Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 30: The strange world of neo-Confederacy

Every year when I do this daily series of posts in April, I worry that I won't be able to find material to use. And every year I wind up thinking there was a lot of other stuff I intended to use but now the month's over.

I'll close this year's series with some comments about an article that appeared in the Biloxi Sun-Herald 04/12/01, during the Mississippi Confederate state flag campaign, Our flag was never intended to be a symbol of hate. Fly it proudly and change hearts instead. by Wallace Mason, "commander of Sam Davis Camp 596, Sons of Confederate Veterans". A copy of it is posted at FreeRepublic.com, the far-right Web site. I haven't checked it word for word against my hard copy, but it appears to be the same thing.

That title reminds me. One of the pitches that the partisans of the Confederate-themed flag used was that fighting over the flag was a distraction from more useful ways of promoting racial reconciliation. So after the election, I was expecting to see the Sons of Confederate Veterans, the League of the South and the White Citizens Council all getting together with the NAACP, the Urban League and other civil rights groups to protest police racial profiling, help enforce anti-discrimination laws, campaign for better public services, have meetings across the state to promote better understanding among the races, stuff like that.

But, darn, for some reason I just never heard about any of that stuff happening. I wonder why?

Mason, who called the Civil War the "War for Southern Independence", recites a pretty broad range of neo-Confederate slogans: only black bigots oppose the Confederate flag; slavery was not the cause of the war, oh, no, not at all; slavery would have faded away peacefull if those damnyankees hadn't forced reluctant Southerners into a war; greedy damnyankees wanted to force a tariff on the South and that had something or other to do with the war; the Emancipation Proclamation was no big deal and didn't do much for the slaves; the slaves just luu-uuved their Massas; lots and lots and lots of blacks served in the Confederate armed forces, I mean, they were totally enthusiastic about fighting for the Confederacy; not many Confederate soldiers owned slaves so how could the war have anything to do with slavery?; the South was deeply, passionately committed to the abstract principle of State Rights and so they had to secede from the Union because the damnyankees were threatening that but it had nothing to do with slavery (did I mention that already?); Southerners wanted lower taxes, too; the Confederacy stood for Honor and Duty and other fine Southern stuff like that.

I particularly like this part:

[The Confederate-themed state flag] was there as the 1950s closed and
the 1960s began, ushering in the turmoil of segregation and integration and
people marching for freedom. Our flag represents all people. Flower power and
the hippie generation and free love were all a part of Mississippi. Our flag was
there when its sons and daughters were sent to the jungles of Vietnam, a
political fiasco that would cost the lives of young men and women, white, black
and Indian, before their time.

Yes, folks, the Confederate flag represents hippies and flower power. (I wish I had known about all the free love around when I lived there!) And it represents civil rights marches against integration.

Now, you're probably thinking, how can anyone offer up a steaming pile of horse-poop like this and expect anyone to take it seriously?

Because, except for those few whose brains have been completely fried by OxyContin or other intoxicants, they don't take it seriously. Neo-Confederate hokum isn't history, neo-Confederate routine is not really about history. It's a political ideology, whose main purpose so far as I can see is to sneer at black people and generally promote authoritarian attitudes. The history just serves as window-dressing to provide slogans and symbols. Like with Holocaust denial, at a basic level it's meant to be a sneer rather than anything serious, for all its pretensions at scholarly trappings. Hey, 93,000 black people fought for the Confederacy! Translate that into what comes through to Rush Limbaugh fans after the words are processed through a heavy OxyContin filter, and it means, "Yuck, yuck, even n*****s fought for the Confederacy, haw haw!"

This is the kind of white folks' that is the heart of neo-Confederacy, from Mason's article, with added commentary in brackets:

And what will the new flag represent? Will it represent those [bad black people] who constantly complain of racism and their remembrance of slavery? Will it represent those[white] businessmen who are worried about the dollar bill or image? Will this new flag represent all those [white] Mississippians who have sacrificed so much in order for us to enjoy what we have today? The new flag would represent absolutely nothing [good from the viewpoint of white supremacists].

Our [white people's] state flag and the Confederate battle flag are symbols of our [the white people in our] region and [white] Southern heritage. That heritage is a culture of contributions from white, black, American Indian and an increasing number of races. [Yuck, yuck, yeah, you know we're real mul-ti-cul-tural at the Sons of Confederate Veterans] As [white] Southerners, we are going to have to do a better job of protecting our heritage [heritage of the white race] because tomorrow it will be our [white bigots'] very freedom.

Those [bad black people] who attack our [white people's] state flag are the ones being intolerant and racist. No one is attacking their [worthless black] heritage. Tolerance has to to work both ways [yuck, yuck, we're real tolerant of black folks as long as they know their place], but, for [white bigors in] the South, that is not happening. Southern [white people's] heritage is being removed for the sake of appeasement and compromise [with bad black people] that will lead only to more compromise [with bad black people].

Yesterday, I quoted a neo-Confederate article from the San Francisco Chronicle that referred to "60,000 and 90,000 black men, both free and slave" who allegedly did something vaguely defined as having "served under the banner of the Stars and Bars," by which he means the Confederate flag. Mason's article says:

Black soldiers did serve in the Confederate army and navy. Professor Ed Smith, director of American Studies at American University, calculates that between 60,000 and 93,000 blacks served the Confederacy in some capacity. They served, not to stay as slaves, but so there would be a better future for them.

Another vague formulation, "served the Confederacy in some capacity". Like, what, being a slave cook at a plantation where a few Confederate cavalrymen stopped by to have lunch one day? As I said yesterday, the notion that any significant number of black, free or slave, served as Confederate soldiers is a favorite claim of neo-Confederates, but it's not true. If this figure about black who "served the Confederacy in some capacity" is true in some sense (though I doubt it's true in any sense), both this article and the one in the Chronicle on Sunday use it to imply with technically saying so that these were soldiers. This kind of thing is thought by crackpot writers to be cagey and clever, though it's really just dissembling and slippery.

There is an Edward C. Smith in the American Studies program at American University. I'll have to follow up on that particular claim later.

Neo-Confederacy: a bottomless pit of nonsense. And of maudlin phrases about "heritage".

