Confederate "Heritage" Union, April 30: Roger Taney and antislavery

Roger Taney (1777-1864) is infamous as the Supreme Court Justice who wrote the Dred Scott decision of 1857 that made the Civil War inevitable. (Taney's last name was pronounced like "Toney.")

Chief Justice Roger Taney (1777-1864)

Taney's decision not only allowed slaveowners to bring their human property into a free state and retain possession of it. He also declared that the Constitution adopted the following view of Americans of African descent, both slave and free:

They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the Negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. .. This opinion was at that time fixed and universal in the civilized portion of the white race. [my emphasis]

As Timothy Heubner notes in the article cited below, "More significant in the context of the debate over the extension of slavery, Taney held that Congress had no power to prohibit slavery in federal territories, thus putting the Court squarely on the side of slaveholders."

Taney was a successful attorney who became active in Maryland politics, becoming state attorney general in 1827. He aligned himself with the Jacksonian Democrats. President Andrew Jackson brought him into his Cabinet in 1831 as national Attorney General, where Taney became a leading figure in Jackson's successful fight against the Bank of the United States, which the Jacksonians with good reasons regarded as a major facilitator of concentration of wealth. Jackson appointed him Secretary of the Treasury in 1834, but he became the first Presidential Cabinet nominee Congress from whom Congress withheld its approval. Conservatives like Daniel Webster considered him too radical a foe of the Money Power to take that post. But Jackson appointed him as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and the Senate approved him; he began his long service as Chief Justice in 1836.

Timothy Huebner takes a look at a far less familiar aspect of Taney's career in "Roger B. Taney and the Slavery Issue: Looking beyond — and before — Dred Scott" The Journal of American History (June 2010).

Huebner explains that post-Civil War defenders of Justice Taney used statements from his antislavery period to argue that he had always been opposed to slavery. And that his infamous opinion in Dred Scott "represented a strictly legal decision that went against his own beliefs." Huebner shows in his article how "Taney's beliefs about slavery changed substantially over the decades [and] that he changed from a moderately antislavery lawyer into a zealous proslavery judge."

Taney's reputation as a critic of slavery rested especially on a 1819 case that Huebner describes this way:

While establishing his career as a lawyer and serving as a Federalist political leader, Taney had defended Rev. Jacob Gruber, who had been indicted for preaching a sermon that allegedly disturbed the peace and promoted rebellion. During that 1819 trial, Taney made impassioned statements against the peculiar institution that stand in stark contrast to those penned by the “angry southern gentleman” in the Dred Scott decision. In a speech to the jury, Taney described slavery as "a blot on our national character" and insisted that "every real lover of freedom confidently hopes that it will be effectually, though it must be gradually, wiped away."

But this was not an isolated incident, an attorney merely making a zealous case for his client. Taney married Anne Phoebe Charlton Key, the sister of Francis Scott Key, in 1806 and they were active for years in "a circle of young, reform-minded Marylanders who sought to protect free blacks from kidnapping and alleviate the harshness of slavery." Huebner writes, "Although slave cases never constituted a significant portion of his practice and the fragmentary nature of the evidence reveals little about his motives, it is clear that Taney occasionally worked to secure for African Americans the limited benefits that Maryland law afforded them."

I've discussed the colonization movement and its contradictory nature in two posts this year. Huebner writes, "Taney also actively supported the colonization of African Americans, a cause that he viewed as a step toward emancipation." (my emphasis) He and Francis Scott Key organized a Maryland chapter of the American Colonization Society. Taney also took antislavery positions in his political career, including antislavery votes in his time as a Maryland state senator - a minority position within the state legislature. While his fondness for colonization wasn't inconsistent with hostility toward blacks and even support, his other positions on slavery in that period show that Taney's public view was antislavery.

But even as early as 1821, he also began arguing cases on behalf of slaveowners arguing against the freedom of their human property. And Huebner relates:

... as Maryland attorney general he defended a notorious slave trader before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1827. As U.S. attorney general under President Andrew Jackson, Taney provided glimpses of the stance he would take in the Dred Scott decision, particularly regarding the question of whether African Americans had been included in the political community at the writing of the Constitution. In 1832, he authored an official opinion on the constitutionality of a South Carolina statute that provided that black seamen who arrived in Charleston were subject to arrest and confinement while their ship remained in port. Written for the secretary of state, Taney’s opinion referred to African Americans as members of a "degraded class." Whatever limited rights African Americans possessed, Taney argued, came from the states, who legitimately conferred or withdrew those privileges based on “the sufferance of the white population." Maintaining white control over black liberties also helped prevent "the evils of insurrection and rebellion."

But Huebner also notes:

Notably, Taney continued his personal activities on behalf of African Americans at this time and retained a reputation as a friend to enslaved blacks seeking to buy their freedom. As late as 1839, the abolitionist James G. Birney relayed to one of his colleagues what had been told to him by a slave whom Taney had assisted in this manner: Taney "was considered by the colored people of Baltimore as one of their steadiest and surest friends—and that his temper toward them never failed to manifest itself on all proper occasions where money was to be raised for their assistance or improvement."

In the end, Huebner winds up explaining Taney's shift from a seemingly dedicated antislavery position in young adulthood to a hardline, reactionary defender of slavery in the later years of his life as a matter of intellectual history:

Roger Taney's odyssey from antislavery lawyer to proslavery justice mirrored larger currents in American political and constitutional development. Having come of age during the founding era, Taney possessed an early nineteenth-century brand of antislavery that began to evaporate during the 1830s. The rise of the immediatist abolitionist movement, with its emphasis on moral purity and revolutionary change, significantly altered the nature of the political debate over slavery. During the early nineteenth century, an amalgam of antislavery societies existed throughout the upper South and border states, and national political leaders vigorously and openly discussed ways to restrict the growth of the peculiar institution. Abolitionists' uncompromising rhetoric forced antislavery opinion from the mainstream to the margins, as more moderate antislavery advocates — particularly in slaveholding states — felt forced to defend themselves against charges of extremism. This development silenced some of slavery’s opponents and nudged others toward a more proslavery stance, thus circumscribing the national political debate on the subject.

But his description of the process doesn't clearly lead to such a conclusion.

Ronald Reagan like to pitch himself to Democratic voters by using some version of the line, "I didn't leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me." In fact, Reagan's political positions just became more conservative over his lifetime, not entirely coincidentally with his acquisition of wealth via his relationships with the owners and executives of the Hollywood film industry. But that line was a recognition that there were not only people who had voted for the Democratic Party out of habit whose views had changed along the lines of his own evolution. It also recognized that Southern segregationists to whom he and the Republican Party were actively courting had developed a long-standing affiliation to the Democratic Party, which in the Deep South was for decades a segregationist party.

Huebner's conclusion just quoted could be summarized as, Taney didn't leave the antislavery movement, the antislavery movement left him.

The Jacksonian Democratic Party of the 19th century underwent a major evolution on race- and slavery-related issues. One trend, the Jacksonian trend with which this blog identifies, developed the democratic and egalitarian side of the Jacksonian political heritage, including antislavery. The other side of the Democratic Party that was the favored party of slaveholders developed in the direction of John Calhoun, the Democratic nullifier and seditionist who Jackson himself regarded from the time of the Nullification Controversy to his death as a traitor to America and an enemy of democratic government. That latter trend, which emphasized the defense of slavery at all costs, was the one with which Taney came to identify.

And Huebner's explanation of Taney's choices in that process earlier in the article seems to describe it better than his actual conclusion:

At this time [1828], Taney embraced the party of Andrew Jackson, a slave-owning Tennessean who built a southern-dominated political party that focused on the rights of slaveholders and the prerogative of states. Over the next several years the Democratic party supported slavery and white supremacy in a variety of ways — from its Indian removal policy to its eventual stance in favor of the annexation of Texas. As an official of the Jackson administration, Taney ceased to think of slavery solely from the perspective of a small-town Maryland lawyer and instead began to reason and act as a representative of the president and his party. Nat Turner’s rebellion in 1831 gave Taney further cause to reconsider his views on slavery and black rights. The revolt prompted a nearly universal response of fear and dread on the part of white southerners, who became more mindful of the threat of uprising and increasingly vigilant about maintaining racial control.

