Confederate "Heritage" Month 2016, April 30:

To close this year's Confederate "Heritage" Month cycle, I'm using a quote from the Tropics of Meta blog, Jeff Davis’s Ghost: The Long Battle over the Memory of the Civil War by Steve Bare 05/18/2015 summarizing the framework historian David Blight uses to understand the major streams of public memory formation that initially emerged from the Civil War:

Blight probes the interrelationship between the two broad themes of race and reunion in American culture and society from 1863 to 1915. Blight is primarily concerned with the ways that contending memories clashed or intermingled in public memory. Blight’s Race and Reunion is considered the opening salvo in memory studies related to the Civil War.

Blight posits three overall visions of Civil War memory that collided and combined over time. One, the reconciliationist vision, which took root in the process of dealing with the dead from so many battlefields, prisons, and hospitals and developed in many ways earlier than Reconstruction. The second vision, the white supremacist articulation embodied in the Lost Cause, took many forms early, including terror and violence, locked arms with reconciliationists of many kinds, and by the turn-of-the-century delivered the country a segregated memory of the Civil War on Southern terms. The third vision Blight articulates, the emancipationist vision, was embodied in African American’s complex remembrance of their own freedom, in the politics of radical Reconstruction, and in conceptions of the war as the reinvention of the republic and the liberation of blacks to citizenship and Constitutional equality. For many Americans, the Civil War is a defining event upon which we have often imposed unity and continuity; as a culture, we have often preferred its music and pathos to its enduring challenges, the theme of reconciled conflict to resurgent, unresolved legacies.

Bare summarizes several other books that have contributed to understanding the processes by which what we could call hegemonic memories of the Civil War and its aftermath formed. And he writes:

Scholarship regarding southern memory of the Civil War saw the greatest paradigm shift in its historiography. Recent scholarship from the late 1980s on focuses on the Lost Cause as a catalyst for the acceptance of southern nostalgia and mythology regarding the war. Uniquely, gender appears more frequently in this scholarship than it does with the historiography of the North. Women in the South played a leading role in fostering the Lost Cause at an ideological level and in popularizing the pathos through print media. We also see how spatial arrangements of landscapes of the dead added weight to the enunciation of the Lost Cause. Finally, scholarship regarding the civil religion aspect of the Lost Cause foregrounded the South’s racist hierarchy. Memory in the South closely aligns with Benedict Anderson’s theory of imagined communities. In the South, the mythos of the Lost Cause bound southerners to a shared heritage with rituals that only those from the South could understand.

I assume in that last sentence, he means that it bound white Southerners together. But it could also mean that the dominant Lost Cause narrative among white Southerners - a narrative that also dominated the national historical conventional wisdom during much of the 20th century - provided the basis for dissenting counter-narratives by African-American and other dissenters.

David Brion Davis writes of Blight's 2001 book Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (The Terrible Cost of Reconciliation New York Review of Books 07/18/2002):

More convincingly than any other historian I know of, Blight explains one of the most troubling questions for the understanding of American history: why 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 or, as many Southerners have long insisted on our calling it, “the War Between the States.” As late as 1947, as I can clearly remember when I was a GI Bill veteran in an Ivy League college, an aging professor of history could teach us that slavery in the American South was a benign and civilizing institution, but uneconomical and thus of minor importance in American history; that the Civil War was a preventable but heroic tragedy, fomented by a few extremists in both North and South; that the war led to the “emancipation” of a people wholly unprepared for such sudden freedom and thus easily manipulated and corrupted by opportunistic “carpetbaggers” and “scalawags”; and that only such groups as the Ku Klux Klan, who played upon the superstitious fears of the “half-savage, half-childish Darkies,” could begin to restore order.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2016, April 29: Recovering Lost Causer? Or liberal concern troll?

The William Winter Institute for Racial Conciliation's April 2 entry at their Facebook page in their series to debunk the pretension of Confederate "Heritage" Month is a bit diappointing. It's an article, Confederate heritage paralyzes Mississippi by Joseph R. Murray II Jackson Clarion-Ledger 03/03/2016. The paper identifies Murray as "a civil rights attorney, a former campaign official for Pat Buchanan [?!] and author of 'Odd Man Out.'" He writes in the tone of a recovering conservative. But some of his Mugwumpish claims sound a lot like liberal concern-trolling, too:

Make no mistake; those who wore a grey uniform were fighting a fight created by aristocrats. Most of those soldiers were not slave owners but poor whites trying to scrape by. In fact, most of those fighting under the Stars & Bars were only one step above a slave.

Yeah, if you ignore that all those non-slaveholding soldiers knew very willing they were fighting to defend the South's sacred Peculiar Institution of slavery. And that they often aspired to become slaveowners themselves. And that in civilian life they had been required to participate in mandatory slave patrols, a key institution that gave non-slaveowning whites a subjective stake in the system of slavery and white supremacy, and was a forerunning of the post-Civil War white terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan.

These poor exploited soldiers were tools of a Southern machine more concerned about the bottom line than human rights.

This history, however, is not recognized today. Instead, Confederate history is either demonized by a liberal culture that equates it to slavery or revered by a revisionist culture pining over the land of cotton.

Bot Sides Do It!

But in the context of the Civil War, one side (the Union) stood for democracy and abolition of chattel slavery. The other side, the one those "poor exploited" white Confederate soldiers fought for was opposed to both.

The fact is those states that seceded from the Union committed acts of treason.

So did the individual soldiers who fought for the Confederacy. Some white Southerners like Newton Knight and his associates in the "Free State of Jones" took a different path. Not an easy one. But why should Americans honor treason in defense of slavery over American patriotism in that cause? Or even equate them?

And while folks can banter back and forth about whether slavery was a key component of the split ....

Those "folks" will be almost exclusively white folks who choose to ignore the actual history of secession and the explicitly declared aims of the seceding states.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2016, April 28:

"World history is not the ground of happiness. The periods of happiness are blank pages in it ..." - Hegel, Philosophy of History (German original: "Die Weltgeschichte ist nicht der Boden des Glücks. Die Perioden des Glücks sind leere Blätter in ihr ...")

I'm continuing here with the discussion of Peter Kolchin's in "Reexamining Southern Emancipation in Comparative Perspective" (Journal of Southern History 81:1 Feb 2015).

Comparing different historical events has a definite empirical aspect. Hopefully, similarities and differences will tell us something important about a particular process. Or it may not.

One comparison he makes is the role of war in ending slavery. While it is obvious in the case of the US Civil War, other cases don't present the same features:

... war frequently weakened slaveholding regimes. Tens of thousands of slaves had escaped from bondage during the American Revolution and the War of 1812, and in the northern states the War for Independence set in motion the eventual abolition of slavery, as did wars for independence in Cuba and much of the Spanish American mainland. The Napoleonic invasion was instrumental in bringing serfdom to an end in Prussia (although in the French Caribbean Napoleon appeared as a reenslaver of those freed by the French Revolution rather than as a liberator).

Usually, however, such wars led to the freedom of some slaves or paved the way for the future ending of bondage, rather than bringing about an immediate or general emancipation. Indeed, despite the enhanced opportunities for freedom provided by the American War for Independence, there were about twice as many slaves in the United States at the conclusion of the Revolutionary era (1800) as there had been at its onset (1770), and despite the massive disruption of slavery during the War of 1812, the censuses of 1810 and 1820 indicate that the enslaved population of the United States increased more than 29 percent during the intervening decade. Although the rebels in Cuba's Ten Years' War (1868-1878) increasingly championed abolition as well as independence, slavery survived in Cuba until 1886. Similarly, although Russia's defeat in the Crimean War helped convince high government officials that serfdom was keeping the country from developing its full military and economic potential and therefore needed to be abolished, the war itself freed almost no one.

He notes parenthetically, "The major exception to this pattern, of course, was the French colony of Saint Domingue, where the slaves engaged in a massive uprising the only successful slave revolution in modern history-and established the Republic of Haiti in 1804." We've looked at the Haitian Revolution several times this month and its relation to slavery and emancipation in the United States.

Kolchin argues that emancipation coming about in the process of a civil war set conditions for making the situation of the liberated slaves a more thoroughgoing formal liberation than in places where it took place by gradual emancipation: "these terms were simple and quintessentially American," he writes, "based upon the principle of republican citizenship."

The term "quintessentially American" has come to be like nails on the blackboard to me. Because it rings of American Exceptionalism. And it's often invoked to describe things that are not at all unique to America. Maybe even not intrinsically American, if even that term makes any sense.

