William A. Williams on the Civil War

I'm on kind of a roll with this William Appleman Williams thing. Something I needed to get out of my system, I guess.

The other day I posted a review of his The Roots of the Modern American Empire (1969). I just finished reading his 1980 book Empire As A Way of Life. And the deterioration in quality of judgment between that 1969 book and the 1980 are disturbing. I'm going to post on the 1980 one later.

But I wanted to mention his brief treatment of the Civil War in 1969. On pp. 99-100 of that book, he writes:

The tension between Eastern and Western farmers was pushed into the background, though not permanently resolved, by the rising opposition to Southern demands to extend the slave labor system into the trans-Mississippi territory. That increasingly bitter confrontation over the Western empire was the single most important immediate cause of the Civil War. Western and Southern agricultural businessmen rapidly came to view control of that land as a necessary condition of their present and future welfare. They considered it the crucial determinant of political power (and hence freedom), as well as of economic prosperity. That estimate of the role of territorial expansion created the hothouse psychological environment that became so congenital after 1844 to the groups that decreed immediate and final solutions. The Northerners who demanded abolition—NOW!, and their Southern counterparts who insisted on secession—NOW!, unquestionably intensified the conflict. But the war came over the extension of slavery, not over the abolition of slavery, and that issue was defined and joined by market-minded agriculturalists rather than by moral crusaders.

The marketplace political economy of the Northern farmers did integrate political and social freedom with economic liberty in a tight causal relationship. That was, indeed, the image and explanation of the world that defined control of the trans-Mississippi West as the decisive determinant of their well-being and security. But the overwhelming majority of them applied that philosophy to themselves first and primarily, and only secondarily and incidentally - if at all - to the black men of the country. They opposed the extension of the slave labor political economy not because they were concerned to free the slave, but because they were resolved to maintain their own freedom and improve their own welfare.

They reacted negatively, therefore, to the strategy of compromise offered after 1853 by Senator Douglas. His popular sovereignty plan, in reality a proposal to fight the issue in each territory, rapidly lost whatever initial backing it gained as the violent struggle in - and for - Kansas revealed the determined willfulness of both protagonists. Northern farm opposition to Southern projects to expand into Cuba, Mexico, or Central America further intensified the anger and militance of both sides. Whatever their differences with each other, Northeastern and Northwestern agriculturalists moved rapidly after 1854 toward an agreement on the sentiments shortly expressed by the Nebraska City People's Press. Paraphrasing what they called the typical Southern attitude, the editors charged that region with ruthless, single-minded selfishness: "'we care nothing about you or your rights, all we desire is to extend the area of slave Territory.'" (my emphasis)

Those three paragraphs as written are accurate. And I wouldn't really object to the formulation there. I've written at some length in my annual April sets of posts that I do as a counter-celebration to Confederate "Heritage" Month about how the conflict over the extension of slavery into the territories led up to the Civil War.

It's also true that most whites in the free states objected to slavery primarily because they rightly understood it as a threat to their own economic well-being and to white men's democracy, as well.

But free whites were also genuinely disgusted by the treatment of slaves, which was widely reported in the rest of the country. While they may have looked at abolitionists as very annoying fanatics, and while very few Northern or Western whites exhibited the late-20th-century style sense of democratic equality that John Brown and his immediate followers did, they also understood that slavery was a disgusting system.

That is also a trick that the neo-Confederates use, to act as though the Union cause was presented as something like the realization of the principles of post-Second World War, post-Voting Rights Act America. And then to point out in "ah-ha!" style that most Northern whites didn't have that point of view, then making the leap to the favorite Lost Cause dogma that slavery had nothing to do with causing the Civil War.

So it's true that "war came over the extension of slavery", which was the program of the Republican Party when it won the Presidency under Lincoln in 1860. The Republicans did not propose to impose abolition of slavery on the South.