In the process, Taney decided that defending slavery was more important to him than defending democracy. This is the opposite of what Jackson himself decided when confronted with the Nullification Crisis. He decided to defend American democracy and national unity against the South Carolina slaveholders, when his personal and class interest at the moment would have pressured him to pander to the pro-slavery position that was fundamental to South Carolina's defiance. Taney made a different series of choices. It worth noting here what Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. wrote in his 1945 classic, The Age of Jackson. Taney was Jackson's Attorney General at the time of the Nullification Controversy in 1832-3. Jackson's December, 1832 Proclamation to the People of South Carolina defended the supremacy of the federal governnment against South Carolina's and John Calhoun's "states rights" claims. It also defended the notion of American patriotism as allegiance to the country and to democracy. Schlesinger writes, "Many years later, after guns had boomed over Sumter, Taney declared that he had not seem the proclamation until it was in print and that he disapproved some of its principles." Yes, even before 1861 Taney had clearly come to disapprove of the principle in Jackson's Proclamation that American patriots could never put the defense of slavery above the Constitution and national unity.

Starting with the 1940s, Huebner writes, "No record of personal activities by Taney on behalf of slaves exists for this period, and the legal evidence indicates a purely proslavery position." In his Supreme Court decisions leading up to Dred Scott, "Taney went beyond his colleagues in compiling a solidly proslavery record. In each instance Taney preserved slaveholders' rights by ensuring that states maintained control of slavery." Huebner quotes from an 1857 letter Taney wrote to illustrate that by that time, the Chief Justice had embraced "full-blown extremism" on slavery and race. Taney wrote in that letter, "In the greater number of cases that have come under my observation, freedom has been a serious misfortune to the manumitted slave; and he has most commonly brought upon himself privations and sufferings which he would not have been called on to endure in a state of slavery." He had abandoned his belief that a person of African descent had any right to freedom at all.

That's why I find it surprising that, after citing all this evidence, Huebner concludes, "Taney’s changing views show that he was both a product and a proponent of this shifting discourse about slavery." That formulation is vague enough to be plausible by not saying much. The more straighforward interpretation would seem to be that Taney decided to start defending the interests of slaveowners and actively opposing the interests of slaves and even of democracy as it existed among American whites.

Note: I also discussed this article in two posts in the 2012 series for April 27 and April 28.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2013, dred scott decision, roger taney, slavery

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 29: Slave system vs. free labor

A Louisiana planter who returned home sadly after the war wrote in 1865: "Society has been completely changed by the war. The [French] revolution of '89 did not produce a greater change in the 'Ancien Regime' than has this in our social life." And four years later George Ticknor, a retired Harvard professor, concluded that the Civil War had created a "great gulf between what happened before in our century and what has happened since, or what is likely to happen hereafter. It does not seem to me as if I were living in the country in which I was born."

James McPherson in "Antebellum Southern Exceptionalism: A New Look at an Old Question" Civil War History 50:4 (Dec 2004), from which the opening quote is taken, wrote about a theme I touched on in yesterday's post, the prewar polemics between North and South each condemning the other for the cruelty of their respective labor systems, chattel slavery in the South and free labor under growing industrial capitalism in the North. There's a whole interesting debate over whether US slavery was part of the capitalist system or represented some kind of feudal holdover; while I see it the first way, that's not the theme of this article of McPherson's.

McPherson explains the Southern position that the agricultural civilization based on slavery in the South was superior to that of the non-slave states this way:

A South Carolinian told [London Times correspondent William Howard] Russell [in Spring 1861]: "We are an agricultural people, pursuing our own system, and working out our own destiny, breeding up women and men with some other purpose than to make them vulgar, fanatical, cheating Yankees." Louis Wigfall of Texas, a former U.S. senator, told Russell: "We are a peculiar people, sir! ... We are an agricultural people. ... We have no cities—we don't want them. ... We want no manufactures: we desire no trading, no mechanical or manufacturing classes. ... As long as we have our rice, our sugar, our tobacco, and our cotton, we can command wealth to purchase all we want. ... But with the Yankees we will never trade—never. Not one pound of cotton shall ever go from the South to their accursed cities."

Such opinions were not universal in the South, of course, but in the fevered atmosphere of the late 1850s they were widely shared. "Free Society!" exclaimed a Georgia newspaper. “We sicken at the name. What is it but a conglomeration of greasy mechanics, filthy operatives, small-fisted farmers, and moon-struck theorists ... hardly fit for association with a southern gentleman’s body servant." In 1861 the Southern Literary Messenger explained to its readers: "It is not a question of slavery alone that we are called upon to decide. It is free society which we must shun or embrace." In the same year Charles Colcock Jones Jr. — no fire-eater, for after all he had graduated from Princeton and from Harvard Law School — spoke of the development of antagonistic cultures in North and South: "In this country have arisen two races [i.e., Northerners and Southerners] which, although claiming a common parentage, have been so entirely separated by climate, by morals, by religion, and by estimates so totally opposite to all that constitutes honor, truth, and manliness, that They cannot longer exist under the same government."

In Jones' comment, we see an extension of Southern white racism to include a racial superiority of Southern whites over Northern whites. Racism just makes white people crazy.

McPherson gives some representative instances of the Northern side of this argument, which did not extend to regarding Southern whites as an inferior race to Northerners:

Spokesmen for the free-labor ideology — which had become the dominant political force in the North by 1860 —reciprocated these sentiments. The South, said Theodore Parker, was "the foe to Northern Industry—to our mines, our manufactures, and our commerce. ... She is the foe to our institutions— to our democratic politics in the State, our democratic culture in the school, our democratic work in the community, our democratic equality in the family." Slavery, said William H. Seward, undermined "intelligence, vigor, and energy" in both blacks and whites. It produced "an exhausted soil, old and decaying towns, wretchedly-neglected roads, ... an absence of enterprise and improvement." Slavery was therefore "incompatible with all ... the elements of the security, welfare, and greatness of nations." The struggle between free labor and slavery, between North and South, said Seward in his most famous speech, was "an irrepressible conflict between two opposing and enduring forces." The United States was therefore two nations, but it could not remain forever so: it "must and will, sooner or later, become either entirely a slaveholding nation, or entirely a free-labor nation." Abraham Lincoln expressed exactly the same theme in his House Divided speech. Many other Republicans echoed this argument that the struggle, in the words of an Ohio congressman, was "between systems, between civilizations." [my emphasis]

These polemics have produced a discussion among Civil War historians over the years as to whether these expressed differences reflected primarily subjective perspectives or whether there was a substantial objective basis for them. And there was a substantial difference between the level of urbanization and industrialization between the two sections:

The North was more urban than the South and was urbanizing at a faster rate. In 1820, 10 percent of the free-state residents lived in urban areas compared with 5 percent in the slave states; by 1860 the figures were 26 percent and 10 percent respectively. Even more striking was the growing contrast between farm and non-farm occupations in the two sections. In 1800, 82 percent of the Southern labor force worked in agriculture compared with 68 percent in the free states. By 1860 the Northern share had dropped to 40 percent while the Southern proportion had actually increased slightly to 84 percent. Southern agriculture remained traditionally labor-intensive while Northern agriculture became increasingly capital-intensive and mechanized. By 1860 the free states had nearly twice the value of farm machinery per acre and per farm worker as the slave states. And the pace of industrialization in the North far outstripped that in the South. In 1810 the slave states had an estimated 31 percent of the capital invested in manufacturing in the United States; by 1840 this had declined to 20 percent and by 1860 to 16 percent. In 1810 the North had two and a half times the amount per capita invested in manufacturing as the South; by 1860 this had increased to three and a half times as much.

McPherson doesn't make the point here, but slavery imposed some practical limits on industrialization in the South. Industry required the use of complex machinery. Machinery subject to sabotage. Even the kinds of agricultural machinery that could be used was limited by the need to protect the machinery against the constant problem of sabotage, one widespread form of slave resistance to the slavery system and their masters. Although he does cite a study by Fred Bateman and Thomas Weiss, A Deplorable Scarcity: The Failure of Industrialization in the Slave Economy (1981) that apparently calls into question assumptions about the non-adaptability of slave labor. And there were the beginnings of efforts to use slave labor in industry at the time the Civil War broke out.

Yesterday, we saw J.D.B. DeBow's rather feeble arguments that slave labor did not reduce income and opportunities for free workers in the South. But McPherson writes:

During the middle decades of the nineteenth century, twice as many whites left the South for the North as vice versa. These facts did not go unnoticed at the time; indeed, they formed the topic of much public comment. Northerners cited the differential in population growth as evidence for the superiority of the free-labor system; Southerners perceived it with alarm as evidence of their declining minority status in the nation. These perceptions became important factors in the growing sectional self-consciousness that led to secession.

