William Seward, the Czar of Russia, Mexico and the Polish insurrenction of 1863

Emperador Maximiliano I: his presence in Mexico helped determine US policy toward Poland

I could get lost poking around in the historical journals. For instance, I came across a brief article called "Seward and the Polish Rebellion of 1863" by Harold Blinn in The American Historical Review July 1940.

The reference is to Abraham Lincoln's Secretary of State William Seward, who was also a leading figure in the Republican Party in his own right.

Obviously, the biggest problem that their administration had to deal with was the Confederate revolt.

One of the problems that the Civil War had caused is that Emperor Napoleon III of France had taken the opportunity presented by that distraction to install a Habsburg emperor to rule Mexico on behalf of France, Emperador Maximiliano I. The Lincoln administration had no intention of allowing the French to establish Mexico as essentially a new colony in the Western Hemisphere. But until that little matter over secession was cleared up, there wasn't much they could do about it.

Czar Alexander II of Russia maintained good relations with the United States (the Union) and unlike Great Britain, showed no interest in establishing diplomatic ties to the Confederacy and thereby help legitimate Jefferson Davis' regime.

The Poles revolted against their Russian overlords in January, 1863, a revolt which dragged on until the autumn of 1864. Napoleon III saw a new opportunity to extend French influence and he announced plans to assist the Polish revolutionaries. He also invited the Americans to do the same.

Napoleon certainly knew that the Americans were not in much of a position to provide any meaningful aid to revolutionaries in Poland. But his pitch, as Blinn points out in his article, was an attempt to get the Americans to legitimize an intervention that bore notable similarities to French intervention in Mexico. And since the revolt was against Russia, which was providing badly needed diplomatic support in Europe to the beleaguered Union, it was too difficult a call for the Lincoln administration to decline to show much formal interest in the cause of the Polish revolutionaries. Seward did communicate to his American Ambassador in Paris that he regarded the Poles as "the gallant nation whose wrongs, whose misfortunes, and whose valor have so deeply excited universal sympathy in Europe."

The Czar's government at the time was regarded by European democrats as the ultimate guarantee to the monarchical regimes of Western Europe against the threat of democracy. The Russian government had willingly played such a role in acting to suppress the Revolutions of 1848.

Blinn's description of the position that Seward took on behalf of the Lincoln administration is worth quoting, though, for the light it sheds on the American stance toward interventions in European civil conflicts:

Seward's reply to the French invitation to the United States to join in the proposed intervention, written on May 11, 1863, was very skillful. After expressing appreciation of Napoleon's considerations and motives, Seward declared his belief that the czar's enlightened and humane character would lead him to receive the proposal "with all the favor that is consistent with the general welfare of the great state over which he presides with such eminent wisdom and moderation". He then pointed out that, despite the favor with which we regarded Napoleon's suggestion, there was an insurmountable difficulty in the way of our active co-operation with France, Austria, and Great Britain. Declaring that the builders of the American republic had at once been recognized as political reformers, that revolutionaries in every country had hailed them as such and consequently looked to the United States for effective sympathy if not for active support and patronage, Seward pointed out that soon after the adoption of the Constitution we had to consider "to what extent we could with propriety. safety and beneficence, intervene, either by alliance or concerted action with friendly powers or otherwise, in the political affairs of foreign states". An urgent appeal for such aid and sympathy had early been made on behalf of France, and so deeply did this touch the heart of the American people, that only the "deference they cherished to the counsels of the Father of our Country, who was then in the fullness of his unapproachable moral greatness, reconciled them to the stern decision that, in view of the location of this republic, the characters, habits and sentiments of the constituent parts, and especially its complex yet unique and very popular constitution, the American people must be content to recommend the cause of human progress by the wisdom with which they should exercise the powers of self-government, forbearing at all times, and in every way, from foreign alliances, intervention, and interference". Although Washington had recognized that the time might come when, American institutions being firmly established and working with complete success, "we might safely and perhaps beneficially take part in the consultations held by foreign states for the common advantage of the nations", Seward recalled that we had on frequent occasions declined such offers and declared that the decisions of the government each time had been approved by the deliberate judgment of the American people. "Our policy of non-intervention, straight, absolute and peculiar as it may seem to other nations, has thus become a traditional one, which could not be abandoned without the most urgent occasion, amounting to a manifest necessity. Certainly it could not be wisely departed from at this moment, when the existence of a local, although as we trust only a transient disturbance, deprives the government of the counsel of a portion of the American people, to whom so wide a departure from the settled policy of the country must in any case be deeply interesting."

Tags: civil war, harold blinn, us civil war, william seward

John Hope Franklin's Reconstruction after the Civil War

One serious lack in the way many people in the US learn about wars through various media is that they so often concentrate on the wars themselves, the battles and the immediate military concerns. While they often lack much historical context on what led up to the war and what followed.

I would guess that this is more true with the American Civil War than with any other.

And in many ways, getting a realistic understanding of the Civil War also involves getting a reality-based understanding of the postwar Reconstruction period. Because much of the subsequent narrative about the Civil War that became familiar to several generations of white Americans all over the country has its roots in Reconstruction and the "Redemption" movement that overthrew it by means fair and foul.

John Hope Franklin's popular history Reconstruction after the Civil War was first published in 1964 and reissued in an updated 2nd edition, on which this post is based. Franklin's book proves once again that "popular" history doesn't have to be superficial or shallow.

Franklin gives a good account of initial problem caused by President Andrew Johnson's relatively mild approach to Reconstruction. Johnson in some ways was a good Jacksonian Democrat. Franklin is relatively generous to Johnson:

Johnson's position was misunderstood, even in those early days. As a Unionist he was not anti-Southern. He subscribed to the honored Southern dogma of states' rights, but he hated the planter class whose reckless policies he believed to be responsible for secession and war. Before the war he had not been anti-slavery. He owned eight slaves and held no racial views that could be regarded as unorthodox in the South. Although a Democrat, he was more devoted to Lincoln and to what he believed were Lincoln's policies than many staunch Republicans. It was his hypersensitivity and obstinacy that caused him to miss entirely the great lessons of Lincoln's statesmanship - flexibility, adjustment, compassion.

But even an generous attitude toward that failed President doesn't make Franklin miss the effects of his 1865-1867 program on making it much more difficult to restore the Southern states as newly democratized entities, with African-American citizens enjoying the equal rights that were newly guaranteed to them by the Constitution.

