Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 30: The past isn't even past

"The past is never dead. It's not even past."- Gavin Stevens, a character in Requiem for a Nun, Act 1, Scene 3, by William Faulkner

Sadly, we have an all-too-current issue of the triumph of segregationist values that grew from the Lost Cause outlook and the practices of the segregated South after the "Redeemers" overthrew the democratic Reconstruction governments in the South by force and violence.

A Supreme Court decision this week green-lighted a core segregationist practice: voter suppression. The decision came in the case of Crawford vs. Marion County Election Board, which upheld an Indiana law requiring voters to show a photo ID at the polls. The Indiana law is one of the successes of the Republican voter suppression efforts, a widespread practice that comes straight out of the playbook of the Old South segregationists. To be regionally fair, the future Chief Justice William Rehnquist was also a practitioner of the method in the 1960s in Arizona.

The most exotic features of the Jim Crow segregation system were things like the whites-only water fountains and bathrooms in public places. But the core of the system, going back to the the overthrow by the so-called "Redeemers" of the democratic Reconstruction governments by force and violence and intimidation in the 1870s, was voter suppression. Through a combination of terrorism and legal subterfuges, African-American voters were prevented from registering and voting.

During the 1960s, one of the most popular methods of doing so was the poll tax, which effectively disenfranchised most black citizens and a significant number of poor whites. It took a Constitutional Amendment to get rid of that practice, although the Republicans are seeking today to institute some backdoor version of the poll tax.

A popular method in Mississippi was to require a voter to give a written interpretation of a section of the state constitution which had to be judged adequate by the county registrar of voters before the voter could register. It turned out that most black applicants just couldn't give an adequate interpretation in the opinions of the registrars, who weren't exactly legal scholars themselves in most cases. The registrars would sometimes be helpful, though, and give the person registering a text to copy which would be acceptable. Although rarely if ever were black applicants given such assistance.

I'm once again struck by this week's coverage of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright by the deeply warped priorities of the Establishment press. Not only are the views of the African-American minister Wright treated in tabloid style and dissected gleefully by pundits who know bupkis about theology or the African-American religious traditions, while the outrageous religious views of Christian Right leaders are treated as a normal thing. But in a week where the Republican Supreme Court issued a ruling validating one of the most serious anti-democratic practices in the country today, media hysteria over the Rev. Wright gets far and away more priority than this very serious setback for American democracy.

Most white Americans of all regions of the country probably tell ourselves in one way or another that we would never tolerate something like that awful Jim Crow system that those backward white Southerners of yesteryear practice. But the truth is that our powdered princes and princesses of the Establishment media mostly don't give a rat's petootie about this new ruling. Sneering at that scary black minister from Chicago is just so-ooo much more entertaining for those supposed guardians of our democracy.

Art Levine provides a good description of the rotten Republican scheme in The Republican War on Voting The American Prospect 04/01/08, in which he writes:

The roots of John Ashcroft's passion on this issue go back to the chaos of Election Day 2000 in St. Louis, when hundreds, if not thousands, of mostly inner-city voters were turned away from polling places because their names were not on voting rolls. The resulting last-minute court battle kept some polling places open for 45 minutes after their scheduled closing time of 7 P.M. Ashcroft, then the Republican U.S. Senate nominee, lost his race to the dead Democratic governor, Mel Carnahan, whose name stayed on the ballot weeks after he died in a plane crash. At an election-night party, an infuriated Republican Sen. Kit Bond pounded the podium and screamed, "This is an outrage!" - and subsequently charged that Republican losses were due in part to dogs and dead people voting. As one local government official observed, "In St. Louis, 'dogs and dead people' is code for black people [voting fraudulently]."

That election night gave birth to the new right-wing voter-fraud movement, while Missouri became a proving ground for the vote-suppression campaigns that later spread to other key states. Missouri's then-Secretary of State Matt Blunt, now governor, launched a trumped-up investigation that concluded that more than 1,000 fraudulent ballots had been cast in an organized scheme. A Justice Department Civil Rights Division investigation, started before Ashcroft shifted the department's priorities, found no fraudulent ballots, however. Instead, it discovered that the St. Louis election board had improperly purged 50,000 voters from the rolls.

Nonetheless, the template for smear campaigns, groundless lawsuits, and politicized prosecutions used across the country had been set in Missouri. Key roles were played by many of the same GOP zealots who later made their mark on the national drive to fight voter fraud, among them St. Louis attorney Thor Hearne, the 2004 Bush-Cheney campaign election counsel who later launched the GOP front group, the American Center for Voting Rights (ACVR). And as early as 2002, the executive director of the Missouri Republican Party pioneered a new dirty trick: publicly "filing" with the Federal Election Commission a 26-page complaint against the state's leading registration group, known as Pro Vote, that charged it with secretly conspiring with Democrats in the Senate race - but then failing to sign the document so the agency never considered it.

The Supreme Court decision is reported in Voter ID law upheld by David Savage, Los Angeles Times 04/29/08 and Ruling's impact on the poor raises concern by Deborah Hastings AP/San Franciso Chronicle 04/29/08.

Digby comments on this awful decision in Validating Voter Suppression Hullabaloo blog 04/28/08. Her comments are, as usual, on point when she explains the significance of this:

First of all, let's not forget that this may be the biggest political land mine the Bush administration has set for Democrats. "Voter fraud" was, you'll remember, at the bottom of the US Attorney scandals and one of their main tools for suppressing the Democratic vote. This is the realization of a very long term plan to chip away at the Voting Rights Act. Republicans, like all aristocrats, know that if enough average people vote, they will lose. Period.

I have been writing about this since before I started this blog. It's at the heart of the Florida debacle in 2000, where they illegitimately purged voter rolls and relied on arcane interpretations of the rules to deny people the fundamental right to have their votes counted. It goes all the way back to the reconstruction period and has continued right up to Ohio in 2004.

The Supreme Court has just legitimized the notion that "voter fraud" is a problem when, in fact, every study shows that it simply does not exist in any systematic way and that the voter disenfranchisement that results from such laws is a far more serious problem.

That's what this is about. It's the victory of a basic, basic practice of the segregation system. This segregationist measure is aimed at suppressing African-American and Latino voters. Digby:

It's important to remember that the thrust of many of these latest laws are to suppress the Latino vote, many of whom are reluctant to show up at polling places only to be treated like second class citizens and viewed with suspicion. Life is short. The same, of course, holds true for African Americans, even today. Simply slowing the lines with demands for proof of ID is enough to suppress the votes in urban precincts with too few voting machines. And then there are the handicapped and elderly who often just don't have the same type of ID as the rest of us. But then that's the point. These people must be made to jump through hoops in order to exercise their right to vote.

