Confederate "Heritage" Month 2018, April 22: Kenneth Stampp on Ulrich Phillips' treatment of slavery

In some earlier posts this month, I looked at an essay by historian Ulrich Phillips (1877–1934), a major historian of slavery but one with a distinctly benign view of the Peculiar Institution, i.e., a proslavery view.

Kenneth Stampp (1912–2009) was one of the major historians who pushed back against the proslavery historical view, notably with The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (1956), and against that of the neo-Confederate Dunning School of historians.

In The Historian and Southern Negro Slavery American Historical Review 57:3 (Apr 1952), he discusses Phillips' approach, noting also Phillips had done important empirical research:

No student could begin to understand the complexities of the slave system without being thoroughly familiar with the findings and varying points of view of such historians as Ulrich B. Phillips, Herbert Aptheker, Lewis C. Gray, John Hope Franklin, Avery Craven, Carter G. Woodson, Frederic Bancroft, Charles S. Sydnor, John Spencer Bassett, and many others.

Among these scholars, the late Professor Phillips has unquestionably made the largest single contribution to our present understanding of southern slavery. It may be that his most durable monument will be the vast amount of new source material which he uncovered. But Phillips was also an unusually able and prolific writer.

In that essay, Stampp criticizes historians who generalize in a proslavery mode about the supposed benign, patriarchal care that owners supposedly provided their slaves:

... the evidence hardly warrants the sweeping pictures of uniform physical comfort or uniform physical misery that are sometimes drawn. The only generalization that can be made with relative confidence is that some masters were harsh and frugal, others were mild and generous, and the rest ran the whole gamut in between. And even this generalization may need qualification, for it is altogether likely that the same master could have been harsh and frugal on some occasions and mild and generous on others. Some men become increasingly mellow and others increasingly irascible with advancing years. Some masters were more generous, or less frugal, in times of economic prosperity than they were in times of economic depression. The treatment of the slaves probably varied with the state of the master's health, with the vicissitudes of his domestic relations, and with the immediate or subsequent impact of alcoholic beverages upon his personality. It would also be logical to suspect-and there is evidence that this was the case-that masters did not treat all their slaves alike, that, being human, they developed personal animosities for some and personal affections for others. The care of slaves under the supervision of overseers might change from year to year as one overseer replaced another in the normally rapid turnover.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2018, for April 20: Unsettled issues from the Civil War?

Uwe Bott has an essay on the lasting effects of the American Civil War, The War That Never Ended The Globalist 04/07/2018.

He makes this point on Abraham Lincoln's election, "Lincoln’s election was in part the result of divisions among Democrats. Lincoln’s opposition to slavery was laudable. However, to him it was far less a humanitarian concern than a smart position in the political power struggle between the North and the South over representation and taxation."

While this is a point that involves judgment and not just factual occurrences, it's wrong. Lincoln was seriously opposed to slavery, seeing it as a moral evil and a threat to democracy in the US. He shared the white supremacist assumptions of most of his fellow white Americans and emphatically denied prior to the war that he wanted social equality for blacks. Although he did insist on civil equality before the law.

He describes the Republican Party's Southern Strategy identified with Richard Nixon and connects it to the situation prior to the Civil War that gave Southern states disproportionate power over the national government through the 3/5 clause of the Constitution, "The industrial and industrious Northeast and Western coastal states are politically underrepresented and fiscally exploited by a conservative, backwards and economically weak South."

That strikes me as more of a metaphor than substantive connection, but it's an interesting one. He makes the point by emphasizing the structure of the US Senate, in which each state has two Senators regardless of population:

... the Senate is even more dysfunctional today as it was back then because many more small states were added after 1861.

As a result, large states (and the vast majority of Americans) are effectively tyrannized by the increasingly extremist majority of Republican senators representing small states.

Two senators serve the population of 574,000 souls in the state of Wyoming, while the same number of senators serve 40 million people in California.

In fact, if you look at senatorial races in 2016, 2014, and 2012 combined – a period during which all 100 seats of the U.S. Senate were up for election – Democrats received more than 10 million more votes in all senatorial races than Republicans. In a proportionate voting system, this would lead to a current Democratic majority of 54-46, rather than the Republican majority of 51-49.

This is true. But it's not different from what it was prior to Civil War. The 3/5 Compromise in the Constitution gave the slave states a "slave bonus" in the allocation of the number of seats in the House of Representatives, because 3/5 of slaves were counted as part of the state's population for allocation purposes but none of those slaves could vote.

He goes on to describe the effects of gerrymandering that does give Republicans an unfair advantage today in the House. And he also describes a similar effect in the Electoral College in selecting a President.

Those are important points. But in his introductory paragraph, it frames it, "It is easy to date the “official” American Civil War. It occurred between 1861 and 1865. It is far more complex to answer the question whether the Battle of Appomattox truly resolved what so deeply divided the United States of America back then." And his essay looks at that problem in the context of the structural issues of how the Constitution sets up the federal government.

But the issue that produced a Civil War in the context of those structural issues was slavery. And that issue was settled by the Civil War.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2018, April 19:: Who were the Mississippi secessionists?

In the last post in this series, I discussed how Percy Rainwater in his essay An Analysis of the Secession Controversy in Mississippi, 1854-61 by Mississippi Valley Historical Review 24:1 (Jun., 1937) made clear the centrality of the slavery issue in the secession debate in the state of Mississippi.

That is heresy to the main Lost Cause narrative, which tries to minimize the role of slavery in secession, stressing instead abstract legal issues, or offenses to Southern Honor,or the difference between a Northern industrial economy and a Southern agricultural one. But Rainwater was put in the same situation as other Lost Cause advocates when they talk about the history leading up to the Civil War, they can't avoid talking about slavery. Even if they jump through hoops to argue that controversies over slavery weren't really over slavery.

One of the arguments he makes is that most slavewoners were cautious businessmen who were reluctant to embrace slavery:

From 1854 to 1861 agitation for secession in Mississippi increased with accelerated momentum. In the early stages of the renewed controversy, it was largely the active, restless, and politically ambitious element, represented by the lawyer-politician and the country editor, which incessantly rang the fire bells in order to arouse a not uneasy social order against the approaching and consuming blasts of abolitionism. Conservative men of property, desiring to be let alone that they might enjoy the fruits of their prosperity, not only held aloof but positively condemned the new agitation. But an equally loud and fanatical minority in the free states played, through the press and from the platform and the pulpit, quite unintentionally into the hands of the secession agitators in Mississippi, as elsewhere in the South.

As a historical description, this is fairly disingenuous on its face. All those named types - "the active, restless, and politically ambitious element, represented by the lawyer-politician and the country editor" - were very aware that the slaveowning planter class was the dominant social and political force in Mississippi. The notion that secession was somehow a demand of the common people against the planter class is, well, not very convincing.