As early as 1866, major anti-black riots in Memphis (April 30-May 2) and New Orleans (July 30) were sending out screaming warning signals of what lay in store, and heralded the failure of Johnson's policy of putting minimal political restrictions of former Confederate officers and civil office-holders. In the Memphis race riot, 46 blacks were killed and 80 wounded. One of the city newspapers, the Avalanche, proclaimed a new day for white people: "Soon we shall have no more black troops among us. Thank heaven the white race are once more rulers of Memphis."

The New Orleans race riot killed around 34 blacks and wounded over 200. One white man was injured in the Memphis incident. Four whites died in New Orleans and ten were injured.

After the Radical Republicans gained in the 1866 Congressional elections, they began taking more Congressional control of Reconstruction, beginning with the Reconstruction Act of March 2, 1867. Under Congressional Reconstruction, as it has often been called, Congress required the reorganization of many Southern state governments and better protection for black citizens. There were also attempts to address the pressing problems of educating the former slaves and their children - a serious problem in that the Southern slavery laws strictly forbade teaching slaves to read.

Some basic mistakes were made on the Union side in managing the termination of hostilities and the aftermath. One of the most serious was allowing decommissioned Confederate soldiers to retain their weapons, many of which would later be used to attack blacks, Republicans and democratically-elected state governments.

Johnson's mild Reconstruction plan was another. As Franklin relates, the South had been devastated by the war and there was little spirit among white Southerners immediately after the conflict's end to mount resistance. Swiftly empowering former slaveowners and former Confederate officials restored their spirits as well as their practical ability to organize anti-democracy activities, which were essentially synonymous with anti-black and anti-Republican Party activities.

Not providing sufficient federal troops to maintain law and order in the South was also a serious error. Franklin makes an important point. It's true that in the mid-1870s, when violent Redeemer resistance came out into the open and reached its zenith, too few federal soldiers were available in the South to maintain the democratic state governments in office.

But the initial role of the occupying forces was also very limited, far more so than Lost Cause demonology would have us believe, as Franklin explains:

The strength and influence of the military forces in the South between 1867 and 1877 have frequently been exaggerated. Even during those years the opponents of congressional reconstruction in their bitter tirades sought to convey the impression that hordes of federal soldiers were stalking through the land on a permanent "Sherman's March." They made the most out of incidents in which persons seeking to obstruct the execution of the congressional program were tried before military tribunals. They were forced to admit, however, that not all the federal troops were reprehensible characters. Some local observers were inclined to think that some members of the army of occupation were too friendly. In South Carolina, for example, the troops were regular army men who got along well with the local population. If anything, they tended to favor the whites and oppress the blacks.

Federal troops were present in the former Confederate states to assist the commanding generals in the task of setting up the new governments. Once this was done, they retired to a less conspicuous role or were withdrawn altogether. As the reconstruction governments became established, the commanding generals relinquished their authority. This usually occurred shortly after the first general election following the ratification of the state constitution or shortly after the inauguration of the new government. Despite the claims of contemporary opponents of Radical Reconstruction or their modern followers, federal military activity in the former Confederacy during the period was negligible. (my emphasis)

Another myth of the Lost Cause dogma is that of the "Black and Tan" state governments, i.e., oppressive and massively corrupt state governments supposedly dominated by vindictive blacks and Radical Republicans. Franklin also debunks that claim:

No group has attracted more attention or has had its role more misrepresented by contemporaries and by posterity than Southern blacks during Radical Reconstruction. The period has been described as one of "Negro rule," as one of gross perfidy with blacks as the central figures, since the reins of misgovernment were supposedly held by black militiamen. Blacks were not in control of the state governments at any time anywhere in the South. They held public office and, at times, played important parts in the public life of their respective states. But it would be stretching a point to say that their roles were dominant, and it would be hopelessly distorting the picture to suggest that they ruled the South. It was in South Carolina that they had the greatest numerical strength. In the first legislature there were eighty-seven blacks and forty whites. From the outset, however, whites controlled the state senate and in 1874 the lower house as well. At all times the governor was white. There were two black lieutenant governors, Alonzo J. Ransier in 1870 and Richard H. Gleaves in 1872. There were other black leaders. Samuel J. Lee was speaker of the House in 1872 and Robert B. Elliot in 1874. From 1868 to 1872 Francis L. Cardozo was secretary of state, and from 1872 to 1876 he was state treasurer. Jonathan J. Wright, a member of the Pennsylvania bar before coming to South Carolina, sat on the state supreme court for seven years, but he was the only African American to achieve a judicial position of that level in any state. (my emphasis)

Franklin devotes considerable attention to the violence directed at black citizens by vigilante/terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan.

But he also stresses the important point that not all Reconstruction governments were overthrown by the massive violence employed by the Redeemers in Mississippi in 1875, and in Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina in the following year. Though violence against blacks and Republicans was a pervasive problem in the South, some of the Radical governments were expelled by relying primarily on peaceful means, albeit with a background of violent threat and intimidation from terrorist groups.

And, although the period of Radical Reconstruction is typically taken to be the decade of 1867-1877, Franklin writes:

Still another widely held misconception is that the reconstruction period was of long duration. It is usually regarded as having lasted for at least a decade, and most of the criticism of the "excesses" of Radical Reconstruction implies that these excesses were all the more unbearable because of this "long" period of time. The contention is that not until Hayes withdrew the troops in 1877 was Radical Reconstruction "overthrown" and the Southern states "redeemed." The fact is that few troops were left in the South in 1877 and only three states could be considered "unredeemed" by this time. When James M. Smith, Democrat, was inaugurated as governor of Georgia in 1871, he spoke of the "long and cheerless night of misrule" from which the people of Georgia were emerging. This "unhappy" period had lasted for less than two years, a portion of which time the legislature was controlled by Democrats and all of which time native whites, with strong Confederate sympathies, were dominant. (my emphasis)

This habit of white folks whining in exaggerated and often plain dishonest ways was regrettably to become as much as Southern specialty and fried chicken in subsequent decades.