Oh wait. That's not quite right, is it? After all it was none other than the majority in Bush vs Gore who made it a point to reaffirm that "the individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States."

Perhaps we ought to change that.

As the news articles and various bloggers have noted, the Crawford vs. Marion County Election Board decision isn't a complete capitulation to the Indiana-type voter suppression law. It was a 5-4 decision that refused to strike down the voter-suppression law. Three of the majority Justice - Thomas, Scalia and Alito - took the straight-up segregationist position that it was valid on the face of it for the a state to pass such a law despite the complete absence of evidence that the "voter fraud" it was nominally aimed at preventing was actually occurring in the state. The actual decision was on the more narrow grounds that the opponents of the law hadn't demonstrated an actual instance of the law violating someone's voting rights. That was bad enough. But the majority decision does leave open the possibility of challenging the law on other grounds, including demonstration of actual violation of rights.

There have been some worthwhile blog comments on the case, including The Supreme Court and the Vote Fraud Fraud by Scott Lemieux TAPPED 04/28/08.

Jack Balkin weighs in on the decision at his Balkiniization blog in Facial ID's, Facial Challenges and In Your Face Politics 04/28/08. He notes the partisan continuity between the pro-Republican decision in Crawford and the pro-Republican decision by the Scalia Five in the infamous Bush v. Gore decision in 2000.

Andrew Malcolm in GOP, Dems split over Supreme Court OK of Indiana voter ID law. More to come? Top of the Ticket blog 04/28/08 essentially makes a "nothing to see here, move along" defense of the ruling. Malcolm is an editor for the Los Angeles Times who served as Laura Bush's press secretary for 1999-2000. His post is a snarky take that apparently finds it amusing that Democrats should object to such a ruling.

The spirit of the Lost Cause is alive and well. And actively at working damaging American democracy.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2008, voter suppression

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 29: The Daughters of the Confederacy - and the Clintons?

Hat tip for today's entry to Ed Sebesta of the Anti-Neo-Confederate blog. This article reminds us that while in our politics the Republican Party is mainly the one of the two major parties than panders to neo-Confederates, the Democratic Party isn't always as careful as they should be about not validating the Lost Cause advocates: Senator Hillary Clinton Must Explain the Praising of a Group of KKK Supporters by David Love and Peter Gamble, BlackCommentator.com 04/20/08. Ed also blogs about this story in his post of 04/23/08.

The article links to this piece from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which monitors extremist groups: The Neo-Confederates Intelligence Report Summer 2000, which provides the following description of the United Daughters of the Confederacy:

Formed in 1894 from the remnants of local memorial associations affiliated with Confederate veterans camps, the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) is open only to women related to Confederate veterans of what the UDC still calls the "War Between the States."

Although the UDC promotes an image of genteel Southern ladies concerned only with honoring their ancestors — and is, in fact, the least political of the neo-Confederate groups — its publications sometimes belie that benign appearance.

In a 1989 article in UDC Magazine, for instance, Walter W. Lee minimized the horrors of the Middle Passage by pointing out that "the sixteen inches of deck space allotted each slave is not all that smaller than the eighteen inches the Royal Navy allowed for each sailor's hammock and the slaves rapidly had more room due the much higher death rate."

Lee also argued that "the worse suffering group among those engaged in the trade" were "the crews of slave ships." Other victims of slavery Lee cites are "the purchasers of slaves" who "found themselves locked into a form of agriculture that could not compete with the new machines."

Other UDC articles praise an array of neo-Confederate ideologues such as Michael Andrew Grissom, author of Southern by the Grace of God (a book which portrays the original Klan favorably) and a member of two racist groups, the Council of Conservative Citizens and the League of the South.

The UDC has also worked directly with these kinds of groups in erecting monuments and staging Confederate battle flag rallies. Most recently, the UDC's president, Mrs. William Wells, shared the podium with League president Michael Hill and white supremacist lawyer Kirk Lyons. (my emphasis)

The title of the Love/Gamble article refers to the official letters Bill Clinton sent as President honoring the UDC in some way. This is one of the facsimiles they provide of a Clinton letter:


Love and Gamble also link to this Time article "Correction" of 01/23/03:

The article "Look Away, Dixieland" [Jan. 27] stated that President George W. Bush "quietly reinstated" a tradition of having the White House deliver a floral wreath to the Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery — a practice "that his father had halted in 1990." The story is wrong. First, the elder president Bush did not, as TIME reported, end the decades-old practice of the White House delivering a wreath to the Confederate Memorial; he changed the date on which the wreath is delivered from the day that some southern heritage groups commemorate Jefferson Davis's birthday to the federal Memorial Day holiday. Second, according to documents provided by the White House this week, the practice of delivering a wreath to the Confederate Memorial on Memorial Day continued under Bill Clinton as it does under George W. Bush.

Now, I don't recommend anyone putting on the sackclothes and ashes and rending clothing over this particular issue.

But the UDC is really not an organization that the President of the United States, no matter which Party s/he is from, should be honoring in this way. This is a far more appropriate attitude toward this subject, from a report also cited by Love and Gamble, Daughter of Slavery Hushes Senate by Adam Clymer New York Times 07/23/08:

The Senate's only black member, Carol Moseley Braun, made the chamber listen today as freshmen seldom do. Her oratory of impassioned tears and shouts, stopped Jesse Helms in his tracks as he defended the Confederate flag.

Senator Helms, the 20-year North Carolina Republican, had sought - and seemed to be finding -- a roundabout way to preserve the design patent held by United Daughters of the Confederacy on a symbol that includes the flag. ...

"On this issue there can be no consensus. It is an outrage. It is an insult.

"It is absolutely unacceptable to me and to millions of Americans, black or white, that we would put the imprimatur of the United States Senate on a symbol of this kind of idea." ...

The Senate, which calls itself the world's greatest deliberative body but in fact finds its votes changed sometime by public opinion but hardly ever by speeches, was convinced by the argument that the flag was an insult and killed the Helms amendment 75 to 25, as 27 senators changed their votes over three hours.

Then Ms. Moseley Braun returned to the attack, angrily. She said "This flag is the real flag of the Confederacy."

She said it symbolized the Civil War, "fought to try to preserve our nation, to keep the states from separating themselves over the issue of whether or not my ancestors could be held as property, as chattel, as objects of trade and commerce in this country.