But he explains what the means by the war situation and the terms of emancipation:

Two features of the American version are especially indicative of what would be the increasingly radical experiment that went by the name of Reconstruction. First of all, in contrast to emancipation in many other countries-Prussia, Austria, Russia, the British colonies, Cuba, Brazil, and much of the Spanish American mainland-as well as in most of the northern states after the American Revolution, emancipation in the South was immediate rather than gradually phased in over many years. Second, American emancipation was uncompensated, the only major example of uncompensated confiscation of private property in American history. In recent years, there has been debate over whether the descendants of former slaves should receive some sort of reparations for the suffering of their ancestors, but in the nineteenth century the debate was over whether the masters should receive financial compensation for the loss of their human property. In many other countries (even eventually in Haiti) they did, and as late as 1862 President Lincoln had held out the incentive of partial compensation in a futile effort to convince Confederate rebels to lay down their arms and to convince slaveholders in the loyal slaveholding states-Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri-to accept the freeing of their slaves. Military victory rendered such ideas obsolete, and the Fourteenth Amendment, among its many other provisions, explicitly invalidated both the Confederate war debt and "any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave." In short, although ending slavery in the southern United States was part of a broad historical process that produced similar features everywhere that it occurred, the specific terms of emancipation that were hammered out during Reconstruction went significantly further than those elsewhere in making citizens of former slaves.

Kolchin compares the post-emancipation situation of African-Americans mostly to that of freed Russian serfs, and shows that the immediate terms of emancipation were indeed more radical in the US.

However, he notes that in the US as well as Russia and Brazil and other countries, there was considerable post-emancipation disappointment among the freed peoples. This is the part that reminds me of Hegel's gloomy observation with which I open this post. Kolchin's descriptions of Reconstruction are important and, like all honest history writing, departs from the neo-Confederate/Lost Cause propaganda version:

The Reconstruction experiment lasted only a few years, of course,and some have seen it as a dismal failure. The process of overthrowing the Reconstruction governments and institutionalizing racial segregation cannot be detailed here, except to note that it involved massive doses of fraud, intimidation, and violence. Reconstruction governments fell at different times in different states, lasting longest in the Deep South, where black voters formed the largest percentage of the population, but were gone everywhere by 1877. In the 1880s and early 1890s conservative Democratic state governments chipped away at Reconstruction initiatives, slashing spending on black education and discouraging black political participation, before launching a more frontal assault on African Americans' civil and political rights at the turn of the twentieth century. An explosion of white racism, marked by a sharp rise in lynching, characterized the 1890s and early years of the twentieth century, and through various quasi-legal devices such as grandfather clauses, poll taxes, and white primaries the great majority of southern African Americans were effectively disenfranchised for more than half a century, in blatant violation of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution. After the heady days of Reconstruction, the former slaves experienced a deep sense of disappointment and disillusionment, as their early hope for the dawning of a new age faded before the reality of life in the era of Jim Crow.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2016, April 28: Emancipation in the US and abroad

Peter Kolchin in "Reexamining Southern Emancipation in Comparative Perspective" (Journal of Southern History 81:1 Feb 2015) attempts to position the significance of the emancipation of the American slaves in the context of other modern emancipations, from both serfdom and chattel slavery. As Kolchin notes in his article, such comparative approaches are in fashion at the moment in Southern history.

He argues that "in much of the Western world":

Until the second half of the eighteenth century, slavery had seemed an unremarkable feature of life, one consistent-as David Brion Davis has shown-with religion, morality, and progress. There was some sentiment that Christians should not enslave other Christians and Muslims should not enslave other Muslims-that is, in the language of the time, slavery was fit only for "infidels"-but there was little sense that slavery in general was wrong or undesirable.

But then with the progress of democratic and republican ideas and revolutionary movements both in the Old World and the New:

Then, beginning in the years leading up to the major Atlantic revolutions of the late eighteenth century, "enlightened" opinion increasingly came to see slavery as problematic. There were different versions of this sentiment: some saw slavery as morally wrong, whereas others argued that it was a backward institution, harmful to society and to economic development. But in an era that increasingly celebrated liberty and equality, slavery and its close twin serfdom, institutions that had for centuries been taken for granted, became objects of intense scrutiny; and over a period of a little more than a century they were abolished throughout the West-bthat is, Europe and European-derived societies in the Americas.

But the Enlightenment was a contradictory phenomenon, which also in some of its manifestations defined aboriginal peoples as "natural" and therefore outside of the civilized world of Reason. Even a major Enlightenment figure like Thomas Jefferson had difficulty imagining that people of African descent could be fully as intelligence and civilized as those of white European descent.

But he is right about how serfdom and slavery came apart with the flowering of capitalist modernism. And he provides this useful timetable about the emancipations in various countries:

Europeans weren't entirely wrong for criticizing or mocking the United States for the genuine contrast between the democratic principles of the government of the white majority and the reality of chattel slavery as a key institution in the American empire of freedom.

Citing the work of James Oakes, he winds up stressing the emancipatory impulse among the Republicans during the Civil War:

... many Republicans saw the war, from its very beginning, as a golden opportunity to move beyond the constitutional limitations that in normal times - that is, in peacetime-prevented the federal government from interfering with slavery in the states where it already existed. Especially important in this regard was the second Confiscation Act, which authorized the seizure and liberation of all slaves owned by rebels. Union army officers pursued varying policies toward African Americans who came under their control, but increasingly they experimented with various forms of free or, in some cases, semi-free labor, on the sea islands off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia, in New Orleans many Republicans saw the war, from its very beginning, as a golden opportunity to move beyond the constitutional limitations that in normal times - that is, in peacetime-prevented the federal government from interfering with slavery in the states where it already existed. Especially important in this regard was the second Confiscation Act, which authorized the seizure and liberation of all slaves owned by rebels. Union army officers pursued varying policies toward African Americans who came under their control, but increasingly they experimented with various forms of free or, in some cases, semi-free labor, on the sea islands off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia, in New Orleans and throughout the lower Mississippi Valley, in northem Virginia, and elsewhere as Confederate territory continued to shrink.

It's part of the neo-Confederate canard that the Civil War was not about slavery to emphasize the limitations of Northern goals when it came to abolishing slavery.

But of course the Southern secessionists were explicit about the reason they were seceding from the Union: to preserve slavery. And while Union war aims were not explicitly directed at abolishing slavery, the North understood that it was necessary to contain slavery and the violent rebellion the slaveowners had ginned up.

When Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, that meant in the common terminology of the time that the war for the North had changed from a conventional war, aimed at defeating the opponent, to a revolutionary war aimed at overthrowing the social system of the enemy. And the developments described by Kolchin show that process in its rabid development once the war was under way.

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 26: Frederick Douglass on Lincoln and slavery

In yesterday's installment, we saw Abraham Lincoln in 1858 using the principle of equality in the Declaration of Independence to attack slavery, while at the same time denying that the equality of blacks and whites.

Frederick Douglass, former slave and Abolitionist leader, recalled the Great Emancipator and his position on slavery in a speech of 04/14/1876 ("Oration by Frederick Douglass, Delivered on the Occasion of the Unveiling of the Freedmen's Monument," Frederick Douglass: Autobiographies Library of America, 1994, pp. 921-4):

I have said that President Lincoln was a white man and shared towards the colored race the prejudices common to his countrymen. Looking back to his times and to the condition of his country, we are compelled to admit that this unfriendly feeling on his part may be safely set down as one element of his wonderful success in organizing the loyal American people for the tremendous conflict before them, and bringing them safely through that conflict. His great mission was to accomplish two things: first, to save his country from dismemberment and ruin; and second, to free his country from the great crime of slavery. To do one or the other, or both, he must have the earnest sympathy and the powerful coöperation of his loyal fellow-countrymen. Without this primary and essential condition to success his efforts must have been vain and utterly fruitless. Had he put the abolition of slavery before the salvation of the Union, he would have inevitably driven from him a powerful class of the American people and rendered resistance to rebellion impossible. Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.

Though Mr. Lincoln shared the prejudices of his white fellow countrymen against the negro, it is hardly necessary to say that in his heart of hearts he loathed and hated slavery. The man who could say, "Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war shall soon pass away, yet if God wills it continue till all the wealth piled by two hundred years of bondage shall have been wasted, and each drop of blood drawn by the lash shall have been paid for by one drawn by the sword, the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether," gives all needed proof of his feeling on the subject of slavery. He was willing, while the South was loyal, that it should have its pound of flesh, because he thought it was so nominated in the bond; but farther than this no earthly power could make him go. ...

Upon his inauguration as President of the United States, an office fitted to tax and strain the largest abilities, even when it is assumed under the most favorable conditions, Abraham Lincoln was met by a tremendous crisis. ...

The tremendous question for him to decide was whether his country should survive the crisis and flourish, or be dismembered and perish. His predecessor in office had already decided the question in favor of national dismemberment by denying to it the right of self-defense and self-preservation - a right which belongs to the meanest insect.