McPherson discusses various cultural differences between white society in the South and in the North. And those are certainly important to understand.

But that does not mean, and McPherson does not argue, that this somehow makes cultural difference like Southern concepts of honor the cause of the Civil War. Many of those cultural differences came directly from the influence of the slavery system itself. And whatever cultural differences came into play in exacerbating tensions between Northern and Southern whites to the point of civil war, those tensions burst into the open around the institution of slavery. As McPherson puts it, "slavery was more than an institution of racial control. Its centrality to many aspects of life focused Southern politics almost exclusively on defense of the institution."

Tags: confederate heritage month 2013, slavery, white racism

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 28: Convincing non-slaveowning whites to fight for the Slave Power

One of the favorite arguments for Lost Cause advocates to promote their pseudohistory that slavery was irrelevant to the Civil War is to point out that many Southerners fought for the Confederacy even though they weren't slaveowners themselves. So how could slavery be the cause of the war? Or how could the war be "about" slavery?

Even without much knowledge of the Confederate mobilization, a moment's thought suggests some obvious problems with that argument. Starting with, what army in the history of the world determined the goal for which it was fighting by taking a vote among privates and corporals and sergeants? In any case, the privates and corporals and sergeants in the Rebel army knew very well what the cause of secession was, because their leaders could scarcely have been more explicit that they were fighting to defend slavery. The Civil War was preceded by an intense decade of controversies: the Compromise of 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act, the Kansas-Nebraska mini-civil war, the Dred Scott decision, John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, all of which had slavery front and center.

De Bow's Review was a leading journal among Southern planters. It also dealt prominently with political questions. Their January 1861 issue came at a time when secession was still being debated among the Southern states and the start of the shooting war had not yet arrived. Lincoln wouldn't assume the Presidency until March, 1861. That number of De Bow's Review (30:2) featured an article titled, "The Non-Slaveholders of the South: Their Interest in the President Sectional Controversy Identical With That of the The Slaveholders."

The title itself gives a picture of what was at the center of the intense discussion about whether the Southern slave states should secede from the Union in the face of the Party the slaveowners called the Black Republicans taking power in Washington. Written in the form of a letter from publisher James Dunwoody Brownson DeBow (1820-1867) to Robert N. Gourdin of South Carolina, a signer of South Carolina's Ordinance of Secession. The largest concentration of slaves were held by wealthy plantations. But many white farmers had one or a few slaves. Owning a slave was sign of social mobility and thus a goal to which other whites could and did aspire. Considerable numbers of whites in the South resented slavery to one degree or another. But there were aspects of the system which many found attractive, like the prospect of one day owning their own slaves. The institution of the slave patrols, to whose existence we owe the Second Amendment to the Constitution, required non-slaveholding white men to participate in patrols to look for escaped slaves. This gave even non-slaveowning white men the chance to directly experience a taste of the power that slaveholders had over their human property. And in practice the slave patrols used their power to abuse free blacks and occasionally indulge their sadistic impulses on a slave or free black they decided deserved a beating or a whipping. The slave patrols were a predecessor to the postwar Ku Klux Klan type vigilante groups.

DeBow's article is directed at encouraging the proslavery sentiment among non-slaveowning whites. A statistician, DeBow first makes an argument about the extent of slaveholding, trying to make it look as widespread as he could. I haven't cross-checked the numbers he uses, though they look exaggerated to me; but the point here is to show the arguments he was formulating to persuade non-slaveholding whites to join a treasonous rebellion against their country:

... it would be safe to put the number of [Southern slaveowning] families at 375,000, and the number of actual slaveholders at about two millions and a quarter [i.e., counting all family members of the slaveowner].

Assuming the published returns [from the Census Bureau that showed a smaller number], however, to be correct, it will appear that one half of the population of South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana, excluding the cities, are slaveholders, and that one third of the population of the entire South are similarly circumstanced. The average number of slaves is nine to each slaveholding family, and one half of the whole number of such holders are in possession of less than five slaves.

This tells us two things: that a considerable number of whites actually did own slaves, and others could aspire to do the same. And that DeBow obviously thought that to persuade nonslaveholding whites to support the rebellion, they needed to be persuaded that the institution of slavery was in their interest. An odd argument if slavery was irrelevant to the causes of the rebellion for which he was agitating in this article. "The poor men of the South are the holders of one to five slaves, and it would he equally consistent with truth and justice to say that they represent, in reality, its slaveholding interest." We'll lead aside here whether there anything involving "truth and justice" about the vile cause of treason in defense of slavery.

DeBow does express the core of the Southern cause in the rebellion straightforwardly here, though he clearly wants to minimize any opposition to slavery among those white Southerners who did hate it, like the hill people of East Tennessee:

... I think it but easy to show that the interest of the poorest non-slaveholder among us is to make common cause with, and die in the last trenches, in defence of the slave property of his more favored neighbor.

The non-slaveholders of the South may be classed as either such as desire and are incapable of purchasing slaves, or such as have the means to purchase and do not, because of the absence of the motive - preferring to hire or employ cheaper
white labor. A class conscientiously objecting to the ownership of slave property does not exist at the South: for all such scruples have long since been silenced by the profound and unanswerable arguments to which Yankee controversy has driven our statesmen, popular orators, and clergy. Upon the sure testimony of God's Holy Book, and upon the principles of universal polity, they have defended and justified the institution! The exceptions, which embrace recent importations in Virginia, and in some of the Southern cities, from the free States of the North, and some of the crazy, socialistic Germans in Texas, are too unimportant to affect the truth of the proposition.

Those "scruples" had more directly been silenced by violence and threats of violence against white Southerners who opposed slavery. Free speech over the slavery issue not longer existed among whites in much of the future Confederacy, though in border states like Viriginia, Missouri and Kentucky there continued to be active debate over the institution of slavery itself up until this point. De Bow prefers to write Southern opponents of slavery off as Yankee-fied city folks and "the crazy, socialistic Germans in Texas."

DeBow proceeds to make a dubious case that slave labor actually increases the wages of white workers - this dubious:

If the poor mechanic could have ever complained of the competition in the cities, of slave labor with his, the cause of that complaint, in the enormous increase of value of slave property, has failed, since such increase has been exhausting the cities and towns of slave labor, or making it so valuable that he can work in competition with it, and receive a rate of remuneration greatly higher than in any of the non-slaveholding towns or cities at the North!

As in the rest of this post, I don't assume the accuracy of his vague claim that there were some places in the South where a free mechanic could earn more than in some places in the North, which in itself doesn't say much.

But DeBow's argument here is, slave prices have been going up, and so in cities where there aren't as many slaves, free mechanics don't have to compete with them, i.e., the slaves that aren't there. And, anyway, the free workers can cut their wages to make themselves competitive. The people in Cyprus, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain are living with policies based on similar arguments today in 2013. De Bow neglects to mention efforts to extend slavery into industrial undertakings.

DeBow also makes this argument, which comes down to, well, white workers won't readily agree to work themselves into an early grave which slaveowners routinely force their slaves to do:

The competition and conflict, if such exist at the South, between slave labor and free labor, is reduced to the single case of such labor being employed, side by side, in the production of the same commodities, and could be felt only in the cane, cotton, tobacco, and rice fields, where almost the entire agricultural slave labor is exhausted. Now, any one cognisant of the actual facts, will admit that the free labor which is employed upon these crops, disconnected with, and in actual independence of, the slaveholder, is a very significant item in the account, and whether in accord or in conflict, would affect nothing, the permanency and security of the institution. It is a competition from which the non-slaveholder cheerfully retires when the occasion offers, his physical organization refusing to endure that exposure to tropical suns and fatal miasmas which are alone the condition of profitable culture, and any attempt to reverse the laws which God has ordained, is attended with disease and death. This the poor white foreign laborer upon our river-swamps and in our Southern cities, especially in Mobile and New-Orleans, and upon the public works of the South, is a daily witness of. [my emphasis]

It's dubious as an argument for why whites should admire slavery and betray their country to defend it. I suppose he's trying to say, look, white boy: if we don't have slaves you'd have to do this. But in the process, he gives an unintentionally revealing description of the reality of slavery.