"This is no small matter," she said. "This is not a matter of little old ladies walking around doing good deeds. There is no reason why these little old ladies cannot do good deeds anyway. If they choose to wave the Confederate flag, that certainly is their right."

But, she said, a flag that symbolized slavery should not be "underwritten, underscored, adopted, approved by this United States Senate." (my emphasis)

While this is a matter of symbolism, groups like the UDC use the trappings of respectability that comes from official recognition like the ones discussed here to validate their groups and their message, which promote a false history of the US with a racist and anti-democracy bias.

Tomorrow, for this month's last entry, I'll discuss an issue where the heritage of the Lost Cause tradition is very much with us today, and is certainly not simply a symbolic one. But because these traditions are still damaging our democracy today, the institutions of government should not be giving official sanction to groups like the UDC, which promote the false and poisonous tradition that is used to justify actions that damage our society in very real ways.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2008, neo-confederates, united daughters of the confederacy

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

Herman Melville

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He continued directly:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 27: Melville's Civil War poems (1)

Herman Melville wrote a series of poems about the Civil War, published in 1866 as Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War. Here is the account of that work given by Elizabeth Hardwick in her Penguin Lives biography, Herman Melville (2000):

Battle-Pieces, more than a hundred verses, considers all the high points of the war: Antietam, Gettysburg, Sherman in Georgia, Shiloh, the surrender at Appomattox, and the scattered elegies for the unknown dead. Bravery and tragedy, a sense of foreboding, an added prose plea for "reasonable consideration of our late enemies." The publication of the book received more disparagement from distinguished Americans than praise here and there. His moderation, sympathy for both sides of the conflict, offended, and one critic called his verse "epileptic."

Here is William Dean Howells writing that the poems lead one to doubt "there has really been a great war, with battles fought by men and bewailed by women: Or is it only that Mr. Melville's inner consciousness has been perturbed, filled with phantasms of enlistments, marches, fights in the air, parenthetic bulletin-boards, and tortured humanity shedding, not words and blood, but words alone?"

The final thought in Daniel Aaron's splendid book on American writers and the Civil War. "By portraying the War as historical tragedy, Melville defied consensus and took one further step toward popular oblivion."

Melville, of course, emerged from "popular oblivion", even if it was after his death. And his Civil War poems still have value, not least for their contemporary impressions.

One of the poems that particularly struck me is, "The Armies of the Wilderness (1863-4)". His patriotic partisanship for the Union is not in doubt. The poem opens with:

Like snows the camps on Southern hills
Lay all the winter long,
Our levies there in patience stood —
They stood in patience strong.
On fronting slopes gleamed other camps
Where faith as firmly clung:
Ah, froward kin! so brave amiss -
The zealots of the Wrong.

In this strife of brothers
(God, hear their country call),
However it be, whatever betide,
Let not the just one fall.

But Melville was very much aware of the ugly tragedy of war. He said while seeing newly-recruited soldiers march through the streets of New York, "All wars are boyish, and are fought by boys." That may partly have reflected his own age at the time. Because, in fact, many of the soldiers on both sides were considerably older than boys, in their later 20s and their 30s.

In any case, this poem reflects a sense of the human costs of war. In this segment, he looks at the sad state of our species as manifested in war:

Did the Fathers feel mistrust?
Can no final good be wrought?
Over and over, again and again
Must the fight for the Right be fought?

Here he looks at the sense of Southern honor as it drove the Confederate army:

Such brave ones, foully snared
By Belial's wily plea,
Were faithful unto the evil end -
Feudal fidelity

The poem is constructed as a kind of dialogue, with the eight-line sections in regular type, as in the first section quoted here, describing actions in a more naturalistic way with the Union cause constantly in mind, and the four-line sections in italics a more somber reflection on the tragedy of the situation. It could be the narrator stating the first eight lines of each exchange aloud, with the final four lines an internal reflection, maybe a voice of conscience more disturbed at the terrible contradictions of war. Or it could be a dialogue between two people, one recountin the battle factually but with excitement for the cause, the other, perhaps older voice, more disturbed at the wastefulness and horror of it all.

As the poem progresses, the contrast between the two perspectives seems to become more pronounced. Near the end, this 12-line dialogue occurs:

Watch and fast, march and fight - clutch your gun!
Day-fights and night-fights; sore is the stress;
Look, through the pines what line comes on?
Longstreet slants through the hauntedness!
Tis charge for charge, and shout for yell :
Such battles on battles oppress —
But Heaven lent strength, the Right strove well,
And emerged from the Wilderness.

Emerged, for the way was won;
But the Pillar of Smoke that led
Was brand-like with ghosts that went up
Ashy and red.

The first narrative voice is more in cheerleader mode, but it is also more reflective than earlier, as reflected by the concreteness of the pines becoming "the hauntedness", and the triumph of "the Right" described with a more neutral "emerged from the Wilderness". Survival rather than victory becomes the focus.

The second voice replies focusing on the terrible cost in lives, invoking the grim finality of death, even as it suggests the "ghosts" of the dead survive in spirit form. The contrast is starker than ever between the two, with the second voice focusing less on the more concrete images like "this strife of brothers", as in its first appearance, and more on the spiritual and abstract images of the Biblical Pillar of Smoke and the ghosts of the tormented dead ascending.

But in the end, the two voices suddenly converge toward each other in their perspectie:

None can narrate that strife in the pines,
A seal is on it — Sabaean lore!
Obscure as the wood, the entangled rhyme
But hints at the maze of war -
Vivid glimpses or livid through peopled gloom,
And fires which creep and char -
A riddle of death, of which the slain
Sole solvers are.

Long they withhold the roll
Of the shroudless dead. It is right;
Not yet can we bear the flare
Of the funeral light.

In the end, the first voice speaks of the mystery of death, and it is the second that concerns itself with the material images of "the shroudless dead".

It is worth remembering in that connection that many civilians saw with their own eyes the battlefields littered with the dead and the dying, and heard the sounds and smelled the smells that came with the sight. These wars were fought close to populated areas, not in some far-off country. So for many, the "the shroudless dead" on the battlefield were vivid personal memories in 1866, and not just for veterans of the fighting.

Tags: battle pieces, confederate heritage month 2008, herman melville

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 26: Another complication of slavery

This is another post on a Civil War article from the New York Review of Books, Dangerous Liaisons by C. Vann Woodward (link behind subscription) 02/19/1998, reviewing White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South by Martha Hodes.