Tags: neo-confederate, confederate heritage month 2007, confederate flag

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 29: Neo-Confederacy in San Francisco

John C. Calhoun: his (white-supremacist) soul goes marching on, too

Well, in the San Francisco Chronicle, anyway: Give the Confederate flag a break by Jaime O'Neill 04/29/07. O'Neill claims to be a devotee of the honorable heritage of the Confederate flag. You have to wonder how devoted he is to actual history, though, when the Confederate flag that is disputed is the Confederate battle flag (although the rectangular form that is usually seen would be more accurately called the Confederate Navy Jack flag) but he refers to it as the "Stars and Bars", which was the first official flag of the Confederacy. The familiar one to us today features the St. Andrews Cross or Southern Cross, which is not even included on the Stars and Bars.

But you stumble across stuff like this all the time in the faith-based but factoid-cluttered world of Lost Cause devotion. I was going to focus for today's post on a newspaper manifesto of the Lost Cause from a Mississippi newspaper in 2001. But when I saw the Chronicle article, I decided to do that one today and save the other for tomorrow.

The Stars and Bars, the first official flag of the Confederate States of America

I'm going to summarize it here. It's only fair to say that it won't be an entirely reverent summary. And I'm going to "desublimate" some of the subtext that commonly lies behind these sentiments, though of course O'Neill can deny any such intent for things he didn't actually say. Lost Cause advocates, like most other rightwingers, can be as obsessive as Protestant fundamentalists in comma-dancing on the sentences of their critics. When it comes to reading history, though ideology and fantasy serve just as well as actual facts for them. After the summary, I'll say a few other things about this stuff.

So by all means read O'Neill's little piece of radical-right ideology. You'll find several common pieces of the neo-Confederate/Lost Cause faith in his article:

1. Most importantly, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton criticize the Confederate flag, if you know what I mean.

Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton criticize white people who make bigoted cracks about black people? Why should us poor persecuted white folks have to listen to Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton? (I should mention here that "Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton" is a common phrase for Republicans to mean "bad black people" because they are the two most famous civil rights leaders in the US right now.) The whole first part of the article is about race, including whining about how pore ole Imus got criticized for his "nappy headed ho's" crack, reminding us of course that such talk by white people is all the fault of black people.

But the Confederate flag has nothing to do with racism or slavery, oh no! Except because Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton make a big deal about it.

The Confederate flag most people know today; this is the Navy Jack; the battle flag was the same design but square

2. Robert E. Lee was the greatest human being since Jesus Christ.

Maybe better, because, you know, that Jesus fellow was a Jew!

3. Nathan Bedford Forrest loved black folks.

Pay no attention to the massacre of black prisoners at Fort Pillow. O'Neill doesn't mention Fort Pillow, but he does mention that Forrest founded the Ku Klux Klan. So maybe that means the KKK likes black people, too!

4. Most Confederate soldiers didn't own slaves.

Most American soldiers in Iraq don't own oil wells, either. What does either of those things say about the purpose and goals of either war?

5. The Confederate Army had droves of black soldiers.

Oh, yeah, the Confederate Army - the whole Confederate nation, in fact! - was a near-paradise of multicultural tolerance.

6. The American flag symbolizes racism and slavery.

Why do neo-Confederates hate America? My guess is, they hate us for our values.

7. The Confederate flag symbolizes racial diversity.

Yeah, Sanjaya is a great singer, Richard Nixon was not a crook and Dick Cheney is a nice guy. And for just $500, I can send you the exclusive secret story on what happened to Saddam Hussein's WMDs!

8. Only some black people resent the Confederate flag.

Like, you know, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton! O'Neill says that an unnamed "recent survey" shows that most young blacks today associate the Confederate flag with the TV show The Dukes of Hazzard, which "many of them had grown up with."

You Lost Cause fans might better update that one. The idea you want to convey is "black kids are so stupid they don't know what the Confederate flag is". Plus they enjoy white-redneck humor. But that TV series ran from 1979 to 1985. So pretty much anyone who remembers seeing it in the first run would be in their 30s or 40s now. I mean, it is a creative thought (as racist ideas go, anyway), combining several insults, sneers and pure nonsense in one sentence. But it's time to update that one, white boys.

John C. Calhoun, the godfather of secession

9. Country music fans like the Confederate flag.

I suppose this would be persuasive to someone who knew nothing whatsoever about country music.

10. Yankees and liberals sneer at us persecuted white bigots.
Why are damnyankees and damnliberals so insensitive to white bigots? What about a little inclusive attitude for white racists, huh?

A corollary of this is the Democratic Party should kiss up to white bigots. Oh, yeah, with a few kind words, all the Confederate flag fans will be happy to vote for Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton.

I want to elaborate on a couple of points. O'Neill writes:

Any country music concert you might attend will be festooned with that flag, either in the parking lot, or in the apparel of those attending, whether the group appearing is Alabama, Willie Nelson, Toby Keith or the Dixie Chicks. Does that mean that all those people are professing a belief in the rightness of slavery? Are they all racists?

Uh, dude, Willie Nelson and Toby Keith are individual people, not "groups", but we'll let that slide.

But when I think back, I've been to country music concerts in the South and in California for years. I can remembers seeing Emmylou Harris, Merle Haggard, George Jones, Tammy Wynette, Gillian Welch, Steve Earle, Buck Owens, Ricky Skaggs, Rodney Crowell, Alison Kraus and Union Station, Kelly Willis, Johnny Cash, Charlie Daniels [gag! choke!], Rosanne Cash, Johnny Cash and June Carter, Dwight Yoakum, Kte Campbell, Nanci Griffin, Utah Phillips, Haxel Dickens, Steve Earle, Guy Clark, Sarah Lee Guthrie and Johnny Irion, Bruce Robison, the Del McCoury Band, Ramblin' Jack Eliot, Iris Dement, Stacey Earle, Bill Monroe, Eliza Gilkyson, Doc Watson, Buddy and Julie Miller, Kasey Chambers, John Prine, Tony Rice, Peter Rowan, to mention the ones I can remember right off.