This is a long-standing trope in the neo-Confederate/Lost Cause narrative in support of the post-Reconstruction Segregation 1.0 system. It was typical for white communities to blame lynchings or other racist violence against black people on the "rednecks out in the country." Certainly not the respectable white leaders of the town or city! "Redeemer" Mississippi Sen. L.Q.C. Lamar had his own version of this, giving moderate-sounding speech on North-South reconciliation in Congress, while agitating on the side of violent white supremacists back home in Mississippi. We saw an iteration of this in the 1950s and 1960s in the face of the Post-World War II civil rights movement, where business leaders tried to present themselves as the sensible moderates who disapproved of the "violent excesses" of the Klan rabble. Well, the businesspeople were at least probably less inclined to use the n-word.

Rainwater tosses out the Fanatics On Both Sides version of the run-up to the Civil War. But there were enough fanatics on one side to start a massive armed rebellion, seceding from the Union, seizing federal property, writing their own Constitution. I'm just sayin'.

Rainwater ties all this together with a version of yet another favorite segregationist revisionist view of history. If the secessionist rabble hadn't imposed treason and rebellion on their betters in the planter class, slavery would have had a better chance of surviving. Or, alternatively, it would have just faded away peacefully if those pushy, rude damnyankee fanatics hadn't been so obnoxious about the whole thing.

He does admit, though, in those speculations he is trying "to argue without the record."

Not exactly. The Republican program of halting the spread of slavery would have doomed the Peculiar Institution. And the power of federal patronage would have also given the Republicans a foothold to start building a party presence in the slave states.

The other possibility was unlikely. Because the Confederate defenders of slavery insisted on the superiority of slavery and were dead set on expanding it, not only geographically but even into industrial settings.

The latter is also a version of the eternal argument of the phony moderate, who claims to be in favor of some reform like desegregation, and praises the virtues of patience and gradualism. But their real ire is reserved for those who actively try to bring about the change. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter From Birmingham Jail" addressed just that kind of "moderate."

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2018, April 18: The secession controversy in Mississippi

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.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2018, April 17: Two political trends leading up to the Civil War

In my third pass this month at Avery Craven's Lost Cause/neo-Confederate essay Coming of the War Between the States: An Interpretation Journal of Southern History 2:3 (Aug 1936).

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.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2018, April 16: Avery Craven on John Brown and "Albert G. Brown of Mississippi"

I'm returning today to Avery Craven's Lost Cause/neo-Confederate historian Coming of the War Between the States: An Interpretation Journal 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]

The Wikipedia entry for him (04/16/2018) elaborates:

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.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2018, April 15: Avery Craven's neo-Confederate version of the origins of the Civil War

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 Interpretation Journal 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.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2018, April 10: The cotton gin and slavery

I'm returning once more to Forrest Nabors' From Oligarchy to Republicanism (2017), he gives a cogent comment on how the invention of the cotton gin, conventionally credited to Eli Whitney in 1793, helped transform slavery and the debate over slavery.

The general assumption of the Founders was that slavery was so much weaker as an economic system compared to free-labor capitalism (although that term hadn't come into usage yet) that it would soon fade away. "Soon" certainly had a different meaning for the slaves themselves than for their owners. But the abolition of slavery in the Northern states seemed to support that assumption. It had also been generally assumed that when the US banned international slave trading that the relative number of slaves would decline over time.

The historian William Freehling has given really helpful accounts of that process in his two-volume Road to Disunion work.

The relative inefficiency of the slave economy displayed itself over the decades even despite the cotton gin. But that technological innovation made a difference, as Nabors explained:

The Republicans [in their accounts of slavery] pointed to this period [the early Republic] as that during which the slave states were undergoing fundamental change, that is, when the power and ambitions of oligarchy were quietly gestating. The most important event that accelerated this change was a historical accident. Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin at the end of the eighteenth century allowed cotton cultivation over greater parts of the slaveholding states and created the demand for more slaves.

And he cites this observation, "In a public speech to his constituents, Representative Henry Deming of Connecticut declared, 'The invention of Whitney adjusted the social position and relations of our Southern brethren, more decisively, than their cotton-perfecting soil and climate'.”

The PBS webpage for Africans in America (KQED; n/d) notes:

Although there was some hope immediately after the Revolution that the ideals of independence and equality would extend to the black American population, this hope died with the invention of the cotton gin in 1793. With the gin (short for engine), raw cotton could be quickly cleaned; Suddenly cotton became a profitable crop, transforming the southern economy and changing the dynamics of slavery. The first federal census of 1790 counted 697,897 slaves; by 1810, there were 1.2 million slaves, a 70 percent increase.

Anthony Kaye gives a broader look at the invention of the cotton gin and points to another type of innovation that also contributed significantly to the increased productivity of the slave economy (The Second Slavery: Modernity in the Nineteenth-Century South and the Atlantic World Journal of Southern History 75:3, Aug 2009):

Angela Lakwete has debunked the myth that the cotton gin was Eli Whitney's invention. He was one of many mechanics around Augusta, Georgia, experimenting on roller gins to increase output. Manufacturers complained his wire-toothed gin tore and tangled the fiber and impeded textile production down the line. The saw gin that he is remembered for was actually another mechanic's handiwork and appropriated to Whitney in court. Only after a long transition lasting until 1830 did the saw gin become ubiquitous. The cotton gin was thus the work of many hands-mechanics, free and enslaved, who modified and made gins with rollers and saws; forward-looking planters and skilled slaves who adopted the saw gin; all in all, "an industrializing, modernizing, and slave labor-based South."

A skein of biological innovations, long obscured by historians' traditional focus on machinery, was also critical to the expansion of slavery. While machines enabled planters to put more land into cultivation and work more slaves, manipulating the natural properties of cotton and sugar increased the crops that slaves produced per acre. With little knowledge of genetics, a rudimentary understanding of plant breeding, and dogged empiricism, agriculturalists in Mississippi, Tennessee, and Georgia molded short-staple cottons for varied environments from the interior of the seaboard states to the lower Mississippi River Valley.

But technology couldn't save the Slave Power from the effects of its incompatibility with democracy.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2018, April 8: Jefferson, Jackson, the American democratic tradition and antislavery

I've expressed my reservations about the arguments made by Forrest Gabors in From Oligarchy to Republicanism (2017). One of those reservations is that his positive presentation of the Republican Party position on what he describes as "regime change" during Reconstruction is uncomfortably consistent with present-day neoconservative demands for "regime change" in Iran and various other countries.

But his account of the Republican position on the Slave Power and Reconstruction does provide a welcome alternative to the brand of Whig history that the left and center-left in the US have largely adopted at the moment in which the monarchist and advocate of government-by-corruption Alexander Hamilton and the plutocratic John Quincy Adams are the stars with Abraham Lincoln as the superstar Great Emancipator, while leaders like Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson are considered as something like contemptible hypocrites and villainous evildoers.