No, the book he's reviewing isn't a porno book. It's about one of the everyday features of slavery, sexual involvements between masters and slaves. It usually involved male masters with female slaves, and was a cause of much complaint and resentment among white society ladies. Abolitionists also made a point of reminding the public that this was a part of the allegedly noble system of slavery in the American South, masters coercing sex from slaves. Such unions not uncommonly resulted in the master owning his own offspring as human property.

Formal restriction of the union of white women with slaves came early. Woodward observes:

Early Maryland lawmakers used the phrase "Negroes and other slaves" in their statutes. A law of 1664, however, declared that free women who married slaves would themselves be enslaved during the lifetime of their husbands and that the children of the union would be slaves for life. The law might have served one or perhaps all of three purposes: first to discourage black access to white women, second to discourage white women from such marriages, and third to ensure that a couple's master could claim their children as his property.

For the slave system, with its Southern honor conception of the sanctity of womanhood, white females becoming pregnant with black offspring was treated as far more problematic than white slave owners having children by slave mothers:

White wives of black men were far from the only source of "mulattoes." A white Virginian observed in 1757 that "the country swarms with mulatto bastards," descendants of a "black father or mother." In fact, most mulattoes had white fathers who were either slave owners or in a position to impose themselves on women slaves. But children of a black slave mother were the property of her owner whoever the father. It was only the mulatto children of white mothers who were the cause of problems for a white society that had turned slavery into a racial institution. The most common resort of a white woman who found herself pregnant by a slave was to charge him with rape. To produce a bastard was officially a crime for a woman, but did not carry the penalty of death, as did rape. (my emphasis)

This occurred not only among female slaveowners but also with free non-slaveholding whites, as well. And while they were not as common as the white male/black female cases, Woodward writes:

Such liaisons were not anomalies in the Southern states, but unless they resulted in pregnancy and childbirth they rarely left a trace in the public record. White communities could put up with liaisons of the kind without outcry when they were not flaunted, or when the offenders lived within the black community. Then, too, evidence for liaisons of the more well-to-do white women could be more easily concealed than those of poor women such as Polly. Not only was resort to abortion and concealment of infanticide more feasible, but family influences over opinion, courts, and officials could be brought to bear. (my emphais)

Woodward's account describes how the taboo against black men being sexually involved with white women became even more intense after the Civil War:

Civil War, emancipation, and Reconstruction brought drastic changes in Southern racial attitudes and policies, including those concerned with liaisons between white women and black men. Black freedmen inspired both fear and brutal behavior on the part of white men. The word "miscegenation" was coined in the election of 1864 by Northern Democrats, who used it to denounce Lincoln Republicans as advocates of interracial sex. Issues previously left to custom, gossip, and personal anguish in local communities and courts suddenly became prominent in national party politics. During the war Democratic politicians introduced the specter of white women victims of black soldiers and freedmen into congressional debates. White abolitionists collected sensational stories about the racial promiscuity of Southern white women, stories that Hodes urges readers to approach with caution. Southern whites reciprocated with stories about Northern missionaries and teachers seeking black lovers in the South.

Among the losses of the Lost Cause were not only slave property and racial hierarchy but patriarchal authority - not only control over family and property but, for a time, monopoly of political power. And along with the gains of emancipation, the freedmen suffered losses in personal security that had, paradoxically, been provided by slavery. No longer property of great value, the freedman lost the protection of an owner and such limited toleration as white communities and courts were willing to accord his liaisons with white women. If he had brothers or children of mixed blood they became more vulnerable. Offended masters could be cruel and brutal but rarely as fierce and murderous as enraged white mobs. The discipline of slavery was soon replaced by that of terrorism. (my emphasis)

Sexual accusations and accusations of rape because part of the justification for "lynch law" during Reconstruction and especially afterward.

Though dedicated to the protection of "white womanhood," Klansmen inflicted violent punishment upon women of both races accused of sexual transgressions, black women by assault and rape, white women of the lower class by whipping and sexual mutilation. Accusations of political as well as sexual transgressions were made against women as well as men. Sex, politics, and the assertion of "manhood" became conflated during this period, and Hodes describes a society in which political life became infused with sexual obsession. Klan violence in early Reconstruction occurred in parts of the South where sex between white women and black men had not produced such violence before the war.

Klan assaults were largely replaced in the 1880s and later by lynchings carried out by mobs in daytime and without disguise, the spectacle attended by whites of all classes. "In the last decades of the century," Hodes writes, "whites accused black men of rape more than at any time before or since, and black men could be lynched for all manner of objectionable behavior toward white women." A black minister warned his listeners in 1892: "If one of our men look at a white woman very hard and she complains he is lynched for it." Notices of lynchings were printed in local papers, and extra cars added to trains for spectators from miles around, sometimes thousands of them. Schoolchildren might get a day off to attend the lynching.

The spectacle could include castration, skinning, roasting, hanging, and shooting. Souvenirs for purchasers might include fingers, toes, teeth and bones, even genitals of the victim, as well as picture postcards of the event. Newspapers published detailed accounts, including the coroner's report of the cause of death as being "at the hands of persons unknown."

This violence and sexual fears and taboos bound up with it were very much a part of the post-Civil War Southern society that adopted the Lost Cause as it ideological framework for politics and history.

And I haven't seen it traced in precise detail, but I'm convinced that the torture policy of the current administration has its roots in some important ways in the culture of lynching in the Jim Crow South.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2008, racism, slavery

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

The Christ of Lost Cause mythology

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

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

But Krick's polemics sound awfully familiar.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the NY Review article, he offers this observation:

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

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

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

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 23: New Orleans and national unity

Andrew Jackson medal

In his book The American Age: United State Foreign Policy at Home and Abroad since 1750 (1989), historian Walter LaFeber addresses the critical importance of New Orleans in the early decades of the American Republic. This was a factor that weighed heavily on the Union decision-makers during the Civil War.

In the years after the War of Independence was concluded in 1783, the United States confronted actual and potential threats from the European empires. The British were still there next door in Canada and were a fearsome sea power. Spain still held the enormous Louisiana Territory which would later pass to France and also Florida. A strip of territory in what's now southern Mississippi and southern Alabama was then disputed between Spain and the US. Spanish agents had made attempts to tempt Anglo-Saxon settlers in Kentucky to join the Spanish empire.

LaFeber writes:

The individual states, however, could not coordinate an effective policy to deal with the Indians and Spain. In the background loomed British power. London officials refused to evacuate the northwest forts at Niagara, Detroit and Oswego until the Americans settled their pre-1776 debt. British agents exploited the fur trade and encourage Native Americans to drive back the settlers.