Happily for the country, happily for you and for me, the judgment of James Buchanan, the patrician, was not the judgment of Abraham Lincoln, the plebeian. He brought his strong common sense, sharpened in the school of adversity, to bear upon the question. He did not hesitate, he did not doubt, he did not falter; but at once resolved that, at whatever peril, at whatever cost, the union of the Stares should be preserved. A patriot himself, his faith was strong and unwavering in the patriotism of his countrymen. Timid men said before Mr. Lincoln's inauguration that we had seen the last President of the United States. A voice in influential quarters said, "Let the Union slide." Some said that a Union maintained by the sword was worthless. Others said a rebellion of eight millions cannot be suppressed. But in the midst of all this tumult and timidity, and against all this, Abraham Lincoln was clear in his duty, and had an oath in heaven. He calmly and bravely heard the voice of doubt and fear all around him, but he had an oath in heaven, and there was not power enough on earth to make this honest boatman, back-woodsman, and broad-handed splitter of rails evade or violate that sacred oath. He had not been schooled in the ethics of slavery; his plain life had favored his love of truth. He had not been taught that treason and perjury were the proof of honor and honesty. His moral training was against his saying one thing when he meant another. The trust which Abraham Lincoln had in himself and in the people was surprising and grand, but it was also enlightened and well founded. He knew the American people better than they knew themselves and his truth was based upon this knowledge.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2016, April 25: Slavery and the development of white racist "theory"

Earlier this month I quoted from Slavery and the Martial South Journal of Negro History 37:1 (Jan 1952) on the practical militarization that the slavery system produced in the slaveowning societies of the South.

Toward the end of the article, he also refers to the development of pseudo-scientific racism and its embrace and encouragement from the slaveowners:

The South's society, as described by its proponents, was to rest on the inequality of men in law and economics. Slavery was a positive good. South Carolina's James H. Hammond said that slavery was "the greatest of all blessings which a kind providence has bestowed upon the South." It gave to the white man the only basis on which he could do something for a group of hopelessly inferior human beings. The view of the inferiority of the Negro was organized into a body of systematic thought by the scientists and social scientists of the South and out of it emerged a doctrine of racial superiority that justified any kind of control that the owner established and maintained over the slave. The racial basis of slavery gave Southern leaders an effective means of solidifying the economically divergent elements among the whites. At the same time, it strengthened the ardor with which most white Southerners were willing to fight to preserve slavery. The sharp cleavage between slavery and freedom was made even sharper by the factor of race. All slaves belonged to a degraded, "inferior" race; and, by the same token, all whites, however wretched some of them might be, were superior. In a society where race was so important, the whites at the lowest rung could satisfy themselves because they could identify themselves with the most privileged of the community. "Color alone is here the badge of distinction, the true mark of aristocracy," said Thomas Dew, "and all who are white are equal in spite of the variety of occupation." [my emphasis]

In 1776, the supporters of the Declaration of Independence, including the slaveowner who wrote it, could live with the contradiction between the classical liberal political notion that "all men are created equal" and the reality of chattel slavery. As time advanced, the cotton gin boosted the profitability of the slave system and the slaveowning states spent decades organizing their societies around defense of the Peculiar Institution. And the leading defenders of slavery in the US no longer bothered with the polite pretense. Rather, they stated the real basis of their society, "the inequality of men in law and economics," as Franklin summarizes it.

In the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, Stephen Douglas, a "moderate" Democrat by the standards of 1858, declared in the first debate of 08/21/1858:

Mr. Lincoln, following the example and lead of all the little Abolition orators, who go around and lecture in the basements of schools and churches, reads from the Declaration of Independence, that all men were created equal, and then asks, how can you deprive a negro of that equality which God and the Declaration of Independence awards to him? He and they maintain that negro equality is guarantied by the laws of God, and that it is asserted in the Declaration of Independence. If they think so, of course they have a right to say so, and so vote. I do not question Mr. Lincoln's conscientious belief that the negro was made his equal, and hence is his brother, (laughter,) but for my own part, I do not regard the negro as my equal, and positively deny that he is my brother or any kin to me whatever. ("Never." "Hit him again," and cheers.) Lincoln has evidently learned by heart Parson Lovejoy's catechism. (Laughter and applause.) He can repeat it as well as Farnsworth, and he is worthy of a medal from Father Giddings and Fred Douglass for his Abolitionism. (Laughter.) He holds that the negro was born his equal and yours, and that he was endowed with equality by the Almighty, and that no human law can deprive him of these rights which were guarantied to him by the Supreme ruler of the Universe. Now, I do not believe that the Almighty ever intended the negro to be the equal of the white man. ("Never, never.") If he did, he has been a long time demonstrating the fact. (Cheers.) [my emphasis]

The texts here from the Lincoln-Douglas debates are taken from the National Park Service's site, The Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858.

Lincoln in his proportion of the debate denied that he advocated racial equality: "I had no thought in the world that I was doing anything to bring about a political and social equality of the black and white races." But Lincoln was still intensely aware of the contradiction, including that of his own position. And he was aware that the existence of slavery and the justifications the master class had developed for it were eroding the principle of human equality - or at least male equality - that was at the heart of the democratic convictions of the Declaration (italics in original; my emphasis in bold):

I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and the black races. There is a physical difference between the two, which, in my judgment, will probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality, and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that there must be a difference, I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position. I have never said anything to the contrary, but I hold that, notwithstanding all this, there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. [Loud cheers.] I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man. I agree with Judge Douglas he is not my equal in many respects - certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment. But in the right to eat the bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man. [Great applause.]

In the seventh debate of 10/15/1858, Lincoln said this of the Declaration (my emphasis):

At Galesburgh the other day, I said in answer to Judge Douglas, that three years ago there never had been a man, so far as I knew or believed, in the whole world, who had said that the Declaration of Independence did not include negroes in the term "all men." I reassert it to-day. I assert that Judge Douglas and all his friends may search the whole records of the country, and it will be a matter of great astonishment to me if they shall be able to find that one human being three years ago had ever uttered the astounding sentiment that the term "all men" in the Declaration did not include the negro. Do not let me be misunderstood. I know that more than three years ago there were men who, finding this assertion constantly in the way of their schemes to bring about the ascendancy and perpetuation of slavery, denied the truth of it. I know that Mr. Calhoun and all the politicians of his school denied the truth of the Declaration. I know that it ran along in the mouth of some Southern men for a period of years, ending at last in that shameful though rather forcible declaration of Pettit of Indiana, upon the floor of the United States Senate, that the Declaration of Independence was in that respect "a self-evident lie," rather than a self-evident truth. But I say, with a perfect knowledge of all this hawking at the Declaration without directly attacking it, that three years ago there never had lived a man who had ventured to assail it in the sneaking way of pretending to believe it and then asserting it did not include the negro. I believe the first man who ever said it was Chief Justice Taney in the Dred Scott case, and the next to him was our friend, Stephen A. Douglas. And now it has become the catch-word of the entire party. I would like to call upon his friends every where to consider how they have come in so short a time to view this matter in a way so entirely different from their former belief? to ask whether they are not being borne along by an irresistible current-whither, they know not? [Great applause.]

In an earlier speech not part of the in-person debates (Speech at Chicago, Illinois 07/10/1858) Lincoln explained:

Now, sirs, for the purpose of squaring things with this idea of “don’t care if slavery is voted up or voted down,” for sustaining the Dred Scott decision [A voice—"Hit him again"], for holding that the Declaration of Independence did not mean anything at all, we have Judge Douglas giving his exposition of what the Declaration of Independence means, and we have him saying that the people of America are equal to the people of England. According to his construction, you Germans are not connected with it. Now I ask you in all soberness, if all these things, if indulged in, if ratified, if confirmed and endorsed, if taught to our children, and repeated to them, do not tend to rub out the sentiment of liberty in the country, and to transform this Government into a government of some other form. Those arguments that are made, that the inferior race are to be treated with as much allowance as they are capable of enjoying; that as much is to be done for them as their condition will allow. What are these arguments? They are the arguments that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world. You will find that all the arguments in favor of king-craft were of this class; they always bestrode the necks of the people, not that they wanted to do it, but because the people were better off for being ridden. That is their argument, and this argument of the Judge is the same old serpent that says you work and I eat, you toil and I will enjoy the fruits of it. Turn in whatever way you will—whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent, and I hold if that course of argumentation that is made for the purpose of convincing the public mind that we should not care about this, should be granted, it does not stop with the negro. I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle and making exceptions to it where will it stop. If one man says it does not mean a negro, why not another say it does not mean some other man? If that declaration is not the truth, let us get the Statute book, in which we find it and tear it out! Who is so bold as to do it! [Voices—"me" "no one," &c.] If it is not true let us tear it out! [cries of "no, no,"] let us stick to it then, [cheers] let us stand firmly by it then. [Applause.]

The arguments of Lincoln and Douglas over the meaning of the Declaration of Independence are reminders of how seriously people of that time took that document as a statement of American principles.

