Catching up again, here with the post for yesterday's date, I'm looking at another older journal article taking a version of the Lost Cause perspective, An Analysis of the Secession Controversy in Mississippi, 1854-61 by Percy Rainwater Mississippi Valley Historical Review 24:1 (Jun., 1937).
In the next post, I'll look at a couple of his points that fall into the neo-Confederate spectrum. But, despite operating in that perspective, in this piece his task is to look at the political disputes in Mississippi around secession. Empirical research is always a special challenge for a neo-Confederate perspective. And this essay makes clear that one issue was central to the secession controversy. Speaking of the militant secessionists versus those less convinced, he writes:
Both of these groups regarded the benefits of the Union as secondary to the preservation of slavery, which was the support of the state's social and economic system. In short, all classes in the state, slaveholders and non-slaveholders alike, looked upon the society in which they lived as representing the realization of a social ideal sanctioned alike by God and nature. This ideal, on its positive side, was beneficial both to the master and the slave; and, although social and economic lines between white groups were not permanently fixed, the system did provide for a wholesome regimentation of the nether herd. On its negative side, the institution of slavery, with its attendant effects upon all groups and classes, created an atmosphere in which, unlike that in the free states, undesirable and dangerous innovations in the religious life and in the general mores of the people could not live.
All groups in Mississippi in 1860 believed apparently that the social system based upon slavery was economically advantageous and socially elevating, and that only upon such a social soil could the highest type of republican government be built. All groups proceeding, it is true, upon a priori arguments, united in the belief that their social system was superior to that based upon free labor at almost every point by which civilization could be evaluated. When, therefore, the institution of slavery was endangered by the election of Lincoln, both the slaveholder and the non-slaveholder arose with religious zeal to defend their social heritage, which, like their religion, was not a subject for the detachment of the laboratory. The rich and the poor, the high and the low, the slaveholder and the non-slaveholder were "so indissolubly united in feeling and interest," said 0. R. Singleton, "that if you but touch a chord connected with either, it vibrates through our whole social system, and unites in more rapid motion the blood of every heart."
Thus united in their loyalty to a social system whose benefits, all agreed, far surpassed the benefits of the Union, the people nevertheless differed sharply concerning the degree of danger to which Lincoln's election subjected slavery and the effect disunion would have on the future of that institution.
He describes how the Northern states had developed into non-slave states and their pernicious about freedom and democracy:
The general period in American history from 1825 to 1860 was one of vast material growth and expansion. But it was also one in which the wealth and power of the few grew disproportionately to that of the many. Democracy was not functioning properly. Liberty was putting an end to equality. I£ some were content, others felt deepest resentments and dreamed of a more perfect society as the political and moral right of an American.
Those decadent Yankees started getting all grumpy about economic slumps, and the gap between rich and poor, and the restrictions on opportunities for the common people. He notes in particular, "the Panic of '37 spread wreck and ruin among them; land legislation lagged behind their demands; internal improvements came all too slowly; prices slumped as home markets broke and "overproduction" glutted the few outside markets they had developed."
And the baneful social phenomena multiplied. There was "unrest," and protest, and (gasp!) labor activism:
The rural North, therefore, throughout the era, was a region of potential and actual unrest. The "average farmer," for whose welfare the American system had been established, resented bitterly the growing importance of the city and the mounting wealth of those engaged in what he considered "minor pursuits." Securing the support of the lesser folk of the towns, only recently come from nearby farms, he launched his protests in various forms, but all in the name of a faltering democracy. The labor movements of the period, says Commons, were "not so much the modern alignment of wage-earner against employer" as they were the revolts of "the poor against the rich, the worker against the owner."
Even worse, people started thinking, "The cause of the oppressed was also the cause of 'righteousness'." The Northern public started obsessing about "democracy and morality." Some were even deciding that "Jeffersonian Democracy was God's chosen form of civil government."
He summarizes the unfolding of these threatening democratic movements in various stages:
The Jacksonian war against "the money power" in an earlier period was "from this same cloth." It represented far more the deep resentments of a "grasping" people than it did a belief in abstract ideals. The same holds, in a degree, for the so-called "free-soil" movement. Historians have largely overlooked the fact that the "liberty groups" with a single human rights appeal failed to gain any great following in the Northwest - but that when Salmon P. Chase, the Democrat, broadened the platform to one in which homesteads, internal improvements at Federal expense, and home markets by tariffs, were included, the moral indignation against slavery rose to a burning flame. A local convention in Chicago in 1848 resolved that the [anti-slavery] Wilmot Proviso "is now and ever has been the doctrine of the Whigs of the free States" and added hastily, "the Whig party has ever been the firm, steady, and unchanging friend of harbor and river appropriations." Lincoln himself would keep slavery from the territories because God had intended them "for the homes of free white people." The Wisconsin farmer, whose interest in Negroes was slight, did not further heckle this great Commoner when the assurance was given that the prime purpose behind his program was a 160-acre farm for all interested persons. Thus the halo of democracy and morality, in part borrowed from the abolitionist, was placed upon the brow of all vital Western needs, and its bitterness from unrealized ambitions became a holy sentiment. [my emphasis]
The trajectory of unfavorable democratic developments in Craven's neo-Confederate view ran from Jeffersonian democracy, to Jacksonian reformism, to the Free Soil and Abolitionist movements to land reform to Lincoln and the Republicans. Jefferson and James Madison were "abolitionist slaveowners," Andrew Jackson was a non-abolitionist slaveowner, but the trend toward expansion of democracy, restriction and abolition of slavery, resistance to concentrated economic power and oligarchic government: those did develop along the lines Craven describes, though from a democratic point of view that was a favorable line of develop, while Craven disparages it. Lincoln himself took Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson as his main Presidential models.
Especially in these strange times where the Democratic Party declines to claim its own founders and the corrupt, democracy-hating plutocrat Donald Trump adopts Andrew Jackson as a major symbol - a truly twisted and bizarre development - I should add that none of these developments were democratically pure by 2018 standards. The women's movement for the vote and legal equality had begun, but American women were second-class citizens, at best. Even white Abolitionists generally accepted some kind of white supremacist outlook, with even some of the most militant and serious anti-slavery activists embracing the fantasy of of mass colonization of black Americans to Africa. Or, mass deportation, to put it less euphemistically. Even those egalitarian land policies Craven mentions were heavily predicated on current and former Indian lands being distributed to white settlers and the native peoples displaced. And the list goes on.
But the single biggest and most consequential political conflict was over slavery with all its class, racial, and political aspects. And the developments that led eventually to the defeat of the slaveocracy and the abolition of chattel slavery did travel the historical path Craven describes (in a hostile mode). And the road that led to secession goes through the political trend represented by John Calhoun, Jackson's great adversary in Nullification Controversy. Craven clearly sympathizes with the Calhounian tradition:
When James K. Polk was elected president in 1844, certain old leaders such as Martin Van Buren, Francis Preston Blair, and Thomas H. Benton were pushed aside. Each in turn blamed John C. Calhoun and the slave interests; each in a different way added to the impression that the party was no longer a fit place for those who followed the immortal Andrew Jackson.
This is a big problem not only with the pseudohistory that makes Donald Trump the Second Coming of William Jennings Bryan. It's also a problem for what seems to be the currently dominant left/left-liberal view of American history, in which the monarchist Alexander Hamilton that believed democracy could function only through massive corruption is a great hero and Jefferson and Jackson are not only personally dastardly but contemptible in their political and political heritage.
It's just not possible to understand the history leading up to the Civil War without understanding the fundamental difference between the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian trend and the Calhounian trend. One led to an expansion of democracy and the presentation of the United States as a democratic Republic. The other led to a civil war in defense of slavery. That's a big difference.
