commissioner who proved more amenable than his colleagues to French influence, and suggested that Gerry publish an account of his experiences, but Jefferson had no enthusiasm for the existing order in France. He was glad to drop the disastrous French issue when, at the height of the war fever, the Federalists provided a better one by passing the Alien and Sedition Acts. Jefferson rightly regarded hysterical hostility to aliens, such as his friends C. F. Volney and Joseph Priestley, and attacks upon freedom of speech a menacing the ideals he most cherished. Since the Sedition Act was applied chiefly to Republican editors, partisan as well as philosophical motives were conjoined in his opposition to it.

His most notable contribution to the campaign of discussion consisted of the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798. (His authorship was not disclosed until years later.) The Virginia Resolutions, drawn by Madison, were similar in tenor though more moderate. The constitutional doctrines advanced by Jefferson - that the government of the United States originated in a compact, that acts of the federal government unauthorized by the delegated powers are void, and that a state has the right to judge of infractions of its powers and to determine the mode of redress - were much emphasized in later years. His dominant purpose, however, was to attack the offensive laws as an unconstitutional and unwarranted infringement upon individual freedom, a denial of rights that could not be alienated [i.e., set aside]. The language of what was in effect a party platform was in the nature of the case extravagant, but Jefferson and Madison had no intention of carrying matters to extremes. More important from the practical point of view than any promulgation of constitutional theory was the vindication of the right of public discussion and political opposition.

Another critical element of the historical situation at that time was that the Supreme Court's authority to be the final arbiter of Constitutional questions had not yet been established. This was the first national crisis in which the federal government set out to blatantly violate the rights of citizens that had been specified in the Bill of Rights. The national government under the Constitution wasn't even 10 years old at that point. Jefferson and Madison were dealing with a very concrete situation where essential personal freedoms of American citizens had to be defended. They considered the Alien and Sedition Acts to be an overt, clear and dangerous attempt by the Adams administration to violate basic rights guaranteed by the Constitution. And they were correct in thinking so. The Resolutions were the most effective means they found readily available to raise a protest against the unconstitutionality of the Alien and Sedition Acts.

In legal terms, that approach was made obsolete by the establishment of the Supreme Court's authority of judicial review in Constitutional questions starting with Marbury v. Madison in 1803.

In terms of judging Jefferson's political theory, the key point is the one Dumas Malone makes: "More important from the practical point of view than any promulgation of constitutional theory was the vindication of the right of public discussion and political opposition." The aim of both Jefferson and Madison in that case was to defend basic freedoms and the American Constitution. Defending slavery, the very opposite of freedom, or promoting the destruction of the Constitution and the Union was no part of their intention.

It's worth noting in this connection that James Madison later argued specifically against the attempt by John Calhoun to use the Virginian and Kentucky Resolutions as support for his own secessionist doctrine.

It was also part of Jefferson's democratic outlook that he viewed the states as bulwarks of liberty and counter-weights to any tendency of the federal government to overstep its bounds. That was true even in the context of the courts being the final arbiters of questions of constitutional law. And that remains part of the American federal system today, though in a very different context and with a much longer series of experiences and precedents that were available in Jefferson's lifetime.

Steele notes in his discussion of the Burr Conspiracy and resistance to the embargo on British trade during Jefferson's Presidency that Jefferson's faith in the states as bulwarks of freedom and defense of the Constitution was justified because the states were prepared to take actions in both cases that would have minimized the role the federal government would have had to play otherwise. But in both cases, defending democracy and the Constitution required opposing secessionists.

So even if one could correctly interpret Jefferson's support for the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions in 1798-99 as a recognition of a state's supposed right of nullification of any law they chose - an unjustified interpretation - his position as President toward the Burr Conspiracy and the resistance to the embargo would have to be regarded as a later and more significant stance in opposition to secession and to any theory of the Union that would justify it.

Jefferson's faith in the states a bulwarks of liberty and the federal Constitution very much shaped his response to the Compromise of 1820, aka, the Missouri Compromise, which did involve the question of the ability of the federal government to limit the spread of slavery. I discussed his position on the Missouri Compromise in a 04/01/09 post in that year's series of these posts, in which I also touch on the partisan context.