As Franklin wrote in 1952, white racism was a major factor in winning allegiance to the Slave Power's rejection of the principles of the Declaration:

White Southerners were, thus, among the first people of the world to develop a militant race superiority. As in other parts of the world where such a notion evolved, these frontier aristocrats sought support for their position by developing a common bond with the less privileged. The obvious basis was race, and outside the white race there was to be found no favor from God, no honor or respect from man. By the time that Europeans were reading Gobineau's Inequality of Human Races Southerners were reading Cartwright's Slavery in the Light of Ethnology. In admitting all whites of the South into the pseudo-nobility of race, Cartwright won their enthusiastic support in the struggle to preserve the integrity and honor of the race. This was a concept of social organization worth fighting for, and the white people of the South entered upon the grim task of exterminating persons and ideas hostile to their way of life. [my emphasis in bold]

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 14: the slave system's political dynamics

Lacy Ford in Democracy, Despotism, and Disunion: A Review Essay Journal of Southern History 76:1 (Feb 2010) gives a useful summary of William Freehling's work on the varying approaches to defending slavery among the various slave states in his book The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 1776-1854:1990ol 1 (1990):

The most important of those points, in my view, are that the political radical ism of the lower South enhanced political moderation in the upper South and that the upper South's moderation drove lower South politicians toward bolder and more extreme defenses of southern interests, precisely because they feared that upper South politicians were not reliable on the subject. Upper South moderation fueled lower South extremism. The lower South's extremism strengthened upper South moderation.

This means that, in the context of Lost Cause myth-making, you can find quotes from people like Robert E. Lee of Virginia who just before the Civil War made statements to the effect that they thought slavery would fade away peacefully. While defenders of the Peculiar Institution in the lower South were trumpeting it as the greatest benefit to human civilization God every created.

A second lesson from Volume 1 is that these tensions between upper South moderation and lower South extremism grew out of underlying differences in political economy. The upper South, with little involvement in the cotton booms of the nineteenth century, depended less on slaves for economic success as the region's tobacco economy stagnated. Hence the upper South looked to reduce the proportion of slaves in its population. Lower South whites experienced cotton booms and busts during the antebellum era, but, on balance, they saw cotton and slaves as paths to both economic competence and wealth. Yet lower South whites nonetheless worried much about slavery, especially about how to make a slaveholding society safe for whites. Still, they could scarcely imagine a lower South economy that did not depend heavily on slave labor. [my emphasis]

This is a good way of stating it. There were tensions between free whites and the slaveowners, between free whites and the slave system. Because in a very basic sense, the slavery system did work against the vital interests of the big majority of Southern whites.

And those tensions including tensions over the very real threat the slavery system was to (white male) democracy:

Finally, Freehling's first volume posited a strong tension between democracy and despotism in the hearts and minds of white southerners. Democracy, both in its political forms and as genuine egalitarian sentiment, increasingly flourished in southern state constitutions and in the region's electoral politics. Yet much despotism grew from the power of slaveholders to own and govern slaves with only minimal restrictions from civil authority. At times, the spirit of this slaveholders' despotism escaped the confines of master-slave relations and influenced the entire white democracy, producing vigilance committees and lynch mobs that intimidated marginal individuals and squashed dissent in an especially ugly form of majoritarian tyranny. [my emphasis]

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2016, April 13: Charles Sumner on the cause of the Civil War

Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts was one of the leading critics of the Slave Power. One of his speeches, not popular in the slave states, was published under the name Barbarism of Slavery (1863). It was a Senate speech of June 4, 1860, in the summer before the election that made Abraham Lincoln President. In the wartime 1863 introduction, Sumner wrote:

It is now more than three years since I deemed it my duty to expose, in the Senate, the Barbarism of Slavery. This phrase, though common now, was new then. The speech was a strict and logical reply to the assumptions of Senators, asserting the "divine origin" of Slavery, its "ennobling" character, and that it was the "black marble keystone" of our national arch. Listening to these assumptions, which were of daily recurrence, I felt that they ought to be answered. ...

In that debate the issue was joined which is still pending in the Trial by Battle. The inordinate assumptions for Slavery naturally ripened in Rebellion and War. If Slavery were, in reality, all that it was said to be by its representatives, they must have failed in duty if they did not vindicate and advance it. Not easily could they see a thing so "divine" and so "ennobling" — constituting the "black marble keystone" of our national arch discredited by a popular vote, even if not yet doomed to sacrifice.

The election of Mr. Lincoln was a judgment against Slavery, and its representatives were aroused. [my emphasis]

Charles Sumner (1811-1874)

The reason for the war was very clear to Americans on both sides of the line:

Therefore, there are two apparent rudiments to this war. One is Slavery and the other is State Rights. But the latter is only a cover for the former. If Slavery were out of the way there would be no trouble from State
Rights.

The war, then, is for Slaver}', and nothing else. It is an insane attempt to vindicate by arms the lordship which had been already asserted in debate. With mad-cap audacity it seeks to install this Barbarism as the truest Civilization. Slavery is declared to be the "corner-stone" of the new edifice. This is enough. ...

Such is the issue simply stated. On the one side are women and children on the auction-block; families rudely separated; human flesh lacerated and scarred by the bloody scourge; labor extorted without wages; and all this frightful, many-sided wrong is the declared foundation of a mock commonwealth. On the other side is the Union of our Fathers, with the image of "Liberty" on its coin and the sentiment of Liberty in its Constitution, now arrayed under a patriotic Government, which insists that no such mock Commonwealth, having such a declared foundation, shall be permitted on our territory, purchased with money and blood, to impair the unity of our jurisdiction and to insult the moral sense of mankind. [my emphasis in bold]

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2016, April 12: Music day

Uh oh, I'm a day behind in my CHM posts!

For today, or rather yesterday. Here Pete Seeger singing Tenting Tomight:

That's one of my favorite songs, actually. It's from the Folkways album Songs of the Civil War (1960).

The liner notes to the album tell this about the song:

Walter Kittredge wrote this hauntingly moving plea for peace in 1863, shortly after receiving his draft notice. Kittredge, however, never served in the army, a childhood bout with rheumatic fever being the cause of his deferment. But while Kittredge didn't go to war, his song did, where it became immensely popular with both soldier and civilian.

Another song on the album is Pete Seeger and Bill McAdoo singing the Marching Song of the First of Arkansas. The liner notes have the following about this song:

This stirring marching song of the Negro troops who comprised the First Arkansas Regiment was used as a recruiting song to enlist Negroes in the Union Army. In fact, the song was published as a broadside by the Supervisory Committee for Recruiting Colored Regiments. Capt. Lindley Miller was the white officer of the Negro regiment, and while Miller may have written some of the verses to this song, others seem to have the genuine stamp of the Negro folk idiom. The original song runs some eight verses, from which Pete Seeger and Bill McAdoo have excerpted the following three:

Here's a version by, uh, Tennessee Ernie Ford. Which gives a hint why he wasn't entirely popular with the hardline segregationist crowd, Tennessee Ernie Ford Marching Song Of the First Arkansas Negro Regiment. He has a verse not in the other one:

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2016, April 11: Reconstruction outside the Lost Cause tradition

An accurate and democratic history of Reconstruction took second place in the dominant versions of American historical memory - including respectable scholarship - to the Lost Cause ideology for decades.

But a real historical version was preserved, not least by African-American scholars like W.E.B. Du Bois, who wrote about Reconstruction and its Benefits in the (thoroughly respectable) American Historical Review 15:4 (July 1910):

There is danger to-day that between the intense feeling of the South and the conciliatory spirit of the North grave injustice will be done the negro American in the history of Reconstruction. Those who see in negro suffrage the cause of the main evils of Reconstruction must remember that if there had not been a single freedman left in the South after the war the problems of Reconstruction would still have been grave. Property in slaves to the extent of perhaps two thousand million dollars had suddenly disappeared. One thousand five hundred more millions, representing the Confederate war debt, had largely disappeared. Large amounts of real estate and other property had been destroyed, industry had been disorganized, 250,000 men had been killed and many more maimed. With this went the moral effect of an unsuccessful war with all its letting down of social standards and quickening of hatred and discouragement-a situation which would make it difficult under any circumstances to reconstruct a new government and a new civilization. Add to all this the presence of four million freedmen and the situation is further complicated. But this complication is very largely a matter of well-known historical causes. Any human being " doomed in his own person, and his posterity, to live without knowledge, and without the capacity to make anything his own, and to toil that another may reap the fruits ",2 is bound, on sudden emancipation, to loom like a great dread on the horizon.