Now, there's nothing wrong with writing the history of Whigs. (Lincoln was a Whig before being a Republica, BTW.) Or of warmongers. Or of crackpot rightwing political sects from the Anti-Masonic Party on.

But I've yet to see a way to understand the growth and expansion of democracy without understanding that the process was a historical movement from not-democracy to democracy. And there's no reason to think that process is completed. Or to assume that the process takes place without resistance or setbacks or reversals.

Democracy in practice has its shadow sides. And it's indispensable for honest history that those sides be recognized.

America in 1776 started a national-independence revolution that was widely and rightly understood as the most democratic movement of the time that successfully took on the world's most powerful empire of the day. The Constitution of 1789 and the system it established became the model for the new Latin American nations and was seen by European liberals as the most advanced democratic republic in the world.

The British took pleasure in pointing out that the great American democratic republic was also a slave republic. Even though the slaveholding states that rebelled in 1776 were slaveholding British colonies immediately before that. Despite the cynicism and hypocrisy with which that criticism was often made, it was true. Just because it functioned as British propaganda doesn't mean it was wrong. And, like the Northern US banks and shipping companies, British firms also profited from American slavery in the cotton trade. So much so that it touch-and-go during the first years of the Civil War whether Britain would recognize the Confederacy as an independent country, which would have made the Union cause much more difficult and even opening the possibility of a formal or de facto alliance of Britain with Confederacy.

In other words, the American Revolution was a messy and contradictory enterprise, like every other drastic political change in history. Purity in political movements hard to find. As Hegel famously observed, "history is not the soil in which happiness grows. The periods of happiness in it are the blank pages of history." (From his Lectures on World History) Substitute "pure political movements" for "history" and the statement is at least equally true.

But looking in what direction a political movement or process is heading is a different story. Those are results we can see, whether or not we like the picture they present.

In the context of the concerns in the forefront of historians' considerations today, even the post-Civil War Reconstruction regimes would qualify only as deeply flawed and very limited democracies. Although there were scattered periods of women voting prior to the Civil War, When the Territory of Wyoming recognized women's right to vote in 1869, they were unique in doing so in the United States. Women's suffrage in the US was established nationally only in 1920 in the US.

And, of course, Native Americans were the targets of discrimination, relocation, plundering, murder and a long series of what were known as Indian Wars. There's no way to tell that story without several variants of Europeans looking very bad: British, English, Spanish, French, Americans, Canadians, Mexicans. Something that Nabors highlights in his book is that Republicans before and after the Civil War advocated radical versions of democratic land reform. But not only was all that land previously occupied by Indians, although not "owned" in the European sense. And part of those radical land reform proposals had to do with distributing territorial land. Or, in other words, distributing land taken from Indians by force and violence to distribute to white men.

And yet democracy grew and expanded. And eventually the American political community expanded to include the vote and full citizenship for blacks, women, and Native Americans. Nabors recounts how the pro- and anti-slavery disputants each claimed to be the true representatives of the tradition and values of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. And in doing so, they confronted the contradictions between the ideals of democracy and equality, on the one hand, and the reality of slavery. A big part of his focus is how white citizens - essentially all of whom shared some kind of white supremacist ideas - came to see it as part of their own interest in democratic rights and freedoms for themselves required them to destroy slavery and make the slaves free people and even voting citizens.

But those ideas didn't drop down from Heaven on the day in 1860 when South Carolina declared its secession from the Union. They were deeply rooted in the ideas of of the Revolution and the Constitution and the ways in those ideas were incorporated of their understanding of their individual and group interests. Abraham Lincoln gave particular emphasis to the Declaration itself. He made this well-known observation in a letter to Joshua Speed (08/24/1854):

I am not a Know-Nothing [i.e., not an adherent of the anti-immigrant American Party]. That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor or degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that "all men are created equal." We now practically read it "all men are created equal, except negroes" When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read "all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics." When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty -- to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy [sic].

As President, Lincoln, who was an abolitionist and dead set on stopping the expansion of slavery, claimed Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson as the Presidents to whom he looked as models for his own Presidency. The two Presidents who founded the Democratic Party that now can't even be bothered to invoke the democratic traditions of which they were a part. Even allowing an anti-democratic malicious clown like Donald Trump to pose as a Jacksonian.

Nabors gives this example of how the Jacksonian reformers in the Democratic Party later found their way into the Republican Party when the Democratic Party converted itself into the party of John Calhoun. How people today can fail to distinguish the radical difference between the Jacksonian tradition and that of John Calhoun still bewilders me:

James Blaine dated Van Buren’s defeat in 1844 as the beginning of Calhoun’s total influence over the Democratic Party, but it “moved so rapidly and so far, that men in the North, who wished to remain in the ranks of the Democracy, were compelled to trample on the principles, and surrender the prejudices, of a lifetime.” In particular, Reconstruction Republicans who were former Democrats deplored the transformation of their party. John Hale had left the Democratic Party and successively joined the Liberty, Free Soil, and Republican Parties. He remembered Van Buren’s surprising demise at the 1844 convention, with the words, “I repeat but history when I say that the breath of slavery has made and unmade the public men of this country.” The old Democratic Party led by Andrew Jackson, said George Williams, had opposed “monopolies, class legislation, and the unjust and artificial distinctions of society.” But “Calhounism however found its way into the party and worked like poison. Contrary to the teachings of the Fathers that Slavery was a political, social and moral evil, it came to teach the ethics of Calhoun that Slavery was a political, social and moral blessing.” [my emphasis]

Nabors also describes an early version of what we now call "voter suppression" directed by the planters and their flunkies against ordinary white workers and farmers in the South, in which votes had to be cast by voice, about as far removed from a secret ballot as it could be.

This method of voting exposed the elector to the candidate’s control by means of bribery, pressure, or intimidation. In addition, it could reverse the effect of the central reform of the Jacksonian democracy movement — the elimination of property qualifications for voting. If the elector was landless or a tenant but had to express his choice by voice vote at the polls, the individual’s fear of the landlord or employer could more easily induce him to vote as the landlord wished, increasing the landlord’s control of election outcomes. Madison expressed this concern in the Federal Convention of 1787, when he predicted that if the propertyless obtained suffrage, they would become the “tools of opulence and ambition.” His intention was not to limit the republican liberty of the people; rather, he intended the opposite. In the same context, he said, “The right of suffrage is certainly one of the fundamental articles of republican government” and that a “gradual abridgment of this right has been the mode in which aristocracies have been built on the ruins of popular forms.” The apparently democratic reform of giving suffrage to the propertyless would actually augment the ruling power of oligarchy, not restrict it, and Madison wished to check that result. Viva voce voting assisted the oligarchy, under democratic guise. [my emphasis]

The 19th century USA had slave revolts and women's suffrage campaigns, utopian movements and religious revivals, public dissent and passive resistance, democratic societies and labor unions, all of which provided some ways for which those excluded from full citizenship ways to exert pressure for democratic change: women, slaves, free blacks, immigrants, non-Protestant religious groups, even Native Americans.