He was disturbed by the part of the Missouri Compromise that seemed to restrict states rights in states above the Missouri Compromise line. But, as Steele's article shows, 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 seceding from the Union. Jefferson's Republicans had been genuinely disgusted by this treasonous sentiment, and were also happy to take advantage of it politically.

To Jefferson, states rights provided support for democratic rights. He also believed that the states themselves would eventually abolish slavery. But he viewed that process in the context of a "diffusionist" theory of abolishing slavery in the US, a notion that I'll be discussing in a separate post this month. One might well argue that he had not fully worked out how the emerging trends in the slaveholders' ideas and goals would affect states rights and the future of the Union. But he clearly did not see his concerns over the Missouri Compromise as any kind of sympathy for secession. He memorably expressed his concerns on this matter in a letter to John Holmes, a Massachusetts state senator who had broken from the Federalist Party over their earlier disunionist sentiments, in which he clearly views the end of the Union as equivalent to rendering the sacrifices of the Revolutionary generation "useless" and "treason against the hopes of the world":

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.

Jefferson was very much a major player in the formation and establishment of the early precedents of the Republic. His major political goals stand out clearly in his career: defense of the America from foreign enemies; democracy, freedom of speech and freedom of religion; support for the Constitution and the national government as guarantor of democracy, freedom and independence; and, opposition to slavery.

Counterfactual history is counterfactual and can't be argued with certainty. But it's unthinkable to me that Thomas Jefferson would have supported a secessionist rebellion against the Constitution and the democratic national government like that staged by the Confederacy in 1860-65. Unthinkable.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2009, missouri compromise, thomas jefferson, slavery

Raúl Alfonsín (1927-2009) of Argentina

Raúl Alfonsín, President of Argentina 1983-89, passed away on Tuesday evening due to complications from lung cancer.

Alfonsín was an attorney by profession. He was affiliated with the Radical Civic Union (UCR) party and served in local and national posts, including as a senator. During the military dictatorship of 1976-83, he founded the Asamblea Permanente por los Derechos Humanos (Permanent Assembly for Human Rights) and defended political prisoners. He became leader of the UCR in 1981 upon the death of the previous leader, Ricardo Balbín.

Despite the "radical" in its name, the UCR was and is basically a conservative, democratic party. But ideological labels are very tricky with Argentine parties, and Alfonsín himself was more of a social-democratic viewpoint and was said to have been influenced by German utopian thought and French humanism.

The Mavinas War of 1982 with Britain, called the Falklands War by the British, destroyed what public support the brutal military junta still enjoyed. And they found themselves forced to step down and agree to a transition back to democratic government. Alfonsín and the UCR won a clear majority with 52% of the vote. As one of the Clarín articles cited below puts it, "Tenía 56 años y la potencia política para encarar la transición de la dictadura a la democracia." (He was 56 years old and had the political power to confront the transition from dictatorshiop to democracy.)

A major task of Alfonsín's was to deal with the crimes of the outgoing dictatorship. As part of the deal for the junta to step down, the civilian parties had agreed to an amnesty law for crimes committed by the junta. Alfonsín annulled it two days into his first term and put senior officials of the dictatorship on trial in what is known as the Juicio a las Juntas. Some leaders of the violent guerrilla opposition were also put on trial at the same time. He also established the Comisión sobre la Desaparición de las Personas Comisión sobre la Desaparición de las Personas (CONADEP) that investigated those who went missing, most of them murdered, during El Proceso, the self-designation of the military dictatorship.

But, under the pressure of two coup attempts by the military, he later approved two laws known as "Punto Final" and "Obediencia Debida", that put an end to further prosecutions until they were revived a few years ago. Alfonsín also framed the period of the dictatorship as one of two evils, the other being the guerrilla/terrorist movement that led the military to overthrow the previous democratic government. It's still a matter of not-inconsequential dispute whether that framing of the issues may have given excessive credence to the military's justification for their coup and the "dirty war" against real and alleged subversives that ensued.

I discussed the transition period in more detail in Remembering military dictatorship in Argentina 12/11/08.

His administration ended in 1989 with inflation at galloping rates, in major part a result of the huge debts taken on by the junta's government.