But it's also unhistorical to make some bright red line of division between the program of opposing the extension of slavery and supporting the abolition of slavery in the South. Williams does not do that in his description I just quoted. Given the situation in 1860, it was clear to many and probably most people in the North that democracy for whites could not survive indefinitely in a country "half slave and half free", in Lincoln's famous phrase. And the slaveowners understood that, for more reasons than one, if their Peculiar Institution were confined to the slave states of 1860, it would eventually expire - or, more precisely, would be rejected by the people of the various states and the country. William Freehling in The Road to Disunion, Vol 2: Secessionists Triumphant, 1854-1861 (2007) describes how that process was visibly under way in the Border South at the time of secession.

The slaveowners were undoubtedly paranoid. But behind the paranoia was also a realization that unless the Peculiar Institution could be imposed on all or most of the rest of the country, it couldn't endure permanently. And they also knew that Lincoln's election would allow the Republican Party, which was an anti-slavery party in 1860 though not officially abolitionist, to use federal patronage to establish their party in the South and start to roll back the political repression that had largely prevented any open debate of slavery in the (soon-to-be) Confederate states since the early 1830s. Although as Freehling also points out, those debates were going on in the Border South states, and they were one of the things that showed the slaveowners that time - time in the American Constitutional democracy - was not on their side.

Having said all that, I thought as I was reading that passage of Williams' book about how the neo-Confederates seize on statements ripped out of context and put at the service of arguments that people who have never encountered them before may find bewildering.

For instance, a neo-Confederate reading of the above passage from Williams might go something like this:

Even William Appleman Williams, one of the most famous leftwing historians of the 1960s, said clearly that the Yankee cause in the Civil War was "not over the abolition of slavery". He said that the main cause of the conflict was competition between Northern and Southern agricultural interests over control of the Western territories. He wrote, "They considered it the crucial determinant of political power (and hence freedom), as well as of economic prosperity."

As I said, I wouldn't challenge Williams' formulation quoted above. Even the most carefully qualified arguments can be nitpicked by pseudohistorians to say something different than the plain meaning of the author's text. (Williams' version of the Civil War in Empire As A Way of Life is a whole 'nother story, and one for a separate post.)

But the following mention of the crucial 1876 election, which effectively ended Reconstruction in the post-Civil War South and allowed the disenfrancisement of the freed slaves, is formulated in a way that makes it too easy for someone to take out of context to support a Lost Cause narrative of American history. And the truth is, I'm not quite sure just how Williams meant it in context.

After talking so much about "context", I'll quote the whole paragraph in which it appears (p. 202 of Roots of the American Empire):

The resin-filled tinder had been assembled, the atmosphere was crackling hot and dry, and sparks were being struck throughout the country. Small wonder that men oscillated between violence and caution. The Republicans nominated the staidly respectable Rutherford Birchard Hayes of Ohio and prepared to use force to control the vote in the South just as they had used it against strikers in the metropolis. The Democrats selected Samuel J. Tilden, a conservative New York lawyer, and prepared to use force to prevent the black man from electing another Republican. Had it not been for the great boom in agricultural exports that developed even as the embattled rulers of the nation compromised the victory of Tilden into the inauguration of Hayes, it seems very possible that their political arrangement would have proved incapable of containing the explosive forces of social change. But the export bonanza turned the agricultural majority away from its embittered confrontation with the metropolitan minority, and at the same time turned it and a metropolitan plurality toward a policy of active overseas economic expansion. The exports that prevented domestic upheaval became the exports that required an imperial foreign policy. (my emphasis)

The bolded portion suggests a false and very misleading equivalence between the federal troops that were kept in the South to preserve the democratically-elected Reconstruction governments (a policy the Republicans supported), and the Ku Klux Klan violence that was directed and overthrowing them by force and violence and depriving the black citizens of the South of the vote and other basic rights. (The Ku Klux Klan and the Democratic Party were pretty much synonomous terms in the South of that time, especially if we understand the Klan to refer to a range of white-supremacist terrorists groups that were violently active at the time.)

The two sides may have used the same kind of guns. In fact, some of the white terrorist antidemocracy groups seized federal shipments of arms on the way to the US Army in the South and used them against the elected and legally constituted governments.

That formulation of Williams' I can't say I support. In context or out, it suggests an equivalence of purpose and function between the American troops and the white-supremacist terrorist groups that is just not accurate. Certainly not from a pro-democracy point of view.

Tags: reconstruction, us civil war, william appleman williams