The Second Amendment and militias

I want to expand a bit on the Second Amendment issues I mentioned in the previous post. Here with reference to Putting the Second Amendment Second by Akhil Reed Amar Slate 03/17/2016.

My first reaction to Amar's article was that it sounds like he may be up to some Tenther/states-rights mischief. (Why, yes, I do think I'm jaded about some things, why do you ask?)

He seems to be arguing straightforwardly for an NRA-friendly interpretation of the Second Amendment and gun regulations.

My understanding without doing an OCD web search is that the federal courts had few if any Second Amendment cases until the 1930s, because there weren't many federal gun regulations. One of the biggest federal mistakes in US history was to allow the soldiers in the disbanded Confederate Army to keep their weapons. It mattered a lot in the mid-1870s when just getting enough weapons for the legitimate state militias to defend democratic government against the pro-"Redemption" terrorist groups was itself a major problem. The "Redeemers'" violent overthrow of the democratic state governments in the South is the only real example of guns being used to defend against the "tyranny" of the federal government, the "tyranny" in that case being required to recognize the citizenship of black people.

Amar pretty much tires to stand that history on its head. Mississippi's last Reconstruction Governor Adelbert Ames could have given a graphic description of who was more desperately in need of weapons, the biracial official militia or the Klan groups of former Confederate soldiers. I don't need to re-parse that statute he cites to know that nobody in their right minds expected individual black people, much less black people organized into their own anti-Klan private militias, to be the main guarantors of democratic government. That's why the US kept an actual military occupation in place in the former Confederacy until 1877.

But from the 1930s until Heller in 2008, the federal courts including SCOTUS held the Second Amendment to apply only to state militias. That's partially because of the plain language of the Amendment, "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." Presidential candidate Barack Obama in 2008 endorsed the personal-rights interpretation before SCOTUS issued their ruling. Bipartisanship!

The actual text of the Consitution matters as well as the legislative history. And the legislative history is also pretty straightforward. The Second Amendment was included in the Bill of Rights at the demand of slave states who wanted to be sure the federal government wouldn't ban slave patrols, the institution by which white non-slaveowners were required to patrol for escaped slaves. As I mentioned in the preceding post, it was an important institution in terrorizing slaves and free blacks, as well as giving nonslaveomwning whites the dubious satisfaction of getting to harass and brutalize black people just like their slaveowning betters. They were also a direct predecessor of the post-Civil War Klan-type terrorist groups.

In that last post, I also linked to Robert Bateman's article on the legal and historical meaning of "militia," Hey Oregon "Militia": Here's the History Lesson You Missed 01/07/2016. http://bit.ly/1Pl4s2P Short version: it has never meant some white guy sittin' at home with his own AR-15 waiting for a scary black kid to step on his property so he can finally git him the chance to exericse his Second Amendments rights to murder black people. (Did I mention I'm jaded about certain things?) Bateman writes: "There is no such thing as a 'locally organized' militia that is not subject to the authority of a State or the Federal Government. Indeed, such is almost explicitly prohibited, in no small part because the Founding Fathers wanted to prevent something like Shays' Rebellion [of 1786-7] from happening again."

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2016, April 1: Mississippi and the Lost Cause

Ever since my first year of blogging (2003-4), I've been doing a counter-observance of Confederate "Heritage" Month every February. Selecting Andrew Jackson as the "mascot" image for this blog, because he sucessfully suppressed the effort by ur-secessionist John Calhoun in the Nullification Controversy.

This year, Mississippi's Republican Gov. Phil Bryant's official proclamation of Confederate Heritage Month in Mississippi inspired Dave Neiwert to do his own version of Confederate "Heritage" Month counter-celebration at his excellent Orcinus blog. His first contribution, It's Confederate Heritage Month! Day 1 deals with lynching, a topic he has researched and written about for years. You should go read it now.

The William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation in Mississippi is also doing the same thing on their Facebook page. William Winter (born 1923) was the Democratic Governor of Mississippi 1980–1984. Mississippi's most distinguished and best Governor since Adelbert Ames (1835–1933), who was a Reconstruction Senator (1870-1874) and Governor (1874–1876) in Mississippi. And, FWIW, one of my main personal heroes.