The period from their admission as "reconstructed" states to the time of Democratic or Conservative victories may be regarded as the maximum extent of so-called Radical control of the former Confederate states. While these periods varied from state to state, they were less than a decade except in Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana. A recent historian of reconstruction observed that Virginia "escaped simon-pure Radical rule entirely." Indeed, the Radicals, feuding among themselves, were unable to win the first election after the readmission of Virginia, with the result that the Democrats became the controlling party in 1870, the very year of readmission. In North Carolina the Radicals lost their grip in 1870, after two years of difficult and uncertain rule. In the same year, Tennessee went Conservative, ending a four-year period as the first state of the former Confederacy to be reconstructed. The Democrats won Texas in 1873 and Alabama and Arkansas in the following year. Mississippi capitulated in 1875. Thus, within ten years after the surrender at Appomattox—including two years of native white rule - eight states had been "redeemed," and their redemption had been effected within a range of a few months to seven years after their readmission to the Union. (my emphasis)

The Presidential election of 1876 marks a convenient turning point to peg when the decisive turn occurred in which white Northerners and white Southerners reconciled among themselves at the expense of African-American rights.

Lost Cause advocates still make much of the racism of Northern whites during this period. In fact, its always been part of the Lost Cause schtick to claim that race relations were at least as contentious in non-Southern states as in the former Confederacy. Hail, boy, blacks and whites git along much better here in the South as they do in most parts of the country! Or so the story goes.

What is true is that whites as a group sold out their African-American fellow citizens:

Acceptance [of the only quasi-democratic "Redeemer" state governments] involved, most of all, Northern acquiescence in the Southern view of blacks. Southerners dominated all expressions of opinion regarding the qualities and characteristics of blacks. As Sterling Brown has observed, the "authoritative" white Southern writers described them in seven categories: the Contented Slave, the Wretched Freedman, the Comic Negro, the Brute Negro, the Tragic Mulatto, the Local Color Negro, and the Exotic Primitive. These writers aggressively advanced the concept of the inherent inferiority of blacks. And, as Rayford Logan has pointed out, Northerners seemed quite content with the white Southerners' contentions in this regard, thus giving the Lost Cause a notable victory in "the market place of free ideas" in the North. (my emphasis)

The result of the 1876 Presidential election was in dispute, with Republican Rutherford Hayes eventually gained 185 Electoral College to Democrat Samuel Tilden. Not for the last time, the uncertainty involved disputed electors in Florida; South Carolina and Lousiana also had disputed electors in 1876.

The resolution of the election involved a notorious deal called the Wormley House Bargain, in which the Democrats agreed to let the Republicans keep the Presidency if the Republicans agreed to withdraw all remaining federal troops from the South. But Franklin argues, following C. Vann Woodward, that the importance of that deal in ending Reconstruction have been exaggerated. The Reconstruction governments had all be "redeemed" (by whites) by that time. Tilden was also committed to withdrawing the federal troops, so there didn't need to be a Republican President to accomplish that.

The sweetener for the deal was an agreement by the Republicans to support federal subsidies for Southern railway routes. The Southerners also agreed to vote for James Garfield for Speaker of the House. Both pieces of the bargain fell through when it came time to deliver. In any case, "Radical Reconstruction was no more."

Tags: civil war, john hope franklin, reconstruction, us civil war

The legend of black Confederate soldiers

Did Southern African-Americans fight for Jefferson Davis and the slaveowners Republic he led?

Historian James McPherson did an anthology back in 1965 of contemporary documents on The Negro's Civil War - How American Negroes Felt and Acted During the War for the Union. (I'm working from the 1991 edition.) One section addresses the issue of African-American Confederate soldiers, which has become one of the sillier pieces of neo-Confederate pseudohistory with claims that large numbers of African-American Southerners fought for the Confederacy.

The kernel of reality in the neo-Confederate scam is that the Confederate Congress passed and Confederate President Jefferson Davis signed a law that would allow the enlistment of black troops to the Confederate Army. Davis signed it on March 13, 1865; Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union Gen. Ulysses Grant at Appomatox Courthouse on April 9, 1865, less than a month later.

McPherson writes, "The 'Negro Soldier Law' was the dying gesture of a crumbling nation," the "nation" in this case being the Confederate States of America.

Some advocates of enlisting black soldiers had suggested that they be promised their freedom in return for serving in the Confederate Army. But the law that was passed specified that slaves who became Rebel soldiers could not be emancipated "except by consent of the owners and of the States in which they may reside."

Not surprisingly, it came to nothing. McPherson notes, "A few companies of black soldiers were enrolled in Richmond and elsewhere, but before any regiments could be organized Richmond had fallen and the war was over."

McPherson includes two statements advocating inducting slaves into the Confederate Army, one from Gen. Patrick Cleburne of the Army of Tennessee, the other from Judah Benjamin, the Confederate Secretary of War. Both of them advocated granting freedom to any slave who agreed to enlist, a course rejected by eventual Negro Soldier Law past in the last weeks of the war.

McPherson cites a letter from Gen. Howell Cobb from January 8, 1865, that expressed why a slaveowners republic looked so dimly on the idea:

... the proposition to make soldiers of our slaves is the most pernicious idea that has been suggested since the war began. ... My first hour of despondency will be the one in which that policy shall be adopted. You cannot make soldiers of slaves, nor slaves of soldiers. ... The day you make soldiers of them is the beginning of the end of the [Confederate] revolution. If slaves will make good soldiers our whole theory of slavery is wrong. (my emphasis)

As McPherson points out:

But even as late as January 1865, there was still considerable opposition in the South to the idea of arming the slaves. After all, the Confederacy had gone to war to defend a social and political system based on slavery, and to accept [Judah] Benjamin's proposal would be to subvert the very cause for which the South was fighting. (my emphasis)

Yep. That's sums it up well.

What is particular intriguing to me about the pleas from Benjamin and Clebourne is their recognition of how effective the Emancipation Proclamation and the Union's arming of black soldiers had been. Benjamin wrote in December of 1864:

The negroes will certainly be made to fight against us if not armed for our defense. The drain of that source of our strength is steadily fatal, and irreversible by any other expedient than that of arming the slaves as an auxiliary force.

Once word about the Emancipation Proclamation got out to the slaves in the South, large numbers of them began deserting their former plantations. Even before that times, slaves in the vicinity of the Union Army would come acroos the Federal lines to seek refuge with the American troops.

When large numbers of slaves started leaving the plantations, that in itself was a severe blow to the Confederate economy, which was heavily dependent on slave labor.

Clebourne's report is even more specific, and it was considerably earlier than the plea from Benjamin (Dec. 1964) and Robert E. Lee's recommendation of it as a desperation measure (Jan. 1865). Clebourne's report was from January 2, 1964:

... slavery, from being one of our chief sources of strength at the commencement of the war, has now become, in a military point of view, one of our chief sources of weakness. ...