He explains the reason that protecting the freedom of the newly liberated slaves depended on active intervention on their behalf by the federal government. Under Andrew Johnson's Presidency, the federal government was restrained in fulfilling that duty. And that wasn't a good thing:

In Tennessee alone was any action attempted that even suggested possible negro suffrage in the future, and that failed. In all other states the "Black Codes" adopted were certainly not reassuring to friends of freedom. To be sure it was not a time to look for calm, cool, thoughtful action on the part of the white South. Their economic condition was pitiable, their fear of negro freedom genuine; yet it was reasonable to expect from them something less than repression and utter reaction toward slavery. To some extent this expectation was fulfilled: the abolition of slavery was recognized and the civil rights of owning property and appearing as a witness in cases in which he was a party were generally granted the negro; yet with these went in many cases harsh and unbearable regulations which largely neutralized the concessions and certainly gave ground for the assumption that once free the South would virtually re-enslave the negro. The colored people themselves naturally feared this and protested as in Mississippi "against the reactionary policy prevailing. and expressing the fear that the Legislature will pass such proscriptive laws as will drive the freedmen from the State, or practically re-enslave them".

The Codes spoke for themselves. They have often been reprinted and quoted. No open-minded sttudent can read them without being convinced that they meant nothing more nor less than slavery in daily toil."

Looking at that record, Du Bois makes this judgment:

All things considered, it seems probable that if the South had been permitted to have its way in 1865 the harshness of negro slavery would have been mitigated so as to make slave-trading difficult, and to make it possible for a negro to hold property and appear in some cases in court; but that in most other respects the blacks would have remained in slavery.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2016, April 10: The martial South and the slave patrols

John Hope Franklin pointed out the effect of the everyday life of the slavery system in creating an authoritarian and martial atmosphere among planters and throughout white Southern society in Slavery and the Martial South Journal of Negro History 37:1 (Jan 1952):

The planter was forced to regard arms as a necessary adjunct to the machinery of control. The lash might be used generously or sparingly, depending on the temperament of the master and the tractability of the slave. There was always the possibility, moreover, of resorting to more deadly weapons. If the slave resisted the "mild" discipline of the lash or undertook to return blow for blow, how else could the master maintain his complete authority except through the use of, or the threat to use, the weapons whose possession was forever denied the slave?

Going about armed with knives and guns became the daily habit of many masters and overseers. And if the armed conquerors, in moments of anger, sometimes turned their weapons against each other, it was no more than was to be expected among an aggregation of armed men. The rule of tyranny by which they lived naturally fostered an independence and self-sufficiency-one is tempted to call it an individual sovereignty-that would, on occasion, burst out in all its fury in their quarrels with each other.

If the relationship between master and slave was that of a superior and a subordinate, a despot or tyrant and a powerless subject, or an armed victor and a vanquished foe, it can almost be described as a state of war. At least it is possible to recognize the martial spirit that pervaded the entire plantation atmosphere. The conduct of the master toward the slave was determined by rules and considerations not unlike those that characterized a military situation. [my emphasis]

Speculations about collective "character" are always dubious, at best.

But Franklin here is not making such an argument. He is pointing out specific patterns of behavior in Southern society that contributed to the practical consequences that ensued. And the periodic outbursts of panic over slave revolts interacted in a poisonous way with this martial state of mind:

The slave was never so completely subjugated as to allay all fears that he would make a desperate, bloody attempt to destroy the institution to which he was bound. Fear and apprehension were relative matters in the ante bellum South; but they were always present. If the slaves seemed satisfied and did not appear to be up to some deviltry, such as running away or revolting, the fears, while still present, were not easily discernible. But if there was even the slightest rumor of an uprising, the entire countryside was not only terrified, but the alarm was sounded. All whites - loyal Negroes, too - were expected to do their share to prevent death and destruction from stalking through the land and to restore the natural foe to his natural condition. [my enphasis]

Franklin connects this phenomenon directly to the formation of the slave patrols, which were a key tool for giving the nonslaveowning whites a psychological stake in the slave system:

Despite the fact that the plantation sought to be self-sufficient and succeeded in many respects, the maintenance of a stable institution of slavery was so important that owners early sought the cooperation of the entire community. This cooperation took the form of the patrol, which became an established institution in most areas of the South at an early date. There were many variations in the size and organization of the patrol. Rather typical was the South Carolina patrol that was established by law in 1690. The law set up patrol detachments of ten men under the captain of a militia company. All white men were eligible for patrol service. In 1819 all white males over eighteen were made liable for patrol duty, the non-slaveholders being excused from duty upon reaching the age of forty-five.

This kind of militarization of Southern civil government and social life meant in practice that at the start of the Civil War, the South had an initial advantage in military preparedness because more Southern men had current military training of some sort.

Bertram Wyatt-Brown gives a couple of examples of how this violent and authoritarian mentality played out in daily practice:

It was a matter of personal reputation to prove oneself a master of events to one's family and household, as well as to the world at large. For instance, when Robert E. Lee of Arlington, Virginia, discovered that two young slaves bad run away to Pennsylvania, he had them sought after and returned. An anonymous critic informed the Northern public, through the New York Tribune, that Lee had personally supervised their flogging. Lee was responsible for some sixty-three slaves, not all of whom could be usefully employed at the Arlington plantation. He sent some to eastern Virginia, particularly the rebellious ones, who would have less opportunity there to flee northward. Perhaps, as Douglas Southall Freeman claims, that was the extent of his reaction to the runaways' offense. Wesley Norris, one of the pair, gave a grim account of the whipping, however. He said that Lee bad watched the proceedings with eyes black with fury and had ordered brine poured into the wounds. Whether this and like reports are to be believed, it must be remembered that even the gentlest masters-and Lee was reputedly one of them-found occasion when there seemed to them very little choice about the use of coercion. It would not do for any slave to take flagrant advantage of a master's delicacy of conscience. To push too hard against the institution or against an owner's sense of self-esteem was to threaten the social order as it was then understood. Failure to react appropriately could be misinterpreted, not only by the compliant slaves but by the white community, too. The moral problem was itself built into the Southern ethic. One simply could not be made to look inept, powerless, or squeamish. For these reasons, in a case about which there can be no doubts, the Rev. Charles Colcock Jones of Liberty County, Georgia, had a slave girl flogged until she revealed the name of the individual who had fathered a mulatto child she had given birth to. The gentleman in question had been the elderly clergyman's secretary, a member, temporarily, of the household. Jones was incensed at this breach of the rules regarding hospitality, and his torture of the mother to confirm his suspicions was the consequence.

This shows an integral side of what the title of Wyatt-Brown's book from which that quote is taken, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (1982).

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2016, April 9: The Haitian Revolution, again

Returning to Gerald Horne's article on the antislavery revolution in Haiti (1791-1804) "The Haitian Revolution and the Central Question of African American History" Journal of African American History 100:1 Winter 2015. Britain didn't have domestic slavery, though obviously it allowed it in its colonies.

But after the Haitian Revolution began, the British government saw how it could use the dilemma the United States faced over its Peculiar Institution against its North American rival, still a minor power in the world. Horne explains:

... London, which bad been ousted from its prime slave trading market in NorthAmerica in any case, prompted by the Haitian Revolution, was busily seizing the moral high ground by turning against this global flesh peddling, placing its erstwhile mainland colony on the defensive and, not coincidentally, winning numerous African adherents, particularly in the United States itself. Certainly, 1791 gave an immeasurable boost to abolitionism.21 The influential Londoner James Stephen declaimed portentously in 1807, as Britain was turning decisively against the international slave trade, "The West Indies have probably cost us more money since 1792 than all our military operations on the continent," jeopardizing national security in the face of France's stiff challenge. Redcoats were futilely seeking to suppress Haiti and slave colonies yearning to be free at an enormous cost of blood and treasure, while a surer path would involve conciliating Africans, which would at once provide a cudgel with which to bludgeon its ascending republican enemy. "[O]ur [ opprobrious] adherence to this [ slave] traffic," Stephen added persuasively, "has added much to the popular prejudice against us. ..."

It would not be the first time a good cause was assisted in some way by old-fashioned international rivalries. And certainly not the last. The King of France had been happy to assist the democratic revolution in the US against Britain during the Revolutionary War. And France had no interest in a democratic revolution at home, or any desire to lose its own colonies.

US leaders in the new Washington Administration, having successfully played this difficult international game against the British, also assumed that the British might encourage an invasion of the US by the Haitian army:

... it was during this turbulent time that Edward Stevens, the U.S. consul on the island, argued that the paramount revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture---commanded an "army" of "55,000 men," while the "largest force" his U.S. commander-in-chief "had ever commanded had not exceeded 20,000. ..." 23 lt was Stevens who in 1799, when control of the island remained unclear, reported that a plan bad been hatched on the island to "invade both the Southern States of America & the Island of Jamaica," a design that was to be bruited repeatedly in coming years.

But it was not only British power politics that the US had to worry about:

A few years after Stevens spoke, Thomas Jefferson observed, "[the inflamed Caribbean] appears to have given a considerable impulse to the minds of the slaves in different parts of the U.S." itself, contributing to a "great disposition to insurgency" that "manifested itself' in his own Virginia in an "actual insurrection." As early as 1793, as terror raged in Paris, [then Secretary of State] Jefferson warned that two reputed Frenchmen - "a small dark mulatto" and a "quarteron"- were headed to Charleston "with a design to excite an insurrection among the Negroes." This was a Parisian plan, he told the governor, "the first branch of which has been carried into execution at St. Domingo ....