Adelbert Ames (1835–1933)

I blogged about Ames in three of my 2007 Confederate "Heritage" Month posts: Differentiating the slaveowners and the slave states 04/18/2007 ("Ames was a democrat in the best Jacksonian sense and one of the most serious white leaders of that time about equal rights for black citizens"); The Mississippi Plan 04/22/2007 ("Ames tried to raise a biracial militia to defend the elected government against the [anti-Reconstruction] Redeemers"); and, John Brown's body stays restless 04/26/2007 (Ames "And he did find a 'righteous path'. The Redeemers prevented him from travelling down it.").

It's going to be awfully tempting to just piggyback on these two excellent sources this year!

Donna Ladd reported on the Governor's proclamation for the Jackson Free Press, Mississippi Governor Declares April 'Confederate Heritage Month,' No Slavery Mention 02/24/2016 (Dave also links this article). It currently begins with this update apparently from a couple of days later: "Bryant spokesman Clay Chandler tweeted an updated Proclamations page, which now includes Confederate Heritage Day, as well as Vernon Dahmer Day, Irish Heritage Month and Ronald Reagan Day — but no Black History Month."

Go figure.

Ladd reports:

On Bryant's gubernatorial letterhead, the proclamation starts out by explaining that April is the appropriate month to honor Confederate heritage because it "is the month in which the Confederate States began and ended a four-year struggle." It adds that the state celebrates Confederate Memorial Day on April 25 to "recognize those who served in the Confederacy."

It then explains that it is "important for all Americans to reflect upon our nation's past" and "to gain insight from our mistakes and successes," adding that we must "earnestly strive to understand and appreciate our heritage and our opportunities which lie before us."

Bryant refuses to take a position on changing the Mississippi flag, saying it should be up to the voters, who decided in 2001 to leave the old flag in place, in a vote that fell largely along racial lines.

Mississippi, along with Arkansas and Alabama, also celebrate Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee's birthday on the same day as the federal Martin Luther King Jr. birthday in January.

The Winter Institute's April 1 post links to the Proceedings of the Mississippi Secession Convention of 1861 at the lUniversity of North Carolina's Documenting the American South resource. Page 47 of the linked document includes the full official secession declaration of the State of Mississippi. Which, of course, stress the centrality of slavery in their decision:

In the momentous step which our State has taken of dissolving its connection with the government of which we so long formed a part, it is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course.

Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery--the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of the commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery, is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has long been aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.

That we do not overstate the dangers to our institution, a reference to a few facts will sufficiently prove.

The hostility to this institution commenced before the adoption of the Constitution, and was manifested in the well-known Ordinance of 1787, in regard to the North-western territory.

The feeling increased, until, in 1819-20, it deprived the South of more than half the vast territory acquired from France.[The reference here is to the Missouri Compromise.]

The same hostility dismembered Texas, and seized upon all the territory acquired from Mexico.

It has grown until it denies the right of property in slaves, and refuses protection to that right on the high seas, in the territories, and whenever the government of the United States had jurisdiction.

It refuses the admission of new slave States into the Union, and seeks to extinguish it by confining it within its present limits, denying the power of expansion.

It tramples the original equality of the South under foot.

It has nullified the Fugitive Slave Law in almost every free State in the Union, and has utterly broken the compact which our fathers pledged their faith to maintain.

It advocates negro equality, socially and politically, and promotes insurrection and incendiarism in our midst.

It has enlisted the press, its pulpit and its schools against us, until the whole popular mind of the North is excited and inflamed with prejudice.

It has made combinations and formed associations to carry out its schemes of emancipation in the States and wherever else slavery exists.

It seeks not to elevate or to support the slave, but to destroy his present condition without providing a better.

It has invaded a State, and invested with the honors of martyrdom, the wretch whose purpose was to apply flames to our dwellings, and the weapons of destruction to our lives.

It has broken every compact into which it has entered for our security.

It has given indubitable evidence of its design to ruin our agriculture, to prostrate our industrial pursuits, and to destoy [sic] our social system.

It knows no relenting or hesitation in its purposes; it stops in its march of aggression, and leaves us no room to hope for cessation or for pause.

It has recently obtained control of the Government, by the prosecution of its unhallowed schemes, and destroyed the last expectation of living together in friendship and brotherhood.