But they also appealed to democratic principles put into effect by war and revolution and political struggle among the dominant white male political community. That was real history. American democracy wan't born by Immaculate Conception.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2018, April 7: Republicanism vs. oligarchy?

I'll have more to say about Forrest Nabors' From Oligarchy to Republicanism (2017). But here I'll summarize what I see as the three key limitations of his approach to explaining the Civil War with the model of Northern republicanism versus Southern oligarchy:

1. He uses the terms republic and oligarchy in an abstract way but nevertheless tries to distinguish sharply between the two
2. But the economic part of his argument largely skips over the extensive work done on the nature of the pre-Civil War economy
3. While the focus on the Republican Party and its antiwar militancy is enjoyable to see, it means almost by definition that the voices of more radical activists and slave resistance are forced more into the background.
4. The way he stresses what he calls the revolutionary nature of the South's cause and the conservative nature of the North's response muddles the history, at best, and arguably even inverts it.
5. Defining the war as fundamentally caused by the difference in political systems does wind up demoting slavery as the cause of the war, which is always a worrisome sign.

This is one of Nabors' formulation of his position, which he presents as a confirmation of the Republican political description of the Southern slaveocracy:

New Northern industrialists were becoming wealthy, in addition to the Southern slaveholders. Noting this, one economic historian collapsed the difference between the two sections, commenting, “In the North the top one percent of the wealth holders were mainly urban merchants and manufacturers whose businesses were based on wage labor, while in the South the top one percent were mainly rural planters whose businesses were based on slave labor. On this basis, it was claimed that the North and South were both “plutocracies.”

Setting aside the fact that this statement passes over wealth mobility, sector diversification, and other metrics of general economic benefit to the citizenry, sovereign rule of the few and concentrated wealth at the top of the scale are not the same. Sometimes they overlap and sometimes they do not. In a model republican society, political and social equality prevails despite property inequality. But in a plutocracy or oligarchy, wealth is the distinctive ruling principle. In an oligarchy wealth determines rank; those unequal in property are absolutely unequal. Therefore, even if the same quantitative pattern of wealth distribution prevails in republican and oligarchic society, those patterns produce very different results, because the political standing of wealth is qualitatively different. [my emphasis]

Briefly put, Nabors claims that wealth and the wealthiest class were not dominant politically in the North, but were so in the South. The voice of the (white male) people were certainly more able to exert their weight on the state and local governments for the benefit of ordinary people. The Jeffersonian and Jacksonian movement were very important historical periods in which the (white male and often slaveholding) leaders represented the interests of the common people in substantial ways and served to expand the franchise. The Jacksonian movement even included the nascent labor union movement.

But both North and South were capitalist economies and they did function under the same broad Constitutional system. Both had considerable concentration of wealth, as the controversy between the Jacksonians and the Bank of the United States made dramatically visible. And as many historians have shown in great detail, Northern shipping and financial interests were also part of the slave system and some of them profited greatly from it. The infamous Draft Riots in New York City during the Civil War which featured deadly white racist violence against blacks were related in part to those Northern interests that profited from slavery and were pro-Confederate Copperheads.

Slavery was physically restricted to the South. But slavery was part of a national economy and protected by the national government. The North was more egalitarian in its economy and society, as Nabors rightly argues, and that was due to the fact that the North was based on a free labor capitalism while the Southern economy was based on slavery. But the rich man's voice always spoke much louder in both sections than the poor man's. And the franchise was restricted to men in both sections alike.

Again and again, he describes that Southern rebellion as a revolution and the Republican and Union cause as counter-revolutionary. That's also an abstract way to look at it, although colloquially an attempted overthrow of an established government from within is called a revolution

In the terms of the time, though, the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation changed the war from a conventional war directed at restoring the status quo ante into a revolutionary war aimed at overthrowing the social and economic system of the South based on slavery. And the mass exodus of slaves away from the plantation as word of the Proclamation spread, the effect on the South's economy was a very significant factor in the Union war effort. That sounds more like a revolutionary general strike than a conservative counter-revolution.

Both North and South claimed to be defending the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the 1789 Constitution. In that sense, both sides were claiming to be the conservatives. But from a democratic point of view, the Northern cause was the one legitimately defending those principles. In the sense of establishing full classical republican democracy, the Union cause was a continuation of the American Revolution. While victory for the Southern cause would have meant the maintenance and expansion of the slave system and would have continued the antidemocratic trends associated with it that Nabors describes well.

Continuity in white racism

I recently read extensively through secessionist-era speeches and sermons. Word for word, they echoed the racist diatribes that I heard growing up in the South - from invocations of African barbarism to blatant portrayals of rape and racial amalgamation. Secession died in 1865, but the ugly sentiments behind it persisted. My hope is that the 150th anniversary of the Civil War will spur reasoned discourse and an end to our forebears' destructive vision. I also hope that it will end denial by my fellow white Southerners. The next time you hear someone proclaim that secession was about state's rights, not slavery, ask what right it was that the seceding states were so anxious to protect. [my emphasis]

This is from the contribution of Gordon Rhea to the article A Civil Discourse Charleston Magazine April 2011 (scrool down). It's a reminder of the elements of direct continuity from the days of slavery and the white racism that developed to justify it and white racism of today. As Rhea points out, that means that Confederate imagery is very servicable to present-day white racist agendas:

The Confederate battle flag of my youth represented opposition to integration. Today, it decorates the armbands of skinheads and white supremacists here and abroad.

Confederate apologists protest that hate groups have hijacked their flag, that Confederate symbols represent a proud heritage, not a hateful ideology. But white supremacists did not appropriate the Confederate flag by accident. They were not drawn to it simply by its design. They embraced it because it represented a nation stridently and openly dedicated to its principles. In 1861, the Confederacy's vice president Alexander Stephens proclaimed: "The Confederacy's foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man, that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based on this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth." [my emphasis]

He also points to the sometimes hysterical fears that antebellum slaveowners embraced and encouraged, which was a huge part of the political dynamic that led to the Civil War:

Southern spokesmen described an apocalyptic vision of emancipation, race wars, and miscegenation: The collapse of white supremacy would be so cataclysmic that no self-respecting Southerner could fail to rally to the secessionist cause. Modern Confederate apologists contend that secession was about "states rights," not slavery. They should read the speeches and pronouncements of their forebears, who give lip service to "states' rights" only in the context of the rights of states to decide whether some of their inhabitants could own other humans.