I'm returning today to Avery Craven's Lost Cause/neo-Confederate historian Coming of the War Between the States: An InterpretationJournal of Southern History 2:3 (Aug 1936). He uses the figure of John Brown to give a race-based justification of the Southern secession. He argues that John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry decisively turned white opinion in the South toward secession:
But the John Brown raid was another matter. It put reality into the much discussed program of Yankee "money-changers," "peasant farmers," and the "long haired men and short haired women" of the North. The sharpest resentments and deepest fears of which a people were capable broke loose. A race war was impending. And that was a poor man's problem. Albert G. Brown of Mississippi put it this way:
The rich will flee the country. ... Then the non-slaveholder will begin to see what his real fate is. The Negro will intrude into his preserve ... insist on being treated as an equal ... that he shall go to the white man's bed, and the white man his ... that his son shall marry the white man's daughter, and the white man's daughter his son. In short that they shall live on terms of perfect social equality. The non-slaveholder will, of course, reject the terms. Then will commence a war of races such as has marked the history of San Domingo. [my emphasis]
Let's start with some basic debunking. There was no "race war" impending. Panics about slave insurrections were a common feature of the paranoid Southern environment. Such panics were far more frequent than actual attempts at anything like a slave rebellion, though of course there were some instances of those occurring, and for obvious reasons. But the panics generally featured their own kind of violence with murders of slaves and free blacks. In effect, they were episodes of sporadic white terror against blacks.
Brown's raid did send Southern slaveowners into new rounds of panic. Although his plan was not to provoke a slave insurrection. The plan was to establish guerrilla bases in the Appalachian mountains from which they would encourage slaves to flee their plantations and harass the slaveholders.
Lost Cause accounts like Craven's also typically downplay white Southern opposition to secession, which was significant even in 1861, though that shouldn't be equated with Unionism, much less opposition to slavery. Though both sentiments were also present.
But who is this "Albert G. Brown of Mississippi"? Is he just some random farmer speaking about the fears of the reg'lar white folks?
Actually, he was Albert Gallatin Brown: Fourteenth Governor of Mississippi: 1844-1848 (David Sansing, Mississippi History Now Dec 2003. He also was one of the Mississippi's two Senators in the runup to the Civil War, along with future Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Sansing writes:
After he was elected to the United States Senate, Brown became one of the most ardent defenders of states’ rights and was one of the South’s first advocates of secession. After Mississippi seceded and joined the Confederate States of America, Brown resigned his U.S. Senate seat and organized a military company known as Brown’s Rifles. Brown was stationed briefly in Virginia before his election as one of Mississippi’s two members in the Confederate Senate where he served until the end of the Civil War. [my emphasis]
He was ... a Fire-Eater [militant secessionist] and a strong advocate for the expansion of slavery. In 1858, he said: "I want a foothold in Central America... because I want to plant slavery there.... I want Cuba,... Tamaulipas, Potosi, and one or two other Mexican States; and I want them all for the same reason - for the planting or spreading of slavery." (Akhil Reed Amar, America's Constitution, A Biography (2005) 267, quoting M.W. Mcklusky, ed., Speeches, Messages, and Other Writings of the Hon. Albert G. Brown (1859), 594-5) Indeed, he went on to say, "I would spread the blessings of slavery, like the religion of our Divine Master, to the uttermost ends of the earth." (internal links omitted)
I followed up Craven's source for the Brown quote: Percy Lee Rainwater, "The Presidential Canvass of 1860 in Mississippi," Mississippi Law Journal V:4 (1933). Although, oddly, his article cites the journal only by its subtitle, Journal of the Mississippi State Bar. Brown's hair-raising rhetoric about rampaging black rapist rebels was from a long 1860 letter Brown wrote for publication, later published as a pamphlet, making the case for secession in defense of slavery.
Albert Gallatin Brown (1813-1880)
The following passage from that letter/pamphlet is interesting in two ways. One is that Sen. Brown certainly seemed to think the current crisis was about fighting for preservation of slavery. And, despite claiming to speak on behalf of the ordinary white man, he certainly seemed to think that Southern non-slaveholders needing some persuading on undertaking secession to defend the Peculiar Institution:
Does the non-slaveholder own land? What will his land be worth when slavery is abolished? Is he the owner of cattle,horses, and other property? What will all these be worth in a free negro community? Does he live by cultivating the soil? Who creates markets and builds railroads, and provides other wise, by his money and his brains, for the most profitable means for selling the products of the soil? The slaveholder. Who gets the benefits of these markets, railroads, and other profitable means, and with comparatively little cost? The non-slaveholding farmer. Then, let him not say 'I own no slaves, and therefore have no interest in the question.
Is he a mechanic? Who is his best and most profitable employer? The slaveholder. Is he a merchant? Who buys most of hiss goods? The slaveholder. Is he a lawyer or doctor? Who pays him the most fees? The slaveholder. Does he, in short, rely on his muscle or his brain for bread? Who is his best customer9 The slaveholder. Then let no man of any occupation, trade or profession, say 'I own no slaves, and therefore I have no interest in the question.
All are interested all have an immediate, positive and PECUNIARY interest in the question, and all ought, as I have no doubt all will, stand up manfully in its support.
Kind of an 1860 version of trickle-down economics, we might say.
I'm finally caught up with today's date on this year's series of posts.
Today I'm looking at another scholarly journal article by another well-known historian of the Lost Cause/neo-Confederate persuasion, Avery Craven's Coming of the War Between the States: An InterpretationJournal of Southern History 2:3 (Aug 1936).
Nobody called it "the War Between the States" at the time it was happening. It was a civil war, known in the official US records as the War of the Rebellion. But War Between the States is a polemic, neo-Confederate label for the conflict. And that is the narrative on which he relies.
Slavery, of course, didn't cause the war in this account. It was because the North rejected the "strict adherence to the Constitution" insisted upon by the slave states. This was the legalistic version that Jefferson Davis advocated in his memoirs. "[I}n its own eyes, the South was the def ender of democratic government against the onslaughts of those who would distort sacred institutions in order to promote their own material interests. All that the Revolution had won, all that 'the [Founding] Fathers' had achieved, was involved in the struggle."
But, as always, when any kind of empirical realities are developed around the various alternative causes promoted by the neo-Confederates, it still comes back to slavery:
When opposition to slavery developed, a new threat of economic loss, now joined with fear of racial conflict and social unrest, was added. When that drive became a moral attack on the whole Southern way of life, the defense broadened in proportion and emotions deepened. The Constitution was not enough against those who would not respect its provisions; the whole South must become unified for political efficiency. The section must have that security which the Constitution guaranteed and an equal right to expand with its institutions as a matter of principle. Keen minds set to work to reveal the virtues in slavery and the life it permitted in the South. When they had finished a stratified society, with Negro "mud-sills" at the bottom, alone permitted genuine republican government, escaped the ills of labor and race conflict, gave widest opportunity for ability and culture, and truly forwarded the cause of civilization. The stability and quiet under such a system were contrasted with the restless strife of the North which was developing socialism and threatening the destruction of security in person and in property. The Southern way of life was the way of order and progress. [my emphasis]
Just not progress in democracy or freedom.
Abraham Lincoln in this account was a blithering fanatic:
Abraham Lincoln, in his "House Divided" speech, prevented himself and his party from being thrust aside by a desperate appeal to old moral foundations. Though his own policy and that of "Judge" Douglas gave identical results, the latter was not born of moral conviction. And until the issue was conceived in terms of "the eternal struggle between two principles-right and wrong-throughout the world" the fight must go on. That is why a man who was willing to save the Union at the cost of a bloody civil war, even with slavery untouched, would not save it by a compromise which yielded party principle but which did not sacrifice a single material thing. The party was one with God and the world's great experiment in Democracy.
I'll leave it for others to sort out whose side God was on. Lincoln himself was restrained on the topic. Lincoln in his Second Inaugural Address in 1865, famous for his "with malice toward none" phrase:
One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. [my emphasis]
Not only Lincoln but everyone else during the Civil War itself knew that slavery was its cause.
Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding.
Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged.
The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.
"Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?
Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether." [my paragraph breaks]
But were Lincoln and the Union on the side of democracy in the Civil War? Absolutely.
Andrew Jackson got dragged into Trump's obnoxious "Pocahontas" outburst yesterday.