Utter subjugation awaits us in the Union, if we should consent longer to remain in it. It is not a matter of choice, but of necessity. We must either submit to degradation, and to the loss or property worth four billions of money [i.e., property in human beings], or we must secede from the Union framed by our fathers, to secure this as well as every other species of property. For far less cause than this, our fathers separated from the Crown of England.

Our decision is made. We follow their footsteps. We embrace the alternative of separation; and for the reasons here stated, we resolve to maintain our rights with the full consciousness of the justice of our course, and the undoubting belief of our ability to maintain it.

The resolution vastly overstated the antislavery zeal of the citizens of free states. But exaggerating the intensity of immediate threats was part of the social environment the slaveowners had created in the South.

It's also notable in the next-to-last paragraph, they project the intentions of enslaving them, white Southerners, onto white Northerners: "Utter subjugation awaits us in the Union, if we should consent longer to remain in it. .... We must either submit to degradation ..." This was also a longer-lasting feature in the vocabulary of white victimization.

Related articles:

The Declaration of Causes of Seceding States Civil War Trust

Dahleen Glanton, Southerners share confederate history Chicago Tribune 03/22/2009

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 26: John Brown's body stays restless

Quarters used by Union forces during the siege of Vicksburg

Here is a review of David Reynolds' recent book on John Brown, called John Brown, Abolitionist, and also of Nicholas Lemann's book, Redemption: The last battle of the Civil War, that focuses on Adelbert Ames' fight to sustain democratic government in Mississippi after the war: John Brown's body and blood by Ari Kelman Times Literary Supplement 02/14/07.

Unfortunately, it starts with a rather fantastic description of John Brown's mission at Harper's Ferry:

Steeled by faith in God’s omnipotence, on October 16, 1859, John Brown set in motion a plan he believed would liberate 4 million slaves throughout the American South. Brown envisioned a biblical flood, not of water, but of people, rising at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers, as bondsmen rallied to the Harpers Ferry federal arsenal. This army of liberation would break over Dixie in a divine wave, cleansing the the region of sin. At nightfall, Brown and his men seized the armoury and sent patrols to take hostages and alert slaves that the day of jubilee had arrived. The next day, townspeople traded shots with Brown's gang, until marines arrived and ended the rebellion.

Well, the part about Brown getting caught is more-or-less right. Brown was hoping for some slave reinforcements in Harper's Ferry. But he didn't imagine gather in them into an "army of liberation" that "would break over Dixie in a divine wave". He intended to set up a guerrilla operation in the Appalachians that would encourage slaves to escape their masters and facilitate them in doing so.

This description of Ames' battle with the Redeemers isn't quite so bad, although it implies that the occurences at Vicksburg were more a one-time event than an example of a process that occurred through much of the South:

At least for six years: in 1865, the states ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, finally abolishing slavery nationwide. In 1874, that amendment, as well as the Fourteenth, expanding citizenship and promising equal protection under the law, and the Fifteenth, guaranteeing voting rights, prompted another violent upheaval, in Vicksburg, Mississippi. Self-styled white "Redeemers", convinced that freedmen with ballots menaced a divinely sanctioned natural order, disfranchised African Americans by terrorizing them. The Redeemers seized Vicksburg to ensure that an upcoming election would remain a whites-only affair. Mississippi’s Reconstruction governor, Adelbert Ames, then sent African American troops to recapture the town. The white mob held off the militia and killed twenty-nine African Americans. (my emphasis)

And this comparison immediately following is accurate enough:

Separated by sixteen years and a Civil War, John Brown’s raid and the Vicksburg murders are divided by more than that in most histories of the era. Brown, after all, fought for freedom. He was a champion of racial equality, whose righteous ends mitigate, even if they don’t necessarily justify, his bloody means. The Redeemers, by contrast, then, were devoted to an antiquated racial order, and they killed to return to a bygone era. Disparate goals seem to open a gulf between the Redeemers and Brown that not even a shared fondness for bloodshed, underpinned by relevant scriptural passages, can close. (my emphasis)

The review kind of goes downhill from there. He makes an unconvincing attempt to link the religious outlook of the postwar, white-supremacist Redeemers with that of John Brown. Well, Brown and most if not all the "Redeemers" were Christian. But beyond that, there's not a lot of resemblance.