He was widely respected and honored as the President who led the successful transition to democracy and began to re-establish the rule of law after a difficult period of lawless government.

Not only Argentines have found lessons and inspiration in his example.

Former President and current leader of the Partido Justicialista (PJ; Peronist) Néstor Kirchner remembered him as a "political leader of the highest stature":

Los argentinos van a tener un profundo reconocimiento porque encabezó el proceso democrático a partir de 1983, pero además el juicio a las juntas militares fue un parangón histórico que le deberán reconocer.

[Argentines are going to have a deep gratitude [to Alfonsín] because he embodied the democratic process startingin 1983, but in addition, the trial of the members of the military junta was an historic paragon that should be remembered.]

Aurora Kochi in a blog post (Adiós Alfonsín Madre Padre Tutor o Engargado blog 04/02/09) recalled the sense of freedom that she felt as a young person then along with others:

De golpe, nos sentíamos libres. Algo nuevo y prometedor comenzaba. Alfonsín representó para muchos de nosotros, una época llena de esperanzas de cambio. Representó la recuperación de aquellos sueños, y el entusiasmo con el nuevo modo de vida, la democracia, incipiente, a la que apostábamos con mucha vitalidad.

La sensación de apertura. La efervescencia de la expresión después de tanto silencio, de tanta mordaza. Las instituciones educativas habían estado comandadas por personajes con pensamiento arcaico y los planes de estudios plagados de contenidos extemporáneos. Todo ello empezaba a ser sustituído. La emoción que sentíamos cuando en las librerías encontrábamos nuevamente los libros de autores que se habían prohibido, la posibilidad de poder elegir qué leer; las carteleras de cines y teatros que nos ofrecían una variedad en cantidad y calidad de temáticas, qué películas ver, qué música escuchar, qué poder decir, sin censuras...dejar de estar silenciados....no fue poca cosa...

Se nos abría un futuro. Sentíamos aires de libertad, y con fervor participábamos en proyectos impensables hasta ese momento.

[Suddenly we felt free. Something new and promising was beginning. Alfonsín represented for many of us an era full of hopes of change. He represented the recuperation of those dreams, and the enthusiasm about the new style of life, democracy, in its beginning, with which we aligned ourselves with much vitality.

The sensation of openness. The effervescence of expression after all the silence, of so much of being gagged. Educational institutions had been headed by people with archaic thinking and the study plans plagued by extemporaneous restraints. All that began to change. The emotion we felt when we newly encountered in the bookstores books by authors that had been prohibited, the possibility to choose what to read; the billboards for movie houses and theaters that offered us a variety in quantity and quality of themes, what movies to see, what music to listen to, what we could say, without censorship ... no longer being silenced ... it was not a small thing.

A future opened up before us. We felt the air of freedom, and participated with fervor in projects that had been unthinkable before this moment.

Being remembered as a symbol and embodiment of freedom and democracyis a real tribute. Jimmy Carter (see link below) calls him "uno de los líderes más importante de la recuperación de la democracia en América Latina" (one of the most important leaders in the recuperation of democracy in Latin America). Carter says that during Alfonsín's presidency, the Argentine leader "abrió un nuevo ciclo de libertad en la región por su fuerte compromiso con los derechos humanos" (opened a new cycle of freedom in the region by his strong engagement with human rights). Alfonsín worked with Carter in monitoring elections in Nicaragua and Venezuela. "El ha mantenido un firme compromiso con sus ideales de justicia social a lo largo de su vida, y yo estoy muy orgulloso de haber sido su amigo personal." (He maintained a firm commitment to his ideals of social justice throughout his life, and I am very proud to have been his personal friend.)

