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, April 25: What have all the "moderates" gone, long time passing?

African-American civilians and Federal troops occupying Jefferson Davis' plantation near Natchez; the banner says, "The House Jeff Built"

I recently read for the first time Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s, 1949 essay, "The Causes of the Civil War", which is included in The Politcs of Hope (1963). At that time, he was dealing with a trend in professional historical writing that was known as "revisionist", although it reflected aspects of the Lost Cause dogma that conservative white Southerners had been promoting practically since the end of the Civil War.

His essay focuses mainly on two advocates of this "revisionism", James Randall and Avery Craven. They "denied the traditional assumption of the inevitability of the war and boldly advanced the thesis that a 'blundering generation' had transformed a 'repressible conflict' into a 'needless war'."

Schlesinger also found Alan Nevins indulging in "a measured but entire acceptance of revisionism" in his 1947 Ordeal of the Union, where he wrote:

The primary task of statesmanship in this era was to furnish a workable adjustment between the two sections [North and South, or, more accurately, slave states and free states], while offering strong inducements to the southern people to regard their labor system not as static but evolutionary, and equal persuasions to the northern people to assume a helpful rather than scolding attitude.

The claim that "northern people" assumed a "scolding attitude" reflects the antebellum whining and blustering of the slaveowners and the publicists who huffed and puffed in defense of the slave system. A "scolding attitude"? We're talking about human slavery, people! If a scolding attitude was all that people could muster against slavery, that would mean they were disgraceful collaborators with slavery.

And, in fact, that was one of the driving forces behind free-state efforts to restrict slavery. Very few whites besides John Brown and his white supporters were ready to wage some war of liberation to free the slaves in the South. But people in free states did feel that they were increasingly made to collaborate against their wills and their consciences with the Slave Power. The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 made that coerced collaboration explicit by requiring free state citizens to join federal posses to recapture human property that had escaped from the lords of the lash.

Schlesinger's essay uses more judicious language than I do, being a part of the mean and nasty blogger world and all. But he rips the "revisionist" version of the Lost Cause ideology apart. He summarizes the Randall-Craven type of revisionism as including three primary premises:

First: that the Civil War was caused by the irresponsible emotionalization of politics far out of proportion to the real problems involved.

Hell, it was just human being held in slavery and being used as breeding stock to produce additional human property to be sold to other slavemongers. Plus, the freedoms of free white citizens were becoming more and more constricted by the demands of the slaveowners and their incresingly paranoid fears. Other than basic human rights and the essential freedoms of all Americans, there weren't such "real problems" that people had to get all worked up about it and stuff.

How did serious historians ever persuade themselves to write this nonsense? It boggles the mind.

Also, as part of this first plank of the "revisionist" Lost Cause approach, its advocates embraced the notion that slavery didn't have anything to do with causing the war. It was "fanaticism", lack of moderation, you know. The fact that all this ungentlemanly immoderation revolved around slavery was, what, a random coincidence?

Thus the second revisionist thesis: that sectional friction was permittd to developinto needless war by the inexcusable failure of political leadership in the '50s.

Schlesinger notes drily, "It is hard to tell which was under attack here - the performance of a particular generation or democratic politics in general."

The reality was that democratic politics and slavery were fundamentally incompatible. Democracy or the slave system had to win out.

Hence the third revisionist thesis: that the slavery problem could have been solved without war.

Assuming as I do that these really were serious historians, I just have to wonder, were they completely unaware of the existence of black people? I mean, really. The real lives of black people seemed to be an exotic abstraction for people who could come up with this kind of stuff.

As Schlesinger points out, this only makes any sense if there was a realistic possibility that slavery could have been abolished nonviolently. But those high-minded desires for peaceful abolition that the "revisionists" implicitly assume were there in the South somehow managed to stay well hidden. Probably because in large parts of the South, open discussion of abolition sentiments was just flat-out repressed. It also assumes that non-Southerners could have remained as completely indifferent to slavery and its poisonous effects on the whole Republic as the lords of the lash were to the humanity of their slave property.

Schlesinger also reminds us that there was no shortage of compensated emancipation schemes, under which capital in the form of cash would be given to the slave owners to replace their capital in the form of human flesh. The idea went about as far as an humanitarian thought would get if it entered the mind of Dick Cheney - nowhere, in other words.

While there are certainly a wide variety of issues generated by slavery, not least of which were class-based effects of slavery, primary among them the threat of slavery to free labor, Schlesinger in this essay focuses on a moral issue, which was certainly how it was widely perceived in both slave and free states:

The revisionists first glided over the implications of the fact
that the slavery system was producing a closed society in the South. Yet that society increasingly had justified itself by a political and philosophical repudiation of free society; southern thinkers swiftly developed the anti-libertarian potentialities in a social system whose cornerstone, in Alexander H. Stephens' proud phrase, was human bondage. In theory and in practice, the South organized itself with mounting rigor against ideas of human dignity and freedom, because such ideas inevitably threatened the basis of their own system. Professor Frank L. Owsley, the southern agrarian, has described inadvertently but accurately the direction in which the slave South was moving. "The abolitionists and their political allies were threatening the existence of the South as seriously as the Nazis threaten the existence of England," wrote Owsley in 1940; "... Under such circumstances the surprising thing is that so little was done by the South to defend its existence."

There can be no question that many southerners in the '50's had similar sentiments; that they regarded their system of control as ridiculously inadequate; and that, with the book-burning, the censorship of the mails, the gradual illegalization of dissent, the South was in process of creating a real machinery of repression in order more effectively "to defend its existence." No society, I suppose, encourages criticism of its basic institutions. Yet, when a democratic society acts in self-defense, it does so at least in the name of human dignity and freedom. When a society based on bond slavery acts to eliminate criticism of its peculiar institution, it outlaws what a believer in democracy can only regard as the abiding values of man. When the basic institutions are evil, in other words, the effect of attempts to defend their existence can only be the moral and intellectual stultification of the society.

A society closed in the defense of evil institutions thus creates moral differences far too profound to be solved by compromise. Such a society forces upon everyone, both those living at the time and those writing about it later, the necessity for a moral judgment; and the moral judgment in such cases becomes an indispensable factor in the historical understanding. (my emphasis)

Schlesinger was suggesting that, in reference to the approach of Randall and Craven, that this neglect of ths historical fact that strong emotions were generated on both sides may have been the main cause of their particular route to embracing a Lost Cause tall tale on the origins of the war. The "fanaticism" that they tried to blame for causing an avoidable war, in other words, was really only one of the manifestations of the social conflict caused by two incompatable systems, slavery and democracy, coexisting in one country under one government. Resolving that contradiction required strong feelings and much more besides.

Tags: arthur schlesinger, avery craven, civil war, james randall, slavery, us civil war