Here are some of the additional arguments De Bow presents for convincing non-slaveowning whites to defend the institution slavery and to support treason and rebellion on behalf of it:

The non-slaveholders, as a class, are not reduced by the necessity of our condition, as is the case in the free States, to find employment in crowded cities, and come into cvmpetition in close and sickly workshops and factories, with remorseless and untiring machinery. They have but to compare their condition, in this particular, with the mining and manufacturing operatives of the North and Europe, to be thankful that God has reserved them for a better fate. Tender women, aged men, delicate children, toil and labor there from early dawn until after candle-light, from one year to another, for a miserable pittance, scarcely above the starvation point, and without hope of amelioration. [italics in original]

Polemicists both North and South could and did point to the evils of the predominant system of labor in the other sections. DeBow's particular point here, though, is another way of saying that the South was less industrialized than the North.

The non-slaveholder of the South preserves the status of the white man, and is not regarded as an inferior or a dependant. ...

The non-slaveholder knows that as soon as his savings will admit, he can become a slaveholder, and thus relieve his wife from the necessities of the kitchen and the laundry, and his children from the labors of the field. This, with ordinary frugality, can in general be accomplished in a few years, and is a process continually going on. Perhaps twice the number of poor men at the South own a slave, to what owned a slave ten years ago. ...

The sons of the non-slaveholder are and have always been among the leading and ruling spirits of the South, in industry as well as in politics. [italics in original]

Near the end, he makes this appeal on the basis of the white racism endlessly fomented by the pulpit, the press and the politicians of the slave states:

If emancipation be brought about, as will, undoubtedly be the case; unless the encroachments of the fanatical majorities of the North are resisted now, the slaveholders, in the main, will escape the degrading equality which must result, by emigration, for which they have the means, by disposing of their personal chattels [slaves], while the non-slaveholders, without these resources, would be compelled to remain and endure the degradation. This is a startling consideration. In Northern communities, where the free negro is one in a hundred of the total population, he is reoogized and acknowledged often as a pest, and in many cases even his presence is prohibited by law. What would be the case in many of our States, where every other inhabitant is a negro, or in many of our communities, as, for example, the parishes around and about Charleston, and in the vicinity of New-Orleans, where there are from
twenty to one hundred negroes to each white inhabitant? Low as would this class of people sink by emancipation in idleness, superstition, and vice, the white man compelled to live among them would, by the power exerted over him, sink even lower, unless, as is to be supposed, he would prefer to suffer death instead. [italics in original]

That argument comes down to, the scary black people are gone git yuh! Pretty much the same argument the NRA's Wayne LaPierre makes today on behalf of unlimited gun proliferation.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2013, slavery, white racism

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 27: Colonization and Republican Abolitionism

Historian William Freehling in his two volumes on The Road to Disunion (Vol 1: Secessionists at Bay, 1776-1854 [1990] and Secessionists Triumphant 1854-1861 [2007]) provides some highly informative discussion of interaction among white racism, slavery and Abolitionism. In my last post, I discussed the American Colonization Society, which many white Abolitionists supported but nevertheless promoted and pandered to white hostility toward blacks.

In Secessionists Triumphant, Freehling describes how the new Republican Party founded in 1854 used an advocacy of colonization, i.e., resettling of blacks from the US to Africa, to widen the appeal of their opposition to slavery:

The colonization strategy also helped distinguish radical abolitionists from moderate Republicans. Garrisonian antislavery campaigns assaulted colonizationists as vehemently as slaveholders. These radicals called expelling blacks as repulsive as enslaving the unfortunates.

By embracing supposedly repulsive colonization, Republicans completed the task of drawing the fangs from antislavery radicalism, yet still claiming its moral glory. They sought ultimate freedom from slaveholders for blacks - but immediate freedom from the Slave Power for whites. They favored emancipation in the South-but only if Southerners became the emancipators. They would lure southern emancipators - but only with federal patronage. They would help allay southern racism - but only with freedmen's federal tickets to Africa. [my emphasis](p. 103)

He notes that "Southern ultras" also opposed colonization because they worried about its potential to undermine slavery. "If the general welfare required blacks to be removed, couldn't the general government free more blacks to remove?" is how Freehling summarizes their argument.

Henry Clay (1777-1852), prominent supporter of the American Colonization Society

Henry Clay, known as the Great Compromiser, was a prominent supporter of the American Colonization Society. He explained his support for sending free blacks to African this way: "Of all classes of our population, the most vicious is that of the free colored people. Contaminated themselves, they extend their vices to all around them. They are the most corrupt, abandoned, and depraved." (Quoted by Henry Wilson in History of The Rise and Fall of The Slave Power in America, Vol 1 []1872)

Samuel Eliot Morison, Henry Steele Commager and William Leutchtenburg in A Concise History of the American Republic (1977) briefly recount the history of the American Colonization Society this way:

... in 1817 the American Colonization Society was founded with the aim of doing for American Negroes what the Republic of Israel later did for Jews - to give them back a part of their homeland, though with the frank admission that the Negro, free or slave, had no place in American society. To further this enterprise, the . A.C.S. purchased from native tribes several tracts along the Grain Coast of West Africa; and several thousand American blacks had been settled by 1847, when they organized the Republic of Liberia, with a capital named Monrovia after President Monroe, and a constitution modeled on that of the United States. However, when the A.C.S., having scraped the barrel of private benevolence, appealed to Congress for federal aid in 1827, Southerners opposed the movement as jeopardizing the supply of slaves and abolitionists denounced it as a subtle attempt to increase the value of the remaining slaves in America. The A. C. S., though discouraged, continued its work to the Civil War, but without congressional backing for colonization, moral suasion against slavery appeared to have spent its force. (p. 226) [my emphasis]

John Hope Franklin and Alfred Moss, Jr. in From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans (2003) pointed to the support of the colonization concept by both Abolitionists and slavery advocates, emphsizing here the rejection of it by white Abolistionist leader William Lloyd Garrison:

Although antislavery forces had for years believed that colonization was one way of relieving the country of its dreaded "Negro problem," militant abolitionists were on the whole unalterably opposed to colonization. They were suspicious of it because of the support it received from slaveholders, who could not be interested in putting an end to slavery as an institution. Abolitionists felt, as the great majority of blacks did, that colonization was primarily for the purpose of draining off the free black population in order to make slavery even more secure. Garrison said that the American Colonization Society had "inflicted a great injury upon the free and slave population; first by strengthening the prejudices of the people; secondly, by discouraging the education of those who are free; thirdly, by inducing passage of severe legislative enactments; and, finally, by lulling the whole county into a deep sleep." (p. 195) [my emphasis]

Ultimately, only about 12,000 Americans of African descent were colonized into Africa, almost all of them to Liberia. Franklin and Moss observe, "In Liberia, ... the cost of living was high and the colony's affairs were mismanaged." The motion that the US black population could be successfully colonized into Africa was always very far-fetched. Not only did the idea have limited support among whites, most free blacks also opposed it, especially in the North: "it was not economically feasible to send hundreds of thousands of blacks to African or anywhere else."

Although some slavery advocates worried about the possible antislavery effects of colonization, Franklin and Moss explain that the general attitude among slavery advocates was more inclined to support colonization of free blacks to Africa: "Slaveholders hoped, of course, to drain off the free black population, thereby giving great security to the institution of slavery." Franklin and Moss toward stress that even by the late 1920s, outright hostility toward the colonization project was widespread and intense among free blacks:

Every convention of blacks opposed colonization, and the leaders spoke and wrote against the scheme. Martin R. Delany was especially hostile to the American Colonization Society, which he described as "anti-Christian in its character and misanthropic in its pretended sympathies." He denounced the leaders as "arrant hypocrites" who were conducting an organization that was obviously "one of the Negro's worst enemies." The main motive of colonization, he claimed, was to eliminate blacks from the United States, and for that purpose a government had been set up in Africa that was "not independent - but a poor miserable mockery - a burlesque on a government." (p. 190)

Tags: american colonization society, confederate heritage month 2013, slavery, white racism

Confederate"Heritage" Month, April 26: The American Colonization Society

Henry Wilson in the 1872 History of the Rise and Fall of The Slave Power in America, Vol 1 (Negro Universities Press; New York) wrote about the American Colonization Society and its contradictory program. Its goal was to resettle Americans of African descent in Africa. Wilson writes:

The American Colonization Society was organized in the year 1816, in the city of Washington. Auxiliary societies were soon formed in most of the States. This association, with its affiliated organizations, contributed in no small degree to influence the opinions and actions of men, and to intensify the irrepressible conflict of the last half-century. In its original formation and subsequent progress, in its avowals, arguments, and acts, it was always singularly inconsistent and illogical. It manifestly yielded and pandered to the wicked prejudice against race and color; and yet it called upon churches and Christians to assist in sustaining it as an essential part of the missionary enterprise. It cruelly aspersed and defamed the free people of color; and yet insisted that they were the preordained instruments of Heaven for the civilization of Africa. It evinced the most undisguised hostility to Abolition and Abolitionists; and yet it persistently pressed its claims on the friends of the slave. While it embraced many wise and good men, actuated by philanthropic and Christian principles, its history compels the conviction that, unwittingly or f:om design, its influence was largely instrumental in producing that sad demoralization of the nation which rendered possible the subsequent aggressions and triumphs of the Slave Power. (pp. 208-9)

It became common among critics of slavery before the civil war to refer to the Southern block of slave states as the Slave Power. It seems like a perfectly fine description to me.