At a ceremony honoring very elderly survivors of the legendary Navaho Code Talkers of the Second World War, Trump worked a gratuitous slur at Sen. Elizabeth Warren as "Pocahontas": Lauren Gambino, Trump makes 'Pocahontas' joke at ceremony honoring Navajo veteransGuardian 11/28/2017.
The Young Turks' had this report, Cenk Uygur and John Iadarola Trump Uses Racial Slur 11/27/2017:
As Cenk and John's report notes, the ceremony took place in front of the large portrait of Andrew Jackson that hangs by Trump's Presidential desk.
This brought the following tweet from the Navaho Law Center:
The President calls a white woman "Pocahontas"—who was a Native American victim of child rape—at an event "honoring" Diné WWII code talkers, all in front a portrait depicting the original architect of Indian removal, Andrew Jackson. https://t.co/Du9DDg2cC3
From the Encyclopedia Britannica Online article on Northeast Indian People (2008) by Elizabeth Prine Pauls and Elisabeth Tooker, about the native people of what's now the Northeast United States (internal hot links omitted):
Of the three language families represented in the Northeast, Algonquian groups were the most widely distributed. Their territories comprised the entire region except the areas immediately surrounding Lakes Erie and Ontario, some parts of the present-day states of Wisconsin and Minnesota, and a portion of the interior of present-day Virginia and North Carolina. The major speakers of Algonquian languages include the Passamaquoddy, Malecite, Mi’kmaq (Micmac) Abenaki, Penobscot, Pennacook, Massachuset, Nauset, Wampanoag, Narragansett, Niantic, Pequot, Mohegan, Nipmuc, Pocomtuc, Mohican (Mahican), Wappinger, Montauk, Delaware, Powhatan, Ojibwa, Menominee, Sauk, Kickapoo, Miami, Shawnee, and Illinois.
The territory around Lakes Ontario and Erie was controlled by peoples speaking Iroquoian languages, including the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, Huron, Tionontati, Neutral, Wenrohronon, Erie, Susquehannock, and Laurentian Iroquois. The Tuscarora, who also spoke an Iroquoian language, lived in the coastal hills of present-day North Carolina and Virginia.
Although many Siouan-speaking tribes once lived in the Northeast culture area, only the Ho-Chunk (Winnebago) people continue to reside there in large numbers. Most tribes within the Sioux nation moved west in the 16th and 17th centuries, as the effects of colonialism rippled across the continent. Although the Santee Sioux bands had the highest level of conflict with their Ojibwa neighbours, the Teton and Yankton Sioux bands moved the farthest west from their original territory. These bands, as well as most other Siouan-speaking groups, are usually considered to be part of the Plains Indian culture area despite their extended period of residence in the forests. [my emphasis]
That's quite the euphemism, "as the effects of colonialism rippled across the continent." But they go on to explains that what that meant was the effects of Europeans' diseases, violence, depletion of resources and Christian missionary activity. For instance (internal hot links omitted):
Europeans who traveled to the Americas brought with them diseases to which indigenous peoples had no immunity. These new diseases proved much more deadly to Amerindians than they had been to Europeans and ultimately precipitated a pancontinental demographic collapse. The introduced diseases proved especially virulent in the concentrated settlements of the Iroquoians, who began to suffer heavier population losses than their neighbours. In attempting to replace those who had died during epidemics, the tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy seem to have taken kidnapping to unprecedented levels.
Economic disruptions related to the commercialization of animal resources also instigated intertribal conflict. By the early 17th century, trapping had severely depleted the beaver population around the Great Lakes. At that time beaver pelts were the most important commodity in the fur trade economy and could easily be bartered for guns, ammunition, and other goods necessary to ensure a tribe’s safety, or even preeminence, in a region. The Iroquois Confederacy occupied some of the more depleted beaver habitat and began a military campaign intended to effect expansion into territory that had not been overhunted. ...
When Europeans arrived on the North American continent, they brought manufactured goods that the Indians welcomed and new diseases that they did not. Certain of these diseases proved particularly devastating to Native Americans because they did not have the immunity that the colonial populations had developed through centuries of exposure. For example, the first epidemic recorded in New England took place in 1616–17; while the very early date of this pestilence makes it difficult to determine exactly what disease was involved, most historical epidemiologists and demographers believe it was probably smallpox. As no census figures for Native Americans are available for this period, the number of individuals who perished is similarly difficult to discern. Historically, however, the mortality rates for populations experiencing smallpox for the first time have ranged from 20 to 90 percent. The mortality rates appear to have been quite high in this case, as the Puritans who landed at Plymouth in 1620 remarked upon the large number of abandoned villages near their settlement. They interpreted this obvious and recent depopulation of the region as a sign of divine favour—believing that God had used the epidemic to rid the area of indigenous nonbelievers who would have hindered Puritan expansion. ...
The initial European settlement clung to the Atlantic coast—the sea provided the lifeline to the European homeland that the colonists needed—and thus coastal groups were first affected by the newcomers’ desire for land. They were ill equipped to counter the invasion. Not only were their numbers relatively small (and made even smaller by the epidemics), but their political organization was not of the kind that easily led to unified action of numbers of men. Friction with the colonists did occasionally erupt, however, as in the Pequot War (1637) and King Philip’s War (1675–76). Such resistance could not be maintained for long, however, and indigenous peoples began to adopt European ways as a means of survival. This often involved the acceptance and practice of Christianity; some missionaries were especially influential. John Eliot, for example, accomplished the monumental task of translating the Bible into Algonquian, publishing the translation in two volumes that appeared in 1661 and 1663. [my emphasis]
The occupation of the North American continent - including Canada, Mexico and Central America - and South America, as well, was accomplished largely by the physical expulsion of the native populations. I don't say this as any kind of moral or political justification of the actions. But it's what happened. It started happening way before the Jacksonian Indian Removal Act of 1930, and continued long after. Even today, Indian tribes have to actively resist attempted incursions by mining companies and others, though fortunately more effective legal means to do so are available to them today.
The history of mass deaths is always grim business. The chief instrument of the European conquest of natives and their land were microscopic. And, as Pauls and Tooker say above, those germs and viruses "ultimately precipitated a pancontinental demographic collapse." That was also true all across what is now Latin America, beginning with Columbus' landing in what is now Haiti in 1492.
Andrew Jackson did not invent Indian relocation. But at this moment in American history, Jackson is now largely viewed in the media and the public discussion as an almost uniquely culpable figure in the long history of Europeans and their descendants in North America. In earlier posts, I've discussed the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and its brutal consequences. It deserves to be seen as a bad, terrible thing in US history.
But the Republicans have now successfully (for the moment) made Jackson a symbol of their version of white supremacy. In the outlook of the Steve Bannons and Richard Spencers of our world, Jackson's treatment of the Indians must look like an admirable thing. As well as the actions of viruses, germs, warriors, plunderers and thieves who preceded and succeeded Jackson.
So, the President who led and lent his name to some of the most important domestic reforms and expansions of democracy, and who led the successful fighters against the plutocratic Bank of the United States (which was a major factor in the early corruption of politics by money) and against John Calhoun and the leaders of South Carolina in the pre-secessionist Nullification Crisis. The Jacksonian reformers were the first large political movement in the US to actively support organized labor. Jackson himself assisted the early feminist activist Frances "Fanny" Wright in setting up the explicitly Abolitionist utopian colony, the Nashoba Commune, in his native Tennessee in 1825. She also actively campaigned for Jackson's Democratic Party and in support of his fight against the Bank.
Republicans are just better at using (misusing) symbols and traditions of the American past than Democrats are.
And reducing history to any one factor is ahistorical. Even those factors like class and gender are fundamental influences, they are not the only ones. It's important to remember that the original political community of the US recognized essentially only white men as full citizens, and even universal male suffrage didn't emerge with the Constitution in 1789. (The Jacksonians pushed for eliminating property requirements for voting.) But there were important developments that benefited some as disadvantaged others within that community. Ever our basic law was established with our 18th-century Constitution. So it doesn't really make much sense to dismiss the entirety of earlier American history to an unbroken horror show. Even though it had no shortage of horror shows, and not only for Indians.