... The danger reached a peak when, in 1784, the Spanish sealed the Mississippi trade at New Orleans. Americans in Kentucky country suddenly faced the choice of losing their trade or joining the Spanish Empire. (my emphasis)

The United States was then ruled under the Articles of Confederation. John Jay, the foreign minister (Secretary of Foreign Affairs) negotiated a treaty with Spain to address the differences, known as the Jay-Gardoqui Treaty. But the Articles required nine of the 13 states to ratify a treaty for it to take effect, and only seven would approve Jay-Gardoqui.

Westerners weren't happy that the treaty granted Spain control of the Mississippi for 30 years. LaFeber writes:

Westerners threatened to join the British in Canada and then, they warned the Congress, "Farewell, a long farewell to all your boasted greatness, [for we] will be able to conquer you."

In other words, Spain's control of New Orleans gave them the power to put an economic stranglehold on Kentuckians and other Westerners in the US territories. If the United States could not provide secure access to the vital Mississippi River waterway through the port of New Orleans, that created a powerful, even irresistible incentive for the westerners to align themselves instead with the empire that did control New Orleans (Spain) or one that could wrest control from Spain (Britain).

This was one of the major incidents that created pressure for a national convention to revise the Articles of Confederation, a convention that actually wound up writing an entire new Constitution.

The critical importance of New Orleans was a central concern of US foreign policy as early as 1784, the year after the Peace of Paris which recognized US independence from Britain.

LaFeber also emphasizes that control of New Orleans was "the primary American objective" in Thomas Jefferson's policies as President, which led to the Louisiana Purchase:

These characteristics of Jefferson's foreign policy - expansionism, freedom of action, centralization of power, and the willingness to use force in selected situations - appeared in his greatest triumph, the purchase of Louisiana in 1803. But the affair could have been a diplomatic catastrophe. Jefferson and [Secretary of State John] Madison found themselves facing a crisis in 1801 when they learned that the weakened Spanish had finally surrendered to Napoleon's demands and sold him the Louisiana Territory. His war with Great Britain had stopped (temporarily, it soon turned out), and the emperor turned to developing a New World empire. He especially wanted to find a food supply in Louisiana for the black slaves who produced highly profitable sugar crops in Haiti and Santo Domingo. In 1802, the crisis intensified when Spanish officials (who still controlled New Orleans) suddenly shut off the Mississippi to U.S. trade. Madison had long understood that whoever controlled that great river controlled the rapidly multiplying Americans settling in the West: "The Mississippi is to them everything," he wrote privately in late 1802. "It is the Hudson, the Delaware, the Potomac, and all the navigable rivers of the Atlantic States formed into one stream." (my emphasis)

Britain could have wound up in control of New Orleans after the War of 1812, had Andrew Jackson not stopped them in the Battle of New Orleans in January, 1815. I'm just saying.

Tags: andrew jackson, confederate heritage month 2008

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 22: California and the slavery issue

Sorry, I'm a day late on this one. James McPherson in The Fight for Slavery in California by James McPherson New York Review of Books 10/11/07 issue, reviewing The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War by Leonard Richards (link behind subscription) deals with an important aspect of California's history. Despite California being admitted as a free state as part of the post-Mexican War Compromise of 1850, the more conservative Democratic "Doughface" faction had a great deal of strength in the state. McPherson writes:

It comes as something of a surprise ... to discover that the territories of Utah and New Mexico (which also included the future states of Nevada and Arizona) legalized slavery in 1852 and 1859 respectively, that slaveholding settlers in California made strenuous and partly successful efforts to infiltrate bondage into that state, and that California's representatives and senators voted mainly with the proslavery South in the 1850s. The distinguished historian Leonard L. Richards was born and raised in California, but learned nothing of this history from his teachers and textbooks there. "Somehow I had gone through the California schools from kindergarten through graduate school," he writes, and never heard or read that several of the state's early political leaders "might as well have been representing Mississippi or Alabama in national affairs." One reason for writing The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War, he explains, was "to bring myself up to speed—to learn material that I should have learned forty or fifty years ago."

Before I discuss the California politics more, though, I want to highlight McPherson's compact description of how the post-Mexican War dispute over slavery in the captured territories furthered the political conflict over slavery that led to the Civil War:

The annexation of Texas to the United States in 1845 and the conquest of what became the American Southwest in the Mexican-American War of 1846–1848 reduced the size of Mexico by more than half and increased the size of the United States by a third. These acquisitions also reopened the vexed question of slavery's expansion, which supposedly had been settled by the Missouri Compromise of 1820.

Three months into the Mexican War, Pennsylvania Congressman David Wilmot introduced his famous "Proviso" stipulating that in any territory acquired from Mexico "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any part of said territory." Almost unanimous support by Northern congressmen, Whig and Democrat alike, passed this resolution over the virtually unanimous opposition of representatives of both parties from the South. In the Senate, however, the equal representation of the fifteen slave states and fifteen free states enabled Southern senators to block Wilmot's Proviso.

These events sounded an ominous knell for the future of the republic. Congressional votes normally divided along party lines, with Northern and Southern Democrats lining up together against Northern and Southern Whigs. The wrenching of this partisan pattern into a sectional split on the Wilmot Proviso foreshadowed the increasing polarization that finally plunged the nation into disunion and civil war fifteen years later.

As McPherson explains, the slaveowners in the South and their representatives in Congress wanted California to come into the Union as a slave state, which the free states opposed. Before it was settled as part of the Compromise of 1850 package, as McPherson writes, "Secession and perhaps war in 1850 over the admission of California seemed a real possibility."

He describes the colorful state of California around that time:

The fears expressed by Jefferson Davis and others that California would tip the balance against the South in Congress proved baseless. The state could scarcely have given the South more aid and comfort in national politics if it had been a slave state. The Democratic Party dominated California politics through the 1850s. And that party in turn was dominated by a coalition of Southern-born politicians that became known as the "Chivalry." Most of them continued to own slaves in the states from which they had emigrated. The foremost "Chiv" was William Gwin, a Mississippi planter who arrived in California in 1849 and served as one of its senators for most of the next decade. Gwin controlled federal patronage in the state during the Democratic administrations of Presidents Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan. The other California senator from 1851 to 1857 was, in the political lexicon of the time, a "doughface" - a Northern man with Southern principles. Together these senators voted for every proslavery measure demanded by Southern Democrats, most notably the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which repealed the earlier ban on slavery in Louisiana Purchase territory north of 36°30', and then the notorious proslavery Lecompton state constitution for Kansas by which Buchanan tried (but failed) to bring Kansas into the Union as a slave state in 1858. Both supported the Confederacy during the Civil War.