I don't actually recall seeing a Confederate flag of any kind at any of those concerts, though I'm sure there were some around when I saw Chuckie (CHARLIE DANIELS) live. He may have even displayed one on the stage in some form.

But I guess if you go to the Theodore Bilbo Country Jackasses or the Ross Barnett Bluegrass Boys or groups with names like that, you might see a Confederate flag. I remember seeing a Confederate flag displayed on a door in the Spanish island of Mallorca once, in the German tourist section of town. You didn't have to ask to know that it was some kind of neo-Nazi or other far-right group that used that particular place.

You often see American flags at country music concerts, though.

This business about blacks fighting in the Confederate Army is also a favorite pile of horse-poop for the Lost Cause crowd, too. O'Neill writes:

Between 60,000 and 90,000 black men, both free and slave, also served under the banner of the Stars and Bars.

There's the Stars and Bars thing again. Though if you wanted to comma-dance on it, the actual Stars and Bars flag was the official flag of the Confederacy from March 1861 to May 1863. So any blacks that actually did serve in the Confederate armed forces could have served under the Stars and Bars.

My April 3 post this year dealt with a case of what certainly appears to be a Lost Cause advocate using fabricated evidence to pump this "black Confederate soldiers" business. As I said there, this business about blacks fighting for the Confederacy and for the sacred right to be held in slavery by white people is a favorite theme of neo-Confederate pseudohistorical hokum. My impression is that it's meant not so much to be taken seriously but rather as a sneer at African-Americans and at anyone who prefers reality-based history.

The paper I linked there, Retouching History: The Modern Falsification of a Civil War Photograph by Jerome Handler and Michael Tuite, Jr., cites this book review on the topic, Desperate Measures: Were slaves really so loyal to their masters that they went to war to defend the Confederacy? by David Blight Washington Post 03/05/06, saying:

In the past decade, the neo-Confederate fringe of Civil War enthusiasm (with tentative support from some academic historians) has contended that thousands of African Americans, slave and free, willingly joined the Confederate war effort as soldiers and fought for their "homeland." A quasi-debate over the existence of "black Confederates" has seeped into academic conferences, historical journals and many Web sites. The issue of competing popular memories is driven largely by the desire of current white supremacists to re-legitimize the Confederacy while tacitly rejecting the victories of the modern civil rights movement. What could better buttress the claims of "color-blind conservatism" in our own time than the notion that the slaveholding leaders of the Confederacy were themselves the true emancipators and that many slaves were devoted to the Southern rebellion? George Orwell warned us: Who needs real history when you can control public language and political debate?

This, by the way, is a typical tack for pseudohistory of all kinds. Invent some kind of whopper and assert it as obvious fact. Even a specialist in the field might immediately realize it's horse-poop but still not be able to come up immediately with a factual refutation. You see this in Holocaust denial all the time. Holocaust deniers like to say, for instance, that even Austrian Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal said that there were no death camps in Germany, implying that he was denying their existence. Wiesenthal actually said that, and it's true: only four of the concentration camps were designated by the Nazis as death camps, intended to kill people in mass numbers with efficient industrial organization. All of those were outside the borders of Germany. There was no shortage of concentration camps in Germany, though, many of them death camps in fact for a lot of their prisoners.

But unless you are familiar with the particular fabrication or slight-of-hand, you wouldn't necessarily know what to make of it. In that sense, bald-faced liars can have a short-term advantage over honest people in a dispute like that. Real scientists encounter the same kind of thing in debate "creationists", which is why scientists active in refuting them have become much more canny about the conditions under which they will debate them face-to-face.

Blight's article is a review of Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves by Bruce Levine, which addresses this particular Lost Cause claim. This claim is largely based on the fact that, in desperation in early 1865, the Confederate Congress actually considered a proposal to allow slaves to fight in the army and be rewarded by emancipation for it. Blight writes:

In late February and early March 1865, after intensive debate and facing huge desertion rates in the Southern forces, the Confederate Congress adopted a halfhearted bill authorizing black enlistment. The House voted 40-37 and the Senate 9-8 to allow [Jefferson] Davis to implement a voluntary plan in which no slaves were to be conscripted. Owners had to come forward and give their slaves to the cause. The law itself did not free a single slave and operated, as one of its proponents admitted, as a "free-will offering." Gen. Lee demanded urgent action to usher black men into his army, which was about to collapse in front of Petersburg. The war ended before anything could come of this last-ditch Confederate effort to find manpower - which now looked, as a Mississippian gravely confessed, "like a drowning man catching at straws." Only in Virginia were any blacks actually mustered into companies, totaling at most perhaps 200 men. None saw meaningful combat, and, as Levine found, some of those who did wear Confederate gray did so as a means of running away to Union lines.

... [Levine's] conclusions are judiciously tethered to the evidence. And how can he avoid letting despairing Confederates speak for themselves, as does a South Carolina planter with remarkable candor right after Appomattox? "Born and raised amid" slavery, said Augustin Taveau, he had believed "that these people were content, happy, and attached to their masters." But "the conduct of the Negro in the late crisis of our affairs convinced me that we have all been labouring under a delusion." That delusion both made and unmade the Confederate quest to save their slaveholders' republic by arming blacks. In the end, Levine successfully counters the "spirit of reactionary nostalgia" that has fueled the "black Confederate" mythology. For more than a century, the pernicious story of the faithful slave took deep root in the American imagination, where it still provides an active, if declining, currency in race relations. (my emphasis)

The Handler and Tuite article links above tells us:

The actual 1st Louisiana Native Guards, consisting of Afro-Creoles [i.e.,mulattos], was formed of about 1,500 men in April 1861 and was formally accepted as part of the Louisiana militia in May 1862. The Native Guards unit (one of three all-black companies) never saw combat while in Confederate service, and was largely kept at arm’s length by city and state officials; in fact, it often lacked proper uniforms and equipment. “The Confederate authorities,” James Hollandsworth has written, "never intended to use black troops for any mission of real importance. If the Native Guards were good for anything, it was for public display; free blacks fighting for Southern rights made good copy for the newspapers." The unit apparently was never committed to the Confederate cause, and appears to have disobeyed orders to evacuate New Orleans with other Confederate forces; instead it surrendered to Union troops in April 1862. (my emphasis)

Such is the fidelity of the Lost Cause ideologists to the actual heritage of real American history.