The North American Indian Wars are considered to have definitely ended in the late 1870s, although some might prefer to use the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890 to mark the ending point. If we date it to Wounded Knee, every US President and Congress from George Washington to Benjamin Harrison presided over a reprehensible Indian policy, even one that liberals and the left are quick to call genocide. But was there nothing in American politics worth admiring, praising, using as some kind of model in all that time?
I think it would be sophomoric to look at history that way. Plus, I still think Andrew Jackson is a great historical symbol that can be used against neo-Confederacy. The title of this blog for most of its existence since 2003 until this year was "Old Hickory's Weblog" for just that reason.
But the left in the US seems largely ready to cede most all of American history prior to 1861 to Republicans, conservatives and white supremacists. And I wonder how long it will be until purist-minded earnest folks on the left discover that Lincoln served in militias in Illinois that fought Indians. Or that both and the Confederate and the Union armies fought Indian tribes. Once people decide that Lincoln is therefore not the Great Liberator but the Great Genocider, then the left can happily join hands with neo-Confederates who also see Lincoln as a bloody, genocidal tyrant (against good Christian white people).
And be careful about telling a group of Democrats that some Indians were also slave-owners. Their heads might just explode.
On a little more serious note, "Whig history" has a depressingly strong influence on the left and center-left in the US today. In that narrative, the monarchist Alexander Hamilton and the plutocrat John Quincy Adams are the great heroes. Maybe we could add in the reactionary Chief Supreme Court John Marshall to make it a trinity. That narrative incorporates them into a trend that culminates with Lincoln the Great Liberator.
In the real world, hardcore Jacksonians saw Lincoln as standing in their own tradition. And the Great Liberators himself cited the slaveowners Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson as his main Presidential models. Go figure. History is kind of complicated, I guess.
But Republicans are happy to provide their own simplifications, which by coincidence wind up providing ideological support for their current policies.
This video on the Trump/Pocahontas flap features Navajo Nation's President Russell Begaye, who takes a more cautious approach to criticizing Jackson, in that he doesn't make him the central symbol of bad policy toward Indians, Navajo President: Donald Trump's 'Pocahontas' Comment Was 'Inappropriate'Velshi & Ruhle/MSNBC 11/28/2017
The continuing move to take down monuments honoring the Confederacy has brought with it an encouraging spate of articles discussing the real history of the Confederacy and of the white supremacist, post-Civil War agenda behind neo-Confederate ideology, including Adam Serwer's The Myth of the Kindly General LeeAtlantic Online 06/04/2017.
One of my Facebook friends posted this piece on Andrew Jackson that is vague enough to be sparse on particular claims but nevertheless has a definite pseudohistory edge to it: Adrienne Keene, How I Feel As a Native Woman When Trump Idolizes Andrew JacksonTeen Vogue 04/19/2017. She happily accepts the idea of Steve Bannon and Donald Trump that Jackson is a fitting image for the current Trump Family Business Administration:
Trump embraced the comparison to Jackson, and once in the Oval Office, he chose a portrait of Jackson to hang in a place of honor. More recently, ... Trump spent the night at Jackson’s Tennessee plantation, the Hermitage, and laid a wreath on his tomb. He gave a speech at the site, stating that America will “build on [his] legacy.” He called Jackson a “military hero and genius and a beloved president,” but noted he was “also a flawed and imperfect man, a product of his time.” He ended his speech, “Andrew Jackson, we thank you for your service. We honor you for your memory. We build on your legacy, and we thank God for the United States of America.”
These statements and comparisons terrify me. Jackson’s legacy is nothing short of Native genocide. History has strangely been kind to him, painting him as a populist president, a “common man,” a political outsider who came to shake up the establishment and break the rules to serve the people. But the reality was far from it.
Jackson came to power campaigning against "the Money Power," concentrated wealth that corrupted democracy. American political leaders used terms like "Wall Street" and "the trusts" and the "malefactors of great wealth" and "economic royalists" to describe later incarnations of the same problem. And DONALD TRUMP wants us to think of him as a present-day Andrew Jackson? Ur-Confederate John C. Calhoun is laughing maniacally in whatever corner of the underworld he currently hangs out. Tom Paine is weeping.
Historians still provide some incredibly nuanced and insightful views of the pre-Civil War US history. But on seemingly the entire left of center, popular accounts reject nearly everything that would have been considered "left" at the time. Republicans and conservatives are much better at evoking historical imagery than the Democrats. But among other things, it leads to sloppy history.
It also leads the Democrats to miss the opportunity to challenge the far right's alt-history of the United States. Like the idea of Donald Trump being a new Andrew Jackson. The Democrats don't even bother to contest that bit of pseudohistory, although Keene doesn't present herself as speaking as a Democrat in that piece.
And even well-informed articles I've seen the last few weeks debunking neo-Confederate pseudohistory haven't yet seem to have focused on the fact that Jackson in the Nullification Controversy came down hard on the side of the Union and against threats of secession on behalf of slavery. Popular left and left-of-center history right now tends to reject Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson (the two major founders of the Democratic Party!) out of hand because they were slaveowners. But Lincoln is still allowed to be the Great Emancipator. But how to explain that he saw Jefferson and Jackson as major role models, and understood his own political project as carrying on their work of democratic emancipation?
For that matter, Lincoln took part in state militia action against Indians in his younger years. And Indian tribes were among those Lincoln sent the Union Army to fight in the Civil War. Some groups of Indians supported the Confederacy, including in Oklahoma where the Creeks, Choctaws and Cherokees were relocated under Jackson Indian Removal Act.
I'll say again what I've said various times in other posts. Jackson's Indian policy was bad. The opponents of Jackson's Indian Removal Act did object to it in real time. But their arguments were things like, having Indian slaveowners in the South helped defend the institution of slavery. Keene at least alludes to that. And that it would be easier to Christianize the Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Cherokees if they stayed in the southeast, i.e., easier to destroy their cultures completely.
Though Jackson rightly gets blamed for the Indian Removal Act, the removal of the Cherokees (what the term Trail of Tears originally referred to) under that law took place under Jackson's successor, Martin Van Buren, which most popular accounts don't even mention. Keene's article also omits that fact. That's not an excuse for Jackson's Administration. Other relocations took place under Jackson's Presidency, and they also caused a great deal of death and suffering.
Herman Melville was one of the few whites in America at that time who held something like a 21st-century view of equality for Native Americans. Francis Parkman came close, but Melville thought Parkman was a bit backward on the subject. And even the Great Emancipator was a white supremacist in today's sense, along with virtually every other white person in the US, including most of the soldiers of the Union Army that destroyed the Slave Power in the Civil War. The only famous white person prior to the Civil War that comes to mind who held views on racial and gender equality like those of American liberals in 2017 is John Brown. And how many white Americans today are willing to identify with the "terrorist" guerrilla fighter and convicted traitor John Brown?
History is complicated, Especially the part that human being make.
Jackson's Indian policy sucked. So did that of virtually every other white person in the US from before the American Revolution until, well, arguably even now. And while there were undoubtedly many settlers who wanted to just kill every Indian in sight, Jackson was not one of them. If "genocide" means anything like the official UN definition of it today - which involves a deliberate intent as well as concrete action aimed at exterminating an entire group of people - neither Jackson's Indian Removal Act nor the removal of the Cherokees to Oklahoma count as genocide. The Cherokee removal on which Keene focused was mainly implemented by Jackson's successor Martin Van Buren. Obviously, "not genocide" does not mean "acceptable."
Republicans are not only better at evoking historical symbolism than the Democrats. And more willing to make up their own pseudohistory, which I guess we call alt-history right now. While Democrats aren't willing to defend the genuine democratic progress made prior to the Civil War even by their own party founders. This is one reason that saying adapted from Robert Frost remains current, "A liberal is someone who is so open-minded he won’t take his own side in a fight."