Colonization was a popular notion among many white opponents of slavery. But Wilson argued that the American Colonization Society "was to render slavery and its supporters more secure." And the colonization movement was by no means all an antislavery movement. The put a major focus on resettled free blacks outside the United States. As Wilson put it:

The same principle was clearly recognized and avowed by Mr. Webster, in his 7th of March speech, in which, among his other overtures for Southern confidence, he pledged his support to any proposition "or scheme of colonization" the South might see fit to propose, "to relieve themselves from the burden of their free colored population." Though many Northern antislavery men and Christians were lending it their aid, for the promised good to Africa and the Africans, its leading members and supporters were characterizing property in man as "sacred," "as inviolable as any other in the country." They said to the slaveholders: "We know your rights, and we respect them." They claimed Southern support on the ground, as expressed by [John] Randolph at its first meeting, that it "-would prove one of the greatest securities" to such property. This idea even the" Repository" expressed, again and again, in different forms and phrases. It declared that removing free people of color" would contribute more effectually to the continuance and strength" of slavery than anything else; "would augment instead of diminishing the value of the property left behind"; "would secure slaveholders and the whole Southern country"; would render the slave who remains in America more obedient, more faithful, more honest, and, consequently, more useful to his master; and "'would provide and keep open a drain for the excess beyond the occasion of profitable employment." (p. 214)

The white racism in Northern states in antebellum times plays a big role in dishonest neo-Confederate polemics which seek to deny the role of slavery in the Civil War and wanted to minimize and detract from the nature of Southern slavery. "How could the Civil War have been about slavery when Northern whites were racists, too?" goes the argument.

For those actually trying to understand what went on, it's important to be careful to not apply anachronistic thinking, projecting current standards onto earlier times. In 2013, anyone expressing some kind of sympathy for slavery or defending it is almost certainly doing so from a white racist perspective. And most people would be very aware of that. But not even present-day segregationists for the most part would defend slavery explicitly. You can be a white racist and not defend slavery.

That was also true in the 19th century. But the immediate context was different. William Freehling has done an admirable job in explaining how the absence of slavery was also associated in the minds of the white majority with the absence of black people. Northern states voluntarily abolished slavery as the proportion of the white population grew, so abolition in the minds of many white Northerners was associated with the reduction of the number of blacks as a percentage of the population. Many whites also saw slave labor as a threat to the wages, farm income and opportunities of white workers and farmers, without making a sharp distinction in that regard between slaves and the much smaller number of free blacks. "Blacks" and "slaves" were heavily identified concepts, and so for many whites, absence of slaves equated to absence of blacks.

And so it was not only possible but common for whites to be opposed to slavery while being hostile to recognizing blacks as equals, and while being just plain hostile to blacks. White racism and antislavery sentiment could and did coexist in people's minds. A famous Southern example of that is Hinton Helper, a well-known Southern abolitionist also known even after the Civil War as an explicit racist.

As Henry Wilson observed, colonization schemes for the most part failed "to secure the confidence of the colored people." Though the American Colonization Society "was ostensibley formed in their injterest and was really incapable of accomplishing the objects of its organization without their voluntary co-operation and willing acceptance of its assistance, it was never regarded with favor by them." He mention a "national convention of colored men" as early as 1831 adopted a statement rejecting colonization as "a direct road to perpetuate slavery." Free blacks were not only a direct source of antislavery agitation and support to escaped slaves. They were also living proof of the dishonesty of white racist notions that were more and more emphasized over time by slavery propagandists presenting African-Americans as racially inferior. To supporters of colonization, they replied that:

... if we must be sacrificed to their philanthropy, we would rather die at home. Many of our father and some of us have fought and bled for the liberty, independence, and peace which you now enjoy; and surely it would be ungenerous and unfeeling in you to deny us a humble and quiet grave in that country which gave us birth.

They were Americans and insisted on being regarded as such.

Tags: american colonization society, confederate heritage month 2013, slavery, white racism

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2013, April 25: Again on Spielberg's Lincoln movie

Historian Glenn David Brasher discussed SPIELBERG: Lincoln (2012) [Take 2] at Civil War Monitor 11/28/2012. He gives a helpful observation about how movies shape popular impressions of historical events and figures:

Movies can negatively shape popular perceptions of history. Birth of a Nation (1915) helped lead to the revival of the Klan. Gone with the Wind (1939) still shapes many peoples’ comprehensions of slavery. The Patriot (2000) provided a false understanding of the soldiers and tactics of both sides during the Revolutionary War. Often, history instructors must spend class time debunking and criticizing Hollywood depictions of America’s past and they skeptically approach any historical film ready to hammer away at inaccuracies or distortions. As a result, many people have come to believe that professional historians simply hate all historical movies.

But he was impressed by Lincoln. He points out that director Steven Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kuchner didn't try to make a panoramic presentation of the entire emancipation process:

They did not even film all aspects of their source book, Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals. Instead, the primary focus is on only one minor part of the emancipation story, President Lincoln’s role in engineering the 13th Amendment through the House of Representatives in early 1865 with bipartisan support. His effort required skillfully uniting the various wings of his own party and securing at least 20 Democratic votes. Here Spielberg gets at the heart of Goodwin’s thesis by accurately portraying Lincoln as a masterfully shrewd politician employing any means necessary (the specifics of which are largely fictionalized, but entertaining and accurate in spirit) to pull together a disparate political coalition. This tightly focused narrative arc provides the film with high drama, light comedy, and an exhilarating climax. Those who have studied Civil War congressional debates will be especially pleased with the film's accurate and entertaining depiction of these discourses. To the film's credit, it becomes clear that northern racism was often as virulent as southern. We may quibble about some of the details, but in the end, the film’s accuracy is praiseworthy, even if narrowly focused on a topic that requires mainly depicting the machinations of a few white men. [my emphasis]

That strikes me as a good observation.

As I discussed in the first posts in this year's Confederate "Heritage" Month series, I had an issue with the opening scene which leaves the impression that Lincoln was fine with war crimes, specifically a "no quarter"/take-no-prisoners approach. When in reality he set a new and internationally important precedent in opposing such a policy. I'm afraid that will also go into the list of "inaccuracies or distortions" that Hollywood has contributed to popular understanding of history.

Today when the Bush Library opening featured a video of Condi-Condi Rice justifying torture, it's a reminder of what a potentially destructive distortion of history that can be when evil people use it to justify their own criminal actions.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2013, lincoln, war crimes

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2013, April 24: David Blight on John Brown

For today's entry, a lecture by David Blight of Yale, 9. John Brown's Holy War: Terrorist or Heroic Revolutionary? YouTube date 11/21/2008

From the YouTube caption:

Professor Blight narrates the momentous events of 1857, 1858, and 1859. The lecture opens with an analysis of the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858. Next, Blight analyzes the Dred Scott decision and discusses what it meant for northerners--particularly African Americans--to live in "the land of the Dred Scott decision." The lecture then shifts to John Brown. Professor Blight begins by discussing the way that John Brown has been remembered in art and literature, and then offers a summary of Brown's life, closing with his raid on Harpers Ferry in October of 1859.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2013, john brown

Confederate "Heritagae" Month, April 23: Neo-Confederate American patriotism and whiteness

Sorry, my April 23 entry is coming a day late. For this one, I want to call attention to the post by Kevin Levin at Civil War Memory, A Study in Irony 04/23/2013. You should go there to see the visual featuring the Confederate battle flag. But this is his comment on it: "The founder of the Virginia Flaggers holds up the flag of a failed rebellion against the United States as she chats with a gentleman at a political event for prospective candidates in Wakefield, Virginia next to a poster accusing Lincoln of treason."