Tags: confederate heritage month, lost cause, neo-confederate

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 28: Confederate "heritage" in Mississippi, 2001

Antislavery fighters in Kansas, 1856

It's been almost six years since Mississippi had a statewide referendum on an issue that was essentially all about neo-Confederate hype and the Lost Cause viewpoint of history and politics. It was a vote on replacing the official state flag, which consisted of three stripes with a replica of the Confederate battle flag in the upper left corner. The proposed new flag would be very similar except it would replace the Confederate battle flag with a cluster of stars.

A native Mississippian like me could hardly fail to appreciate - or maybe "recognize" would be a better word - that there was something distinctively Mississippi about that vote. It came about through some quirk in the law that led the state Supreme Court to hold that the old flag wasn't technically the official state flag.

So there was a statewide vote held in April 2001, in which the flag was the only issue on the ballot. It's rare, maybe even unique, for a state to vote on an issue that is essentially purely symbolic. The very fact that the vote at all was being held was bad public relations for the state. The fact that the Confederate state flag won was bad PR, too. In that sense, it was a no-win decision.

Small states in the US, like small countries in the world, tend to make the news only when there's a natural disaster (we read plenty about Mississippi after the Katrina disaster, though not as much as about New Orleans) or something politically obnoxious happens. On the other hand, once the occurence is over, the national press tends to quickly forget about it.

So it's unlikely that Mississippi suffered any measurable damage from it. There weren't even any formal boycotts over it, because those are basically only meaningful for tourist events like large conventions and trade shows, and Mississippi doesn't have the kinds of facilities to attract those kind of larger events. Their main tourist draw is casino gambling, and that business isn't that subject to boycotts because it tends to be individuals or small groups coming for that. There's also some Civil War tourism, but that's also not that subject to boycotts. Are people not going to go the federally-run national park at Vicksburg because the state flag inlcudes Confederate symbolism? Not likely.

The Confederate battle flag became a symbol of white resistance to integration in the 1950s. It wasn't strongly associated with Lost Cause memorials or white-supremacist politics prior to that. But now it's about the only Confederate flag popularly known. It's sometimes erroneously called the "Stars and Bars". But the "Stars and Bars" flag was the official flag of the Confederacy; the one that's most known now is the battle flag. Sarah Lee Guthrie and Johnny Irion sing a song of his called "Gervais" about South Carolina's well-known Confederate flag:

An eye for an eye and we'll go blind
That's what the man said and it stuck in my mind
We've hearing the ringing off these walls today

Still flying the flag upon Gervais
Was a battle flag, now we can put it away

Given its racially-charged symbolism, it's not surprising that the vote tended to split heavily along racial lines, though African-American voter turnout there is generally lower than among whites. Of the 16 counties with a black population of 60% or more, only three (Quitman, Sharkey and Issaquena) squeaked out a majority to retain the Confederate state flag. Of the 57 counties of 50% or more white, a grand total of two (Madison and Oktibbeha) voted for the replacement flag. And in the eight counties with 50-60% black population, five voted for the Confederate state flag. It's hard to read those results as other than heavy black opposition for the Confederate-themed flag and heavy white support, with a lower proportional black turnout accounting for the pro-Confederate-symbol vote in the five of eight counties with 50-60% black population. (The Jackson Clarion-Ledger published these results from the Associated Press online - "Totals by majority race" www.clarionledger.com/news/flagvote - but the link has expired.

Of the counties where I lived in Mississippi, Clarke County voted 65% for the Confederate-themed flag, Forrest County voted 63% for it, and Hinds County (where the capital Jackson is) voted 65% against.

The campaign for the Confederate state flag was most actively supported by the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV), which was then in the process of largely being taken of by hardline white-supremacists (not that they were exactly a human-rights group before!), and the crackpot League of the South, which actually advocates secession now, which is actually a minority position among today's neo-Confederates. The Council of Conservative Citizens, the successor group to the White Citizens Council, also pushed the Confederate-themed flag.

Sadly, the pro-new-flag side struck a high-minded, Chamber of Commerce tone. And lost. When the Confederate side was using a simple slogan with emotional resonance like, "It's mah heritage!" and the American side is saying things along the line of, "It would be much preferable for the state to project and more respectable image by selecting a more appropriate state flag", good grief!

They would have been better off to run an in-your-face campaign. They could have runs adds in heavily black areas showing the Confederate flag and photos of lynch-murders to encourage black turnout. They could have done pitches to white voters along the lines of, "Are you patriotic Americans or Confederate-loving fools who hate America?" Or use ads showing some of the more crackpot positions of the League of the South, the SCV and the White Citizen's Council and tag lines like, "Do you really want to vote for white supremacist scumbags like this?" They might still have lost. But it couldn't have been any less effective than the bland, politely and losing Chamber of Commerce approach.

What the election did do, though, is provide a public debate, directed at ordinary voters, not at historians or activists for far-right groups, that aired the issues that neo-Confederacy is really about. Here I'll give some examples from the letters-to-the-editor section of the Clarion-Ledger, with the reminder that letter-to-the-editor are often eccentric and that the Clarion-Ledger editorially supported a new flag. Tomorrow I'll mention some of the other more elaborated arguments.

One fine American patriot, Lilliane Bobbitt of Cleveland (MS) wrote in a letter published 04/10/01:

The flag with the St. Andrew's cross [the Confederate-themed state flag] was designed to commemorate all the soldiers, black and white, who died defending Mississippi from Union soldiers.

You seem to think we should discard this symbol just because blacks are unhappy with it.

I am astonished how a whole race will let themselves be manipulated by liberals and others who have no interest in them or in the welfare of our state. Until recent years there was little mention of or notice given to our state flag. But, more than 40 years ago blacks began to push, demand and boycott guided by agitators like Jesse Jackson.

Our flag is not only a symbol. A spiritual force surrounds our flag just as the American flag and the Christian cross are surrounded by a spiritual force.

No race has the right to push their selfish ends to the destruction of another culture.

Surely, you know this.