Adrienne Keene who authored the Teen Vogue article is presumably the same one who is an American Studies Professor at Brown University. She has a blog called Native Appropriations focusing on issues of "cultural appropriation," which seems to be a major focus of her scholarly work, as well.
In yesterday's installment, we saw Abraham Lincoln in 1858 using the principle of equality in the Declaration of Independence to attack slavery, while at the same time denying that the equality of blacks and whites.
Frederick Douglass, former slave and Abolitionist leader, recalled the Great Emancipator and his position on slavery in a speech of 04/14/1876 ("Oration by Frederick Douglass, Delivered on the Occasion of the Unveiling of the Freedmen's Monument," Frederick Douglass: Autobiographies Library of America, 1994, pp. 921-4):
I have said that President Lincoln was a white man and shared towards the colored race the prejudices common to his countrymen. Looking back to his times and to the condition of his country, we are compelled to admit that this unfriendly feeling on his part may be safely set down as one element of his wonderful success in organizing the loyal American people for the tremendous conflict before them, and bringing them safely through that conflict. His great mission was to accomplish two things: first, to save his country from dismemberment and ruin; and second, to free his country from the great crime of slavery. To do one or the other, or both, he must have the earnest sympathy and the powerful coöperation of his loyal fellow-countrymen. Without this primary and essential condition to success his efforts must have been vain and utterly fruitless. Had he put the abolition of slavery before the salvation of the Union, he would have inevitably driven from him a powerful class of the American people and rendered resistance to rebellion impossible. Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.
Though Mr. Lincoln shared the prejudices of his white fellow countrymen against the negro, it is hardly necessary to say that in his heart of hearts he loathed and hated slavery. The man who could say, "Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war shall soon pass away, yet if God wills it continue till all the wealth piled by two hundred years of bondage shall have been wasted, and each drop of blood drawn by the lash shall have been paid for by one drawn by the sword, the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether," gives all needed proof of his feeling on the subject of slavery. He was willing, while the South was loyal, that it should have its pound of flesh, because he thought it was so nominated in the bond; but farther than this no earthly power could make him go. ...
Upon his inauguration as President of the United States, an office fitted to tax and strain the largest abilities, even when it is assumed under the most favorable conditions, Abraham Lincoln was met by a tremendous crisis. ...
The tremendous question for him to decide was whether his country should survive the crisis and flourish, or be dismembered and perish. His predecessor in office had already decided the question in favor of national dismemberment by denying to it the right of self-defense and self-preservation - a right which belongs to the meanest insect.
Happily for the country, happily for you and for me, the judgment of James Buchanan, the patrician, was not the judgment of Abraham Lincoln, the plebeian. He brought his strong common sense, sharpened in the school of adversity, to bear upon the question. He did not hesitate, he did not doubt, he did not falter; but at once resolved that, at whatever peril, at whatever cost, the union of the Stares should be preserved. A patriot himself, his faith was strong and unwavering in the patriotism of his countrymen. Timid men said before Mr. Lincoln's inauguration that we had seen the last President of the United States. A voice in influential quarters said, "Let the Union slide." Some said that a Union maintained by the sword was worthless. Others said a rebellion of eight millions cannot be suppressed. But in the midst of all this tumult and timidity, and against all this, Abraham Lincoln was clear in his duty, and had an oath in heaven. He calmly and bravely heard the voice of doubt and fear all around him, but he had an oath in heaven, and there was not power enough on earth to make this honest boatman, back-woodsman, and broad-handed splitter of rails evade or violate that sacred oath. He had not been schooled in the ethics of slavery; his plain life had favored his love of truth. He had not been taught that treason and perjury were the proof of honor and honesty. His moral training was against his saying one thing when he meant another. The trust which Abraham Lincoln had in himself and in the people was surprising and grand, but it was also enlightened and well founded. He knew the American people better than they knew themselves and his truth was based upon this knowledge.
Earlier this month I quoted from Slavery and the Martial SouthJournal of Negro History 37:1 (Jan 1952) on the practical militarization that the slavery system produced in the slaveowning societies of the South.
Toward the end of the article, he also refers to the development of pseudo-scientific racism and its embrace and encouragement from the slaveowners:
The South's society, as described by its proponents, was to rest on the inequality of men in law and economics. Slavery was a positive good. South Carolina's James H. Hammond said that slavery was "the greatest of all blessings which a kind providence has bestowed upon the South." It gave to the white man the only basis on which he could do something for a group of hopelessly inferior human beings. The view of the inferiority of the Negro was organized into a body of systematic thought by the scientists and social scientists of the South and out of it emerged a doctrine of racial superiority that justified any kind of control that the owner established and maintained over the slave. The racial basis of slavery gave Southern leaders an effective means of solidifying the economically divergent elements among the whites. At the same time, it strengthened the ardor with which most white Southerners were willing to fight to preserve slavery. The sharp cleavage between slavery and freedom was made even sharper by the factor of race. All slaves belonged to a degraded, "inferior" race; and, by the same token, all whites, however wretched some of them might be, were superior. In a society where race was so important, the whites at the lowest rung could satisfy themselves because they could identify themselves with the most privileged of the community. "Color alone is here the badge of distinction, the true mark of aristocracy," said Thomas Dew, "and all who are white are equal in spite of the variety of occupation." [my emphasis]
In 1776, the supporters of the Declaration of Independence, including the slaveowner who wrote it, could live with the contradiction between the classical liberal political notion that "all men are created equal" and the reality of chattel slavery. As time advanced, the cotton gin boosted the profitability of the slave system and the slaveowning states spent decades organizing their societies around defense of the Peculiar Institution. And the leading defenders of slavery in the US no longer bothered with the polite pretense. Rather, they stated the real basis of their society, "the inequality of men in law and economics," as Franklin summarizes it.
In the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, Stephen Douglas, a "moderate" Democrat by the standards of 1858, declared in the first debate of 08/21/1858:
Mr. Lincoln, following the example and lead of all the little Abolition orators, who go around and lecture in the basements of schools and churches, reads from the Declaration of Independence, that all men were created equal, and then asks, how can you deprive a negro of that equality which God and the Declaration of Independence awards to him? He and they maintain that negro equality is guarantied by the laws of God, and that it is asserted in the Declaration of Independence. If they think so, of course they have a right to say so, and so vote. I do not question Mr. Lincoln's conscientious belief that the negro was made his equal, and hence is his brother, (laughter,) but for my own part, I do not regard the negro as my equal, and positively deny that he is my brother or any kin to me whatever. ("Never." "Hit him again," and cheers.) Lincoln has evidently learned by heart Parson Lovejoy's catechism. (Laughter and applause.) He can repeat it as well as Farnsworth, and he is worthy of a medal from Father Giddings and Fred Douglass for his Abolitionism. (Laughter.) He holds that the negro was born his equal and yours, and that he was endowed with equality by the Almighty, and that no human law can deprive him of these rights which were guarantied to him by the Supreme ruler of the Universe. Now, I do not believe that the Almighty ever intended the negro to be the equal of the white man. ("Never, never.") If he did, he has been a long time demonstrating the fact. (Cheers.) [my emphasis]
Lincoln in his proportion of the debate denied that he advocated racial equality: "I had no thought in the world that I was doing anything to bring about a political and social equality of the black and white races." But Lincoln was still intensely aware of the contradiction, including that of his own position. And he was aware that the existence of slavery and the justifications the master class had developed for it were eroding the principle of human equality - or at least male equality - that was at the heart of the democratic convictions of the Declaration (italics in original; my emphasis in bold):
I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and the black races. There is a physical difference between the two, which, in my judgment, will probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality, and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that there must be a difference, I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position. I have never said anything to the contrary, but I hold that, notwithstanding all this, there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. [Loud cheers.] I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man. I agree with Judge Douglas he is not my equal in many respects - certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment. But in the right to eat the bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man. [Great applause.]