Articles from Clarín:

Murió Raúl Alfonsín, primer presidente y símbolo de la democracia 31.03.2009

Una vida dedicada a la lucha y a la política 31.03.2009

Kirchner habló de "un hombre de muy fuertes convicciones al que los argentinos reconocerán" 31.03.2009

Del oficialismo a la oposición, todas las voces lamentan la pérdida 31.03.09

Raúl Alfonsín: El símbolo de la democracia (I) 01.04.2009

Kirchner, emocionado, se despidió de Alfonsín en el Senado 01.04.2009

Una multitud aún hace fila para dar el último adiós al ex presidente 01.04.2009

"Abrió un ciclo de libertad" by Jimmy Carter 01.04.2009

"Fue un símbolo del espíritu de reconquista de la libertad" por Julio María Sanguinetti (Ex Presidente de la Republica de Uruguay) 01.04.2009

Articles from Página 12:

La clase política homenajeó al ex presidente 02.04.2009

El día que desfilaron veinticinco años de historia por Miguel Jorquera 02.04.2009

Articles from El País (Spain):

El demócrata que juzgó a la Junta por S. Gallego-Díaz 02.04.2009

Argentina se vuelca en el entierro del 'padre de la democracia' por Alejandro Rebossio 03.04.2009

Miles de argentinos despiden al ex presidente Raúl Alfonsín por Leandro Kobisz 03.04.2009

Raúl Alfonsín, la audacia y la honradez por Rodolfo Terragno [a minister in Alfonsín's government and a former head of the UCR] 03.04.2009

Tags: argentina, cristina fernández, el proceso, luis alberto romero, néstor kirchner

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2009, April 3: Jefferson and the Union (1)

I'm not quite as partisan in my views of Thomas Jefferson as I am about Andrew Jackson. But almost.

So I was interested to see this article by historian Brian Steele of the University of Alabama-Birmingham, "Thomas Jefferson, Coercion, and the Limits of Harmonious Union" Journal of Southern History Nov 2008. Steele looks at Jefferson's position on states rights and the nature of the American Union, particularly in light of the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798-99. Those documents, which were joint products of Jefferson and James Madison, were later held up by secessionists as support for their own advocacy of treason.

Steele's conclusions are sound, though I was surprised at some of the trappings surrounding them:

This admittedly brief and tentative examination of Jefferson's response to several crises of union suggests that he was willing to enforce federal law in the face of opposition by state and local authorities, that he believed the Union was empowered to coerce a seceding state, and that he claimed executive prerogative in cases of national selfpreservation or even of national interest. This was hardly [President] James Buchanan's position in 1860 and appears much closer to Lincoln's. None of this is meant to imply that Jefferson and Lincoln embraced similar theories of union. They did not. It is meant to suggest that our reflexive assumption that Jefferson's approach to disunion would have approximated Buchanan's or even that of the fire-eaters [!?!] needs careful reconsideration. The argument here should not be misread as a contrary assertion that Jefferson would not have "gone with the Confederacy" but seen rather as a call for historians to reconsider our reflexive tendency to assume this counterfactual. [!!?!?!]

If we look at Jefferson's political career as a whole, we see a kind of alternation between fear of the potentially negative consequences of centralized power, on the one hand, and a fear of national weakness and dissolution, on the other. During the Revolution, Jefferson joined other Americans in his resistance to arbitrary metropolitan authority. But during the Confederation period, Jefferson (along with many other leading figures) saw the greatest threat to American interests (and ultimately liberty) in the inability of Congress to compel member states to perform their obligations. During the 1790s, however, Jefferson understood the Federalists in charge of the national state to be exercising authority that was unauthorized by the original compact. The correction for this would be a restoration of the proper constitutional role of the state governments. During his presidency and the Republican ascendancy, though, Jefferson saw various threats to majority rule and to the legitimate powers granted to the national state posed by outlying states. [my emphasis]

Steele is correct that Jefferson's view of federalism was not at all consistent with the arguments made by the Confederate secessionists, arguments of which the obnoxious slavery advocate John C. Calhoun was the godfather. At the same time, the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions did seem to argue that states had the right to declare federal laws invalid that clearly infringed on basic Constitutional liberties.

But, good grief! Whoever that knew anything about Thomas Jefferson's political career would assume that he would have supported the Confederacy's revolt to preserve slavery? Steele seems to assume that such is a common assumption among historians of the period. And I can't say with any authority that it's not. And, yes, we can't know what would have happened if he had lived at the time something happened that didn't happen when he was actually alive.

But it still requires pretty much totally disregarding Jefferson's actual political career and picking and choosing an argument here and there as abstract justification for secession. To the extent Calhoun had any real talent as a political theorist, it was in his cleverness at spinning such arguments.