The link he includes in that quote is to a Facebook page for "Confederate Flaggers - Stand, Fight, and NEVER Back Down!" Their "About" description is as follows, with quotation marks in the original:

"A group dedicated to the promotion of and education in flagging as a way to protect and defend all Confederate heritage, and to the support of all who are willing to join in. When needed, flaggers stand with our flags against those in opposition in a peaceful, yet forceful manner, to educate and inform the general public, and in open and visible protest against those who have attacked us, our flags, our ancestors, or our Heritage. This group will serve as a gathering place for flaggers, to share information and ideas, and help to facilitate the growth of flagging throughout the South, the U.S. and beyond!"

Kevin's comment focuses on the seeming contradiction between participating in an event honoring a Constitutional election and glorifying treason and sedition and white racism at the same time.

In this particular case, I would have to say that there is no inherent contradiction here. Participating in an election-related event doesn't mean that the participant supports the existing form of government as right, just or acceptable in a larger or longer-term sense.

But it is true that many people who "honor" Confederate Heritage by displaying the Confederate battle flag or other symbols of the Lost Cause also consider themselves very patriotic Americans. Isn't that a real contradiction?

It is. But the connecting point lies in part in a racialist conception of patriotism. Neo-Confederates honor the treason and armed rebellion of the Southern whites supporting the cause Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens stated like this in his famous Cornerstone Speech of March 21, 1861, describing the Confederate cause:

The [US] constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution [slavery] while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the "storm came and the wind blew."

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.

But for those who conceive of American patriotism today as an aspect of "whiteness," then American patriotism becomes a brand of white nationalism and therefore very compatible with the celebration of slavery and white supremacy in neo-Confederate thinking and rituals.

This photo at the Confederate Flaggers Facebook page shows an undated photo of people in Ku Klux Klan hoods and robes displaying a version of the American flag.

One of the commenters identifying himself as John Henry Taylor writes:

In 1861 this flag had become the symbol of corruption and evil. The monstrosity government that it represents now wants to destroy even our Christianity. Tis better that it is flown by the Klan and their vile membership than ever flown over our country as a symbol of a vile, evil, and corrupt occupation government, hell bent on enslaving the populace.

It sounds like the commenter wants us to consider him a patriotic American, as well.

Chauncey DeVega in Featured Reader Comment About the Boston Bombing, Chechens, and Racial Formation: "Whiteness" is a Measure of Community Norms and "Good Conduct" WARN 04/22/2013 describes his conception of whiteness and how it is socially constructed: "Whiteness has value in the United States. Race is made by the law, circulated and enforced via common sense, day-to-day interactions, and reproduced by social norms and standards."

He quotes one of his reader's comments about a 19th century court case that expressed a view, "the logic" of which, he says, "would appear to still hold today":

An 1857 South Carolina court decision on whether two men were white, quoted in Race Relations in Virginia and Miscegenation in the South 1776-1860, illustrates racial formation at work at the individual level:

"The condition of the individual is not to be determined solely by distinct and visible mixture of negro blood, but by reputation, by his reception into society, and his having commonly exercised the privileges of a white man.

But his admission to these privileges, regulated by the public opinion of the community in which he lives, will very much depend on his character and conduct; and it may be well and proper, that a man of worth, honesty, industry, and respectability, should have the rank of a white man, while a vagabond of the same degree of blood should be confined to the inferior caste. It will be a stimulus to the good conduct of these persons, and security for their fidelity as citizens."

Tags: confederate heritage month 2013, neo-confederate, white racist

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2013, April 22: Civil War and slavery

Tracy Thompson in The South still lies about the Civil War Salon 03/16/2013 marvels at the fact that the neo-Confederate pseudohistory of the Civil War which argues that slavery not only did not cause the war but was basically irrelevant to it still has such wide credence:

We pause here to note that wars are complex events whose causes can never be adequately summed up in a phrase, that they can start out as one thing and evolve into another, and that what people think they are fighting for isn’t always the cause history will record. Yet, as Lincoln noted in his second inaugural address, there was never any doubt that the billions of dollars in property represented by the South’s roughly four million slaves was somehow at the root of everything, and on this point scholars who don’t agree about much of anything else have long found common ground. “No respected historian has argued for decades that the Civil War was fought over tariffs, that abolitionists were mere hypocrites, or that only constitutional concerns drove secessionists,” writes University of Virginia historian Edward Ayers. Yet there’s a vast chasm between this long-established scholarly consensus and the views of millions of presumably educated Americans, who hold to a theory that relegates slavery to, at best, incidental status. How did this happen?

One reason boils down to simple convenience—for white people, that is. In his 2002 book "Race and Reunion," Yale historian David Blight describes a national fervor for "reconciliation" that began in the 1880s and lasted through the end of World War I, fueled in large part by the South’s desire to attract industry, Northern investors’ desire to make money, and the desire of white people everywhere to push "the Negro question" aside. In the process, the real causes of the war were swept under the rug, the better to facilitate economic partnerships and sentimental reunions of Civil War veterans.

But an equally important reason was a vigorous, sustained effort by Southerners to literally rewrite history — and among the most ardent revisionists were a group of respectable white Southern matrons known as the United Daughters of the Confederacy. [my emphasis]

Tags: confederate heritage month 2013, lost cause, slavery

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2013, April 21: Celebrating treason on behalf of slavery

I post here occasionally in response to Bro. Wade "Sword of Vengeance" Burleson, whjo uses his blog to spread John Birch Society politics along with the Good News of the Gospel.

Bro. Sword-of-Vengeance indulges in a bit of neo-Confederate history himself, further illustrating his general political-social outlook, in The Charitable Spirit of R.E. Lee Toward His Enemies Istoria Ministries Blog 03/09/2012, encouraging the neo-Confederate canonization of the military leader whose armies killed far more American soldiers than any group with "Al Qa'ida" in its name ever did. "The world would be a better place were we all able to exhibit Lee's charitable spirit toward those who consider us their enemy," he writes.

Robert E. Lee, the Christ figure of the Lost Cause

The world would be a better place if there weren't people like Robert E. Lee in it who was willing to fight a bloody four-year war to defend slavery.

Along the same lines is his post on one of those convicted of participating in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln: The Challenges of Life Reveal True Character: Samuel Mudd and His Imprisonment at the Dry Tortugas 05/20/2012. To put it mildly, not everyone takes such a benign view of Mudd's role in the assassination as Bro. Wade does; see, for instance: Doug Linder, The Trial of the Lincoln Assassination Conspirators (2009) UMKC website, including the article on Dr. Samuel Mudd; Edward Steers Jr., His Name Is Still Mud (1997) and Blood on the Moon: The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln (2001); and, the long review by Phillip Stone of Blood on the Moon and two other books in Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 27/1 (Winter 2006).

Bro. Wade goes to some lengths to dismiss any involvement of Mudd in the assassination plot, e.g., "Both Dr. Mudd and his wife swore to their graves that Dr. Mudd had no knowledge of the President's death when he treated Booth's leg, and even had he known, he would have been obligated by the Hippocratic Oath to treat the assassin." It would presumably come as a surprise to Hippocrates that his oath also forbade notifying the law that an assassin who had just shot your country's leader was in your house. As Phillip Stone writes:

In light of this [repeated previous] exposure to Booth [on the part of Mudd - something Bro. Wade also minimizes], it is not credible that Dr. Mudd, even in the pre-dawn of April 15, while examining and treating someone in his home, did not recognize Booth, a famous actor, a particularly handsome man, and a man with whom he had had an extended conversation less than four months earlier. Even with a false beard, and certainly in the ensuing hours of daylight, Booth would have been recognizable. The suspicion that Mudd was not telling the truth is corroborated by his claim that he left these strangers in his home with his wife and children, went to town for supplies, learned of the assassination and even Booth's involvement, but said nothing. Later, he started to realize that it was indeed Booth at his house. When he returned home, he told his wife, but because of her fears of being left there alone again if he should return to town to tell the authorities, he waited until the next day. Even at that point, he provided the information only through his cousin. The most dramatic news in Dr. Mudd's entire life was breaking around his own home and, even after realizing who Booth was, he delayed going to authorities. Steers has it right: These are the actions of a man who knowingly treated and sheltered Booth. [my emphasis]

But to admirers of the Lost Cause, Lincoln was the evil Yankee dictator, quite a different man from the Christ-like traitor Robert E. Lee. So it's not surprising that Lost Cause advocates jump to the defense of his murderers.