Apart from the assistance that home and foreign prejudice against slavery has given to the North, slavery is a source of great strength to the enemy in a purely military point of view, by supplying him with an army from our granaries; but it is our most vulnerable point, a continued embarrassment, and in some respects an insidious weakness. ... All along the lines slavery is comparatively valueless to us for labor, but of great and increasing worth to the enemy for information. It is an omnipresent spy system, pointing out our valuable men to the enemy, revealing our positions, purposes, and resources. ... (my emphasis)

For once, this wwas not just chronic Southern white paranoia asserting itself. Slaves did act as Union spies.

He further wrote of the virtues of his proposal to enlist slaves with a guarantee of freedom if they serve in the army:

The measure will at one blow strip the enemy of foreign sympathy and assistance, and transfer them to the South; it will dry up two of his three sources of recruiting; it will take from his negro army the only motive it could have to fight against the South, and will probably cause much of it to desert over to us. ... It would instantly remove all the vulnerability, embarrassment, and inherent weakness which result from slavery. The approach of the enemy would no longer find every household surrounded by spies. ... There would be no recruits awaiting the enemy with open arms, no complete history of every neighborhood with ready guides, no fear of insurrection in the rear. ... Apart from all other aspects of the question, the necessity for more fighting men is upon us. We can only get a sufficiency by making the negro share the danger and hardships of the war. ... (my emphasis)

The General even recognizes the fighting abilities of African-American Union soldiers, though his praise isn't what you would call wholehearted: "the experience of this war has been so far that half-trained negroes have fought as bravely as many other half-trained Yankees."

Tags: civil war, neo-confederate, us civil war

The heritage of Southern Unionism

I just came across this article about Southern Unionists, which talks about the number of Southerners who served in the Union Army during the American Civil War, "The Confederate Spin on Winfield Scott and George Thomas", by Francis MacDonnell Civil War History Dec 1998 (print edition). Lost Cause true believers like to refer to the Civil War as "the War Between the States", to emphasize their argument that the war was not a civil war involving classes between different sections of the same society, but rather a war of one nation (the US) against another (the Confederacy).

Gen. Winfield Scott was a hero of the Mexican War who was in command of US forces at the time Southern states started seceding, beginning in 1860. Both he and Gen. George Thomas stayed loyal to the United States and refused to join with the secessionists.

MacDonnell looks at Confederate propaganda directed at two prominent Southern Unionists and at how such propaganda directed against particular individuals like them helped fuel public hatred and violence against other Southern Unionists:

The consequences of Confederate spin often proved more grave for ordinary Southerners who stood by the Union. Secessionists harmed Scott and Thomas's reputations but not their persons. Enraged Confederate soldiers shot dead helpless black men, refusing them the right to become prisoners, at Olustee, Florida; Poison Springs, Arkansas; Fort Pillow, Tennessee; Plymouth, North Carolina; Petersburg, Virginia; and Saltville, Virginia. While longstanding racial hatred clearly played the most important part in such excesses, tacit encouragement from the Davis administration and Confederate press also contributed to the violence. The Confederate government and newspapers characterized freedmen in Union arms as criminal insurrectionaries not entitled to the usual protections guaranteed by the laws of war. White Unionists also found their lives in jeopardy. For example, in Gainesville, Texas, vigilantes hanged at least forty-two suspected Unionists; at Fort Pillow, Nathan Bedford Forrest's men killed white Southerners, so-called "home-made Yankees" in the Thirteenth West Tennessee Cavalry; at Laurel Springs, North Carolina, Confederate soldiers murdered fifteen Unionists ranging in age from thirteen to sixty; in Kinston, North Carolina, George Pickett ordered twenty-two North Carolinians captured in Union uniforms hanged for desertion.

After the war, devotees of the Lost Cause pointed to Lee's fidelity to Virginia as unmistakeable proof that an honorable man's primary loyalty belonged to his state rather than his nation. As Alan Nolan has observed, Lee helped sustain such views by describing his decision to fight for the South as a matter of duty and compulsion. Yet raw numbers suggest that Southerners who made the "other choice" greatly affected the course of the War. Ninety to one hundred thousand whites and approximately 98,000 blacks from Confederate states entered the Federal ranks, making a total of over 188,000 militant Southern Unionists. Scholars estimate overall enlistments in the Confederate Army at between 750,000 and 900,000 men. Thus, as many as one out of five Southerners who fought in the Civil War were Union soldiers. As Richard Current has noted, the 90,000 to 100,000 whites who enlisted in the federal army constituted a double loss for the Confederacy, denying desperately needed troops for the secessionist cause and at the same time strengthening the invading yankees. Given the obvious menace posed by internal division, one can hardly be surprised at the industriousness with which Confederate publicists worked to defame Unionists, especially two of the most consequential ones. (my emphasis)

Another thing to keep in mind when hearing about neo-Confederates claiming that celebrating the Confederacy and Jim Crow racism is just a matter of "honoring their heritage".

The heritage of the patriotic Americans who fought for their country instead of the slaveowners revolt certainly deserves to be honored. The Confederate cause does not. Thomas' comments from 1867 are worth noting:

At the start of the war, Winfield Scott was the most celebrated Southerner to side with the Union. By the conflict's end, that distinction belonged to George Thomas. Thomas knew that his decision to bear arms against the South had subjected him to savage attacks by supporters of secession. In a March 2, 1867, piece in the Army and Navy Journal, he expressed anger at the way former Confederates had successfully stigmatized Unionism: "[l]oyalists to the whole country are called d--d Yankees and traitors, and over the whole great crime with its accursed record of slaughtered heroes, patriots murdered because of their true-hearted love of country, widowed wives and orphaned children, and prisoners of war slain amid such horrors as find no parallel in the history of the world, they are trying to throw the gloss of respectability, and are thrusting with contumely and derision from their society the men and women who would not join hands with them in their work of ruining their country." Thomas wrote out of personal experience, for his own actions and character were the subject of a vicious campaign of rumor-mongering, distortions, and lies. Such attacks continued, even intensified, after his death. (my emphasis)

Tags: civil war, george thomas, robert e lee, us civil war, winfield scott

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

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 20: More on the Dred Scott decision

There have been a number of posts recently at Jack Balkin's Balkinization blog related to the Dred Scott decision. The posters there are law professors and they don't always explain the cases they mention for us lay people. But there is a lot of interesting informtion there. Here are some of the posts:

Andrew Jackson and the Constitution by Mark Graber 04/09/07:

The University of Kansas Press has just published Gerard Magliocca’s, Andrew Jackson and the Constitution, a wonderful study of the constitutional politics of Jacksonian America. ... Jackson was our first imperial president and fashioned precedents that still structure separation of powers struggles in the United States. Persons seeking to understand President Bush must understand Andrew Jackson, and this book is the place to start.