It's surprising to see Steele assuming that historians today would be inclined to adopt the Calhounian position on Jefferson's attitude toward states rights. Because Steele seems to understand that very well based on the evidence he adduces:

Nevertheless, the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions did not advocate - or even broach - secession, and there were substantial qualitative differences between them and the later claims made by some New England Federalists and South Carolina nullifiers, despite the claims to Jefferson's legacy made by the latter group in particular.

As Steele explains in his article, Jefferson understood the Union under a "compact theory" by which the states had entered together in a mutual agreement among themselves to have a shared national government.

But Jefferson never viewed the United States as 13 separate nations, even under the Articles of Confederacy. And he believed even under the Articles, in which the authority of the national government was much less clearly defined than under the Constitution, the national government had the right and necessity to compel cooperation on recalcitrant states who chose to violate the shared compact. He wrote in 1786, as Steele relates:

Whenever "two or more nations enter into a compact, it is not usual for them to say what shall be done to tbe party wbo infringes it. Decency forbids tbis. And it is as unnecessary as indecent, because tbe right of compulsion naturally results to tbe party injured by the breach." Accordingly, "When any one state in the American Union refuses obedience to the Confederation by which they bave bound themselves," he told Démeunier, "the rest have a natural right to compel them to obedience." The essential point, Jefferson told Edmund Randolph, was that the Congress did not lack the "coercive powers" most people imagined "to be wanting." On the contrary, the "law of nature" quite simply gave "one party to an agreement" the authority "to compel the otber to performance." [my emphasis]

In 1798 during the Adams administration when Jefferson was Vice President but under the Constitutional system at that time was the de facto opposition leader, he wrote to an advocate of North Carolina and Virginia seceeding from the Union, Steele quotes:

... if on a temporary superiority of the one party, the other is to resort to a scission of the union, no federal government can ever exist, if to rid ourselves of the present rule of Massachusets & Connecticut, we break the union, will the evil stop there? suppose the N. England states alone cut off, will our natures be changed? are we not men still to the South of that, & with all the passions of men? immediately we shall see a Pennsylvania & a Virginia party arise in the residuary confederacy, and the public mind will be distracted with the same party spirit, what a game too will the one party have in their hands by eternally threatening the other that unless they do so & so, they will join their Northern neighbors, if we reduce our Union to Virginia & N. Carolina, immediately the conflict will be established between the representatives of these two states, and they will end by breaking into their simple units. ... who can say what would be the evils of a scission and when & where they would end?

Steele mentions Andrew Jackson a couple of times, and those mentions are worth notice here. On the question of the limits of federal power, he writes:

Strict construction of a Jeffersonian variety did limit federal power, but it also realized the full scope of federal power within those limits strictly prescribed. This is why Jefferson and Andrew Jackson (and Madison for that matter) found it necessary to call for constitutional amendments for national programs of internal improvements, on the one hand, but remained unafraid to enforce the embargo on Britain or squash nullification, on the other. All were committed to states' rights, to strict construction, and to limited government, but they nevertheless vigorously enforced federal law and even expanded federal power in certain areas. It is too simplistic to call this range of views contradiction or hypocrisy. [emphasis]

He goes own to show that Jefferson's own positions in relation to events such as the Burr Conspiracy and the embargo against trade with Britain during his Presidency, and secessionist rumblings from reactionary New England Federalists in connection with the War of 1812, against Britain demonstrated his opposition to secessionist tendencies.

Jefferson saw the Constitution and the national government as being essential for the defense of political democracy and the personal liberties that are an inseparable part of democracy. In tomorrow's post, I'll discuss a bit more about how those views affected his stance in the concrete political situations he faced during his lifetime.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2009, missouri compromise, thomas jefferson, slavery

Women in Afghanistan

Taylor Marsh has a strange position about the Afghanistan War. Back in January I posted about a post of hers calling for the Obama administration to make establishment of equal rights for women a major goal of the war there. She seemed to be oblivious to the fact that adopting such a goal would be a major expansion of the mission. And of the historical experience of the Soviets there, in which their requirements of schools for girls and the like became a major issue for the extremist Muslim terrorists brave mujaheddin freedom fighters the United States was actively supporting.