In the seventh debate of 10/15/1858, Lincoln said this of the Declaration (my emphasis):
At Galesburgh the other day, I said in answer to Judge Douglas, that three years ago there never had been a man, so far as I knew or believed, in the whole world, who had said that the Declaration of Independence did not include negroes in the term "all men." I reassert it to-day. I assert that Judge Douglas and all his friends may search the whole records of the country, and it will be a matter of great astonishment to me if they shall be able to find that one human being three years ago had ever uttered the astounding sentiment that the term "all men" in the Declaration did not include the negro. Do not let me be misunderstood. I know that more than three years ago there were men who, finding this assertion constantly in the way of their schemes to bring about the ascendancy and perpetuation of slavery, denied the truth of it. I know that Mr. Calhoun and all the politicians of his school denied the truth of the Declaration. I know that it ran along in the mouth of some Southern men for a period of years, ending at last in that shameful though rather forcible declaration of Pettit of Indiana, upon the floor of the United States Senate, that the Declaration of Independence was in that respect "a self-evident lie," rather than a self-evident truth. But I say, with a perfect knowledge of all this hawking at the Declaration without directly attacking it, that three years ago there never had lived a man who had ventured to assail it in the sneaking way of pretending to believe it and then asserting it did not include the negro. I believe the first man who ever said it was Chief Justice Taney in the Dred Scott case, and the next to him was our friend, Stephen A. Douglas. And now it has become the catch-word of the entire party. I would like to call upon his friends every where to consider how they have come in so short a time to view this matter in a way so entirely different from their former belief? to ask whether they are not being borne along by an irresistible current-whither, they know not? [Great applause.]
In an earlier speech not part of the in-person debates (Speech at Chicago, Illinois 07/10/1858) Lincoln explained:
Now, sirs, for the purpose of squaring things with this idea of “don’t care if slavery is voted up or voted down,” for sustaining the Dred Scott decision [A voice—"Hit him again"], for holding that the Declaration of Independence did not mean anything at all, we have Judge Douglas giving his exposition of what the Declaration of Independence means, and we have him saying that the people of America are equal to the people of England. According to his construction, you Germans are not connected with it. Now I ask you in all soberness, if all these things, if indulged in, if ratified, if confirmed and endorsed, if taught to our children, and repeated to them, do not tend to rub out the sentiment of liberty in the country, and to transform this Government into a government of some other form. Those arguments that are made, that the inferior race are to be treated with as much allowance as they are capable of enjoying; that as much is to be done for them as their condition will allow. What are these arguments? They are the arguments that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world. You will find that all the arguments in favor of king-craft were of this class; they always bestrode the necks of the people, not that they wanted to do it, but because the people were better off for being ridden. That is their argument, and this argument of the Judge is the same old serpent that says you work and I eat, you toil and I will enjoy the fruits of it. Turn in whatever way you will—whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent, and I hold if that course of argumentation that is made for the purpose of convincing the public mind that we should not care about this, should be granted, it does not stop with the negro. I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle and making exceptions to it where will it stop. If one man says it does not mean a negro, why not another say it does not mean some other man? If that declaration is not the truth, let us get the Statute book, in which we find it and tear it out! Who is so bold as to do it! [Voices—"me" "no one," &c.] If it is not true let us tear it out! [cries of "no, no,"] let us stick to it then, [cheers] let us stand firmly by it then. [Applause.]
The arguments of Lincoln and Douglas over the meaning of the Declaration of Independence are reminders of how seriously people of that time took that document as a statement of American principles.
As Franklin wrote in 1952, white racism was a major factor in winning allegiance to the Slave Power's rejection of the principles of the Declaration:
White Southerners were, thus, among the first people of the world to develop a militant race superiority. As in other parts of the world where such a notion evolved, these frontier aristocrats sought support for their position by developing a common bond with the less privileged. The obvious basis was race, and outside the white race there was to be found no favor from God, no honor or respect from man. By the time that Europeans were reading Gobineau's Inequality of Human Races Southerners were reading Cartwright's Slavery in the Light of Ethnology. In admitting all whites of the South into the pseudo-nobility of race, Cartwright won their enthusiastic support in the struggle to preserve the integrity and honor of the race. This was a concept of social organization worth fighting for, and the white people of the South entered upon the grim task of exterminating persons and ideas hostile to their way of life. [my emphasis in bold]
I post here occasionally in response to Bro. Wade "Sword of Vengeance" Burleson, whjo uses his blog to spread John Birch Society politics along with the Good News of the Gospel.
Bro. Sword-of-Vengeance indulges in a bit of neo-Confederate history himself, further illustrating his general political-social outlook, in The Charitable Spirit of R.E. Lee Toward His EnemiesIstoria Ministries Blog 03/09/2012, encouraging the neo-Confederate canonization of the military leader whose armies killed far more American soldiers than any group with "Al Qa'ida" in its name ever did. "The world would be a better place were we all able to exhibit Lee's charitable spirit toward those who consider us their enemy," he writes.
Robert E. Lee, the Christ figure of the Lost Cause
The world would be a better place if there weren't people like Robert E. Lee in it who was willing to fight a bloody four-year war to defend slavery.
Along the same lines is his post on one of those convicted of participating in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln: The Challenges of Life Reveal True Character: Samuel Mudd and His Imprisonment at the Dry Tortugas 05/20/2012. To put it mildly, not everyone takes such a benign view of Mudd's role in the assassination as Bro. Wade does; see, for instance: Doug Linder, The Trial of the Lincoln Assassination Conspirators (2009) UMKC website, including the article on Dr. Samuel Mudd; Edward Steers Jr., His Name Is Still Mud (1997) and Blood on the Moon: The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln (2001); and, the long review by Phillip Stone of Blood on the Moon and two other books in Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 27/1 (Winter 2006).
Bro. Wade goes to some lengths to dismiss any involvement of Mudd in the assassination plot, e.g., "Both Dr. Mudd and his wife swore to their graves that Dr. Mudd had no knowledge of the President's death when he treated Booth's leg, and even had he known, he would have been obligated by the Hippocratic Oath to treat the assassin." It would presumably come as a surprise to Hippocrates that his oath also forbade notifying the law that an assassin who had just shot your country's leader was in your house. As Phillip Stone writes:
In light of this [repeated previous] exposure to Booth [on the part of Mudd - something Bro. Wade also minimizes], it is not credible that Dr. Mudd, even in the pre-dawn of April 15, while examining and treating someone in his home, did not recognize Booth, a famous actor, a particularly handsome man, and a man with whom he had had an extended conversation less than four months earlier. Even with a false beard, and certainly in the ensuing hours of daylight, Booth would have been recognizable. The suspicion that Mudd was not telling the truth is corroborated by his claim that he left these strangers in his home with his wife and children, went to town for supplies, learned of the assassination and even Booth's involvement, but said nothing. Later, he started to realize that it was indeed Booth at his house. When he returned home, he told his wife, but because of her fears of being left there alone again if he should return to town to tell the authorities, he waited until the next day. Even at that point, he provided the information only through his cousin. The most dramatic news in Dr. Mudd's entire life was breaking around his own home and, even after realizing who Booth was, he delayed going to authorities. Steers has it right: These are the actions of a man who knowingly treated and sheltered Booth. [my emphasis]
But to admirers of the Lost Cause, Lincoln was the evil Yankee dictator, quite a different man from the Christ-like traitor Robert E. Lee. So it's not surprising that Lost Cause advocates jump to the defense of his murderers.
Some quotes from Lincoln are always good in a Civil War series of posts.
Apologists for the Confederacy have since 1865 put themselves through verbal and mental contortions to argue that slavery was not the cause of the Civil War. One piece of sophistry on which they rely is the fact that emancipation was not the official aim of the Union from the start of the war.
But that is a minor effort compared to the ones required to deny the many clear, explicit enthusiastic statements from the Confederacy that slavery was at the core of their cause.
Lincoln was an abolitionist, though prior to the Civil War and even some ways into it, he favored impractical schemes like colonization of African-Americans to Africa or some other location outside the US. He also favored compensated emancipation, though Southern slaveowners had vanishingly little interest in such a proposal.
Still, Lincoln was certainly clear that slavery was the central cause of the war. Addressing a black delegation in Washington on 08/14/1862 - addressing them on the issues of colonization - he said "without the institution of slavery ... the war could not have an existence."