And he refers to these events:

But it was not just London that was scrambling to avoid being overtaken by events. In Venezuela in 1795 an enslaved African, Jose Chirino, who had visited Hispaniola, returned with militant demands for imposition of "the law of the French." A few years later another revolt shook the northern coast of South America, as militia leader Francisco Xavier Pirela was said to be in touch with crews of ships from Hispaniola. Then the "Revolt of the Tailors" in Bahia, Brazil, raised the provocative issue of racial equality as well as independence. Even the rebellion in Mexico in 1810 was said to have featured the now ubiquitous hand of Haiti.

Here's where one wishes for specifics. To what extent were the fears just mentioned realistic? How much were they due to caution, suspicion or slaveowners' paranoia and guilty imaginations? How much the result of disinformation efforts by Britain, France or other powers?

No doubt that example of the Haitian slave revolt and successful liberation spurred on antislavery aspirations elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere. So did the victorious American Revolution against Britain and the liberal ideals by which they justified it. So did the French Revolution. But what was there in Jefferson's suspicions of a French plan to promote slave insurrection in the US? Was there a "dark mulatto" and a "quarteron" promoting slave revolt in Charleston in 1793? What does it mean that the obscure "militia leader Francisco Xavier Pirela was said to be in touch with crews of ships from Hispaniola"? How much influence in the real world did anyone from Haiti have on the Mexican Revolution of 1810?

The Mexican Revolution of which Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla was the most famous leader had an awful lot to do with events in the Iberian Peninsula. Napoleon invaded Spain and made the Spanish king Fernando VII (1784-1833) his prisoner until 1814. During the interim Napoleon installed his brother Joseph Bonaparte (1768-1844) as King Jose I Bonaparte from 1808 to 1813. The Spanish War of Independence against France was famously brutal, as . From 1810, it was led by the Cortes of Cádiz, a council loyal to Fernando VII. This gave Spanish New World colonies the opportunity to declare independence of the Spain of Jose I in the name of loyalty to the imprisoned Fernando VII. And while the example of Haiti was not doubt some influence on Mexican ideas, there was no Cortes of Cádiz in Haiti. Nor did Haitian armies wage a revolutionary war in Mexico on the model of the French wars after the 1789 revolution.

Horne's article unfortunately leaves the reader wondering in places whether we're talking about actual significant political influence by Haiti or Haitians, or whether we're dealing with speculation or just fear.

For the American slaveowners, the fear was highly significant in itself, whether or not it was based on a realistic evaluation of events. Still, a meaningful evaluation of the international influence of the Haitian Revolution requires understanding the factual basis for these fears. It makes a difference whether the real existing Haiti was presenting actual threats or whether it was white Americans' image of "Haiti" that was at work. Horne's references to white refugees from Haiti influencing American attitudes about slavery are more clear:

[T]he European refugees [from Haiti], fleeing in fear from the island and recoiling at the violence inflicted upon so many of them, served to bolster a pre-existing conservatism within the republic, buttressing slavery at a time when abolitionism was rising. Contradictorily, there were other French nationals who had a sense of revulsion upon encountering the pestiferous racism that pockmarked the slaveholding republic. The fire-breathing southerner Edmund Ruffin did not see the gens du couleur [people of color] abandoning the island, at times with human property under their control, as comrades since, he said, "it was not the slaves of St. Domingo but the wealthy and educated class of free mulattoes that commenced the insurrection"; and who was to say they would not seek to do the same on the mainland? The point is there was a regnant worry in slave societies that the lighter skinned and/or "free Negroes" (who often overlapped) would ally with the darker skinned enslaved against the ruling elite, with Haiti cited as exhibit A. Often in Spanish and Portuguese America concessions were made to the lighter skinned persons to win their allegiance to slavery, whereas the United States, buoyed with hardline refugees from Hispaniola, begged to differ, and the tendency was to marginalize mixed-race people too. [my emphasis]

For instance, the following passage would leave the impression with the reader that some Haitian connection was highly likely in the Nat Turner revolt of 1831 (my emphasis):

One of the first scholarly explorations of the epochal Virginia slave revolt, led by Nat Turner in 1831, declared that Haitian fingerprints were everywhere to be found. Given the frequent commerce between the island and the mainland, which preceded 1776 and continued thereafter, said William Sidney Drewry of Johns Hopkins, mainland Africans "had traveled to and from many of the [island] seaports and had ample means of communication with cooks and other servants of the vessels plying between the United States and the West Indies." Moreover, some of the "refugees from St. Domingo settled in Southampton, having brought their Negroes with them" and "recollections of St. Domingo were still vivid in 1831." lt was "probable" that the "reports of this catastrophe"- Africans who "murdered their masters"- were freely available. Like others before and since, he observed further that the conspirators led by Denmark Vesey in Charleston in 1822 "were detected in active communication with St. Domingo .... "

Footnote 72 to that passage reads (my emphasis in bold):

William Sidney Drewry, The Southampton Jnsurrection (Washington, DC, 1900), 121- 123. He wrote that "recollections of St. Domingo were still vivid in 1831" and points to an enslaved African named "Philip" who "may have had communication with some of those who were in ringleaders" in Turner's revolt: he "'came from St. Domingo' before arriving in the commonwealth. The judge presiding in the trial of the conspirators had similar ties to the island via marriage and Africans owned by this family came from the island .... " See also Jackson, "The Origins of Pan-African Nationalism," 127- 128: "Fragmentary evidence ... suggested the Nat Turner rebellion may have been influenced by the Haitian Revolution. Many Haitian refugees and their African slaves settled in the Southampton area." Apparently following the revolt, an African named - impressively - "Nero" came to this still-shaken area and told slaveholders there of his plan to "educate blacks, to spy upon the whites of the South, to disseminate insurrectionistic [sie] pamphlets" and, generally, to wreak ruination. He also detailed the role Haiti "was to play as a site for training the leaders of the approaching insurrection and in raising money for a black college to be built in Boston. Finally, after the rebellion, Haiti would offer 'an asylum for those who survive the approaching carnage. "'

Obviously, word got around about the Haitian Revolution even among slaves. For one thing, they would have overheard fearful slaveowners talking about it. But Horne's account could expresses less caution about sources than one might have wished. On the one hand, slave conspirators were scarcely attempting to leave careful documentation of their plans and motives. On the other, domestic insurrections are always blamed on a Foreign Power by those with a stake in the established order. And the Virginia authorities of 1831 weren't exactly scrupulous in how they compiled incriminating evidence against murderous slave rebels. As Horne notes in his article:

It is possible that it became easier, and less immediately terrifying, for malevolently guilty slaveholders to point the bloody finger of accusation at Haiti when seeking to understand domestic revolts, rather than blame the murderous scheming of those who served them food. Painting Haiti in drastically distorted colors at once allowed slaveholders to rationalize the continuation of a brutal enslavement, while comforting them in the falsehood that it was the Caribbean "vampire" that was singularly responsible for seditious discontent.

But slaveowners' ambitions against Haiti took very public, verifiable form:

But in 1844 tbe United States struck back forcefully by allying with the founders of what became the Dominican Republic, assisting this new nation to independence. The fire-breathing Edmund Ruffin confided to his diary that when his comrade, John C. Calhoun, was Secretary of State in 1844, "[Calhoun] used the secret service fund to supply arms" to Haiti's foes in the east with the ultimate aim being "the conquest of Hayti," a plan that overmatched Port-au-Prince's own capacious ambitions and which did not exclude the possibility of re-enslavement, and rolling back the revolution dramatically.

All in all, Horne is giving the Haitian Revolution more weight in the process that led to the American Civil War than it can bear: "Haiti hailed the raid led by John Brown in Virginia in
late 1859, which portended slavery's collapse, a process arguably set in motion in 1791."

In the article's concluding paragraph, he declares, "discussing U.S. emancipation absent a consideration of the Haitian Revolution is akin to Hamlet without the Prince."

Doesn't this mean that he's holding up the Haitian Revolution was the main actor in the abolition of slavery in the US? Or did he just let a literary simile get away from him?

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 8: William Freehling on slavery debates in Viriginia

Today I'm linking to a 2010 lecture by historian William Freehling on Pre-Civil War Virginia Showdowns C-Span 09/30/2010. The full lecture available at the C-Span link is not available for embedding here.

Their YouTube channel has a brief clip, Virginia Showdowns and Secession 10/18/2010, also not available for embedding here. They also provide this descriptive comments there:

The most populous slave state in the south prior to the Civil War was Virginia. The debate to abolish slavery in 1832 and the 1861 secession debate became critical showdowns as the Old Dominion struggled to decide whether to stay with the Union or join the Confederacy. Author William Freehling explores both topics at a recent talk given at the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond.