Today she's posting about a genuine outrage, President Karzai ‘Legalizes’ Rape 04/02/09. It's about a new law that our ally Hamid Karzai put into effect on his own authority without the action of Parliament requiring that married women have sex with their husbands under certain conditions. I'm not clear what the law actually says. According to the Canadian Press article to which she links, the law applies only to Shi'a women and says that they can't refuse sex to their husbands, apparently at all; Shi'a are a minority among a Sunni majority in Afghanistan. The account in Gesetz bestimmt Häufigkeit von Sex in der Ehe Die Welt 02.04.2009 says it requires women to have sex with their husbands once every four days (in the body of the article) or maybe four times per week (in the introductory summary). This account says it also requires the husband to agree to have sex with the wife at least once every four months.

So I'm really confused about what this new law actually says. But, once again, Taylor Marsh is outraged about the law without apparently putting it together what that means for her preferred women's-right war goal. If the very pro-American, relatively secular Hamid Karzai is imposing such a law, it says something about what kinds of obstacles women there have to overcome before gaining full equality. And it shows once again as we've seen in Iraq that the US likes to claim we're improving the status of women by making war on their country, but the practical effects are often very different than our advertised ideals.

And wars are the most unpredictable of tools to achieve anything. Optimistic views of Obama's current strategy are picturing another five years before the country can be stabilized and Karzai's government and army be at full capability. How many civilians - men, women and children - will be killed during that time? How many things can go wrong and send developments off into a very different direction? How open are men and women in Afghanistan going to be to American notions of women's equality when our planes and helicopters and drones are rocketing their villages and blowing up adults and children, fighters and noncombatants, young and old? And what kind of blowback will five or ten more years of Americans fighting in Afghanistan produce?

I'm sick of people coming up with pretty-sounding reasons to kill foreigners in wars thousands of miles away. And it's depressing to see after the experience of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars already how hard it is for many people to come to grips with the real limits of American power that we've encountered.

Tags: afghanistan war, humanitarian intervention, humanitarian war, taylor marsh

Afghanistan War problems

Juan Cole takes a critical look at Obama's Afghanistan War strategy in Obama's domino theory Salon 03/30/09. His analysis raises several important questions.

One is the question of the stability of the central government of Pakistan. The Obama administration's rhetoric about Pakistan and that of many supporters of the war make Pakistan sound like a borderline failed state. In his announcement of his war strategy on March 27, Obama talked about Pakistan as follows:

It's been more than seven years since the Taliban was removed from power, yet war rages on, and insurgents control parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan. ...

The future of Afghanistan is inextricably linked to the future of its neighbor, Pakistan. In the nearly eight years since 9/11, al Qaeda and its extremist allies have moved across the border to the remote areas of the Pakistani frontier. This almost certainly includes al Qaeda's leadership: Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. They have used this mountainous terrain as a safe haven to hide, to train terrorists, to communicate with followers, to plot attacks, and to send fighters to support the insurgency in Afghanistan. For the American people, this border region has become the most dangerous place in the world. ...

The people of Pakistan want the same things that we want: an end to terror, access to basic services, the opportunity to live their dreams, and the security that can only come with the rule of law. The single greatest threat to that future comes from al Qaeda and their extremist allies, and that is why we must stand together.

The terrorists within Pakistan's borders are not simply enemies of America or Afghanistan -- they are a grave and urgent danger to the people of Pakistan. Al Qaeda and other violent extremists have killed several thousand Pakistanis since 9/11. They've killed many Pakistani soldiers and police. They assassinated Benazir Bhutto. They've blown up buildings, derailed foreign investment, and threatened the stability of the state. So make no mistake: al Qaeda and its extremist allies are a cancer that risks killing Pakistan from within.

It's important for the American people to understand that Pakistan needs our help in going after al Qaeda. This is no simple task. The tribal regions are vast, they are rugged, and they are often ungoverned. And that's why we must focus our military assistance on the tools, training and support that Pakistan needs to root out the terrorists. And after years of mixed results, we will not, and cannot, provide a blank check.

Pakistan must demonstrate its commitment to rooting out al Qaeda and the violent extremists within its borders. And we will insist that action be taken -- one way or another -- when we have intelligence about high-level terrorist targets. ...