A year later, a small eternity had passed in the war. Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation, making emancipation an explicit issue in the conflict. In military terms of the time, the Emancipation Proclamation changed the Union strategy from one of conventional war to revolutionary war, revolutionary because it aimed not just at subduing the enemy but at overthrowing the social system of slavery on which the Confederate economy was based.
On 08/26/1863, he wrote a letter addressed to James Conkling intended to be read at a Union political meeting in Springfield, Illinois. He addressed criticisms he had received over the emancipation policy:
But to be plain. You are dissatisfied with me about the Negro. Quite likely there is a difference of opinion between you and myself upon that subject. I certainly wish that all men could be free, while I suppose you do not. Yet, I have neither adopted nor proposed any measure which is not consistent with even your view, provided you are for the Union. I suggested compensated emancipation, to which you replied you wished not to be taxed to buy Negroes. But I had not asked you to be taxed to buy Negroes, except in such way as to save you from greater taxation to save the Union exclusively by other means.
You dislike the Emancipation Proclamation, and perhaps would have it retracted. You say it is unconstitutional. I think differently. I think the Constitution invests its Commander-in-Chief with the law of war in time of war. The most that can be said - if so much - is that slaves are property. Is there - has there ever been - any question that by the law of war, property, both of enemies and friends, may be taken when needed? And is it not needed whenever taking it helps us, or hurts the enemy? Armies, the world over, destroy enemies' property when they cannot use it; and even destroy their own to keep it from the enemy. Civilized belligerents do all in their power to help themselves or hurt the enemy, except a few things regarded as barbarous or cruel. Among the exceptions are the massacre of vanquished foes and non-combatants, male and female.
But the proclamation, as law, either is valid or is not valid. If it is not valid, it needs no retraction. If it is valid, it cannot be retracted any more than the dead can be brought to life. Some of you profess to think its retraction would operate favorably for the Union. Why better after the retraction than before the issue? There was more than a year and a half of trial to suppress the rebellion before the proclamation issued; the last one hundred days of which passed under an explicit notice that it was coming, unless averted by those in revolt returning to their allegiance. The war has certainly progressed as favorably for us since the issue of the proclamation as before.
I know, as fully as one can know the opinions of others, that some of the commanders of our armies in the field, who have given us our most important successes, believe the emancipation policy and the use of the colored troops constitute the heaviest blow yet dealt to the rebellion, and that at least one of these important successes could not have been achieved when it was but for the aid of black soldiers. Among the commanders holding these views are some who have never had any affinity with what is called Abolitionism, or with Republican party politics, but who hold them purely as military opinions. I submit these opinions as being entitled to some weight against the objections often urged that emancipation and arming the blacks are unwise as military measures, and were not adopted as such in good faith.
You say you will not fight to free Negroes. Some of them seem willing to fight for you; but no matter. Fight you, then, exclusively, to save the Union. I issued the proclamation on purpose to aid you in saving the Union. Whenever you shall have conquered all resistance to the Union, if I shall urge you to continue fighting, it will be an apt time then for you to declare you will not fight to free Negroes.
I thought that in your struggle for the Union, to whatever extent the Negroes should cease helping the enemy, to that extent it weakened the enemy in his resistance to you. Do you think differently? I thought that whatever Negroes can be got to do as soldiers, leaves just so much less for white soldiers to do in saving the Union. Does it appear otherwise to you? But Negroes, like other people, act upon motives. Why should they do anything for us if we will do nothing for them? If they stake their lives for us they must be prompted by the strongest motive, even the promise of freedom. And the promise, being made, must be kept. [my emphasis]
The text of the Lincoln letter is from The Life and Writings of Abraham Lincoln (1940), Philip Van Doren Stern, ed.
The White House has been pushing this video of President Obama talking about he virtues of compromise, compromise, compromise. The most amazing thing about it to me is what he says about Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. This is from the White House YouTube channel. It was posted July 14 but is from a meeting of March 8. As the White House caption explains, "On March 8th 2011 President Obama surprised and took questions from a group of Boston Area College Democrats, Republicans and Independents after his speech at Tech Boston Academy in Dorchester, MA."
Obama's historical revisionism on the Emancipation Proclamation is astonishing to me. The Emancipation Proclamation in his telling was mainly about compromising with slavery! This actually is one of the neo-Confederates' big talking points: see, Lincoln didn't free all the slaves and that shows what a big ole hypocrite he was!
And Lincoln making a strategic compromise with pro-Union border states in the middle of a Civil War is just like, say, Obama caving in to industry lobbyists on the public option before it even came to a vote in Congress? Please.
Franklin addresses the reaction of Frederick Douglass, who was a great admirer of the radical-democratic, violent revolutionary John Brown and the best known African-American opponent of slavery before and during the Civil War, to the Proclamation. One has to wonder if Douglass's association with violent anti-slavery seditionists would makes Douglass just like the Huffington Post in the President's view. After all, Van Jones and Elizabeth Warren are far too leftie for Obama's taste.
Douglass called the Emancipation Proclamation "the first step on the part of the nation in its departure from the thraldom of the ages." Douglass, unlike Obama in that video, actually understood the political and military significance of the Proclamation, though he certainly continued to push for full emancipation. Lincoln before he was murdered supported for the 13th Constitutional Amendment barring slavery everywhere in the US.
Obama sneers in that video that the Huffington Post in 1863 would have been demanding to "run a third party guy" and so on. In fact, there was serious consideration among many Republicans of running Charles Frémont against Lincoln in the Republican primaries. Not only because of his perceived weaknesses on slavery but also because of the military problems the North was experiencing in suppressing the Confederate slaveholders' revolt.
Just to be clear: this does not illustrate how Obama, in caving and caving against to Republicans on core Democratic issues was just like Lincoln, waging a Civil War to destroy slavery and defend the American Constitution. The comparison is downright silly. What it illustrates is that the antislavery movement was serious and had real political clout and was willing to put major political pressure on the President of their own Party to fully eradicate slavery. And, to take up another of Obama's points in the video, with the 13th Amendment, the Abolitionists actually did get 100% of what they wanted in ending chattel slavery.
Franklin writes:
It is worth observing that there was no mention, in the final draft, of Lincoln's pet schemes of compensation and colonization, which were in the Preliminary Proclamation of September 22, 1862. Perhaps Lincoln was about to give up on such impracticable propositions. In the Preliminary Proclamation, the President had said that he would declare slaves in designated territories "thenceforward, and forever free." In the final draft of January 1, 1863, he was content to say that they "are, and henceforward shall be free." Nothing had been said in the preliminary draft about the use of blacks as soldiers. In the summer of 1862 the Confiscation Act had authorized the President to use blacks in any way he saw fit, and there had been some limited use of them in noncombat activities. In stating in the Proclamation that former slaves were to be received into the armed services, the President believed that he was using congressional authority to strike a mighty blow against the Confederacy.
To present the Proclamation, as Obama does in that video, as mainly about compromising with slaveowners, is just nuts. Or, more specifically, grotesquely ahistorical.
Franklin continues:
The trenchant observation by Douglass that the Emancipation Proclamation was but the first step could not have been more accurate. Although the Presidential decree would not free slaves in areas where the United States could not enforce the Proclamation, it sent a mighty signal both to the slaves and to the Confederacy that enslavement would no longer be tolerated. An important part of that signal was the invitation to the slaves to take up arms and participate in the fight for their own freedom. That more than 185,000 slaves as well as free blacks accepted the invitation indicates that those who had been the victims of thraldom were now among the most enthusiastic freedom fighters.
Meanwhile, no one appreciated better than Lincoln the fact that the Emancipation Proclamation had a quite limited effect in freeing the slaves directly. It should be remembered, however, that in the Proclamation he called emancipation "an act of justice," and in later weeks and months he did everything he could to confirm his view that it was An Act of Justice. And no one was more anxious than Lincoln to take the necessary additional steps to bring about actual freedom. Thus, he proposed that the Republican Party include in its 1864 platform a plank calling for the abolition of slavery by constitutional amendment. When he was "notified" of his renomination, as was the custom in those days, he singled out that plank in the platform calling for constitutional emancipation and pronounced it "a fitting and necessary conclusion to the final success of the Union cause." Early in 1865, when Congress sent the amendment to Lincoln for his signature, he is reported to have said, "This amendment is a King's cure for all the evils. It winds the whole thing up."