He gives a good sense here of the complexity of the slavery question in Virginia politics between the American Revolution and the Civil War. He reminds us that the debate over slavery was prompted by Nat Turner's rebellion in 1831 was the occasion for the two-week debate in the legislature.

One of Freehling's important insights is useful for people to day who may struggle to understand that white Americans could be both antislavery and racist against black people. Racist ideas were already in the air and developing rapidly from a variety of sources. But the experience of the voluntary abolition of slavery by Northern states showed a pattern of opposition to slavery being associated with a low percentage of black in the population.

It actually makes sense, though it seems counter-intuitive today. If there were a lot of black people in areas like eastern Virginia, it meant in practice there were a lot of slaves. And with a lot of slaves came a class of wealthy slaveowners who defended the institution of slavery and worked hard to convince other whites to do the same. Areas where there were fewer slaves were areas with a less powerful slaveowning group had less proximate defenses of slavery. And he describes in the case of what became West Virginia when it split off to remain with the Union after Virginia's secession, the whites in those areas resented the disproportionate representation that the eastern Viriginia slaveowners had under the state Constitution. The US Constitution itself in its infamous "three-fifths" clause awarded representation to states based on their slave population, but the slaves themselves weren't allowed to vote. This created an electoral bonus for the slave states that became a major source of regional resentment in the North.

This phenomenon also meant that white Americans in the "whiter" parts of the country came to associate slavery with the presence of black people, including free black people. And vice-versa. Which meant that whites could be bitterly antislavery and also bitterly hostile to black people. That's by no means the whole story of white racism in the pre-Civil War US. But it's an important part of it.

And it speaks specifically to the claim by present-day defenders of the Confederacy that the Civil War couldn't have been about slavery because Northern whites hated black people, too.

It's worth recalling in this regard that one of the most famous prewar antislavery books was Hinton Helper's The Impending Crisis of the South (1857). I discussed Helper's book in a blog post even before I started doing these Confederate "Heritage" Month posts every year. John Brown's body lies a-mold'ring in the grave 11/02/2003:

I was glad to see the reference to Hinton Helper, an antislavery Southerner who published a book in 1857 (the year of the infamous Dred Scott decision) called The Impending Crisis of the South. His book goes into a great deal of detail comparing the Northern and Southern economies, relying heavily on contemporary economic statistics. He argues that the Northern industrial/commercial economy was far more efficient and prosperous, and refutes some of the most prominent arguments of pro-slavery propagandists.

He also emphasizes how slavery damaged the interests of non-slaveholding whites in the South. In a weird sort of way, Helper's argument is made even stronger by the fact that the guy was a white supremacist. That comes out at places in the book. After the Civil War, he published books advocating the explusion of African-Americans from the United States (which we would call "ethnic cleansing" today).

Helper was no saintly prophet of multiculturalism, in other words. But he was dead-on in his analysis of slavery. And The Impending Crisis of the South still makes fascinating reading to get an idea of the terms in which slavery was debated by contemporaries prior to the Civil War.

Freehling in the linked lecture argues that the "antislavery" debates in the Virginia Legislature in 1832 were actually about how to "whiten" Virginia. Since slavery was associated with the presence of black people, the white Virginians assumed that ending slavery would necessarily entail getting rid of most of the black people in Virginia.

This was the idea behind the notion of "returning" African-Americans to Africa, favored by white leaders of the stature of Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln. (And revived in radically different context by white supremacist Sen. Theodore Bilbo after the Second World War.) The American Colonization Society was established for that purpose, as reported in the linked article from KQED's Africans in America resources (article not dated):

The American Colonization Society, founded in 1816 to assist free black people in emigrating to Africa, was the brainchild of the Reverend Robert Finley, a Presbyterian minister from Basking Ridge, New Jersey. Finley believed that blacks would never be fully integrated into American society and that they would only be able to fulfill their potential as human beings in Africa, the "land of their fathers." He saw colonization as a charitable work, one that would benefit American blacks and Africans alike through the spreading of Christianity to Africa. He also thought that it would prompt a gradual end to slavery.

In keeping with the popular thought of the day, Finley saw the presence of blacks in America as a threat to the national well-being and the quality of life for whites. He said that free blacks were "unfavorable to our industry and morals" and that removing them would save Americans from difficulties such as interracial marriage and having to provide for poor blacks. ...

In a series of meetings [at the end of 1816], the group adopted a constitution, chose officers, and decided to call themselves the "American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Color in the United States." Bushrod Washington, the nephew of George Washington, was chosen as president of the society. Vice presidents included Finley, Henry Clay, and Richard Rush, the son of Benjamin Rush. Andrew Jackson was included on the list without his consent; in reality he was a staunch anti-colonizationist. Caldwell was the organization's secretary, and Key was on the board of managers.

The motives of the ACS members varied considerably. Some were genuine allies of free blacks, and were concerned for their welfare. Some hoped that colonization would eradicate slavery. Others wanted to maintain the institution of slavery but to rid the country of free blacks, who they believed posed a serious threat as potential fomenters of slave rebellion. [my emphasis]

In reality, whatever the motives, it was an impractical idea that was fundamentally cruel. The idea never found more than a small number of supporters among African-Americans, including those like Frederick Douglass who became important Abolitionist leaders.

Although there was enough practicality in the idea that the American Colonization Society was able to establish settlement areas in what became the nation of Liberia in 1947 and a small number of blacks from America were settled there under the auspices of the Society.

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 7: Haitian revolution and Slave Power paranoia

Gerald Horne writes on the antislavery revolution in Haiti (1791-1804) and its repercussions in the US in "The Haitian Revolution and the Central Question of African American History" Journal of African American History 100:1 Winter 2015.

Much of the impact was psychological rather than material. In other words, there was no Haitian army of liberation landing on the shores of South Carolina to overthrow the Slave Power. But it scared slaveowners in the United States. A lot.

It's important to keep in mind is that slaveowners suffered from political paranoia, which they spread as widely as possible among nonslaveowning whites, as well. William Freehling talks about the "Cuffee" phenomenon. By which he means that slaveowners were aware at some level that the agreeable face their slaves were expected to present to them was a false one. And they constantly worried that there were hidden threats in everyday interactions with their human property. It created a state of mind that predisposed them to panic over alleged slave revolts. And indeed, there were many more slave panics over slave revolts than there were of the real thing.

But there were real slave revolts. The study of slave resistance has revealed a very complex set of resistance actions and strategies. The Underground Railroad, for instance, was a critical one. Not every one of them involved some kind of uprising. But there were some of those, too.

And the Haitian revolution was a big-time instance of one. Horne call it:

... one of those rare transformative social, political, and economic detonations made all the more remarkable in that it took place in not only the richest and most productive colony of the French Empire, but of any empire. But it also implicated the slaveholding republic in that Paris spent heavily in backing North American rebels opposing their eternal enemy across the channel, which contributed to a crisis in Paris that sparked yet another transforming revolt in 1789, which correspondingly contributed mightily to the radicalization of the island. Correspondingly, revolutionary violence in France and Hispaniola seemed to some U.S. citizens to flow together in a common river of blood that signaled a new departure that could reach the mainland. This was ironic indeed since North American-then U.S.- residents were heavily implicated in the dramatic increase of the slave trade to the island of Hispaniola, which in the 1780s surpassed the British trade, creating a demographic imbalance favorable to a slave revolt. [my emphasis]

Yes, Haiti was "the richest and most productive colony of the French Empire." And the successful slave revolt there scared white slaveowners in the United STates. A lot.

Horne goes further and argues that "the Haitian Revolution created a general crisis for the system of slavery that could only be resolved with its collapse." He even calls it "a central argument of this essay."

That seems a bit of a stretch to me. But there were important international dynamics at work that I'm hesitant to dismiss. Horne cites these events:

But it was in 1795 in Spanish Louisiana - apparently encouraged by the possibility of a French attempt to invade and force retrocession of the former colony - that Africans rose up. This slave conspiracy in Pointe Coupee was blamed by those on the scene on the direct influence of island revolutionaries. There had been an extensive plot in July 1791, days before the ignition in Hispaniola, then again in October when one conspirator was said to have stated that he and his comrades were simply awaiting ward from Hispaniola before deciding to "strike a blow" in concert with islanders. After the uproar of 1795 there were additional slave conspiracies in February, March, and April 1796 in Pointe Coupee and on the German Coast.

Proslavery whites who had emigrated from Haiti brought some of their fear of slave revolts with them:

A contemporary historian has estimated that "over 100,000 whites and 60,000 blacks lost their lives" during the "thirteen year struggle" encapsulated as the Haitian Revolution, 1791-1804. That more defined as "white" perished, though their numbers were considerably smaller than their counterparts-less than 500,000 Africans on the island then- with many survivors fleeing to the mainland imbued with hair-raising tales of woe, was bound to concentrate devilishly in the collective mind of "white" Americans. The revolution posed starkly an existential choice: retreat stolidly from slavery or risk losing everything, including one's life, a la Hispaniola. ...