William Gwin's chief challenger for control of California's Democratic Party was David Broderick, a New Yorker who opposed the Chivalry's proslavery tilt. Broderick was a hardened political fighter who had learned his trade in the rough politics of New York City before migrating to California. But he proved no match for the Chivs, who outmaneuvered him to gain the support and patronage of the Buchanan administration even though Broderick managed to get himself elected to the Senate in 1857. His tenure there was short-lived. In 1859 a political mudslinging match between Broderick and David Terry, a Texan who had arrived in California in 1849 and became a prominent Chiv, led to a duel. Terry resigned from his post as chief justice of the California Supreme Court in order to challenge Broderick. Winning the coin toss for choice of weapons, Terry selected pistols with hair triggers that he had brought with him. Unaccustomed to these weapons, Broderick fired too soon and wildly, whereupon Terry took careful aim and shot him dead. This was the third duel in California during the 1850s in which a Chiv Democrat killed a member of the anti-Chiv faction of the party. (my emphasis)

The manner in which Terry himself was dispatched to his Maker, McPherson also describes in a passage that reminds us this was very much a civil war, not simply a regional conflict:

Within California itself, perhaps the first shot of the Civil War came from David Terry's hair-trigger pistol that killed David Broderick in September 1859. The backlash against what many Californians saw as a political assassination weakened the Chivs and redounded to the advantage of the state Republican Party, which had never previously gotten more than 23 percent of the vote. In 1860 Abraham Lincoln won a plurality of 32 percent of California's votes in the four-party contest and came away with the state's four electoral votes. During the Civil War most Californians remained loyal to the United States, and the state's shipments of gold helped finance the Union war effort.

Several prominent Chivs, however, went South. One of them was David Terry, who had suffered no legal punishment for his killing of Broderick. He fought with the 8th Texas Cavalry and was wounded at Chickamauga. He returned to California in 1868 to practice law and dabble again in politics. In 1889, exactly thirty years after he had killed a United States senator, Terry became embroiled in a dispute with another California political rival from the 1850s. This time it was Stephen J. Field, who had been appointed by Lincoln as an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court in 1863. In 1888, Field, as senior justice of the California circuit court, presided over a lawsuit by Terry's second wife against her former husband, a Nevada senator. When Field jailed Terry and his wife for contempt, Terry vowed revenge. The US marshal assigned a bodyguard for Field. The following year Terry encountered Field in a railroad station near Stockton and slapped his face (as a challenge to a duel, presumably). The bodyguard shot Terry dead. Perhaps this was truly the last shot of the Civil War. (my emphasis)

In this connection, McPherson also discusses what he calls the Natural Limits thesis of slavery, which held that slavery was unsuited to areas outside of the South for a variety of reasons. McPherson argues that his involves a real misunderstanding of the functioning of the American slave system:

It was all so unnecessary, according to historians whose interpretation of the Civil War's causes once prevailed. With the expansion of the cotton frontier into eastern Texas in the 1830s, they maintained, slavery had reached the "natural limits" of its growth and could spread no farther into the arid and inhospitable Southwest. This Natural Limits thesis sustained an argument that the Civil War was a needless war, a "repressible conflict" brought on by self-serving Northern politicians who seized on the artificial issue of slavery's expansion to vault into power by scaring Northern voters with false alarms about an aggressive "Slave Power." Their self-righteous anti-Southern rhetoric finally goaded slave states into secession when Abraham Lincoln won the presidency in 1860.

The Natural Limits thesis echoes the voices of antebellum politicians exasperated by antislavery claims that slaveholders intended to expand their "peculiar institution" into the territory taken from Mexico. This whole matter, insisted one Southern congressman, "related to an imaginary negro in an impossible place." President James K. Polk, who presided over the Mexican War, wrote in his diary that the agitation about slavery's expansion was "not only mischievous but wicked" because "there is no probability that any territory will ever be acquired from Mexico in which slavery could ever exist." Senator Daniel Webster insisted that the arid climate would keep slavery out of these territories, so why insult the South by the Wilmot Proviso legislating exclusion? "I would not take pains to reaffirm an ordinance of nature," said Webster, "nor to reenact the will of God."[6] Kentucky Governor John J. Crittenden maintained in 1848 that "the right to carry slaves to New Mexico or California is no very great matter...and the more especially when it seems to be agreed that no sensible man would carry his slaves there if he could."

In fact, there were those who argued strenuously that slavery was very well suited to California mining. And by the time of the Civil War, slaves were being used for some industrial occupations in the South. Having a working class of chattel slaves did have inherent problems. But it was by no means impossible for the slave system to expand a great deal more in that direction. And some slaveowners were in the process of doing just that.

Tags: california politics, confederate heritage month 2008, slavery

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 21: Racism as a justification for slavery

One doesn't need to be an economic determinist to recognize that economic changes had a great deal to do with generating shifts in the ideology used to justify human bondage. As Bruce Franklin writes in The Victim As Criminal and Artist: Literature from the American Prison (1978):

Slavery, as we now recognize, went through a fundamental change around 1830, completing its evolution from a predominantly small-scale, quasi-domestic institution appended to hand-tool farming and manufacture into the productive base of an expanding agricultural economy, utilizing machinery to process the harvested crops and pouring vast quantities of agricultural raw materials, principally cotton, into developing capitalist industry in the northern states and England. Prior to the 1830s, open assertions of the "permanent inferiority" of Blacks "were exceedingly rare." [quoting George Fredrickson] In fact, many eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century apologists for slavery defended it as a means of "raising" and "civilizing" the poor, benighted, childlike Negro. But in the 1830s there emerged in America a world-view based on the belief that Blacks were inherently a race inferior to whites, and as part of this world-view there developed a scientific theory of Blacks as beings halfway, or even less than halfway, between animals and white people. This was part of the shift of Blacks from their role as children, appropriate to a professedly patriarchal society which offered them the opportunity of eventual development into adulthood, into their role as subhuman beasts of burden, the permanent mainstay of the labor force of expanding agribusiness.

As Franklin explains, these pseudoscientific racist views were advocated in books like Richard Colfax's Evidence Against the Views of the Abolitionists, Consisting of Physical and Moral Proofs of the Natural Inferiority of the Negroes (1833) and Samuel George Morton's book Crania Americana (1839) and Crania Aegyptiaca (1844).