Dadgum, how could them liberals ever imagine that support for the Confederate battle flag was about "hate" instead of "heritage"? Or that it might have something to do with white racism? Where do these dang liberals git such ideas?

Cartoonist Ramsey Marshall captured the moment after the vote (from the Clarion-Ledger 04/20/01)

Also on April 10, R. Charles Van Buren of Jackson shared his thoughts on Christian respect:

According to The Clarion-Ledger (NAACP planning strategy in flag vote, Feb. 6), the Rev. Dolphus Weary, a member of the state flag advisory commission, believes we should change our state flag and justifies this with a biblical mandate, "If there's something that offends your brother, you need to move it off the table."

Now, I have heard the Rev. Weary preach and I consider him to be a brother in Christ and a good man. However, has he considered the other side? I, and many others, feel offended by the statements and attitudes of many of the flag opponents. Particularly the implication that if I support the 1894 flag or the displaying of other symbols of the confederacy, I am a racist. The many untruths and half truths put forth about the flag and great Americans such as Robert E. Lee offend me greatly.

Are not my feelings and the feelings of those who share my views just as important as anyone else's?

What can be done if people on both sides of the issue feel offended and angry?

Well, what could have been done if the issue had not been hijacked by radical's was a simple compromise for which I would have voted - replace the [Confederate-themed] 1894 flag with one of the older state flags, particularly the 1861 flag which celebrates our heritage. I am now forced to choose between two positions which I dislike. I will not give in to radical hate mongers so I will vote for the 1894 flag and pray that in the future we are offered a true compromise that will defuse this issue.

Gol-lee! You just cain't help but feel sorry for those pore white folks who're picked on by that there n-double-a-c-p, can you?

This is the kind of dissembling horse-poo that segregationists raised to an art form. Or maybe a full-blown neurosis. "Ah don't have nothin' against black folks. Some of my best friends are black. Ah just don't like them radicals like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton tellin' me whut to do." Yeah, right.

Finally, in the April 12 paper, one Tip H. Allen, Jr. of Starkville pleaded for sympathy for those sadly persecuted white people:

Flags are symbols. In the eyes of the viewer they are regarded as either good or bad symbols. The U.S. flag is perceived by most as a glorious symbol, yet it has had a darker side: It flew over slave ships in 1788 to 1808.

Supporters of the present Mississippi flag with the battle emblem view the emblem not as a symbol of hate, or slavery or segregation, but as a symbol of heritage.

Walter Lord in his book The Past That Would Not Die notes that of the 78,000 Mississippians who joined in the fight for Southern independence, only 28,000 returned. A majority of the soldiers in the Confederate army came from families who did not own slaves. Soldiers of the Confederacy regarded themselves as fighting for country, not slavery.

Significant progress in race relations in Mississippi during recent years has come from a spirit of tolerance on the part of both races. White Mississippians have recognized the importance of African-Americans preserving their heritage. There were no protest marches or threats of boycotts when scores of street names were changed to honor Dr. King or when Black History Month was established.

Now, supporters of the [Confederate-themed] 1894 flag ask for a similar display of tolerance in permitting them to honor an important part of their heritage. Alleged economic gain or political correctness should not bring down the 1894 banner.

Got that? The Confederate flag had nothing to do with racism. But the American flag does!

Is it any surprise that people who become accustomed to this kind of through-the-looking glass thinking can also believe other incredible whoppers like Dick Cheney's claims about the Iraq War?

Tags: mississippi, neo-confederate

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 27: More on John Brown

Black and white Union sailors serving together

Last year, I devoted a number of posts to the career of the still-controversial John Brown. And I'm still interested to read various views of his actions and impact.

I'm about half-way through William Freehling's new The Road to Disunion, Vol 2: Secessionists Triumphant, 1854-1861 (2007). While Freehling is one of my favorite sources on the antebellum era, he didn't get Brown quite right. Like the reviewer I discussed in yesterday's post, he gives a distorted and misleading version of the Pottawatomie killings of 1854. I looked at those in several posts last year, beginning with this one of 04/14/06, so I won't belabor it here.

Freehling admits to having changed his view over time on the plausibility of Brown's Harpers Ferry mission, specifically in relation to the possibility of attracting local slaves to his fight in Harpers Ferry itself. Freehling's current judgment of the outcome seems reasonable to me:

There transpired one of the most stupendous scenes in American history. In the dark night, Brown's freedom fighters easily captured Harpers Ferry's federal armory, arsenal, and engine house. They sliced the telegraph wires. They halted a train. They dispatched messengers to a nearby plantation, Lewis Washington's (a great-grandnephew of George Washington's), there to alert slaves to spread the invasion. No other first strike has ever been better planned or carried out (which is only to say that John Brown here perfected his lifelong specialty).

No other following tactics have ever been botched so badly (which is only to say that John Brown here succumbed to his lifelong flaw). ...

Where Brown and his men needed to transport Harpers Ferry's potentially highly consequential firearms to the nooks and crannies of the mountains in a great big hurry, the raider stayed in Harpers Ferry's death trap. While whites gathered to hurl themselves at the furious old man, their prey jailed himself inside the most innocuous corner of his caputred fortress, the engine house. There, the self-imprisoned raider found no food.

The night after Brown struck, U.S. Marines arrived, led by Robert E. Lee. The next day, Lee's assaulters fed Brown's hungry raiders stell for breakfast.

Freehling also gives a good account of the subsequent slave-insurrection panic that spread through the South.

I also want to mention an essay by Bertram Wyatt-Brown that makes the best case I've seen for John Brown having suffered from depression, "'A Volcano Beneath a Mountain of Snow': John Brown and the Problem of Interpretation" in His Soul Goes Marching On: Responses to John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid, Paul Finkelman, ed., (1995).