Any suggestion of kinship between Andrew Jackson's Presidency and Dear Leader Bush's regime make me want to retch. But we'll leave that aside for now, even though my keyboard may need to be cleaned now.

... Magliocca details how the antislavery turn to immediacy was inspired by the treatment of the Cherokees during the 1830s and that one central purpose of the 14th Amendment was to prevent a repeat of the Trail of Tears. He further explains how Marshall’s understanding of national sovereignty and the rights of tribal members were core commitments of the National Republic[an] regime and would become core commitments of the Reconstruction Republican regime as well. There may be a bit of a romance here, but John Bingham’s repeated references to both Worcester and the fate of the Cherokees during his 1860 speeches make clear that the revival of Worcester was (almost) as central to the Republican constitutional universe as the repudiation of Dred Scott. The latter, Magliocca points out, was (almost) as much an expression of Jacksonian constitutional commitments as an expression of proslavery constitutionalism.(my emphasis)

Taney as Imperialist (and Racist) by Mark Graber 03/26/07:

Jacksonians before the Civil War justified expansion by asserting the virtues an extended white republic. White persons who moved into the territories were fully protected by the Bill of Rights, in this view, partly because the whole point of expansion was to increase the land available for free white settlement and partly because Jacksonians had other doctrinal means for fencing out non-whites. Put differently, Taney's claim that the constitution follows the flag in Dred Scott was connected to American expansionism as well as American racism and American slavery, but American expansionism was closely connected to American racism and slavery. Putting African-Americans aside, Taney and others had few qualms about the number of native-Americans killed to expand the scope of white liberty.

Should The Civil Rights Cases be cited? And can Roger Taney get an honest hearing from Justice Breyer? by Sandy Levinson 03/26/07

Apologizing for Slavery by Mark Graber 03/20/07:

More broadly, the contemporary historian consistently finds that you smell slavery’s influence no matter where you scratch in antebellum America. To take an example from the Dred Scott text, the House of Representatives, Presidency, and federal court system were structured in ways thought to magnify the influence of slaveholders. Similar studies have been done of South Carolina and Virginia.

Is Dred Scott uncitable? by Jack Balkin 03/26/07

Why Would An Inferior Court Judge Ever Cite Dred Scott? by Jack Balkin 03/27/07

Those previous two Balkin posts have to do with this article: A deplorable citation by Gregory Wallance The National Law Journal 03/26/07. Wallance writes:

A few weeks ago, in Parker v. District of Columbia, a federal court of appeals struck down as unconstitutional a gun control law prohibiting possession of "functional firearms" in the owner's home. In its opinion, the majority cited the U.S. Supreme Court's disastrous Dred Scott case of 1857. Whatever the merits of its opinion on gun control, the majority's undoubtedly well-intentioned citation resurrects a shameful ruling.

Not surprisingly, the Parker v. District of Columbia ruling broke new ground, as explained in this statement from the Bradey Center to Prevent Gun Violence: Parker v. District of Columbia, 311 F.Supp.2d 103 (D.D.C. 2004); statement undated but was apparently released in March 2007. The statement observes:

The ruling represents the first time in American history that a Federal appeals court has struck down a gun law on Second Amendment grounds. While acknowledging that "reasonable restrictions" to promote "the government's interest in public safety" are permitted by the Second Amendment, the two-judge majority substituted its policy preferences for those of the elected representatives of the District of Columbia.

Wallance also summarizes Dred Scott and its effects at the time:

In a country that was a tinderbox, the Supreme Court had struck a match. Dred Scott hurled the nation down the path to the Civil War. The Dred Scott case was reversed only by the deaths of 600,000 American soldiers. ...

In fact, there is no aspect of Taney's opinion that deserves respect, let alone a citation by a court regarded in importance as second only to the Supreme Court. By 1857, according to Don E. Fehrenbacher, in The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics, Taney, a former slaveholder from Maryland, was a "bitter sectionalist, seething with anger at Northern insult and Northern aggression." Although the case should have been resolved on narrow, technical grounds, Taney went out of his way to write a sweeping opinion that resolved every issue affecting slavery in favor of the South. In doing so, he mischaracterized outright provisions of the Constitution that addressed slavery.

A cascade of Northern anger descended on Taney after the first newspaper accounts of the ruling as read out loud by Taney in the Supreme Court. Taney instructed the clerk of the Supreme Court not to release the written opinion to anyone, even the dissenting justices. He then rewrote the opinion to respond to his infuriated critics, expanding its length by nearly a third. We will never know if the passage cited by the Parker majority was written when a bitter, resentful chief justice found himself besieged in a political firestorm. One Northern newspaper editorialized that Taney's opinion deserves no more respect than "what might be obtained in a Washington City barroom." That observation is still true. (my emphasis)

Tags: civil war, dred scott decision, jack balkin, mark graber, sandy levinson, us civil war

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 19: The Slave Power

One of the more informative histories I've come across on pre-Civil War politics is Leonard Richards' The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780-1860 (2000).

Richards gives a political history of the strength of the slaveowning states, including a lot of attention to the effect of the Constitution's "three-fifths" clause on boosting Southern clout. The three-fifths clause is in Article 1, Section 2:

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons. (my emphasis)

The phrase "other Persons" referred to slaves. The slaves, of course, could not vote. But the white voters in the slave states got additional Congressmen based on the three-fifths rule and therefore gained a voting advantage in Congress. As disputes over slavery became more frequent over the decades, the three-fifths advantage came to be resented more and more by people in nonslaveholding states.

Richards analyzes various key decisions around slavery, including the Missouri Compromise of 1820. The gist of that agreement is that Congress, under the crucial leadership of House Speaker Henry Clay of Kentucky, admitted Missouri to the Union as a slave state with Main admitted as a free state at the same time, while permanently prohibiting slavery in all of the Lousisian Purchase area north of the 36-30' line, except for Missouri itself.