Tags: abraham lincoln, confederate heritage month 2013, john wilkes booth, robert e lee

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 20: Theodore Bilbo (Updated)

Theodore Bilbo (1877-1947), Senator from Mississippi and supporter of New Deal economic legislation, was one of the most rancid white racists to ever sit in the US Senate.

Theodore Bilbo (1877-1947)

Robert L. Fleegler in Theodore G. Bilbo and the Decline of Public Racism, 1938-1947 Journal of Mississippi History (Spring 2006) reminds us why:

On May 24, 1938, Bilbo formally proposed legislation to return blacks to Africa. During a floor speech on the proposal, he rejected new social science theories that suggested that environment rather than genetics determined an individual’s capabilities. "It is the height of folly," he insisted, "to assume that environment, discipline, education, and all other external devices can affect the blood, smooth down inequalities between individuals of the same breed, much less between different breeds, or transmute racial qualities." Bilbo went on to praise Nazi racial doctrines. "The Germans appreciate the importance of race values. They understand that racial improvement is the greatest asset that any country can have. ... They know, as few other nations have realized, that the impoverishment of race values contributes more to the impairment and destruction of a civilization than any other agency." [my emphasis]

Fleegler makes an important point about what might be called the social-psychological economy of white racist politics, in which fine distinctions were made on the basis of often insubstantial differences:

Many southern politicians continued to use extreme language similar to Bilbo's [after 1947]. Major southern figures such as James Eastland, Richard Russell, Strom Thurmond, and George Wallace played the race card and supported Jim Crow with all their energies well into the 1960s. But they usually avoided the kind of overt racism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Italian remarks that Bilbo consistently expressed. Instead they employed code words; these legislators talked of the need to protect the South from “outside agitators” and the necessity of defending "state’s rights," but rarely used the terms niggers or kikes.

Fleegler gives a sense of how Bilbo's extreme racism could be accompanied by his support for liberal New Deal ideas, reflecting the way in which the near-total exclusion of blacks from voting in Mississippi left room for some limited amount of class-based politics between "conservatives" and "rednecks". And division which later allowed some wealthier but conservative Mississippians to blame the working-class rednecks for white racism. Fleegler writes:

Scholars have debated whether or not Bilbo's commitment to white supremacy was genuine or merely a cynical attempt to earn votes. Chester Morgan, whose book Redneck Liberal details Bilbo’s progressive record on economic issues during his Senate tenure, believes that the demagogue label is unfair. Morgan suggests that "The Man" truly believed in racial separation and that Bilbo discussed racial issues only after his opponents first raised the subject. Morgan believes that the southern establishment attempted to discredit Bilbo's progressive economic views through race baiting. For example, Bilbo’s Bourbon [conservative] opponents attacked him for being soft on racial issues because he suggested that the state abolish the poll tax. Bourbons supported the poll tax not only because it eliminated the political power of blacks but also because the measure disfranchised many of Bilbo’s poor white supporters.

Still, Bilbo’s racist outbursts erupted at suspicious times. His most famous periods of race baiting were in 1938 and 1944, points at which he was beginning re-election campaigns for the Senate, a pattern suggesting political purposes. In all likelihood, both sides of this debate are correct. Perhaps his appeals to class differences superseded his appeals to white supremacy during much of his career; however, as civil rights legislation slowly gained momentum during the 1930s and 1940s, race became increasingly central to his philosophy and he expressed his supremacist views in a more extreme fashion than most of his fellow southern politicians.

It's worth noting in the political environment of 2013 that the requirement for government-issued ID is a backdoor form of poll tax since it typically requires the payment of a fee for the ID.

Bilbo could cite some legendary pre-Civil War names of men regarded as great statesmen who had endorsed the idea of deporting blacks. But those were in the context of Abolitionist schemes to end slavery. White opponents of slavery looked favorably on "colonization" of freed slaves back to Africa, partly out of a general assumption that blacks were inferior to white but also in connection with the heavy association of slavery with the presence of blacks. As discussed in yesterday's post, the fight over Indian Removal in the 1930s was one event that made some white Abolitionists realize not only the impracticability but the inhumanity of the colonization scheme, which in any case had never achieved much resonance among African-American Abolitionists.

(Update 04/27/2013: This previous paragraph could leave the impression that antebellum advocates of colonization were all Abolitionists. They were not. In my 04/26/2013 post, I discuss the contradictory nature of the colonization program. On the other hand, many Republicans in the first years of that Party's existence advocated colonization after abolition in an attempt to broaden the appeal of their Abolitionist program.)

Fleegler's essay focuses on how Bilbo's rancid racism came increasingly into conflict with changing attitudes about race and legal equality in connection with the Second World War:

Bilbo made a speech to the Mississippi State legislature on March 22, 1944, in which typical Bilboisms contained new references to the racial changes brought about by the war. He reiterated his proposal to resettle blacks in West Africa, saying, "When this war is over and more than two million Negro soldiers, whose minds have been filled and poisoned with political and social equality stuff, return and 'hell breaks out' all over the country, I think I’ll get more help in settling the Negroes in Africa."

... The debate over appropriations for the Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC) in the summer of 1944 also demonstrated a heightened awareness of Bilbo’s racism. Bilbo again proposed the repatriation of blacks to West Africa and, referring to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt's opposition to such a scheme, said, “Of course, she did not understand my ultimate plan. If I can succeed eventually in resettling the great majority of Negroes in West Africa— and I propose to do it—I might entertain the proposition of crowning Eleanor queen of Greater Liberia.” While this language was incendiary, it was not dramatically different from Bilbo’s rhetoric during the 1938 anti-lynching debate.

But by early 1944, such blatant bigotry drew more notice. The New York Times, which had ignored earlier instances of Bilbo’s racism, noted that "From the opening until the final passage vote, debate was conducted with a bluntness as to racial questions which appeared to surprise and at times astound observers in the visitor’s galleries." Allen Drury, a UPI reporter, wrote in his diary, "The FEPC appropriation was sustained today, after a vicious, dirty speech by Bilbo, who was hissed from the galleries and deserved it." [my emphasis in bold]

Fleegler also observes throughout that Bilbo's white racism against blacks was accompanied by a shameless anti-Semitism, as well.

He also provides us this reminder of what voter suppression looked like in 1946:

Bilbo, however, now faced another problem in his native Mississippi. Some African-Americans in Mississippi were challenging segregation after a pair of changes created opportunities for black voting. In 1944, the Supreme Court had ruled the all-white Democratic primary unconstitutional in Smith v. Allwright. Moreover, the Mississippi legislature unintentionally opened the door to black participation when it exempted veterans from the poll tax in 1946. The legislature expected other measures, such as the literacy test, to prevent African-American veterans from voting. Emboldened by these measures, some black veterans, including a young man by the name of Medgar Evers, attempted to vote in the Democratic primary on July 2, 1946, the first statewide election after Smith v. Allwright.

With blacks engaged in an attack on a bulwark of white supremacy, Bilbo stepped up his rhetoric and engaged in incitements that had been unnecessary in the past. "I'm calling on every red-blooded American who believes in the superiority and integrity of the white race to get out and see that no nigger votes," he proclaimed, "and the best time to do that is the night before!" As a result of Bilbo’s inflammatory statements and the incitements of the local press, some white Mississippians responded with a campaign of intimidation and violence. Evers and a group of veterans made two attempts to vote in Decatur, but on both occasions white mobs prevented them from doing so. Their experience was replicated across the state, and few African-Americans were able to exercise their constitutional rights. [my emphasis in bold]

This is what vote suppression is. But I don't mean to say it's a "slippery slope." The present-day voter suppression tactics are the same thing as the vote suppression of the Jim Crow decades in Mississippi and the Deep South. We already see blatant psychological and physical intimidation of African-American and Latino voters happening. Again, what we're seeing today is not a "slippery slope." This is the bottom of the slope already, straight-up segregationist vote suppression. It will get worse if the current measures aren't rolled back. But this is an issue where present-day Americans have no reason to pat ourselves on the back that we've overcome that aspect of the past. It's the present again.