He criticizes Reynolds for supposedly justifying Brown spilling "rivers of blood", a highly questionable metaphor in Brown's case. Describing Brown's most controversial action, the execution of five proslavery settlers in the "Bleeding Kansas" mini-civil war, this way:

On May 24, he and his followers snatched five pro-slavery settlers near Pottawatomie Creek, Kansas. His gang split the captives' skulls with broadswords, biblical retribution gone mad.

Kelman seems to accept the notion of Brown as a crazy religious fanatic. But the Pottawatomie killings, whatever else they may have been, were not "biblical retribution gone mad". They were specific acts done in a particular context of the conflict in Kansas. Kelman at least gives some historical background of the Kansas conflict and even of the Pottawatomie killings.

But he writes, "Even militant abolitionists, like Frederick Douglass, had considered him a dangerous tool, a loaded gun with a hair trigger." Well, no, they didn't. Douglass supported Brown in some of his activities. He declined Brown's invitation to join the Harper's Ferry raid because he thought it was too risky a plan, a judgment which the outcome arguably validated. But he didn't think of Brown as off his rocker or as someone operating on "a hair trigger".

Kelman is correct when he writes of the post "Redeemers":

The Redeemers, along with other Evangelical terrorists in the South, sensed an opening and became the Democratic Party’s de facto military wing.

He also gives a decent definition of the Redeemer strategy that "became known as the Mississippi plan: terrorism backed by biblical metaphors, in service of voter suppression", though I do think he over-emphasizes the religious theme. John Brown was clearly deeply religious. The Redeemers were Christians and no doubt had religious views matching their white supremacist beliefs. But their motivations weren't overtly religious in the way Brown's were.

His closing judgment on Ames is also unfair:

Ames, bumbling and naive, lived in complex times and was swamped by uncertainty. He tried to find the righteous path. But he kept tripping along the way.

No, Ames was not "bumbling and naive". He was not "swamped by uncertainty" but by organized force and violence. And he did find a "righteous path". The Redeemers prevented him from travelling down it.

Tags: adelbert ames, john brown

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 22: The Mississippi Plan

Adelbert Ames: a genuine hero of American democracy - his lost cause was real, and worth fighting for

In yesterday's post, I referred to the overthrow if the democractically elected Reconstruction governments in the postwar South through force, violence, threats and fraud. This unfortunately successful overthrow was known as the "Mississippi Plan", because that's where it achieved its first clear-cut victory.

Sad to say, the white peoples' narrative of national reconciliation, based to a large extent of the Lost Cause mythology, affected the consciousness of people who really should have known better. John Kennedy in Profiles in Courage (1956) is an unfortunate example of that. One of his profiles was on the rotten white supremacist Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar (L.Q.C. Lamar for short) who as Mississippi Senator was a key figure in promoting reconciliation between the whites of North and South and the expense of democracy and basic civil rights for African-American citizens.

Lamar's most famous moment in establishing his "moderate" image in the North was his generous eulogy for the Massachusetts Radical Republican Senator Charles Sumner in 1872. The old scamster held forth with stuff like this:

Shall we not, over the honored remains of... this earnest pleader for the exercise of human tenderness and charity, lay aside the concealments which serve only to perpetuate misunderstandings and distrust, and frankly confess that on both sides we most earnestly desire to be one... in feeling and in heart?... Would that the spirit of the illustrious dead whom we lament today could speak from the grave to both parties to this deplorable discord in tones which should reach each and every heart throughout this broad territory: "My countrymen! know one another, and you will love one another!"

Pretty words. But he presented a very different face to the white folks back home. Richard Nelson Current in Those Terrible Carpetbaggers (1988) recounts the following about Ames' testimony to the Senate after he was impeached and removed from office by the Mississippi legislature in 1875, then in the grips of the so-called Redeemers:

His testimony before the Senate committee was secret for the time being, but he got immediate publicity for his opinions when a New York Times correspondent intervewed him in Washington. He told the Times man that the Mississippi Democrats would try to get rid of anyone. Northerner or Southerner, who stood by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. They were determined, he said, to control or neutralize the blacks in politics.

Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar: a genuine villain who conned gullible Yankees with his "moderate" talk while fighting for white supremacy and against democracy

"Does not Lamar oppose this policy?" the reporter asked incredulously. Lamar, now [former Mississippi Senator] Alcorn's successor in the Senate, enjoyed throughout the North a reputation as the foremost Southern advocate of reconciliation between the sections and between the races. He was remembered for the eloquence of his eulogy of Charles Sumner after Sumner's death. "No; Lamar makes very different speeches in Mississippi from those he delivers for the Northern market," Ames replied to the newsman's query. "He made the most vituperative speeches during the last campaign, and he owes his election as United States Senator to that fact. He explained away his eulogy to Sumner as being a political necessity — to give the South a hearing in the North." (my emphasis)

I wouldn't want to leave the impression at all that a peaceful impeachment proceeding was all that was involved. Here is Kenneth Stammp's summary from The Era of Reconstruction, 1865-1877 (1965):

But the [official] end of the [Ku Klux] Klan [around 1872] was not the end of organized violence, for violence was a basic part of the crusade against the radicals [i.e., defenders of democracy, Radical Republicans] in every southern state. The Klan had done this rugged work in Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia, where the conservatives had regained control between 1869 and 1871; but similar groups arose in the seven remaining southern states. The pattern of violence that conservatives developed in Mississippi, generally known as the Mississippi Plan, sometimes as the "shotgun policy," was typical. In the state election of 1875, Mississippi Democrats simply resolved to use as much force as was necessary in order to win. During the campaign a local newspaper announced this purpose with complete candor: "All other means having been exhausted to abate the horrible condition of things, the thieves and robbers, and scoundrels, white and black, deserve death and ought to be killed. ... [They] ought to be compelled to leave the state or abide the consequences. ... Carry the election peaceably if we can, forcibly if we must." According to another editor: "The present contest is rather a revolution than a political campaign - it is the rebellion, if you see fit to apply that term, of a down-trodden people [i.e., whites] against an absolutism imposed by their own hirelings ..."

To implement the Mississippi Plan local Democratic clubs organized themselves into irregular militia companies and armed themselves with rifles. They drilled and paraded through the areas of heavy Negro population; they enrolled Negro leaders in so-called "dead-books"; they dispersed Republican meetings; they forced Negroes at rifle point to listen to Democratic speakers; they deliberately provoked riots in which hundreds of Negroes were killed; and they posted armed pickets at registration places to prevent Negroes from registering. Before long, in many Mississippi counties, the Republicans simply abandoned any attempt to hold political meetings.

Ames tried to raise a biracial militia to defend the elected government against the Redeemers. But without adequate military assistance from the federal government, which was not forthcoming, he was unsucessful indoing so. After the Redeemers violent tactics had clearly prevailed, Ames resigned the governorship and left the state. The state legislature had made a deal with him to drop the phony impeachment action if he resigned, but with the Redeemers brand of "Southern honor" they went ahead with the impeachment action even after he resigned.

And what was the "moderate" L.Q.C. Lamar doing for democracy during this critical time? Current writes:

L.Q.C. Lamar, the Democratic Mississippi congressman, and John B. Gordon, former head of the Georgia Ku Klux Klan, were visiting the state and making what seemed to Ames "most incendiary" speeches. "The language they use is not of itself violent, but the conclusions they reach are that this election must be carried, even if violence be resorted to."

Ames beautiful and politically savvy wife Blanche saw what Lamar really was. Current quotes her:

The warmest friends of Lamar here [in Mississippi] are the most violent for impeachment - and Mr. Lamar is a double dealer on whom no dependence can be placed, as it is well known that in all matter political he does not hesitate to be false. ... If he really wishes to be of service, let him call off the dogs - which he can easily do, as they are trained to hound or retreat at the word of command.

Ames characterized the Redeemer takeover accurately at the time:

Yes, a revolution has taken place - by force of arms - and a race are disfranchised - they are to be returned to a condition of serfdom - an era of second slavery.