Richards argues that without the three-fifths advantage in Congressional representation, the South could not have won Missouri's admission as a slave state. He refers to the extra representation as "slave seats":

[W]ithout the South's seventeen slave seats, the liklihood of Clay putting together a three-vote Majority would have been slim at best. Historians later forgot this fact; the restrictionists who fought the battle never did. It thus became one of the crucial ingredients in the development of the Slave Power thesis.

Richards looks at a number of different controversies to measure the South's political strength in Congress, including in addition to the Missouri Compromise: Indian removal in 1830; the "Pinckney gag" of 1836; the 1840 gag rule; Texas in 1845; the Wilmot Proviso in 1847, which was connected to the "Three Million Bill"; the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850; the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854; and, the Montgomery-Crittenden Amendment of 1858.

Although it didn't involve a Congressional vote, Richards also emphasizes the significance of the Dred Scott decision in early 1847, which the Court delivered two days after James Buchanan's inaguration as President.

The Indian removal act of 1830 is something the Lost Cause advocates prefer to ignore altogether, even though there was a very clear sectional alignment with Souterners voting one way and Northerners another, more so than with the Nullification Controversy that also occurred during Andrew Jackson's Presidency. It also wasn't about slavery, a case with the Lost Causers try to make with the Nullification Controversy. The main reason, I'm sure, is that in the case of Indian removal, the Southerners were aligned in favor of using national power to override any consideration of states' rights, which the Lost Cause mythology holds up as the cause of the Civil War. In their version, the South seceeded to protect states rights, not slavery. But during the Congressional debate over the Indian removal bill, the Northern Whigs mocked the Democrats for overriding states rights, which they defended on other issues.

In his discussion of the Dred Scott decision, which ruled that Congress had no authority to ban slavery from territories, it was widely believed that the Court was willing to allow slaveowners to bring slaves into free states. The suit of Dred Scott and his wife for freedom was based on their temporary residence in free states, but the ruling didn't apply to that argument, because it held that Scott had no legal standing to bring the suit. The Buchanan administration's official paper (i.e., a privately held paper that reflected the administration's viewpoint), the Washington Union, editorialized on 11/17/1857 that it was unconstitutional for Northern states to ban slavery even within their own borders!

The Lemmon Slave Case by John Gordan III (in the Bulletin of The Historical Society of the
Courts of the State of New York; Issue #4)gives an account of this little-known case. Gordan quotes the 03/09/1857 edition of the Albany Evening Journal just after Justice Roger Taney delivered the Supreme Court's most infamous verdict in its history with the Dred Scott decision:

The Lemmon Case is on its way to this corrupt fountain of law. Arrived there, a new shackle for the North will be handed to the servile Supreme Court, to rivet upon us. A decision of that case is expected which shall complete the disgraceful labors of the Federal Judiciary in behalf of Slavery - a decision that slaves can lawfully be held in free States, and Slavery be fully maintained here in New York through the sanctions of "property" contained in the Constitution. That decision will be rendered. The Slave breeders will celebrate it as the crowning success of a complete conquest.

Gordan also quotes this joint resolution of the New York State Senate and Assembly asserting the right of their state to ban slavery against a possible decision by the Taney Supreme Court to override "states rights" to prevent states from banning slavery:

Resolved, That this State will not allow Slavery within her borders, in any form, or under any pretence, or for any time.

Resolved, That the Supreme Court of the United States, by reason of a majority of the Judges thereof, having identified it with a sectional and aggressive party, has impaired the confidence and respect of the people of this State.

Resolved, That the Governor of this State be, and he hereby is, respectfully requested to transmit a copy of this report, the law above mentioned, and these resolutions, to the respective Governors of the States of this Union.

The New York Court of Appeals decided in favor of New York's right to ban slavery in March of 1860. The owner appealed to the US Supreme Court. But, as Gordan quotes William Wiecek:

The owner appealed the decision to the United States Supreme Court, and
antislavery propagandists panicked, fearing that a reversal of the New York
judgment would establish slavery in the free states. The onset of war aborted this
possibility, and Lemmon today is forgotten ...

Well, not entirely forgotten. Readers of Old Hickory Weblog know about it!

Wiecek's article, for the really curious, is, "Somerset: Lord Mansfield and the Legitimacy of Slavery in the Anglo-American World," University of Chicago Law Review, 42 (1974), 86-146. Wiecek there notes that Abraham Lincoln warned of the danger in the Taney Court deciding on the Lemmon case in his now-legendary debates with Stephen Douglass in 1858. He quotes Lincoln at Springfield:

Put this and that together, and we have another nice little niche, which we may, ere long, see filled with another Supreme Court decision, declaring that the Constitution of the United States does not permit a State to exclude slavery from its limits.

And at Galesburg, he continued to warn of a proslavery line of thinking that went like this:

Nothing in the Constitution or laws of any State can destroy a right distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution of the United States. The right of property in a slave is distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution of the United States. Therefore, nothing in the Constitution or laws of any State can destroy the right of property in a slave.

And, as Wiecek comments:

The appeal of the Lemmon case to the United States Supreme Court seemed to abolitionists just the vehicle that Lincoln and others had predicted would be used to force slavery into the free states. Though the case was never decided, Lincoln and the abolitionists were not in the grip of hysteria when they voiced their warning. Taney and his pro-slavery colleagues might well have resolved the conflicts debate engendered by Somerset by annihilating the entire antislavery position.

Somerset was an older British court decision that greatly influenced American legal thinking on slavery. Or, as Wiecek puts it, it "became a basic text of antislavery constitutionalism."

Leonard Richards' methodology in his book focuses on quantifying the Congressional votes and analyzing which groups in the Democratic Party in particular were voting with the slaveowners.

His book is informative and well-written. He marshals his evidence carefully, though I'm not familiar enough with the details of the Congressional votes to critically evaluate the specifics of a lot of his arguments. He does a good job of comgining his careful quantitative analysis with interesting sketches of some of the personalities involved. It was also very interesting to me that California's first two Senators were pro-Southern "doughfaces", even though California came into the Union as a free state.

A review of Richards' book is also available at: Reviewed by William L Barney H-SHEAR (October, 2001).

Tags: civil war, dred scott decision, leonard richards, lemmon slave case, somerset, us civil war

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

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

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

But Foner gets this right:

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

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

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

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

Foner also writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 17: The General on Confederate-American pride

Today's Confederate Heritage post is dedicated to the General, Jesus' General that is. The General runs one of the best satirical sites I've ever seen, focused on the crackpottery of the Radical Right, which is becoming increasingly synonomous with today's authoritarian Republican Party.