"Psychohistory" is always tricky, and a lot of it isn't worth the paper it's printed on. It's especially tricky in the case of someone like John Brown whose enemies often tried to portray him as a fanatical lunatic. Wyatt-Brown manages to talk about Brown's personal psychology without getting too far out ahead of the available evidence and also without reducing his politics or his religion to a personal quirk. Or, worse, to a personal pathology. He writes:

If Brown's composure under fire at the engine house and his later serenity as he faced the prospect of the gallows testified to his religious strength of character, it also bespeaks his melancholy satisfaction in ending a life of inner rage and darkest mood. He had contemplated his own death for many years, and the issue was now settled. Without having to encounter the moral dilemma of self-destruction, long considered an offense against God's will, Brown could face the terminus of his life with devout tranquility. Thus he entered the most creative period of his antislavery career, fulfilling the role of martyr with almost artistic perfection. ... When asked by by his captors who had sent him, he replied, "It was my own prompting and that of my Maker, or that of the devil, whichever you please to ascribe to it." The sentiment was almost jocular, but one wonders if Brown himself did not feel that he was inspired by both supernatural elements — an amalgamation of the Manichean division that seemed to have empowered him to create the tumult he wished for. ...

Brown's self-possession as he faced death was perhaps the most significant manifestation of the melancholy state of mind with which he had so long contended.

In conclusion, Wyatt-Brown describes John Brown as "a singular, complex, and nigenious agitator" who "profoundly touched the life of a nation". And he observes how "the very depth of Brown's dispondency helped to shape his own creative vocation as a martyr who aspired to free a nation from a moral yoke and a race from its hideous bondage."

I think Brown would be proud to be remembered that way.

Tags: bertram wyatt-brown, john brown, william freehling

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

Quarters used by Union forces during the siege of Vicksburg

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

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

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

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

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

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

And this comparison immediately following is accurate enough:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

His closing judgment on Ames is also unfair:

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

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

Tags: adelbert ames, john brown

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 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 24: Reactionary Catholic neo-Confederacy

Pius X (Andrés Jacinto Longhin [1863-1936]): Symbol for Catholic fundamentalists ("traditionalists")

Via Edward Sebesta's blog Anti-Neo-Confederate (Article on Thomas Woods at DePaul University 04/19/07), I see this article about the pro-Confederate inclinations of a guy who Sebesta identifies as the associate editor of Latin Mass magazine.

I don't know if this is the same kind of reactionary Catholicism with which Mel Gibson and his Holocaust-denier father are associated. But it's clearly a Catholic fundamentalist publication. (The title is a big clue right off the bat.)

The article to which Sebesta links is Neo-confederacy a possibilty? by Euan Hague The DePaulia (undated but apparently from April 2007). Hague writes of Woods:

Woods is the author of a 2004 book entitled The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History which the Boston Globe described as "ultra-reactionary extremism." A lengthy essay in the New York Times by Adam Cohen stated that the intent of this book by Woods is in "distorting the past to promote dangerous policies today." Cohen continues, explaining that "if the 14th Amendment, which guarantees minorities 'equal protection of the law,' was never properly ratified – as Mr. Woods argues – racial discrimination may be constitutional after all." ...

Our upcoming speaker, Thomas Woods, was a member of the League of the South and contributed to their publication Southern Patriot on more than one occasion in the 1990s. For example, in a 1995 essay Woods claimed that the 14th Amendment, which gave citizenship rights to former slaves and provides us with equal protection guarantees, was "wholly incompatible with a federal system" giving "ill-begotten authority" to "militant egalitarians."

The League of the South has been described by the anti-racist Southern Poverty Law Center as a "hate group" at the forefront of a neo-Confederate movement "increasingly rife with white supremacists and racist ideology." Mr. Woods has subsequently become involved with a group of radical reactionary Catholic scholars whom, the Southern Poverty Law Center demonstrated in a lengthy article in their Intelligence Report magazine published in Winter 2006, reject recent Vatican teachings and "may form the largest group of hard-line anti-Semites in America."

This is a reminder that what neo-Confederacy is really about is not preserving "heritage" or honor the memory of Confederate soldiers and whatever. It's about white racism and white supremacy.

Hague also provides a link to The New Crusaders by Heidi Beirich Intelligence Report Winter 2007, which uses the term "radical tranditionalists" for this brand of Catholic extremists.

Woods also has a column that runs at the neo-Confederate LewRockwell.com Web site. The titles of Woods' column reflect the rightwing isolationist position of the Lew Rockwell crowd as well as some other hard-right types. I have occasionally linked to articles at that site that I thought were worthwhile, though I identify it as a neo-Confederate Web site when I do.

They publish some columns by people like Gabriel Kolko, Tom Engelhardt, Jude Wanniski, Jim Lobe, and Eric Margolis who are critical of the Iraq War and American unilateralism but who also are not advocates of neo-Confederate ideology or pseudohistory, so far as I know. Gary North, who has a column there, is one of the best known advocates of the extreme fundamentalist Christian Reconstruction movement. Some of the links they have at their "Columnists & Commentators" page are actually links to other Web sites.

Tags: catholic fundamentalists, neo-confederate, thomas woods

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 23: Lincoln, Jackson and the Slave Power

There is certainly no shortage of books about Abraham Lincoln. But with the 150th anniversary of the Civil War coming up in four years, we're sure to see many more.

Back in 1982 in Lincoln and His Legend New York Review of Books 07/15/1982 issue (behind subscription, unfortunately), George Fredrickson reviewed two books, Lincoln's Quest for Union: Public and Private Meanings by Charles Strozier and Abraham Lincoln: The Quest for Immortality by Dwight Anderson. Both are "psychohistories", and much of his review focuses on the strengths and weaknesses of their approaches.

I haven't read either of those books, and he doesn't make them sound terribly valuable. Here I want to focus on a couple of things that he mentions that are important in Lincoln's career and the politics of the time, apart from any "psychohistory" considerations.

