John Kelly's neo-Confederate view of history

I'm not a big fan of Trump's Chief of Staff and retired general John Kelly to begin with. But I was still jolted hearing his defense of Robert E. Lee and the Confederate cause. Breaking Down General John Kelly's Controversial Comments On Civil War Velshi & Ruhle/MSNBC 10/31/2017:

Cenk Uygur did a good takedown of his comments on Tuesday, Deplorable John Kelly's Revisionist Civil War History The Young Turks 10/31/2017:

Robert Reich shared this photo on his Facebook page today:

My Facebook caption for it was:

What Andrew Jackson really thinks of Trump. This was taken right after he heard about John Kelly's comment that prior to the Civil War, people put loyalty to state above loyalty to country. Well, at least Jackson's nemesis John Calhoun took that position during the Nullification Controversy, that loyalty to state and slavery were more important than loyalty to the United States. It didn't work out well for Calhoun's approach back then, either. Maybe Trump should have gotten someone other than Steve Bannon to explain Andrew Jackson to him.

Speaking of Andrew Jackson, until earlier this year, I called this blog Old Hickory's Weblog, which is the name I used when I started it back in the dawn of time (2003) on the AOL blog platform that has long since ceased to exist. I deliberately selected the Andrew Jackson (Old Hickory) symbolism with refuting the neo-Confederate narrative in mind. That's something I've done since I've been doing this blog. Ever since the first April rolled (2004) around after I started the blog, I've done daily posts every April criticizing neo-Confederate pseudohistory. Lost Cause fans celebrate April as Confederate Heritage Month.

I saw - and still see - Andrew Jackson and the Jacksonian movement as an important moment in the expansion of political democracy in establishing an early framework for popular movements resisting concentrated economic power. The democracy part included the fight against Calhounian secession in the Nullification Crisis as well as the expansion of the franchise and popular participation in politics. The fight for economic democracy focused on the fight against the Bank of the United States, which genuinely was a tool for plutocratic rule. The political community of the United States in 1828, when Jackson was first elected President, was a political community of white men. And it was also that when he left the White House in 1837.

His Indian policies were terrible, and I've written about that various times here. He was also not an abolitionist. He also did not take a Jeffersonian position of abolishing slavery at the state level, and Jackson was a slaveowner himself. That's real history and it's important to recognize it. It's also the case that the Jacksonian movement took the country in the right direction, if one seems the expansion of democracy as a good thing in American history. And later movements to expand the vote and other rights to women, black people, former slaves, new immigrants, and Native Americans built on the ideas and methods of Jacksonian democracy, and widened the framing of democracy both theoretically and in practice.

On the specific issues raised by Kelly's neo-Confederate claims and their current political implications, Charlie Pierce (John Kelly Proves That Compromise Is Not, in Itself, a Virtue Esquire Politics Blog 10/31/2017) and Digby Parton (John Kelly’s ignorance and the dark legacy of the Civil War Salon 11/01/2017) have provided good analyses with links, both of which I highly recommend.

Kevin Levin has been working for years as realistic historian of the Civil War, including on his respected blog Civil War Memory, which he posted General Kelly’s Civil War 11/01/2017:

Americans were not necessarily more connected to their state than the nation as a whole. One of the most basic concepts we teach in the classroom is the idea of “Manifest Destiny” which suggested that the nation had a right to expand westward and civilize areas occupied by Native Americans in the name of capitalism and Christianity. White southerners committed to slavery believed that the federal government could be leveraged to create a slave empire that expanded both westward and southward into the Caribbean and beyond. It was only after they realized that slavery could no longer be protected and strengthened through the federal government that they chose to begin the process of breaking up the Union.

But it is Kelly’s final claim about the failure to compromise that is the most perplexing. It reflects no understanding of the history of the United States from its very founding through the middle of the Civil War. It was compromising that brought the nation to the brink of war from the Three-Fifths Compromise to the Compromise of 1850. At the beginning of the war Lincoln supported an amendment that would have given federal protection to slavery. In 1862 he was still willing to compromise with slaveowners in the Border States to compensate them for voluntarily freeing their slaves. Compromise is everywhere you look.