In Mainstreaming Our Confederate-American Heritage 04/16/07, the General sends a letter to Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, one of the leading Christian Right organizations right now, in the orbit of James Dobson:

As much as I enjoyed the part of your "Reclaiming America for Christ" sermon where you took Islamunism to task for being a very violent religion, I found the last part, the piece centered around the story of Phineas, to be much more uplifting. It's a story we just don't hear enough in these politically correct times. Thankfully, people like you aren't afraid to hold up the story of Phineas, and his use of impalement as a means of combating miscegenation, as an example of what Christianism should be and what American Christianism is becoming.

Sure there were others who preached the gospel of Phineas before you - good Confederate-Americans and heroes of the Heartland like Joseph Paul Franklin, Eric Rudolph, Byron De La Beckwith, Buford Furrow, and Paul Hill - but none of them had the kind of standing you have. You're the only person who has the ability and the will to take the Phineas Priesthood into the mainstream.

In a follow-up comment, My response to the Army of God 04/14/07, he amends one part of his previous day's post, directed to some rightwinger who left a comment:

Thank you for leaving a comment on my Mainstreaming Our Confederate -American Heritage post. You're absolutely right. I erred in labeling Eric Rudolph a terrorist. It was a typo. I meant to call him a Hero of the Glorious Conservative Christian Cultural Revolution. While I freely admit that I'm a terrible typist, I have no idea how I could have gotten so many letters wrong - that is, I have no explanation other than it must have been the work of Satan, or as Tommy Thompson might claim in a friendly, respectful, and complimentary kind of way, the Jews.

Fortunately, my readers are all good god-fearing people. They understood what I meant. They know how I feel about Rudolf's war against Christianity's greatest enemy, the Olympics. They've witnessed my own anger over the blasphemy that is greco-roman wrestling, a "sport" that makes a mockery of the greatest of the ancient warrior traditions, Spartan-style wrestling, by requiring that the contestants be clothed and their Spears of Manly Domination remain sheathed.

Tags: civil war, neo-confederates, us civil war

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 16: Lost Cause issues

This older article which as of this writing is available online for free, The Cult of the Lost Cause by C. Vann Woodward New York Review of Books 09/25/1980 issue, covers some of the major issues that have been disputed over the antebellum history that led up to the Civil War.

Woodward is reviewing a collection of essays by the historian Kenneth Stampp, The Imperiled Union: Essays on the Background of the Civil War (). Using the language of battles, kind of a tongue-in-chief device that doesn't work entirely well, Woodward explains the basis of Stampp's eminence as an historian:

Nearly twenty-five years ago Stampp opened a reassessment of slavery with his book The Peculiar Institution. It challenged and reversed the view of slavery as essentially benign and the slaves as largely contented, stressed the hardships and brutalities of the system, and emphasized the resistance short of rebellion that slaves used against their exploiters. Three years later, in 1959, Stanley M. Elkins presented a counter-thesis that pictured the typical plantation slave as a placid, childlike, and contented Sambo. He was no less oppressed than Stampp's slave, but he reacted to oppression by conforming to the submissive role demanded by his masters and partially internalizing their values. Contrasting Elkins's Sambo with Herbert Aptheker's earlier picture of the slave as an activist rebel, Stampp trains his guns on both. A few well-placed shots on misused sources and shaky scholarship dispose of the activist prototype, and the main critical barrage is concentrated on the Sambo image. Already weakened by other attacks during the past twenty years, the defenses of this hypothesis are left by Stampp in general disarray.

In addition to this running controversy over the nature of slavery and extent of slave resistance, Woodward also discusses a now largely-forgotten flap from the 1976os over a book called Time on the Cross, in which a couple of historians used a lot of quantitative data and crunched them with computers (something not so common at the time) to argue that slavery was far more economically efficient than historians had previously thought, and generally presented a benign and proslavery view of the Peculiar Institution. Since the authors had made some serious errors in their usage of data, the book was pretty much totally discredited.

Another long-running dispute that continues today is over the role of racism in the antebellum Republican Party. As Woodward observes, "The issue at stake here is how much wind the racism of Republicans and abolitionists takes out of the sails of their moral pretensions." This is actually a staple of Lost Cause advocates: "Look, Lincoln and the Repubicans said all this racist stuff. So they couldn't possibly have been really interested in freeing the slaves". This pitch mainly has plausibility because of the radical changes that have taken place in American whites' general views of race since the 1850s. The historical milestones in those changes were the Civil War itself, the Second World War and the postwar civil rights movement (which itself owed more to the experience of black veterans in the Second World War than is generally recognized). Yes, the public statements of antebellum Republicans and the general attitudes of Northern whites were racist. But white racism wasn't incompatible with a desire to get rid of slavery. In actual fact, opposition to slavery and opposition to the presence of blacks were often seen as the same thing. The search for purity and moral inspiration in the study of history is one of those "searching for a needle in a haystack" undertakings.

Another matter of dispute was Lincoln's position on the Fort Sumter defense. Woodward summarizes it this way:

The lines are more sharply drawn in the struggle over determining President Lincoln's intentions over relieving Fort Sumter and starting the war. On one side are those who call his policy war-like and describe it as cynically designed to maneuver the South into firing the first shot. His purpose was not only to unite the North but also to save his administration and his party. On the other side are those who believe his intentions were peaceful and that the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter represented a defeat instead of a victory for Lincoln's policy. Stampp takes a third position. Sumter was a triumph for Lincoln: "With consummate skill he had at once hamstrung the South, satisfied the great majority of Northerners that he contemplated no aggression, and yet conveyed his determination to defend the authority of the federal government." National interest was made to coincide with party and personal interest. Whether the South attacked or submitted, Lincoln's purpose would prevail. In the end, the Confederates like the Unionists chose war over submission.

On the question of the causes of war, Woodward notes that Stampp comes down solidly on the side of those who focus on the central conflict of slavery. In Woodward's words, "it all boiled down to the compulsions of proslavery and antislavery forces". Stampp rejected the arguments of both conservative historians that blamed the war on Northern fanatics or various and sundry other villains, and also the left historians who looked for other economic determinants.