Al Qaeda's offers the people of Pakistan nothing but destruction.

Are Islamic extremists, specifically the groups the US government describes as "Taliban" and "Al Qa'ida" really a critical threat to the Pakistani government? Cole is dubious:

While the emergence of "Pakistani Taliban" in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas is a blow to Pakistan's security, they have just been defeated in one of the seven major tribal agencies, Bajaur, by a concerted and months-long campaign of the highly professional and well-equipped Pakistani army. United States Secretary of Defense Robert Gates replied last summer to the idea that al-Qaida is regrouping in Pakistan and forms a new and vital threat to the West: "Actually, I don't agree with that assessment, because when al-Qaida was in Afghanistan, they had the partnership of a government. They had ready access to international communications, ready access to travel, and so on. Their circumstances in the FATA (Federally Administered Tribal Areas) and on the Pakistani side of the border are much more primitive. And it's much more difficult for them to move around, much more difficult for them to communicate."

As for a threat to Pakistan, the FATA areas are smaller than Connecticut, with a total population of a little over 3 million, while Pakistan itself is bigger than Texas, with a population more than half that of the entire United States. A few thousand Pashtun tribesmen cannot take over Pakistan, nor can they "kill" it. The Pakistani public just forced a military dictator out of office and forced the reinstatement of the Supreme Court, which oversees secular law. Over three-quarters of Pakistanis said in a poll last summer that they had an unfavorable view of the Taliban, and a recent poll found that 90 percent of them worried about terrorism. To be sure, Pakistanis are on the whole highly opposed to the U.S. military presence in the region, and most outside the tribal areas object to U.S. Predator drone strikes on Pakistani territory. The danger is that the U.S. strikes may make the radicals seem victims of Western imperialism and so sympathetic to the Pakistani public.

... Pashtun tribes in northwestern Pakistan and southern Afghanistan have a long history of dissidence, feuding and rebellion, which is now being branded Talibanism and configured as a dire menace to the Western way of life. Obama has added yet another domino theory to the history of Washington's justifications for massive military interventions in Asia. When a policymaker gets the rationale for action wrong, he is at particular risk of falling into mission creep and stubborn commitment to a doomed and unnecessary enterprise. [my emphasis]

Yesterday I heard the first hour or so of a lecture by one of Pakistan's leading journalists, Hamid Mir of Geo News. He talked about the nature of those Pashtun frontier areas and said that the Pakistani government really has very little actual presence in those areas. The Afghanistan-Pakistan border, based on the Durand Line drawn by the British, doesn't function as a border in the normal sense of the word, according to Mir. The Pashtun tribes in that area are used to passing back and forth across it. He also said that no visa is required for travel from Pakistan to Afghanistan, except for journalists. Part of his point was that it's misleading to talk about that area being a "safe haven" for fighters from Afghanistan. Because to most of the people in those areas, there really is no border in the normal sense of the word. But his description of the ways in which the frontier badlands are isolated from the politics of the rest of Pakistan is also consistent with Cole's.

The notion of Pakistan being in imminent danger of being overthrown by Salafi (Al Qa'ida-style) extremists is sound pretty unlikely to me. The United States has a clear interest in finding Osama bin Laden and the remnants of his organization. But it's hard to avoid the impression that the Obama administration is indulging in a significant "threat inflation" around the Afghanistan War.

Cole was been critical of Obama's position on this war during the Presidential campaign, for instance in Obama is saying the wrong things about Afghanistan Salon 07/23/08. Cole's description of the badlands of western Pakistan seem to be in line with Mir's observations about the isolation of the region:

Pakistan, a country of 165 million people, is composed of six major ethnic groups, one of them the Pashtuns of the northwest. The Pakistani Taliban are largely drawn from this group. The more settled Pashtun population is centered in the North-West Frontier province, with its capital at Peshawar. Between the NWFP and Afghanistan are badlands administered rather as Native American reservations are in the U.S., called the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, with a population of some 3 million. These areas abut Pashtun provinces of Afghanistan, also a multiethnic society, but one in which Pashtuns are a plurality.