That so many of these survivors and their relatives wound up playing pivotal roles in maintaining the harshest machinery of slavery on the mainland may not have been accidental. This lengthy list included Judah P. Benjamin, a loyal leader of the Confederate States of America, whose father-in-law fled the island in horror and proceeded to regale many an audience with the alleged perfidy of incited Africans. Louis Tousard, who served in the revolt against British rule in North America, also owned a plantation on the rebellious island, an enterprise that was marred by frequent unrest in the 1780s. He was involved in seeking to suppress the revolt in 1791 before fleeing to the mainland where, tellingly, he was intimately involved in establishing the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, which was to be both the sturdy sword and shield, if plans by vengeful Africans to invade the mainland and ignite the vengeance of the enslaved were to come to pass.

As Horne summarizes it, "These newly minted "white Americans" were hardly in the mood to retreat in the face of African demands, particularly those backed by Haiti (and London)."

Horne notes that "the horrors of St. Domingo" became "a catchphrase summarizing the knife's edge on which slavery rested."

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2016, April 6: Emancipation in Haiti

"I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I cannot remember when I did not so think and feel." - Abraham Lincoln 04/04/1864

Christopher Colombus landed in Haiti in 1492 and began the European project of slave labor in the New World, which Spain first undertook with the aboriginal inhabitants. African slaves eventually took their place.

France took possession of part of Haiti from Spain according under the terms of the Treaty of Rijswijk (1697) and it became an important French colony. Spain formally ceded authority over the whole island to France in 1795.

The Enlightenment had a deeply contradictory legacy in its effects on white European views of human liberty and the less "civilized" peoples. The best of the liberationist aspect of that legacy arrived in Haiti, known as Saint-Domingue at the time, after the French Revolution when Léger-Félicité Sonthonax (1763–1813) abolished slavery there in 1793 while he was in command of the French forces there on behalf of the revolutionary government. Like most major political decisions, it was done from a mixture of motives. But as Hegel might have said, the World Spirit was pushing history in that direction.

In this case, the real history of the French emancipation in Haiti was preceded by a slave rebellion that began in 1791. John Hope Franklin and Alfred Moss, Jr. write about it in From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans (8th edition; 2003). The "magnitude and intensity" of the uprising in August 1791 "demonstrated the blacks' determination to secure freedom and equality." After two years of conflict, the French offered freedom to slaves who adhered to the French cause, which Sothonax soon extended to all slaves.

Toussaint Louverture (c. 1743-1803)

Toussaint Louverture (c. 1743-1803) emerged as the main leader, fighting against French forces that he feared would try to restore slavery. He also successfully liberated the remaining slaves by overrunning Santo Domingo, which was still held by the Spanish and where slavery had been maintained. He was eventually captured by France and died in a French prison in 1803. But France was unable to reconquer the island, which became independent and took on the name of Haiti on the first day of 1804.

Franklin and Moss explain the reverberations of these events in the United States:

The effect of these events on the course of American history was extremely important. Of Toussaint, W. E. B. Du Bois said, "He rose to leadership through a bloody terror, which contrived a Negro 'problem' for the Western Hemisphere, intensified and defined the anti-slavery movement, became one of the causes, and probably the prime one, which led Napoleon to sell Louisiana for a song, and finally, through the interworking of all these effects, rendered more certain the final prohibition of the slave-trade by the United States in 1807." Americans were terrified at the news of what was happening in Haiti. For more than a decade beginning in 1791 many Americans were more concerned with events in Haiti than with the life-and-death struggle that was going on between France and England. Despite the fact that Southern states wanted more slaves, they were afraid to import them. In 1792 South Carolina found it inexpedient to allow blacks "from Africa, the West India Islands, or other places beyond the sea" to enter for two years, but many entered illegally. In 1794 North Carolina passed an act "to prevent future importation and bringing of slaves." Virginia and Maryland strengthened their nonimportation laws. Though the Middle Atlantic and New England states did not seem as disturbed over Haiti as their Southern neighbors, there were attempts by Quakers and other humanitarian groups to take advantage of the situation and to strengthen various aspects of antislavery legislation. The revolution in the West Indies did much to discourage the importation of slaves into the United States.

Speaking of mixed motives, even the reduction and eventual prohibition of the international slave trade was being driven by fear as well as love for liberty and humanitarian considerations.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2016, April 5: Hollywood brings us Newt Knight

It wouldn't be right this year to let Confederate "Heritage" Month go by without a mention of the upcoming Free State of Jones movie about the legendary American patriot Newton Knight.

Newton Knight (1837-1922)

Here's Free State of Jones-Official Trailer STX Entertainment 010/09/2016:

Here's the blurb from the YouTube post:

Written and directed by four-time Oscar nominee Gary Ross (THE HUNGER GAMES, SEABISCUIT, PLEASANTVILLE), and starring Oscar winner Matthew McConaughey. FREE STATE OF JONES is an epic action-drama set during the Civil War, and tells the story of defiant Southern farmer, Newt Knight, and his extraordinary armed rebellion against the Confederacy.

Banding together with other small farmers and local slaves, Knight launched an uprising that led Jones County, Mississippi to secede from the Confederacy, creating a Free State of Jones.

Knight continued his struggle into Reconstruction, distinguishing him as a compelling, if controversial, figure of defiance long beyond the War.

In Theaters June 24, 2016 ...

Connect with Free State of Jones Online:
WEBSITE: http://bit.ly/STX_FreeStateOfJones
FACEBOOK: http://bit.ly/STX_FreeStateFB
TWITTER: http://bit.ly/STX_FreeStateTW
INSTAGRAM: http://bit.ly/STX_FreeStateIG

No, I'm not getting paid by STX Entertainment. Although, hey guys, I am giving your movie free publicity!

There was a kind of hokey movie about Newt Knight from 1978, Tap Roots, provided here by the BeforeISleepFilms YouTube channel, Matthew McConaughey's Film "Free State of Jones," Was First Told In 1948 As "Tap Roots." 01/10/2016:

The blurb there says:

Complete 1948 Film "Tap Roots." With enhanced video and audio.

Based on true facts surrounding the U.S. Civil War. Newton Knight was a southern soldier who deserted and turned against the Confederate army during the war. Being the leader of Knight Company, he and his men are said to have tried to form a "Free State of Jones" in Jones County, Mississippi. After the war he became apart of building Mississippi's Reconstruction government.

A controversial figure for the time indeed, Knight was in a common law marriage to a former slave and had several children with her. He lived until 1922 at the age of 84 and upon his headstone his epitaph red, "He lived for others."

I posted about Newt Knight in my second annual Confederate "Heritage" Month counter-observance, Confederate "Heritage" Month - April 23: Newt Knight and The Free State of Jones 04/23/2005.

James R. Kelly Jr. has an article on Newton Knight and the Legend of the Free State of Jones Mississippi History Now April 2009. He describes the Free State of Jones pro-American rebellion against the Confederacy this way:

Newton Knight quickly organized a company of approximately 125 men from Jones, Jasper, Covington, and Smith counties to defend themselves against the Confederates. They were known as the Knight Company and Newt was elected captain. A tall, powerful man, Newt was known for his imposing presence and steel-blue eyes. He was an expert with his double-barreled, muzzle-loading shotgun, and he proved to be a very skilled and resourceful guerrilla war captain. To avoid capture, the Knight men would disappear into swamp hideouts such as “Devil’s Den” or “Panther Creek.” They communicated with each other by blowing signals into hollow cattle horns. The Knight Company was aided by sympathetic local people, whites and blacks. In particular, a slave woman named Rachel helped supply Newt with food and information.

By early 1864, news of Newt Knight’s exploits had reached the highest levels of the Confederate government. Confederate Captain Wirt Thomson reported to Secretary of War James Seddon that the United States flag had been raised over the courthouse in Ellisville. Captain William H. Hardy of Raleigh, who later founded Hattiesburg, Mississippi, pleaded with Governor Charles Clark to act against the hundreds of men who had “confederated” in Jones County. Lieutenant General Leonidas Polk informed President Jefferson Davis that Jones County was in “open rebellion” and the combatants were “… proclaiming themselves ‘Southern Yankees,’ and resolved to resist by force of arms all efforts to capture them.”

The Natchez Courier reported in its July 12, 1864, edition that Jones County had seceded from the Confederacy. A few days after his destructive Meridian campaign in February 1864, Union General Sherman wrote that he had received “a declaration of independence” from a group of local citizens who opposed the Confederacy. Much has been written about whether the “Free State of Jones” actually seceded or not. Although no official secession document survives, for a time in the spring of 1864, the Confederate government in Jones County was effectively overthrown.

That's just an awesome story!