I'll conclude with this quote of Bilbo defending himself against charges of inciting violence and intimidation against black citizens. He goes on to say that he's a friend to the Negroes, just like, say, Rand "Baby Doc" Paul today. This isn't just ass-covering or hypocrisy, it's proud sneering at what he and his violent followers had accomplished in preventing the practice of democracy in the State of Mississippi:

The hearings concluded with Bilbo’s own testimony in which he claimed that he had never advocated violent means to prevent blacks from voting, suggesting that a hostile media had distorted his remarks. Bilbo declared, "I deny that I exhorted, agitated, and made any inflammatory appeals to the passions and prejudices of the white population to foster, stimulate, inspire, create and intensify a state of acute and aggravated tension between the white and Negro races in the state of Mississippi." He added, "I want to say right here off the record that the Negroes of Mississippi have never had a better friend."

Tags: confederate heritage month 2013, theodore bilbo, white racism

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2013, April 19: Abolitionists against Indian removal

Natalie Joy has an article on another issue that was a major theme for the Jackson Administration, Indian Removal. As I've said more than once here, even though this blog's name is a recognition of the vital democratic tradition that Jacksonianism represented, the Indian Removal Act of 1830 was one major accomplishment of his that was a bad decision, and an immoral one by the standards of the time.

Joy's article is on Cherokee Slaveholders and Radical Abolitionists: An unlikely alliance in antebellum America Common-Place 10/4 (July 2010). She gives the background of the Act this way:

The election of Andrew Jackson to the presidency in 1828 famously signaled a new era in U.S. Indian policy, one that had dire consequences for thousands of Native Americans. Once in office, Jackson urged Congress to pass federal legislation authorizing him to sign removal treaties with all Indians living east of the Mississippi River, thus freeing up millions of acres of land for white settlement. The states most eager for such legislation were in the South, not coincidentally a region that had offered Jackson significant support precisely because he promised to make Indian removal a top priority of his administration. Georgia was particularly eager for the federal government to make good on its 1802 promise to extinguish Indian land titles within its borders, which included a significant portion of the Cherokee Nation. But Jackson's plan did not go unchallenged. In 1829, as both houses of Congress prepared their own version of what would become the Indian Removal Bill, reformers throughout the northern United States joined with Native Americans to fight its passage. [my emphasis]

I won't go into the complexities of Old Hickory's general approach to Indian policy here. I discussed it in this earlier post, Old Hickory and the Indians 04/08/2004, a review of Robert Remini's Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars (2001). My focus here is more on the "antiremoval" coalition, as Joy calls them. "Antiremovalists," she notes argued against removal on moral grounds and defended the sovereign rights of the native tribes. "Most importantly," she notes, "antiremovalists believed that Anglo-Americans had a moral duty to bring Christian civilization to Native Americans, a project that would be greatly hampered by removal."

Morality in their eyes was deeply connected to Christianity and capitalism:

Making Indians "civilized" had been a central component of federal U.S. Indian policy since George Washington's administration, but it was not formalized until the passage of the 1819 Civilization Act, which provided funds for missionary organizations eager to participate in the conversion of "savages." "Civilization," it was commonly understood, was the only way for Indians to avoid extinction—the inevitable fate of uncivilized peoples who came into contact with more advanced cultures. What exactly "civilization" entailed was a matter of debate in the nineteenth century, but most people agreed that to be civilized, Indians would have to be guided by Christian morality, live as settled farmers, and abide by a written system of laws and government. Most importantly, Indians needed to acknowledge and embrace private property, including individual landownership. In 1789, no less a figure than Henry Knox, Washington's Secretary of War and the architect of early national Indian policy, argued that the key to civilizing Indians was "to introduce among [them] a love for exclusive property."

Abolitionists believed, as did most Americans, in the myth of the "noble savage," whose innocence of civilization was the source of his virtuous purity, but also his greatest weakness, for it left him vulnerable to the introduction of unwanted vices ... [my emphasis]

This is a reminder to be cautious about anachronism, the projecting of current understandings onto an earlier time. By liberal or left standards of 2013, even the Indians' white partisans weren't interested in assisting the Indians by putting them under white American laws, practices and institutions, especially the institutions of Christian churches and private property.

The irony acknowledged in the title of Joy's article is that the Abolitionists opposing Indian removal to prevent the spread of slavery found themselves in coalition with Cherokee slaveowners:

Most Cherokees did not own slaves, nor did they radically alter their traditional ways of living to conform to the standards of American civilization, but those who did were part of a growing class of wealthy and politically powerful elites who lived on large plantations like their white neighbors. And it was this elite class with whom antiremovalists, including abolitionists, had the most contact in print and in person.

And that coalition had many of the problems of such the-enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend alliances:

Throughout the debate over Indian removal in the 1830s, abolitionist support of the Cherokee cause was contingent upon a romanticized picture of Indian slaveholding. As part of their support for the Cherokee Nation's fight against removal, abolitionists found themselves in the unusual position of acting as apologists for Indian slaveholding, mounting a defense that drew heavily from the testimony of Cherokee leaders. Abolitionists accepted such testimony as fact, even when they had good reason to doubt its truthfulness, because it reinforced their own ideas about Indians, slavery and civilization. [my emphasis]

Politics is politics, as Joe Stalin said shortly before he signed the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact in 1939.

The antiremoval Abolitionists found themselves defending slavery in a kind of Hegelian way, arguing that the adoption of black slavery by the Cherokees was evidence of their progress in the American Christian form of civilization, including this unfortunately element of it. Joy observes that the establishment of classical liberal notions of constitutions and the rule of law, and slaveowning Cherokees were on board with that part of the program to some extent:

In 1827 the Cherokee Nation had written its own constitution, which included numerous provisions protecting the interests of slaveholders, including barring slaves and their descendants, free or enslaved, from holding office or voting. Many other laws including those against interracial marriage attest to the legal and political institutionalization of black chattel slavery in the Cherokee Nation.

... Abolitionists accepted that Cherokee slaveholding—at least in the short term—was compatible with and even evidence of civilization. The Cherokees' adoption of black chattel slavery, and the larger cultural, legal and political changes it wrought, proved their inherent capacity for progress. Because abolitionists did not believe slavery to be the basis of a civilized society, Indian slaveholding had to be merely an intermediary stage, not the end result of the process of civilization. [my emphasis]

But even given the complexities and moral ambiguities that politics often produce, the Abolitionists were fighting for the rights of the Indians, as they understood them. "Even after passage of the Indian Removal Act in May 1830, abolitionists continued to support Indian rights, often folding the plight of Indians into their condemnation of black chattel slavery," Joy writes.

Even though the Abolition movement was still relatively small, the conflicts between the North and the South due to slavery were already beginning to affect issues not directly connected with slavery as such:

Abolitionists joined the Indian cause because they saw in removal the influence of the slaveholding South. "One would think that the guilt of African slavery was enough for the nation to bear," one writer lamented in 1829, "without the additional crime of injustice to the aborigines." Although the Indian Removal Bill applied to nearly all Indians living east of the Mississippi River, southern slaveowners were clearly the most eager to obtain fertile Indian land, and abolitionists feared that removal would hasten the westward expansion of slavery at the expense of national honor. [my emphasis]

The Hegelian World Spirit was evidently at work in the alliance of the Abolitionists with Southern Cherokee slaveholders revealing to some of them the problems with their supported for colonization of African-Americans back to Africa after the abolition of slavery, i.e., mass deportation:

The fight over the Indian Removal Bill immediately preceded the radicalization of the antislavery movement in the early 1830s. This was no accident, as several historians have noted. Many reformers who supported the American Colonization Society and other moderate antislavery activities in the 1820s had been radicalized by their involvement with the antiremoval cause. Antiremoval activism convinced many antislavery reformers to reconsider the colonization of free blacks to Africa. They found themselves increasingly unable to justify their support for one policy (colonization) that bore such strong similarities to another (removal) which they strongly opposed. By 1831, leading abolitionists, including, most famously, William Lloyd Garrison, were denouncing the gradualism of colonization in favor of immediate emancipation, a crucial shift brought about, at least in part, by the debate over Indian removal in the late 1820s and early 1830s. [my emphasis]

The colonization idea for black Americans, which never gained more than marginal popularity among black Abolitionists, was nevertheless still seen by many whites as a viable option up until the Civil War.

And, if we count Theodore Bilbo, even long after.

But that's a topic for tomorrow's post.

Tags: abolitionism, andrew jackson, confederate heritage month 2013, indian removal act, robert rimini, slavery