One is a speech from early in Lincoln's political career (1938), which is known as the Lyceum speech. Fredrickson writes:

Those seeking to relate the "conflicted" private man to the great statesman have relied heavily on Lincoln's first major public address, a lecture he gave before the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield in 1838. Ostensibly a call for law and order in the face of the wave of mob violence in Jacksonian America, the speech contains what strikes many readers as a curiously ambivalent warning against the rise of an American Caesar or Napoleon. "Towering genius," the young Lincoln proclaimed, will not be satisfied to follow in the footsteps of the Founding Fathers and defend the existing republic. "It scorns to tread in the footsteps of any predecessor, however illustrious. It thirsts and burns for distinction; and, if possible, it will have it, whether at the expense of emancipating slaves, or enslaving freemen." According to Edmund Wilson, Lincoln already had grandiose dreams of his own destiny and was deliberately projecting himself into the role that he pretended to be warning his audience against. Subsequent analysts of Lincoln's developing image of himself, including the two under review, have offered more complex interpretations, but they have followed Wilson's example in viewing this passage as a window on Lincoln's psyche and a key to the personal motivations behind his public career. (my emphasis)

As Fredrickson explains, Lincoln's reference to "towering genius" referred primarily to Democrat Andrew Jackson, who had recently completed his two terms as President:

During the 1830s, Whigs — and especially Whig lawyers — often called for devotion to law and order and warned against Caesarean demagogues. The evil genius they generally had in mind was Andrew Jackson, who had enormously enlarged the powers of the presidency by persuading the electorate that he was the direct representative of the popular will. Whigs like Lincoln saw the danger of an elective tyranny in Jacksonian democracy and viewed mob violence as a sign that the common people were following Jackson's bad example by putting popular emotion ahead of a "rational" adherence to established legal and constitutional procedures. The nonpartisan occasion for the Lyceum speech prevented Lincoln from making these political implications explicit; but in other early addresses he inveighed against the Jacksonian Democrats for fostering a "mobocratic spirit." If Lincoln waxed strangely lyrical in describing the would-be tyrants against which the public must be on guard, it might have been because he shared his era's sentimental fascination with amoral geniuses. (Napoleon or Byron could cast a strange spell on puritanical, middle-class Americans.) (my emphasis)

I've written a number of times here about the contradictory nature of Jacksonian democracy. Lincoln represented the genuine democratic and liberating trend of Jacksonian democracy, even though as a Whig and later a Republican he did not identify with Jackson's party. It's notably that even Roger Taney, who had served as Jackson's attorney general and was appointed as Chief Justic of the Supreme Court by Jackson - the same Roger Taney who wrote the notorious proslavery Dred Scott decision - even as conservative a Jacksonian as Taney remained loyal to the Union during the Civil War.

Lincoln's declaration of the "genius" on the Jackson mold in this sentence actually captures the basic contradiction of Jacksonian democracy: "It thirsts and burns for distinction; and, if possible, it will have it, whether at the expense of emancipating slaves, or enslaving freemen."

Lincoln later left behind his Whiggish apprehension of the unwashed common people tarnishing democracy by using it to defend their interest against concentrated wealth.

Fredrickson also talks about the Republican notions of a Slave Power conspiracy against the free states:

[Strozier] attempts to explain the sectional crisis in general as a collective expression of narcissistic rage. Such literal-minded efforts to explain group behavior by individual psychology require a leap of faith that most historians are unwilling to make. ...

This approach, it seems to me, substitutes dubious theorizing for a close examination of the historical record. The crisis of the 1850s may have had an irrational component, but most of what happened can be explained as a conflict of interests and ideologies rooted in the objective fact that one section was committed to slavery and the other to free labor. There were mistakes and misconceptions, to be sure, but most of them were founded on circumstantial evidence that only appears misleading in the hindsight of historians.

A good case in point is the one that Strozier seizes on as evidence of pathological rage — the belief of Lincoln and others that there was a conspiracy in the 1850s to extend slavery and make its protection the dominant concern of the nation as a whole. There was no such conspiracy in the sense of a well coordinated plot by a few powerful people. But the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, the Dred Scott decision of 1857, and the effort made by a Democratic administration in 1858 to admit Kansas to the Union under a fraudulent, pro-slavery constitution could all be interpreted by sane and reasonable men as deliberate efforts to strengthen the power of the slave states at the expense of those committed to free labor.

When Lincoln and the Republicans declared their resistance to these policies they were not being "paranoid," but were confronting a genuine challenge to deeply held convictions about what was best for the country. Strozier's interpretation, stripped of its psychoanalytic paraphernalia, amounts to a rehash of the "revisionist" interpretation of the causes of the Civil War that was popular in the 1930s and 1940s. This viewpoint — which attributed a "needless war" to "hysteria," extremism, and irrational leadership — has proved unacceptable to a later generation of historians. For the past two decades, most writers on the origins of the Civil War have assumed that the antislavery ideas and ideologies that provoked Southern secession are not reducible to psychopathology but deserve to be respected as rational expressions of moral commitment. The fact that individuals may invest their personal conflicts in a public cause — as Lincoln may have done to some degree — does not justify treating the cause itself as the neurosis of an individual writ large.(my emphasis)

It seems that this approach of trying to discredit Union and abolitionist leaders by trying to make them sound crazy or fanatical is still a common one among Lost Cause devotees.

Speaking of conspiracies and conspiracy theories, Fredrickson recommends Beware the People Weeping: Public Opinion and the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln by Thomas Reed Turner (1982) as "a well-researched and judicious study" that "can be strongly recommended to those who are curious about what can actually be proved about the assassination and its aftermath".

Fredrickson also makes an interesting observation about Lincoln's public references to God in his Civil War speeches:

To his credit, he eschewed the popular jingoistic theory that God was on the side of the North, and conceded that the Almighty had his own purposes, which probably involved punishing the nation as a whole for its long history of tolerating slavery.

If only our pious Republican leaders of our own day had that level of humility in their assumptions about knowing the will of the Almighty ...

Tags: abraham lincoln, andrew jackson, slave power

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ames characterized the Redeemer takeover accurately at the time:

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

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

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

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

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

Kennedy wrote further:

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

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

Current also reported:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 21: The first Ku Klux Klan and white Christian terrorism

The Thomas Nast cartoon above, titled "The Union as it Was", first appeared in Harper's Weekly of 10/24/1874 as a comment on the white Christian terrorist groups that former Confederates had organized in the South to deprive newly-enfranched black men of the vote and both black men and women of their civil rights.