Here was John Kennedy's description of the transition from the democratic Reconstruction government headed by Governor Adelbert Ames (pronounced a-DEL-bert) to the undemocratic and thoroughly corrupt "Redemption" government:

No state suffered more from carpetbag rule than Mississippi. Adelbert Ames, first Senator and then Governor, was a native of Maine, a son-in-law of the notorious "butcher of New Orleans," Ben Butler. He admitted before a Congressional committee that only his election to the Senate prompted him to take up his residence in Mississippi. He was chosen Governor by a majority composed of freed slaves [Mississippi had been majority black at the time of secession in 1861] and Radical Republicans, sustained and nourished by Federal bayonets. ... Vast areas of northern Mississippi lay in ruins. Taxes increased to a level fourteen times as high as normal in order to support the extravagances of the reconstruction government and heavy state and national war debts.

Those "extravagances" included things like "Freedman's Schools" to teach African-American citizens to read and write; it had been strictly prohibited to teach slaves to read and write. As this picture shows, women and children were also included in the instruction. The white teacher depicted here was one of many Northern teachers who volunteered to go South to teach.

Ben Butler, by the way, was mainly known as the "butcher of New Orleans" because the fine white ladies were known to dump the contents of their chamberpots out the windown onto Federal soldiers after the city was taken. This being the brave and honorable way that white men in New Orleans chose to express their opposition. Butler eventually decreed that any woman caught doing this again would be arrested for prostitution. They stopped.

Kennedy wrote further:

Mississippians, on the whole, came either to understand and admire the sentiments of the Sumner eulogy, to respect Lamar's sincerity if they did not admire it, or to forgive him for what they considered to be one serious error of jedgment if they were strongly opposed to it. Riding a wave of popularity and the 1876 return to Democratic rule in Mississippi, Lamar was elected by the Legislature to the United States Senate.

The Profiles in Courage picture of "Redemption" had no room to discuss the Mississippi Plan and the violent details of the "return to Democratic [Party] rule in Mississippi" - though democratic rule had been ended, to be replaced by a truncated democracy for whites.

Current also reported:

But truth did not prevail. When the prize-winning book Profiles in Courage (1956) came to their attention, Ames's daughters were understandably upset. This book, bearing on the title page the name of John F. Kennedy, then a United States senator from Massachusetts, lauded the Mississippi white-supremacist L.Q.C. Lamar as one of its exemplars of statesmanly courage. In doing so, it slurred Adelbert Ames. "No state suffered more from carpetbag rule than Mississippi," the book asserted, and it exhumed the stale canard about "the extravagances of the reconstruction government" with its "heavy" state debt. By implication, Governor Ames was to blame. Ames's daughters protested repeatedly to Senator (and later President) Kennedy and to his special counsel, Theodore C. Sorensen. They got only evasive replies. No correction was ever made in any of the successive reissues of the Sorensen-Kennedy book. (my emphasis)

Now, to be clear, John Kennedy as President from 1961-63 did more than any other President except for Lyndon Johnson to restore the democracy in the South that Lamar and his white-supremacist cronies had destroyed. That was the main reason Kennedy was so bitterly hated by so many white Southerners.

And Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in Robert Kennedy and His Times (1978) quotes John Kennedy from Schlesinger's own contemporary diary entry of 06/20/1963. Kennedy was commenting specifically on the murder of Mississippi civil rights leader Medgar Evers:

I don't understand the South. I'm coming to believe that [Radical Republican Reconstruction-era Congressman] Thaddeus Stevens was right. I had always been taught to regard him as a man of vicious bias. But when I see this sort of thing, I begin to wonder how else you can treat them.

Schlesinger, who had been a Harvard professor, notes, "Alas, he had been thus taught by the Harvard history department."

Schlesinger also quotes Robert Kennedy, again in response to a Mississippi incident, the white mob riot at the University of Mississippi in 1962, saying that Jack Kennedy had told him that his experiences as President with the Southern resistance to racial integration had made him change his view of Reconstruction.

So I'm willing to be generous and think that if Kennedy had not been assassinated, that he might eventually have rewritten his chapter on L.Q.C. Lamar and Adelbert Ames.

Adelbert Ames' story had a happier ending than Kennedy's. Ames returned North and became a millionaire in the textile business. He had a big family and lived until the age of 97. He died the month after Franklin Roosevelt was inagurated as President in 1933. He always defended his fight for democracy in Mississippi.