Tags: american civil war, gordon rhea, racism, us civil war, white racism

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2011: Introduction

I've been doing a series of counter-celebration posts to Confederate Heritage Month on this blog every year since 2004. I got the idea from something Edward Sebesta, who has made himself into a critical-minded expert on neo-Confederate ideology in the United States today, posted on his Web site at the time. It was a day-by-day set of postings from a local NAACP group, using each day's information to highlight segregationist groups using their Southern Civil War "heritage" in some way to promote their present-day politics.

Debunking Lost Cause and neo-Confederate ideology has remained the general focus of these annual April postings. They have been a combination of discussing relevant issues in the decades leading up to the Civil War, some about the war itself, and analysis of particular pieces of neo-Confederate/Lost Cause advocacy.

Neo-Confederate pseudohistory of the Civil War, slavery, antebellum politics and Reconstruction are important in the field of history itself. For those who care about history, this is a matter for concern in itself.


Jackson Clarion-Ledger cartoonist Marshall Ramsey spoofed Mississippi's latest neo-Confederate controversy - over car tags honoring Confederate war criminal and Ku Klux Klan leader Bedford Forrest

One encouraging development on that front is the starting up of historical retrospectives occasioned by the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, such as the New York Times' Disunion blog, the Washington Post's A House Divided and The Long Recall by The American Interest. These retrospectives focus on the contemporary history of the war as it unfolded, not on retrospective versions of it. This is particularly important in relation to the Lost Cause. Political imperatives among the planters and other prominent leaders in the states of the former Confederacy led them immediately after the Civil War to develop a revisionist history of the war that cast the Confederate cause in a less unpatriotic and destructive image. In particular, the argument that slavery had nothing to do with causing the war and that what was primarily involved was an abstract principle of "states' rights" required major falsifications of prewar history.

One concern I have as such "as it was happening" retrospectives move into the period of the shooting war itself, that political issues relating to Lost Cause pseudohistory may get less emphasis and the drama of battles and military campaigns will crowd them out. In any case, what caused the war, a key element in Lost Cause revisionism and debunking it, requires attention to the events that actually led up to the outbreak of war. It's not that Civil War history as such is irrelevant to such questions, on the contrary. The role of emancipation as a war aim and the alleged participation of slaves as Confederate soldiers - currently a fashionable piece of Lost Cause junk history - are important, as well. But those issues can be obscured in history that overindulges that pathos involves in the innumerable individual triumphs and tragedies that were part of the war itself.

As much as I enjoy studying history, the longer I do it the more skeptical I become about how much current voters and decision-makers actually learn from it. That is a frequently-heard justification for learning history, as in George Santayana's famous statement, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

But those distortions of history were also part of the ideology of segregation and white supremacy that were dominant in the states of the former Confederacy for many years after the overthrown of the democratic Reconstruction state governments circa 1875-77. And they contribute significantly to such ideologies today, from voter suppression by the Republican Party to violent white supremacist militia groups.

Nick Owchar writes about some of the Civil War books that continue to emerge from publishers in Lessons of America's Civil War Los Angeles Times 03/06/2011. He hopefully invokes learning from history:

The lessons of the Civil War, these books suggest, remain relevant.

"The political process was so polarized that democratic compromise was almost impossible. Is our politics less polarizing today? Not really," explains David Goldfield, author of a monumental new appraisal of the war, "America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation" (Bloomsbury Press). "Can we learn from this? I hope so."

A history professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Goldfield said two questions have hovered over his 30-year academic career: Why wasn't there a better way? How did we get to the point of solving disputes only by war? He found his answer and a fresh angle for his book in examining how evangelical Christianity drove a wedge between Southern and Northern interests.

"It intruded into the political process so that there was no middle ground. There was only good and evil," he says. "Self-righteousness doesn't make for good public policy. It poisons the process. That's the theme that frames my book, from the war's start to its aftermath."

I prefer the quote that is commonly cited to William Faulkner, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."; though more accurately it's what the character Gavin Stevens says in the play Requiem for a Nun Act I, Scene 3. Maybe for 2012 I'll devote most of the Confederate "Heritage" Month posts to Faulkner's stories on the Civil War and closely related subjects.

There are drawbacks to remembering history. Jeffrey Record has written two memorable books on the problem of American foreign policymakers interpreting current challenges by analogy to past ones: Making War, Thinking History: Munich, Vietnam, and Presidential Uses of Force from Korea to Kosovo (2002) and The Specter of Munich: Reconsidering the Lessons of Appeasing Hitler (2007) . Anti-abortion fanatics like to identify themselves with antebellum abolitionists and 1960s civil rights advocates. They point to the proslavery Dred Scott Supreme Court decision of 1857 to compare it to the Roe v. Wade of 1973 that established a woman's legal right to an abortion. In fact, they do it so often that a Republican politician's mention of Dred Scott will be widely understood among the Republican base as an anti-abortion statement!

It's unlikely in the foreseeable future that we will be able to separate "history" neatly from current political passions or from our desire to identify with historical models and predecessors.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2011, american civil war, lost cause,
neo-confederate, southern agrarians

Slavery and cotton

The New York Times is running a Disunion blog on the events of the Civil War. It has the great virtue of focusing on contemporary sources from the time, an approach which makes any neo-Confederate/Lost Cause version of the Civil War and slavery very difficult to justify. Gene Dattel in When Cotton Was King 03/26/2011 takes on one of the favorite neo-Confederate arguments, the claim that slavery would have faded out on its own without the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th and 14th Amendments. This false claim in the Lost Cause narrative of American history would become a model for the pro-segregation argument of more recent decades, that segregation would have faded out on its own, probably faster than actually occurred. And that all those Outside Agitators and mean Yankees messing around with the South just preserved it longer! Dattel, author of Cotton and Race in the Making of America (), explains that no fading away of slavery was on the horizon at the time the Civil War began:

But nothing about the cotton economy of 1861 pointed that way. On the eve of the Civil War there was no perceived threat to the existence of slavery; on the contrary, production levels had never been higher, and despite occasional drops in price, cotton was proving a reliably stable profit engine. Indeed, slave-produced cotton had become a formidable political and still-growing economic force: as early as 1838, a partner of Nicholas Biddle, America’s finance king, paid homage to cotton as a weapon: "Cotton ... will be much more effective in bring ... [England] to terms than all the disciplined troops America could bring into the field." In 1858 James Henry Hammond, a senator from South Carolina, asked, "Would any sane nation make war on cotton? ... No power on earth dares to make war upon it. Cotton is King." The ubiquitous faith in cotton made slavery seem impregnable. [My emphasis]

One correction: there certainly was a "perceived threat to the existence of slavery" at the time. Southern leaders and the planter elite had become downright paranoid at the time about the imminent threat they perceived from Northern abolitionism and the Republican Party. Several factors combined to make those Southerners wildly exaggerate the threat in their own minds. But the fact that they may have had inaequate reality-testing skills doesn't change the fact that they clearly perceived a threat to slavery from the Republicans and from the Republican President. Taken out of context, like the factoids used by neo-Confederates typically are, this could be integrated into a Lost Cause argument, e.g., "no one in the South thought slavery was under immediate threat so why would they secede from the Union over that?"