This part of Woodward's comments on the issue of why the South lost the Civil War is well worth quoting:

Stampp offers the hypothesis that many southerners—"enough to affect the outcome of the war—who outwardly appeared to support the Confederate cause had inward doubts about its validity, and that, in all probability, some, perhaps unconsciously, welcomed its defeat." In the first place he believes there was no "genuine southern nationalism," and that except for slavery, southern whites had little in the way of distinctive culture, either in the stock of their population or in their political and religious beliefs. They were driven to secession not out of nationalism, but by fear and anger, as a last painful resort. Hating the Yankees was not the same as hating the Union. Indeed, they blamed the Yankees for driving them out of the Union and for questioning their fidelity to American traditions, which they vowed to give better protection than did the Union. Some of them seem to have regarded secession as a means of eventually negotiating a better position in the old Union than could be obtained by negotiating from within. Whether or not guilt and shame over slavery were so prevalent as Stampp suggests, defeat offered a way of unloading the burden and may help explain the readiness to accept abolition. Defeat also offered a way of returning to the Union. Some may have been persuaded that they had less to gain by winning than by losing. That was not a strong incentive for fighting on, nor was slavery ever an effective rallying cry. (my emphasis)

Tags: c vann woodward, civil war, kenneth stampp, us civil war

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 15: why the slaveowner had to "disbelieve the world out there"

The second volume of William Freehling's The Road to Disunion was published this year, this one called Secessionists Triumphant, 1854-1861. As in the first volume, Freehling focuses heavily on the social and political dynamics in the South. And there are several things he does well.

I particularly like the ways he shows in concrete examples how the contradiction between the dictatorial rule of the slaveowners over their slaves and the democratic ideals and practice of American democracy. The theoretical contradiction was obvious from the start. And if it weren't, British polemicists in particular were eager to call it to the Americans' attention.

One of the things he discusses at length in the first volume is the way in which the daily dynamics of plantantion life affected the general consciousness of the slaveowners in a way to make them suspicious and distrustful of white political opponents. In the second volume, he recaps some of that discussion.

He places this in the context of the concept of "Cuffee". In the followeing quotation, he summarizes that notion and how it affected slaveowners' consciousness. It strikes me that a reader not familiar with Freehling's work might be jolted a bit by the language, so let me emphasize that Freehling is in no way writing any kind of proslavery or pro-Confederate pitches. In this section, he's describing the way masters saw the world and how it led them to what in the 1960s might have been called a "false consciousness", a useful (though easily abused) concept:

The ideal master's most revealing word for the ideal servile was not "boy," not even "Sambo," but "Cuffee." Just cuff a childish black, declared the condescending word, and he will become that alleged impossibility, the consenting slave.

But most often, Cuffee's and Massa's role slipped, belied by duplicity on both sides of the color line. Dubious paternalists regularly faced exasperating slaves' lies, misunderstood orders, slovenly work, and dark glances. Occasionally pretenses altogether disappeared. In the nineteenth century, massive slave revolts almost never ripped apart the Massa-Cuffee charade. The last slave revolt, Nat Turner's in 1831, came to seem ages ago. But individual slaves who ambushed masters were not as rare. Individual slave runaways were not rare at all, especially in the South closest to the North.

Thus Massa faced the impossible, indispensable task of discovering whether Cuffee's act of consent was true blue. The underling here taught the superior that life was a charade, that professions of loyalty must be scrutinized, and that affectations of friendship must be doubted. Cuffee's lessons bore painfully on loyalty politics among whites. Southern politicians' extravagant professions of love for slavery might be a charade. As for northern declarations of true-blue friendship, who could trust a Yankee con man after experiencing Cuffee, the ultimate pretender? To live with Cuffee was to disbelieve the world out there. Thus did the master form the slave and the slave form the master, and the two together generate a hothouse culture, too dictatorial to be comfortably democratic. (my emphasis)

Tags: civil war, slavery, us civil war, william freehling

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 14: the "Slave Power"

The historian Richard Hofstadter is probably best known for his writing on the history of what we might call organized intolerance in America, of movements and parties like the Anti-Masonic Party of pre-Civil War days that practiced what he called "the paranoid style", a phrase which has long since become a normal part of the American political vocabulary.

Unfortunately, Hofstadter used the notion of the "Slave Power", a phrase that became increasingly common in Northern politics leading up to the Civil War, as an example of the "paranoid style", thus implying that it was creating an imaginary conspiracy.

But that's not how the concept of the Slave Power was used in politics. It referred to the organized block of Southern states and their representatives in Congress, as well as to the larger and undoubtedly real power of the slaveowners. A power which icnreasingly infringed on the freedom of white Americans, particularly in the South but increasingly all over the country.

The historian David Brion Davis, who is one of the leading historians of slavery, edited a collection published in 1971 called, The Fear of Conspiracy: Images of Un-American Subversion From the Revolution to the Present. In his commentary, Davis puts the notion of the Slave Power into a more realistic context than simply regarding it as an example of the paranoid style in politics:

As we have already suggested, the tangible conflict over slavery in the territories, which led to an escalation in southern demands and expectations, gave increasing substance to the northern view of a Slave Power conspiracy. It is significant that a northern newspaper editor like James Watson Webb, who in the 1830's denounced abolitionism as a subversive plot to amalgamate the races, eventually became a Free-Soiler and an avowed enemy of the Slave Power. Resistance to southern expansionism, especially if the expansionism resulted from a carefully conceived plot, had far more popular appeal than did social justice or racial equality. Yet in a deeper sense, the threat of a Slave Power may have been the only way to overcome the traditional conviction that Negro slavery was an "unfortunate necessity" which would hopefully disappear some day but which could never be openly discussed or tampered with. It can at least be argued that the conspiratorial mode of thought helped counteract public inertia and focus attention on the anomaly of slavery in a democratic society. In this respect the paranoid style was at least as "realistic" as were the earlier rationalizations which disguised a fundamental conflict in values. The image of the Slave Power was a hypothetical construct that provided a way of conceptualizing and responding to a genuine problem.

Davis' description clarifies the concept. But it's an inadequate description unless we understand "hypothetical construct" to mean the use of a collective concept, like "big business" or "aristocracy" or "farmers" or "abolitionists", that describe a social reality. It's hard to see how we could discuss the history of slavery meaningfully without using some such descriptions. The fact that the democratic antislavery voters and leaders referred to the Slave Power as a collective entity makes it a useful phrase even now, which is why it's not unusual to see historians employing it. "Slaveocracy" or slaveowners or the planter class are similar concepts that are used in valid ways to describe the era of slavery.

Maybe this is a case where the saying applies, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you."

Tags: civil war, david brion davis, richard hofstadter, slave power, us civil war