The late Stephen Jay Gould devotes a portion of his 1982 book The Mismeasure of Man to an discussion of Morton's work, which was based on craniometry, the study of skulls. Gould goes back to Morton's orginal physical data and re-examines it. What he found was that, even assuming that differences in cranial size in skulls was some kind of significant measure of intelligence (which we have long since known it is not), Morton had flat-out misinterpreted his own data. The skulls with which he worked showed "no significant differences among races" in terms of cranial size. Gould found that Morton had skewed his measurements and interpretations in line with his hypothesized ranking among the races.

But he also claimed that "I detect no sign of fraud or conscious manipulation" in Morton's work. He believed from his examination of Morton's studies that the problems were due to Morton's "a priori conviction about racial ranking so poweful that it directed his tabulations along preestablished lines."

This line of thinking about racial differences was known as "polygeny". Gould writes about the public reception of such works:

The leading American polygenists differed in their attitude toward slavery. Most were Northerners, and most favored some version of Squier's quip: "[I have a] precious poor opinion of neggers...a still poorer one of slavery."

Yet another reminder that white supremacy, racism and hatred of the institution of slavery could go together, a reality which Lost Cause advocates find it convenient to obscure.

But the identification of blacks as a separate and unequal species had obvious appeal as an argument for slavery. Josiah Nott, a leading polygenist, encountered particularly receptive audiences in the South for his "lectures on niggerology" (as he called them). Morion's Crania Aegyptiaca received a warm welcome in the South ... One supporter of slavery wrote that the South need no longer be "so much frightened" by "voices of Europe or of Northern America" in defending its "peculiar institutions." When Morton died, the South's leading medical journal proclaimed (R. W. Gibbs, Charleston Medical Journal, 1851 ...): "We of the South should consider him as our benefactor, for aiding most materially in giving to the negro his true position as an inferior race."

Tags: bruce franklin, confederate heritage month 2008, racism, slavery

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 20: The slave trade

This post concerns another New York Review article by historian David Brion Davis: A Big Business 06/11/1998 (link behind subscription), reviewing The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440-1870 by Hugh Thomas and The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800 by Robin Blackburn.

The Robin Blackburn book he reviews stresses the role of slavery in the development of the modern capitalist economy, or "the market system" as business writers blandly call it these days:

Blackburn succeeds in conveying a deep sense of the "superexploitation" of millions of black slaves working millions of uncompensated hours to produce wealth that flowed into white industrial investment and conspicuous display. He shows no hesitation in identifying the historical villains: not the Baroque governments and popes that first authorized the African slave trade so much as the "civil society" that broke with the traditional "moral economy" and unleashed "rampant capitalism and the free market." While Blackburn's arguments regarding civil society and the transition "from baroque to modern" are difficult to follow, he reinforces the often forgotten point made by Robert William Fogel (and many others) that market forces and economic self-interest can produce the most immoral and humanly destructive institutions, epitomized historically by racial slavery in the New World.[7] I should emphasize that Blackburn does not see the New World slave system as the necessary or optimum path to a modern society. But once chosen, because of its absolute centrality to the history of the past four hundred years it left a profound taint on the Western world we know.

... Blackburn carefully considers the diverse views of various economic historians and concludes that while New World slavery did not produce capitalism, profits from the New World slave system made a significant contribution to British economic growth and investment in manufacturing.

Davis reminds us that the severity of slavery is a topic which has been clouded by propaganda of various kinds:

British and American abolitionists initiated a tradition of sharply differentiating New World and especially Anglo-American slavery from all previous forms of servitude. They were particularly intent on showing that modern plantation slavery was more inhumane and oppressive than the bondage recognized and sanctioned in the Bible or the servitude found in contemporary Africa. This line of argument later appealed to Marxists and other critics who were eager to demonize capitalism and market forces as the sources of the world's worst example of human exploitation. Blackburn is surely right when he insists that "the novelty of New World slavery resided in the scale and intensity of the slave traffic and the plantation trades." But because Blackburn desperately wants to see New World slavery as a unique aberration, as a tragic choice dictated by capitalist greed when other choices were available, he tends to romanticize earlier forms of human bondage. He forgets that slaves in premodern societies have often been subject to cannibalism, torture, ritual sacrifice, sexual exploitation, and arbitrary death at the whim of an owner.

When Blackburn asserts that "the slavery of the Ancient World had not denied the basic humanity of the slave," he also forgets the appalling descriptions of slaves in the mine shafts at Laurium in ancient Attica and in Ptolemaic Egypt. One need not dwell on the laws that sanctioned the Romans' pouring molten lead down the throats of slaves convicted of raping a virgin or crucifying four hundred household slaves after the murder of Pedanius Secundas, in 61 CE, in order to agree with the Quaker John Woolman that no human being is saintly enough to be entrusted with the power of owning a slave as a piece of property, a power which has always involved some degree of dehumanization.[11] As Orlando Patterson and other scholars have demonstrated, while small numbers of highly privileged slaves can be found throughout history, even in nineteenth-century Mississippi, the institution of slavery has always depended on violent domination, dishonor, and a kind of "social death." (my emphasis)

Davis also addresses an issue which comes up in rightwing polemics over slavery:

Perhaps the most startling point that Hugh Thomas makes about the early Portuguese slave trade is the way it became dominated by New Christian or converso merchants. Fernão de Loronha, for example, an associate and successor of Marchionni, gained a temporary monopoly of trade in the Bight of Benin and supplied slaves and wine to Elmina (Africans in the Gold Coast region continued to buy slaves from the Portuguese in exchange for gold). José Rodrigues Mascarenhas and Fernando Jiménez were other sixteenth-century merchants of Jewish ancestry who gained control over large segments of the slave trade to the Americas. King Philip II of Spain awarded Portuguese New Christians with asiento contracts to supply the Spanish colonies with African slaves. Some of these merchants had relatives or close friends in Italy, Brazil, or Antwerp, long the major center for refining and marketing sugar.

Thomas, unlike Blackburn, avoids the error of thinking of these converso merchants as Jews. Since there has been recent controversy over the Jewish role in the Atlantic slave trade, it is important to be on guard against the Inquisition's or the Nazis' definition of Jewishness: that is, having the taint of Jewish ancestry. In 1492 many of the Jews expelled from Spain settled in Portugal, and in 1497 the Portuguese king banished all the Jews who refused to convert to Christianity. Given the frequency of intermarriage between New Christians and Old Christians, many of these New Christian families would have lost their converso identity and been assimilated if there had been no doctrine of "purity of blood" and if the Inquisition had not become obsessed with secret "judaizing" practices. Even so, with the passage of time, the great majority of New Christians became absorbed in the Iberian Catholic culture. As Seymour Drescher has pointed out, most of the New Christians who made their fortunes in Africa, Asia, or the Americas returned to Iberia and "were disinclined to resettle where they could openly practice Judaism or even syncretic brands of family religiosity."