As a logical argument, it wouldn't fit well. But screaming contradictions never both fanatics - when it's a contradiction in their own position. Having said that, Dattel gives a clear description of how the invention of the cotton gin and its widespread implementation combined with a drop in prices for cotton clothing affected the institution of slavery. It was common, even in the South, at the time of the American Revolution to assume that slavery was a temporary institution, though slaveowners for the most part weren't putting time limits on it. In the new states of the newly-founded nation where slavery was a minor factor, slavery was outlawed in the late 18th and early 19th century with literal time limits put on it. But thanks to technology, massive Southern capital investment in slaves and the frantic reaction of white Southerners to slave revolts in Haiti and the United States, by the 1830s slaveowning ideology in the South was shifting to justify slavery as a virtuous permanent institution. That was the position that the Confederate States of America wrote into the Rebel Constitution.

In 1787, there was virtually no cotton grown in America. Two things, however, quickly changed that. Eli Whitney's cotton gin allowed cotton production to go from a process limited by manual labor to an industrial machine, allowing a person to "clean" 50 pounds, rather than one pound, of cotton a day. And of course, the cotton gin didn’t remove manual labor from the process; it just shifted it. In fact, this labor-saving device extended slavery by creating a labor shortage in the cotton fields.

The mass production of cotton was accompanied by a dramatic 90 percent drop in the price of a cotton textile garment. This in turn led to a consumer revolution whose raw material was slave-produced cotton – 80 percent of which was produced in the South. As a result, American cotton production exploded from almost nothing in 1787 to over 4.5 million bales, at 500 lbs. a bale, by 1860. On the eve of the war, cotton comprised almost 60 percent of America’s exports.

Slavery expanded accordingly. The number of slaves increased from 700,000 in 1787 to over 4 million on the eve of the American Civil War; approximately 70 percent were involved in some way with cotton production. [my emphasis]

The Disunion blog will presumably also be affected by the Times' latest suicide attempt, limiting the number of articles that non-subscribers can access in a month. But I understand that even over your monthly quota, you will still be able to access blog entries from links. So if you subscribe to Disunion on Facebook, you will get notices of all their entries and can go to them via Facebook. Brilliant business plan: instead of having people click to the entire blog and view ads besides several posts at one page loading, you have them go to Facebook where they view several ads there, and then come to a single blog entry on your site. What could go wrong with that?

Tags: american civil war, slavery, us civil war

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 28: Melville's Civil War poems (2)

Herman Melville

The more I read Melville's Civil War poems, the more intriguing I find them.

But I have to remind myself that poems like novels or short stories have a point of view, a narrator's perspective that isn't necessarily identical to the perspective of the author. And Melville does employ different perspectives in these poems. For example, one poem is called "Stonewall Jackson. Mortally wounded at Chancellorsville. (May, 1863)". It is clearly from the viewpoint of a Union sympathizer: "Dead is the Man whose Cause is dead,/Vainly he died and set his seal". This narrator takes grudging notice of Jackson's death but refuses to pretend he or his cause were noble:

Justly his fame we outlaw; so
We drop a tear on the bold Virginian's bier,
Because no wreath we owe.

The poem immediately following is called "Stonewall Jackson. (Ascribed to a Virginia.)" This one is from a Confederate viewpoint, and employs the more flowery images of which Southern fans of Sir Walter Scott's novels were so fond:

But who shall hymn the Roman heart?
A stoic he, but even more:
The iron will and lion thew
Were strong to inflict as to endure:
Who like him could stand, or pursue?
His gate the fatalist followed through;
In all his great soul found to do
Stonewall followed his star.

In the final stanza of this piece, we catch a glimpse of the emerging romance of the Lost Cause:

O, much of doubt in after days
Shall cling, as now, to the war;
Of the right and the wrong they'll still debate,
Puzzled by Stonewall's star:
"Fortune went with the North elate,"
"Ay, but the South had Stonewall's weight,
And he fell in the South's vain war."

One thing I appreciate about these poems is that while Melville - or at least the narrator's voice in many of these poems - understood the Union cause and supported it, he also kept his eyes open to the gruesome reality of war. For instance, in "The College Colonel", not specifically identified as being North or South, he pictures a colonel returning home after long service:

He brings his regiment home -
Not as they filed two years before,
But a remnant half-tattered, and battered, and worn,
Like castaway sailors, who - stunned
By the surf's loud roar,
Their mates dragged back and seen no more -
Again and again breast the surge,
And at last crawl, spent, to shore.

He invokes the plight of prisoners of war in the poem, "In the Prison Pen. (1964.)" The treatment of prisoners of war, particularly the treatment of Federal prisoners by the Rebels, and the atrocious treatment of African-American Union troops, was a source of long resentment. He pictures an ill-treated prisoner:

A smiting sun. No shed, no tree;
He totters to his lair -
A den that sick hands dug in earth
Ere famine wasted there,

Or, dropping in his place, he swoons,
Walled in by throngs that press,
Till forth from the throngs they bear him dead -
Dead in his meagreness.

In a longer selection near the end of the collection, he gives a verse account of "Lee in the Capitol", describing Robert E. Lee's postwar plea for leniency toward the white South. Lee's voice in the poem pleads:

A voice comes out from these charnel-fields,
A plaintive yet unheeded one:
'Died all in vain? both sides undone?'
Push not your triumph; do not urge
Submissiveness beyond the verge.
Intestine rancor would you bide,
Nursing eleven sliding daggers in your side?
Far from my thought to school or threat;
I speak the things which hard beset.
Where various hazards meet the eyes,
To elect in magnanimity is wise.

We can't tell from the work itself whether Melville is sympathetic toward this viewpoint, this plea for reconciliation among whites North and South at the expense of the rights of the newly freed black men and women.

The final selection in the book is called "A Meditation: Attributed to a Northerner After Attending the Last of Two Funerals From the Same Homestead - Those of a National and a Confederate Officer (Brothers), His Kinsmen, Who Had Died From the Effects of Wounds Received in the Closing Battles." That setting of the stage is a reminder that the conflict was a civil war, not the War Between the States of Lost Cause lore.

But this poem seems to catch the sense of a war-weary white Union veteran, tired of the conflict and ready to look to the business of the future and a reconciliation among the white "brothers" of America. This Northerner betrays perhaps a feeling of bitterness at the former slaves themselves:

Of North or South they recked not then,
Warm passion cursed the cause of war:
Can Africa pay back this blood
Spilt on Potomac's shore?
Yet doubts, as pangs, were vain the strife to stay,
And hands that fain had clasped again could slay.