Tags: adelbert ames, arthur schlesinger, kenneth stammp, l.q.c. lamar, reconstruction, redeemers, redemption, richard nelson current

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 18: Differentiating the slaveowners and the slave states

Historian Eric Foner has done a review of William Freehling's new book, The Road to Disunion, Vol. 2, Secessionists Triumphant: 1854-1861, The Three Souths New York Times Book Review 04/08/07. (Hat tip to Kevin Levin at his Civil War Memory blog, Eric Foner Reviews Freehlings Road To Disunion 04/17/07.)

Kevin's post deals with some issues that Foner raises in criticism to Freehling's book. Here I'll mention a couple of the things Foner did better on. I confess to a bit of a bias here: Foner dissed Mississippi's Reconstruction era Governor Adelbert Ames in his book on Reconstruction. Ames was a democrat in the best Jacksonian sense and one of the most serious white leaders of that time about equal rights for black citizens. He was the best governor the State of Mississippi even had, will the possible exception of William Winter. Ames is one of the few Republicans I would admit to holding as a hero. Trust me, he would not be part of today's Republican Party.

But Foner gets this right:

Since the publication four decades ago of "Prelude to Civil War," a study of the nullification crisis of the early 1830s, Freehling has been among the foremost students of 19th-century Southern history. If one theme unites his scholarship it is that the Old South cannot be viewed as a monolith. It contained distinct regions with divergent economic structures and degrees of commitment to slavery. In the seven states of the Lower South, cotton was king and slaves comprised nearly half the population. The Middle South (Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Arkansas) contained large regions of nonslaveholding whites. In the Border South (Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri) slavery seemed to be in decline. By 1860, 90 percent of Delaware’s black population and half of Maryland’s were already free.

Time and again, Freehling writes, the three Souths collided. In the three months following Lincoln’s election, the entire Lower South seceded. The Middle South waited, hoping for compromise; it joined the Confederacy only after the firing on Fort Sumter. The four border states not only remained in the Union but furnished thousands of troops to help defeat their Southern brethren.

That differentiation between the three sections of the South helps explain some of the seemingly contradictory attitudes toward slavery that we see cited, whenever someone bothers to actually find the prewar statements about slavery - something Lost Cause advocates are loathe to do, for good reason.

Freehling also describes how the slaveocracy saw three major groups threatening or potentially threatening their sacred institution: Northern abolitionists, the slaves themselves and white nonslaveowning Southerners.

Foner also writes:

Freehling examines how, in the 1850s, the Lower South became more and more committed to defending slavery as a positive good. At the same time, he tells us, the Middle and Border Souths persisted in the dream of eventually removing all slaves (and free blacks) from the region and reorienting its economy toward the North. Secessionists were not wrong, he writes, to see these states as slavery’s Achilles’ heel.

The movements in the 1850s to acquire new slave territories for the United States, reopen the African slave trade and re-enslave free blacks also revealed Southern disunity. Freehling offers fascinating accounts of each. But his main point is that because of opposition within the South, all failed. Even South Carolina, he shows, was divided. In his account of the aftermath of Lincoln’s election, Freehling overturns the conventional picture of a state rushing headlong into disunion. South Carolina secessionists emerge instead as a beleaguered minority, fearful that their state would stand alone (as it had during the nullification crisis).

As I mentioned in a comment at Kevin's post, one of the challenges that Freehling's history presents is that he's focusing on the conflicts within the South over slavery and disunion. After all, it was the South that seceeded and therefore the dynamics of Southern politics that eventually produced that result.

His discussions of the differing perspectives in slave states like Missouri and Kentucky with lower percentages of slaves compared to those like South Carolina and Mississippi with high concentrations is very helpful; this is part of his "three Souths" analysis, as Foner calls it. But it's a "Southern viewpoint" though definitely not a pro-Confederate or Lost Cause viewpoint, which sometimes makes me do double-takes. In analyzing the viewpoints of proslavery advocates, many of whom where nasty characters, he has to "learn to love his monster", which he mostly succeeds in doing without losing his perspective.

One of Freehling's goals in the second volume is to recount something that has much bearing on one of the favorite arguments of Lost Cause advocates: how the slaveowners undertook to gain the support of nonslaveowning whites in the South for the Peculiar Institution.

Tags: adelbert ames, civil war, us civil war, william freehling, william winter