But with respect to their participation in the slave trade, the genuineness of the conversos' Christian faith should be irrelevant. Neither Blackburn nor Thomas fully grasps the central point. The Church and the Catholic crowns prohibited Jews from owning baptized slaves or even traveling to the New World. What qualified men like Antônio Fernandes Elvas and Manuel Rodrigues Lamego to transport thousands of African slaves to the Spanish New World was their convincing Christian identity. According to Thomas, Pope Sixtus V thought so highly of Fernando Jiménez, despite his Jewish ancestry, that "he gave him the right to use his own surname, Peretti." When doubts arose that a converso merchant or planter was not a genuine Christian, he was often burned at the stake. (my emphasis)

Present-day historians seem to put too much credibility in the claims of the Spanish Inquisition which accused so many "conversos" of being secret Jews or "Judaizers" of the Christian religion. There is strong evidence that, for the most part, the Spanish "conversos" largely abandoned Judaism and practiced Christianity. The Inquisition's persecutions of them was unjust on a number of levels. And their confessions to secret Jewish practices were largely exacted by torture or the fear of torture.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2008, david brion davis, slavery

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

Harriet Tubman, conductor on the Underground Railroad

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 18: Slavery and Confederate foreign relations

Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy: his rebellion gave hope to reactionaries far beyond the United States

David Brion Davis is a leading historian of slavery. He wrote on The Terrible Cost of Reconciliation in the New York Review of Books 07/18/02 issue (link behind subscription), reviewing Divided Hearts: Britain and the American Civil War by R.J.M. Blackett and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory by David Blight.

Slavery as such was very much an issue in the foreign relations of both the Union and the Confederacy. Davis writes:

The American South had supplied three quarters of the raw cotton for Britain's textile industry, the very heart of the British industrial economy, and by the summer of 1862 such cotton imports had fallen to one third of their 1860 level. This led to a "Cotton Famine" and widespread unemployment. Yet Britain's prime minister, Viscount Palmerston, remained cautious in the face of French pressure and reluctant to give formal recognition to the Confederacy until he could be certain of the latter's impending military victory. After a summer of Union defeats in 1862 and growing pressure from his cabinet for some kind of intervention, Palmerston and the Union were saved, at least temporarily, by Robert E. Lee's defeat in Maryland, on September 17, 1862, at the extremely bloody Battle of Antietam. It was this longed-for if marginal Union victory that opened the way a few days later for Lincoln's Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. The central question, for both Palmerston and later historians, was the issue of British public opinion.

British public opinion was not uniformly anti-slavery. Many Britons were anti-Union. And even the important British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society was passive during the debate over the Confederacy. Davis explains:

The initial caution and passivity of British abolitionists may well have been related to a subject that has been neglected or underestimated by historians: the drastic "failure" of West Indian slave emancipation. I use quotation marks to suggest that the disappointment and embarrassment did not concern the happiness and well-being of blacks but rather the expectations of whites, including many abolitionists, who often assumed that freed slaves would work harder and more efficiently on colonial plantations. However, wherever freedpeople could find plots of land for subsistence agriculture, they fled the plantations or worked as little as possible. After the end of so-called apprenticeship in 1838, both Britain and the Southern states absorbed a stream of evidence showing that freed blacks did everything they could to escape slave-like gang labor, and that plantation production and land values had plummeted. The evidence showed moreover that Britain had desperately turned to India and other poverty-stricken regions to find thousands of indentured laborers who could be transported to the West Indies, and that Cuba and Brazil, which still imported large numbers of slaves from Africa, had greatly prospered, especially in producing sugar and coffee for the world's expanding markets.

He also notes that his was a situation that added to the slaveowners' overheated fears of abolitionist politics:

... American diplomats had deluged Southern leaders with similar tales of West Indian catastrophe, which reinforced the older horrors associated with the Haitian Revolution that took place between 1791 and 1804. Interpreting these disasters as the inevitable results of French and British abolitionism, Southerners greatly overestimated the power of Northern abolitionists and thus escalated their demands in a self-defeating way. This finally antagonized many moderate Northerners and thus contributed to secession and civil war, despite Southern dominance of the federal government from Washington's time to that of President Buchanan (1789–1861). (my emphasis)

Eventually, anti-slavery sentiment carried the day on British recognition of the Confederacy:

Rumors that the government was seriously considering recognition of the Confederacy alarmed large numbers of Britons who equated a Union victory with furthering social and political reforms in their own land. It was no secret that the strongest supporters of the Confederacy were precisely those privileged minorities who opposed labor unions and the extension of suffrage in Britain. No less important, Lincoln's commitment to slave emancipation gave a moral objective to the preservation of the Union, a goal that coincided with an abstract and residual British pride in having led the global struggle for the liberty of slaves. (my emphasis)

He also notes that a namesake of Andrew Jackson played an important role in pro-Union politics in Britain:

... a large cadre of African-American speakers, including J. Sella Martin, William and Ellen Craft, and Henry "Box" Brown, challenged racist stereotypes and kept reminding Britons that slavery stood at the center of the American war. Nothing could embody this point more forcefully than the speeches of William Andrew Jackson, the escaped slave and former coachman of the Confederacy's President Jefferson Davis. (my emphasis)

Davis argues that the anti-slavery public's political perspective connecting reform in Britain to the defeat of the Confederacy and its slave system was accurate:

Though Blackett fails to recognize the importance of free-labor ideology, he makes it clear that a Confederate victory would have created an enormous impediment to the growth of democracy in Britain. This conclusion, underscored by the political and class alignments in Britain, conforms with the grim speculations of the economic historian and Nobel Laureate Robert William Fogel. After briefly surveying the plight of most workers in Europe and even England in the 1850s and 1860s, Fogel suggests that a Confederate victory would have delivered a devastating blow to antislavery and progressive politics, replacing democracy and liberal reform with "a drive for aristocratic privilege under the flags of paternalism and the preservation of order."

Given the high productivity of slave labor, an independent Confederacy could have exploited its monopoly on cotton by passing on a small sales tax to consumers, a tax that would have financed a huge standing army, along with expansionist, proslavery policies that might well have led to Confederate domination of Latin America and a reversal of Britain's antislavery pressures on Cuba and Brazil. While Fogel is fully aware that the abolition of American slavery brought "no heaven on earth," there is much to be said for his argument that Confederate independence would have greatly increased the power of the most conservative movements in much of the world. (my emphasis)

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