Despite the fact that the Proclamation did not emancipate the slaves and surely did not do what the Thirteenth Amendment did in winding things up, it is the Proclamation and not the Thirteenth Amendment that has been remembered and celebrated over the past 130 years. That should not be surprising. Americans seem not to take to celebrating legal documents. The language of such documents is not particularly inspiring, and they are the product of the deliberations of large numbers of people. We celebrate the Declaration of Independence, but not the ratification of the Constitution. Jefferson's words in the Declaration moved the emerging Americans in a way that Madison's committee of style failed to do in the Constitution. [my emphasis in bold]
This is the first thing I've heard Obama say that sounds like something that could have come from Shrub Bush's mouth. Up until now, he has been awfully frustrating and disappointing for progressives. In this video, he's starting to sound downright pitiful.
See also Emancipation ProclamationMr. Lincoln and Freedom website (Lincoln Institute/Lehrman Institute; not dated, accessed 07/18/2011)
In fact, this country was built by anti-populists. It was built by people like Alexander Hamilton and Abraham Lincoln who rejected the idea that the national economy is fundamentally divided along class lines.
Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.
This link is to a recording of a 1983 speech Stampp called My Life With Lincoln. He lays out at some length some of the major criticisms of Lincoln and then explaining (starting at about 35:40) why most of them do not hold up well. It's a great example of realistically evaluating an historical figure in the context of his own time. He explains clearly in the context of his subject how "presentism" can lead to some very misleading interpretations of history.
Abe Lincoln: How the [Cheney] did the Confederates take over my Republican Party?
The boys and girls of our press corps have adopted the phrase "team of rivals" to describe Obama's Cabinet nominees. It comes from the title of a book by Big Pundit/popular historian Doris Kearns Goodwin.
This isn't the ideal description, for more than one reason. Joe Conason argues that it's Not a Team of Rivals at AllNew York Observer 12/02/08. Conason is more bullish on the prospects for Bob Gates to keep with Obama's program than I am. I'm also concerned that being head of Bush's Pentagon for the last two years, he may be implicated in criminal acts, or feel some incentive to cover up such acts. But in Gates' particular case, there's a general worry, not a specific one. Unlike Rummy, who definitely should be indicted and put on trial.
Conason reminds us how well the "team of rivals" narrative fits the media's gossipy, tabloid focus on personal quabbles. My favorite moment in Obama's press conference Tuesday was when he called the reporters on the fact that they were "having fun" by looking for Clinton gossip as opposed to focus on substantive foreign policy issues. Conason writes:
But as Mr. Obama learned many months ago, our leading media minds tend to be far less interested in real ideas and policies than in a fixed narrative about personalities. So his decision to nominate primary rival Hillary Rodham Clinton as secretary of state, with all the friction that would supposedly generate, became the focus of the news. All his other appointees somehow had to be crammed into the same imaginary framework.
Conason also seems to have the same impression as I, that Obama grew very much more skeptical about the quality of our national press corps' work as the Presidential campaign went on.
Also, the "team of rivals" script has a bit of a problem in that it's not really a good description of Abraham Lincoln's Cabinet. He brought other Republicans into the Cabinet who largely shared his views of the most pressing issue of the day, the fact that his most serious rivals were getting up a civil war against the US government.
Kevin Levin at Civil War Memory links to several articles debunking various aspects of the notion of Lincoln's "team of rivals" in a memorable named post, The Use and Abuse of Popular History - Goodwin Style 11/21/08:
We are being barraged by various commentators and so-called authorities who are either reflecting on or pushing Barack Obama to follow in the footsteps of Abraham Lincoln in choosing a cabinet. Well, not quite. They are actually utilizing an interpretive theme that dominates Doris Kearns Goodwin’s best-selling book, Team of Rivals, which argues that Lincoln intentionally chose cabinet members who would both reflect very different political positions and challenge his policies. Almost no one is questioning whether this accurately reflects Lincoln’s approach, whether it was unusual, or whether it makes any sense at all in comparing our own political climate and party organization with the 1860s. No doubt, the pervasiveness of this line of thought is in part the result of Obama’s own continual references to the sixteenth president as well as his best-known speeches.
... Goodwin’s book deserves to be treated as a study of Lincoln and the politics of the 1860s. The pervasiveness of recent commentary surrounding this theme of cabinet rivals, however, is more about what we want to see in the past and much of the country’s frustrations and anger over the past few years.
But, you know, it would be too much for our overpaid pundits to both to do a few minutes research to find out whether the "team of rivals" script makes any sense at all.
So, other than the fact that it's a concept that would sloppily derived in the first place and in any case doesn't actually apply to Obama's team, the "team of rivals" is a great metaphor!
The late historian Theodore Draper wrote about the Mexican War in Presidential WarsNew York Review of Books 09/26/1991 issue (link behind subscription).
The war against Mexico in 1846 was President James K. Polk's personal crusade to obtain Texas and California. Even a historian so little censorious as Samuel Eliot Morison recognized that Polk "baited Mexico into a war with the United States in which California was the big pile of blue chips." Albert Gallatin, the secretary of the treasury under both Jefferson and Madison, the last surviving statesman present at the creation, demanded, "What shall we say of a war iniquitous in its origin, and provoked by ourselves, of a war of aggression, which is now publicly avowed to be one of intended conquest?" A young congressman made his maiden speech in opposition to the war with Mexico. He voted in favor of a resolution declaring that the war was "unnecessarily and unconstitutionally commenced by the President." The young congressman was Abraham Lincoln.
The Morison quote is from The Oxford History of the American People (1965). The paragraph that includes it reads:
Even though President Polk knew little about California except what [John Charles] Frémont [later to become the first Republican candidate for President in 1856] related, he wished desperately to acquire it for the United States because he feared lest England or France get it first. First he tried to buy it, but Mexico refused to sell. Next, he tried to stir up revolution in California. When that failed to come off on time, he baited Mexico into a war with the United States in which California was the big pile of blue chips.
Morrison also describes how Polk sent American troops to Texas, then recognized by the US as an independent Republic - and it was indeed functioning as an independent Republic - in July 1845 under the command of Gen. Zachary Taylor, who took a position on the Nueces River. There was no dispute about whether this piece of territory was part of Texas. Even Mexico recognized that it was.
Mexico did not recognize Texas' independence. But they also were not trying to wage war to regain it. Morison compares that to the situation in which Mexico and most Latin American republics found themselves at the time in relation to Spain. There was still a state of war existing with Spain, but Spain was not trying to reclaim those lands. It had been more than 20 years since the last military confrontation had taken place. He observes, "If Polk had been context with Texas and had not reached for California, there is no reason to suppose that Mexico would have initiated hostilities, although she would long have delayed acknowledging the loss of Texas".
After a US mission to Mexico under the leadership of John Slidell failed to negotatie to secure a purchase of Texas and California, in January 1846 Polk ordered Taylor to take his forces across the Nueces River and occupy the western bank of the Rio Grande River, which he did. This was the action that finally set off the shooting war. Morison writes of Polk's action, "That was an act of war, since the Nueces had been the southern boundary of Texas for a century".
Since Abraham Lincoln is even more heavily identified with a later war, it's worth quoting this observation of Draper's:
Lincoln's actions in the first months of the Civil War have been used to justify presidential wars. But Lincoln was faced with an internal rebellion, not an external threat. He acted to resist an attack, not to send armed forces half way around the world. Lincoln was responding to an unprecedented type of civil war, and his proclamation calling out the militia to suppress the revolt cannot be used to justify presidential wars of very different character without indiscriminately disregarding the difference between a sudden civil war and deliberate intervention in a Korean-type war.