The tribal Pashtuns of the FATA no man's land, a third of which is classified as "inaccessible" by the Pakistani government, have sometimes given shelter to al-Qaida or Afghan Taliban militants. Some of the Pashtun tribesmen themselves have turned militant, and have been responsible for suicide bombings at police checkpoints inside Pakistan. They are also accused of attacking targets across the border in Afghanistan and of giving refuge to Afghan Taliban who conduct cross-border raids.

The governor of the North-West Frontier province, Owais Ghani, immediately spoke out against Obama, saying that the senator's remarks had the effect of undermining the new civilian government elected last February. Ghani warned that a U.S. incursion into the northwestern tribal areas would have "disastrous" consequences for the globe.

The governor underlined that a "war on terrorism" policy depended on popular support for it, and that such support was being leeched away by U.S. strikes on the Pakistan side of the border and by statements such as Obama's. A recent American attack mistakenly killed Pakistani troops who had been sent to fight the Pakistani Taliban at American insistence. The Pakistani public was furious. Ghani complained, "Candidate Obama gave these statements; I come out openly and say such statements undermine support, don't do it."

The NWFP governor is responsible for Pakistani counterinsurgency efforts in his province and in the neighboring tribal regions. He is well thought of in Pakistan because of his successes in Baluchistan province, which he governed for five years prior to January of this year, where he combined political negotiations with militants and targeted military action when he felt it necessary. He firmly subordinated the military strategy to civilian politics and negotiations. That is, Ghani is a politician with long experience in dealing with tribal insurgencies. [my emphasis]

Another problem on which Cole touches, closely related to the claimed threat of "Taliban" takeovers in Afghanistan and Pakistan, is the question of just who are the present-day "Taliban"?

The truth is, it's almost impossible to tell from the meager information we get through our media, which is distracted by other urgent matters such as Michele Obama's fashion sense. But this makes it all the more disturbing that Obama initiated a new strategy for this war without a new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on the situation. Cole argues that only a portion of the fighters coded by the American press as "Taliban" are someone directly related to the old Afghan Taliban regime of Mullah Omar. Is that true? And, if so, are these groups capable of seizing power in either country? Are they more or less compatible with US interests than the original Taliban?

Another issue is the air strikes on Pakistani villages, and Afghan villages as well. As Cole points out in both articles cited here, even Pakistanis outside the tribal areas get upset when the United States blows up civilian noncombatants in their country. That shouldn't be a hard concept to grasp. The same is true in Afghanistan.

And there is little doubt that many of those air strikes, which are presented to the public as more-or-less targeted assassinations, are killing civilian noncombatants. Mir said that he had personally investigated 11 drone strikes in Pakistan. In only two did he find evidence that anyone involved with the Taliban had been killed, and those were only low-level participants.

Another problematic matter to me is the stability of the Afghan government. I've been assuming for years that it's barely hanging on because of the persistent reports that it effectively controls only the capital city of Kabul.

But Hamid Karzai's government is into its seventh year now. And by previous Afghan standards, that's a pretty enduring incumbency. There's also the fact that power in Afghanistan has always tended to be heavily vested in regional warlords, a structure which the Cheney-Bush strategy heavily reinforced. So the absence of a strong central government there doesn't necessarily equal stability or vulnerability to insurgent takeovers. While Cole's argument on the stability of the Karzai government hasn't convinced me, not least because of chronic problems in building up the Afghan armed forces, it's not something I'm willing to ignore at this point.

Pakistan's long-term conflict with India over Kashmir is inevitably connected with the Afghanistan-Pakistan situation, although American press analyses of the area normally give it little if any attention. As long as that conflict is essentially frozen as it is now, Pakistan is going to want a friendly government in Kabul. And they view the Karzai government as "pro-India". Pakistan is never going to fully cooperate with the US-NATO-Afghan counterinsurgency efforts as long as that's the case.

Then we have a new, intransigent government in Israel. This is going to complicate the United States' dealings with the Muslim world. Especially with an escalating war lead by the US in Afghanistan. Ever more so if the war keeps expanding into Pakistan. The Obama administration doesn't seem to be looking at the fact that a protracted American war is a problem in itself. Their pronouncement on this war strike me as though they were written for this time of the year in 2002. Instead of in 2009, when we're into our eighth year of war in Afghanistan.

Tags: afghanistan war