The most famous of those groups was the Ku Klux Klan, though it was only one among a number of such groups. The "White League" pictured in Nast's cartoon was another name used by these anti-democracy Christian terrorist groups. The generic name "Ku Klux Klan" became a common shorthand for such groups generally. The KKK as such was largely suppressed at the time, though other groups continued to use violence and coercion to overthrown the democratic Reconstruction governments by terrorizing Republican voters (both black and white) and by massive "voter fraud" (to use the current phrase, only then it was very real) and corruption. The Klan of this era is now referred to as the "first Klan", because the later groups that went by that name were not directly connected to the earlier versions. The 1920s were actually the peak of political influence for the KKK nationally.

Kenneth Stammp described the activities of the KKK and related Christian terrorist groups in The Era of Reconstruction, 1865-1877 (1966):

Organized terrorism was popularly associated with the Ku Klux Klan, formed in Tennessee in 1866, but the Klan was only one of many such organizations, which included the Knights of the White Camelia, the White Brotherhood, the Pale Faces, and the '76 Association. These societies drew their membership chiefly, but by no means exclusively, from the poor whites and yeoman farmers, who apparently found their rituals and organizational terminology, as well as their purposes, irresistible. The local Klan units were called dens; these were organized into provinces, the provinces into dominions, the dominions into realms, and the whole into an empire, "The Invisible Empire of the South." At the head was a grand wizard and ten genii; subordinate to them were grand dragons, furies, hydras, titans, and night-hawks. Members of the dens were called ghouls, and the den master was a Cyclops. "This is an institution of Chivalry, Humanity, Mercy, and Patriotism," declared the Klan's prescript, "embodying in its genius and its principles all that is chivalric in conduct, noble in sentiment, generous in manhood, and patriotic in purpose." Its purposes were, among others, to "protect the weak, the innocent, and the defenseless" and to "protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." Presumably in pursuit of these goals candidates for membership had to affirm that they were "opposed to negro equality, both social and political," and "in favor of a white man's government." (my emphasis)

Nathan Bedford Forrest, early Ku Klux Klan leader and general whose troops massacred black Union prisoners of war at Fort Pillow

The Confederate cavalry General Nathan Bedford Forrest was one of the main leaders of the early Klan and is considered to be one of its founders, possibly also the first "grand dragon" who presided over the first convention of the Invisible Empire of the South held in Nashville in 1867. Forrest was notorious for what was known as the Fort Pillow Massacre, in which soldiers under his command murdered black Union prisoners of war.

The Lost Cause view romanticized the Klan terrorists of this period. In the Gone With the Wind movie, we see Scarlett O'Hara (Scarlett Kennedy at the time) attacked by men who tried to pull her out of her wagon as she rode near their encampment. She's saved by a former family slave. After that, her husband Frank Kennedy goes out with a group of white men to raze the black emcampment. Rhett Butler goes out and saves some of them from a Federal soldiers' ambush, though Frank doesn't make it back. Scarlett is far more concerned about her beloved Ashley Wilkes, who is wounded but Rhett cons the soldiers who show up at the mansion into thinking Ashley is just drunk. No particular organization is mentioned in connection with that incident in the movie.

In Margaret Mitchell's 1936 novel, she is more explicit. Describing the scene of the women at the mansion waiting for the men to return, she writes:

"Where is Ashley? What has happened to him, Melly?" cried Scarlett.

"Where's your husband? Aren't you interested in him?" India's pale eyes blazed with insane malice as she crumpled and straightened the torn towel she had been mending.

"India, please!" Melanie had mastered her voice but her white, shaken face and tortured eyes showed the strain under which she was laboring. "Scarlett, perhaps we should have told you but—but—you had been through so much this afternoon that we — that Frank didn't think—and you were always so outspoken against the Klan—"

"The Klan—"

At first, Scarlett spoke the word as if she had never heard it before and had no comprehension of its meaning and then:

"The Klan!" she almost screamed it. "Ashley isn't in the Klan! Frank can't be! Oh, he promised me!"

"Of course, Mr. Kennedy is in the Klan and Ashley, too, and all the men we know," cried India. "They are men, aren't they? And white men and Southerners. You should have been proud of him instead of making him sneak out as though it were something shameful and -"

"You all have known all along and I didn't -"

"We were afraid it would upset you," said Melanie sorrowfully.

"Then that's where they go when they're supposed to be at the political meetings? Oh, he promised me! Now, the Yankees will come and take my mills and the store and put him in jail - oh, what did Rhett Butler mean?" (my emphasis)

This positive view of the Klan was very much part of the Lost Cause "heritage". I should point out here that Scarlett's opposition to Ashley's and Frank's being part of the Klan was due to her worry for Ashley's safety and her selfish desire to protect her property from being confiscated by the Yankees. It functions in the story as a sign of weakness of character, not as some kind of principled opposition to white Christian terrorism.

Stammp points out that Congress passed three "Force Acts" (1870 and two in 1871) and the Grant administration at that time did take steps to preserve democracy in face of its terrorist opponents:

Additional federal troops were sent into the South, adn President Grant suspended the write of habeas corpus in a number of South Carolina counties [where Christian terrorist violence was particular severe]. After scores of arrests, fines and imprisonments, the Klan's power was finally broken, and by 1872 it had almost disappeared.

As I mentioned, though, and as Stammp proceeds to describe, that didn't end the violence and attempts to suppress democratic government in the South, attempts that eventually succeeded. John Hope Franklin and Alfred Moos, Jr., describe the disgraceful process in From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans (8th edition; 2003):

The overthrow of the Radicals [pro-democracy Republicans] was accomplished not only by [white] Southerners returning to political action and restoring Conservative governments but also by other circumstances favorable to white Southerners. Intimidation of blacks was effective. Even where there were no riots, whites kept blacks from the polls by terrorism and thus ensured victory for the Democratic party. After the official dissolution of the Ku Klux Klan in 1869, other methods of intimidation were employed to render blacks politically inconsequential. Indeed, intimidation was most effective after 1870, although the Ku Klux Klan disclaimed all responsibility because of the increasing violence. The crops of blacks were destroyed, their barns and houses burned, and they were whipped and lynched for voting Republican. Organized whites became bolder as they patrolled polling places to guarantee "fair, peaceful, and Democratic" elections.

Tags: christian terrorism, john hope franklin, kenneth stampp, ku klux klan, reconstruction