This desire for reconciliation among former foes didn't have to have come at the expense of the rights of the freed slaves. In practice, it did. But it didn't have to. The final three stanzas of this concluding poem catch a moment in which the future held the danger and promise of paths to which the country had not yet irrevocably committed:

Mark the great Captains on both sides,
The soldiers with the broad renown -
They all were messmates on the Hudson's marge,
Beneath one roof they laid them down;
And, free from hate in many an after pass,
Strove as in school-boy rivalry of the class.

A darker side there is; but doubt
In Nature's charity hovers there:
If men for new agreement yearn,
Then old upbraiding best forbear:
"The South's the sinner!" Well, so let it be;
But shall the North sin worse, and stand the Pharisee?

O, now that brave men yield the sword,
Mine be the manful soldier-view;
By how much more they boldly warred,
By so much more is mercy due:
When Vicksburg fell, and the moody files marched out,
Silent the victors stood, scorning to raise a shout.

One of my favorite poems in this collection is in an account of the conflict at Vicksburg, "Running the Batteries. As observed from the Anchorage above Vicksburgh. (April, 1863)". He writes about the seductive and false appeal of war:

A baleful brand, a hurrying torch
Whereby anew the boats are seen -
A burning transport all alurch!
Breathless we gaze; yet still we glean
Glimpses of beauty as we eager lean.

The effulgence takes an amber glow
Which bathes the hill-side villas far;
Affrighted ladies mark the show
Painting the pale magnolia -
The fair, false, Circe light of cruel War.

While the poems themselves tell us of the perspective of the narrator but not necessarily of the author, Melville added a prose "Supplement" at the very end, which was clearly meant as his own statement at the time. And, sadly, it seemed that Melville's generous heart was too ready to see civility and Christian decency in his white Southern countrymen. Still, even as he urged restraint toward the white South, he validated the truth of John Brown's final declaration that he had once believed that slavery could be ended without the shedding of much blood, but now knew he was in error. Melville wrote:

Those of us who always abhorred slavery as an atheistical iniquity, gladly we join in the exulting chorus of humanity over its downfall. But we should remember that emancipation was accomplished not by deliberate legislation; only through agonized violence could so mighty a result be effected.

He continued directly:

In our natural solicitude to confirm the benefit of liberty to the blacks, let us forbear from measures of dubious constitutional rightfulness toward our white countrymen — measures of a nature to provoke, among other of the last evils, exterminating hatred of race toward race. In imagination let us place ourselves in the unprecedented position of the Southerners — their position as regards the millions of ignorant manumitted slaves in their midst, for whom some of us now claim the suffrage. Let us be Christians toward our fellow-whites, as well as philanthropists toward the blacks, our fellow-men. In all things, and toward all, we are enjoined to do as we would be done by. Nor should we forget that benevolent desires, after passing a certain point, can not undertake their own fulfillment without incurring the risk of evils beyond those sought to be remedied. Something may well be left to the graduated care of future legislation, and to heaven. In one point of view the coexistence of the two races in the South — whether the negro be bond or free - seems (even as it did to Abraham Lincoln) a grave evil. Emancipation has ridded the country of the reproach, but not wholly of the calamity. Especially in the present transition period for both races in the South, more or less of trouble may not unreasonably be anticipated; but let us not here after be too swift to charge the blame exclusively in anyone quarter. With certain evils men must be more or less patient. Our institutions have a potent digestion, and may in time convert and assimilate to good all elements thrown in, however originally alien.

Despite his overly optimistic view of Southern white reaction, its clear he foresaw the assimilation of former slaves as full citizens.

And, since this series of posts is broadly in relation to Lost Cause mythology, it's worth noting that in this "Supplement", Melville had no doubt that slavery had caused the war, whatever other elements were dragged into the mix along the way:

It was in subserviency to the slave-interest that Secession was plotted; but it was under the plea, plausibly urged, that certain inestimable rights guaranteed by the Constitution were directly menaced, that the people of the South were cajoled into revolution. Through the arts of the conspirators and the perversity of fortune, the most sensitive love of liberty was entrapped into the support of a war whose implied end was the erecting in our advanced century of an Anglo-American empire based upon the systematic degradation of man.(my emphasis)

Melville may have had illusions about the amount of good will among postwar white Southerners. But he was very clear on what the Confederacy had been about.

Tags: american civil war, battle pieces, confederate heritage month 2008, herman melville, us civil war

Confederate "Heritage" Month April 25: On not letting Lost Cause advocates off too easily

The Christ of Lost Cause mythology

I posted the following comment in response to Kevin Levin's post at his Civil War Memory blog, Peter Carmichael on Robert E. Lee or Why Robert K. Krick and Michael Fellman Will Never Agree 10/09/07:

Kevin, I'm not familiar with either Feldman's or Krick's work yet.

But Krick's polemics sound awfully familiar.

I keep William Faulkner's books in the section of my bookshelf reserved for Bibles and religious literature. Because I consider his work part of the Scriptural canon.

One of the distinctive things about Faulkner is the serious research he obviously did on the Civil War period. And the fact that he clearly wasn't blinded by Lost Cause mythology in his treatment of the period.

But I can't think of an instance where Faulkner "mocks" the Old South. He didn't make up phony romantic tales to justify the cause of slavery. But he took the characters who did support that cause as seriously as those who did not.

I'm also not sure who Carmichael had in mind when he criticized people for using the label "neo-Confederate" too freely. But it would be generous in the extreme to assume that the deliberate misrepresentations of history that were part of the Lost Cause ideology from roughly the moment Lee surrendered his sword to Grant are the result of some sincere but mistaken "Victorian" view of history. A distorting assumption about history is one thing. Making stuff up is something else.

It's one thing to analyze, say, whether the circumstantial evidence about Lee's decision to join the Confederate revolt was as agonized as he later claimed it was. I tend to think his claim to that effect was a load of bull, though it's something on which a realistic student of the subject could reasonably disagree.

But the ludicrous claim of the true believers in the Lost Cause that slavery had nothing to do with causing the Civil War is a whole different level of discourse. It may not be quite so extreme or contemptable as Holocaust denial. Since several generations of Southerners were raised on that version of history (including me), it's possible that someone could argue the "slavery had nothing to do with it" claim out of gullibility and lack of real familiarity with the history.

But whatever excuse it comes with, it's pseudohistory with as much claim to be taken seriously as other examples of that genre.

The Civil War was also a political event. Political views shouldn't effect how someone goes about estimating the number of dead at Antietam. But making judgments about the significance of events is also a part of writing and understanding history. I fail to see how anyone from any country who supports democracy could look at the Civil War and not recognize that the Union was the defender of democracy and the Confederacy was its enemy. Or fail to be deeply suspicious of any attempt to glorify or romanticize or justify the Confederate cause.

And as long as there are significant numbers of people who are determined to make Lee the Christ of the Lost Cause, historians will have to be aware that the Lost Cause fans will seek to tear anything they can out of context to justify their own ideological view of the Civil War. I once heard Christopher Browning discuss how David Irving's claim that Hitler did not order the Holocaust influenced real history-writing. Not, he said, because real historians took the claim seriously. But because Irving's false claim made historians take a closer look at the exact sequence of the decision-making in 1940-41 in that regard.

Historians of the Civil War for the foreseeable future will have to deal with Lost Cause claims about the glorious and honorable Confederacy (that nothing at all to do with slavery!) in much the same way.

Tags: american civil war, confederate heritage month 2008, lost cause, us civil war

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 24: Southern (white) honor

This will be a relatively short one today. This is an observation by Bertram Wyatt-Brown The South Against Itself New York Review of Books 10/10/1991 (link behind subscription), reviewing The Road to Disunion: Vol. I: Secessionists at Bay, 1776–1854 by William W. Freehling.

Wyatt-Brown is the author of book Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (1982), which explores the kinship networks and the related honor code which was prevalent in so much of Southern society and which greatly influenced white Southerners' perceptions of abolitionism and Northern criticism.

In the NY Review article, he offers this observation:

We must understand that Southern whites thought and acted within a set of cultural standards very different from our own and also that of their contemporaries in the North. The Southerner linked his identity with his lineage, family, posterity, and community. As a result, the regional politician - and voter, too - did not easily distinguish those insults directed toward himself from those that disparaged, as he saw it, the values of his neighborhood, state, or region. The individual was merged into the whole even as he felt himself to be its representative to the world. For instance, Reuben Davis, a Mississippi congressman favoring secession, in recollection boasted that he had been "the mouthpiece of a wronged and outraged people, and their righteous indignation poured itself through me." Under these circumstances, politicians saw themselves as stout defenders of those communal values without which, they insisted, political order could not be preserved. To ignore the workings of the psychology of honor is to miss the anger and hurt pride that secession was intended in large measure to vindicate. (my emphasis)

Just to be clear so that this one isolated quotation doesn't leave a mistaken impression: Wyatt-Brown is not a Confederate apologist. And he does not offer the Southern sense of "honor" as somehow the "real cause" of the war. He recognizes that slavery was the cause. But the perceptions and reactions Southerners learned in their honor culture shaped and misshaped their perceptions of Northern opposition to slavery.

Tags: american civil war, bertram wyatt-brown, confederate heritage month 2008, us civil war

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 19: the plague of Lost Cause pseudohistory

Harriet Tubman, conductor on the Underground Railroad

Continuing the discussion of David Brion Davis' article The Terrible Cost of Reconciliation in the New York Review of Books 07/18/02 issue (link behind subscription), reviewing Divided Hearts: Britain and the American Civil War by R.J.M. Blackett and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory by David Blight, he also has some important things to say about the nature of American historical memory about the Civil War.

As Davis writes, "it became accepted wisdom from the 1870s to the 1960s, among American historians as well as white students from grade school through college, that states' rights, not slavery, was the cause of the Civil War". A false historical narrative, the Lost Cause narrative.

He refers to David Blight's book in discussing one of the reasons:

Blight quotes William Dean Howells's famous words that "what the American public always wants is a tragedy with a happy ending." Despite the extraordinarily voluminous literature on the Civil War, few accounts convey the fear, panic, carnage, brutal violence, and suffering that continued to infect the nightmares of veterans,[6] to say nothing of the rubble, ruins, desolate landscape, and crowds of black and white refugees seen throughout the South by 1865. As Blight points out, however, both Northern and Southern whites found it much easier to honor the dead and hold ceremonies amid forests of white gravestones on "Decoration Day," later called Memorial Day, than to confront what Blight terms "the logic of emancipation" and "the stirrings of racial equality." It was easier to commemorate and sometimes sentimentalize the death of 620,000 American soldiers than to remember that the Union victory depended, to a considerable degree, on the enlistment of nearly 200,000 African-Americans, who, like Henry C. Hoyle, could write home about their "struggle for freedom, liberty and equal rights."

In popular memory among whites and to a large extent even in textbooks and in the work of historians, the Civil War came to be seen in terms of its significance as a conflict among white Americans:

Blight's major theme, as he describes the frequent "reunions" of white Union and Confederate veterans, is that the yearning for a "redemptive" sectional reconciliation required a "harmonious forgetfulness" of slavery, emancipation, and even minimal African-American rights. "In this vision of the terms of Blue-Gray reunion," he writes, "slavery was everyone's and no one's responsibility. America's bloody racial history was to be banished from consciousness; the only notions of equality contemplated were soldiers' heroism and the exchange of the business deal."

But it's important to remember that the central role of slavery and emancipation in the Civil War was not forgotten by everyone. It certainly wasn't an invention of "politically correct" recent historians, as the neo-Confederates might like to claim. As Davis explains:

Blight emphasizes the importance of "the emancipationist vision," tracing how it originated with black and white abolitionists and was reflected in Lincoln's revolutionary call for a new birth of freedom. It was a view that was always centered on the "proposition" that all men are created equal. One of the first major events celebrating this tradition occurred when over one hundred black leaders assembled in Louisville, Kentucky, in September 1883. While expressing their gratitude for "the miraculous emancipation" that had brought such seeming promise twenty years earlier, the resolutions of these blacks "threw a bleak picture of African American conditions," in Blight's words, "at the feet of the nation."

In his keynote address at this meeting, Frederick Douglass referred to the "feeling of color madness" and the "atmosphere of color hate" that pervaded "churches, courts, and schools, and worse, the deepest 'sentiment' of ordinary people." "In all relations of life and death," Douglass testified, "we are met by the color line.... It hunts us at midnight, it denies us accommodation...excludes our children from schools...compels us to pursue only such labor as will bring the least reward."

Speaking only days before the Supreme Court struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875, opening the way for later Jim Crow laws throughout the South, Douglass made the telling point that the revolutionary measure of slave emancipation had come "from the hell of war," including "fields of smoke and fire strewn with...bleeding and dying men." It was therefore linked with "deadly hate and a spirit of revenge," which had engendered a Southern determination to reverse the racial revolution by reconstructing the very meaning of the Civil War. (my emphasis)

Davis also deals with another bogus claim of Lost Cause pseudohistory:

It is now clear that American slavery was not doomed to some kind of inevitable economic death ("econocide," to use the term coined by the brilliant historian Seymour Drescher). Nor was the white American public prepared in the mid-1860s for immediate and total slave emancipation. In 1858, in his famous debates with Stephen Douglas, Lincoln predicted, after affirming the total wrongness of slavery, that "I do not suppose that in the most peaceful way ultimate extinction would occur in less than a hundred years at the least." In other words, he was thinking of 1958 at the earliest, but four years later, in 1862, concluded that the South's "rebellion" could not be overcome unless the primary cause of the conflict was eliminated.

Tags: american civil war, confederate heritage month 2008, david brion davis, lost cause, us civil war