Confederate "Heritage" Month 2018 for April 30: The Hamiltonian ideology

I referred in the last post in this series to a case in 2016 in which Hillary Clinton offered up a bit of Lost Cause history.

Matthew Yglesias picked up on that moment to talk about how the prevalent understanding of US history has evolved in recent years, How Hillary Clinton got on the wrong side of liberals' changing theory of American history Vox 01/26/2016.

Hillary's blooper was about how the Yankees were too mean to (white) Southerners after the Civil War:

The kind of politician Bill Clinton — supported by Hillary as, by all accounts, a genuinely trusted adviser and confidante — was at that time has gone badly out of style, and Hillary Clinton's reemergence as a Northern suburbanite is part of that process. But answering the question of which historical president she most admires, Clinton named Abraham Lincoln. That's a safe choice in almost any context. But she went on to espouse a theory about the aftermath of Lincoln's assassination that would have been banal for almost any 20th-century Democrat but that cuts sharply against the modern progressive view of American history. [my emphasis]

Yglesias describes the dominant view in the Democratic Party of 2016 this way, "Most liberals now believe that Reconstruction was a noble project to secure racial equality that was stopped by unjustified Southern racism and violence."

That also happens to be a view based on empirical reality. Whether that was desirable or not is to some extent a matter of judgment. White supremacists obviously don't agree with the desirability of Reconstruction's project to achieve racial equality before the law. But I would argue that value judgments can't legitimately be abstracted from empirical history, either.

I share the broad view of Reconstruction as a democratic project. But I think of my own outlook on American history as a left viewpoint or interpretation. And from my perspective, the general Democratic view of the Civil War period and Reconstruction is basically accurate from an empirical standpoint and is also consistent with a left, left-liberal, or even (theoretically) conservative perspective.

But the popular left and left-liberal versions of early American history and the antebellum period I find very problematic. HistoryNet's definition of antebellum: "The Antebellum Period in American history is generally considered to be the period before the civil war and after the War of 1812, although some historians expand it to all the years from the adoption of the Constitution in 1789 to the beginning of the Civil War."

Continuing with Matt Yglesias: "Modern-day liberals no longer feel the need to talk around the embarrassing fact that it was a Republican who saved the Union." So far, so good.

But he continues, "and are in the process of constructing an entirely new usable history in which Alexander Hamilton is a heroic Founding Father and the post–Civil War effort at Reconstruction was a noble failure, not a regrettable consequence of Lincoln's death." Reconstruction, I'm down with that.

But the idea of Alexander Hamilton as an admirable admirable historical model for the left and/or center-left, that's where I get off the train. Alexander Hamilton was a great American and a supporter of the American Revolution, which does make him a revolutionary, at least for part of his career. He also was one of the three authors of the Federalist Papers, along with James Madison and John Jay. The lazy left-liberal version of history right now is very jumpy about saying positive things about the American Revolution. Because, you know, "revolution" is a BernieBros thing.

At least we seem to be largely spared, for the moment, of a re-run of the old capital-p Progressive interpretation of the American Revolution as the real revolution and the Constitution as a counter-revolution (more or less) of self-serving rich white guys at the Constitution Convention. This was the famous theory of Charles Beard in An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913). It has been thoroughly refuted on empirical and theoretical grounds in the ensuing 105 years. But it still pops up now and then. It's only a matter time, I'll pessimistically guess, before corporate Democrats discover Beard's theory, which set up the Revolution up as a good event and the Constitution as the bad one, and use it only in reverse: the Revolution as bad (BernieBros!!!) and the Constitution is good (Hamilton the "heroic Founding Father.")

BTW, it's been pretty common for a while to use "Founders" for "Founding Fathers," although all the Founders at the Constitutional Convention were men. But referring the the founders of the country in a more general sense, I tend to use the more inclusive version.

Before we leave Hamilton, the guy was a conservative at best later in his career and I would go with reactionary. He was a brand of monarchist, wanting to set up the American President as a de facto king. He believed that a popularly elective legislature could only function practically if they were being regularly bribed, preferably by the Executive or his allies. The Citizens United decision in that sense was a very Hamiltonian one. The Bank of the United States, which he is conventionally praised for advocating, eventually came to undertake that function by paying regular stipends to members of Congress. The Bank was a private institution given special approval by the federal government, paying members of Congress before whom it could advocate for policies favoring the very rich.

Then there's this. Yglesias writes about:

... the sensibilities of the modern-day Democratic Party, which includes very few white people with deep family ties in the South. But it's an institutional problem for the Democratic Party to the extent that admitting Republicans were right on racial issues in the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s leads to awkward questions about why committed white supremacists from earlier periods (like Andrew Jackson) and later ones (like Woodrow Wilson) are celebrated as pillars of the party.

I'm not a particularly fan of Woodrow Wilson, though I'm a "fan" of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Andrew Jackson. More specifically, they represent the trend in actual American history that successfully fought and won the American Revolution. Jackson at age 17 was a soldier in the American Revolution, so he can legitimately be counted as one of the Founders. They also represent the strain in American history that worked, with considerable success, to expand democracy among the American political community.

Today, we take a different view than at least white American males mostly took in, say, 1820, of the historical reality that the American political community was made up almost exclusively of white males.

But it's also true democrats all over the world looked to the United States of the Revolution and the early Republic and the antebellum period as a radical experiment in democracy. Which it was. So the movements that expanded democracy, as the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian period did, matters historically. Those were the people who were going in the direction that the Democratic Party celebrates in retrospect. The Abolitionist movement matters, the women's rights movement mattered, the growth and activism of labor union matters, advocates for immigrants' rights, Indian rights, and much more, they all matter. They don't erase the horrors of slavery or Indian dispossession. But they didn't drop down from Heaven in a divine intervention like Yahweh opening the earth to swallow up Korah and his followers, the Biblical event Walter Benjamin celebrated as sweeping away the old order to make way for an entirely new one. They happened in the process of real struggles by real people.

Real achievements in national independence for the American Republic are also important: the Revolution, the Louisiana Purchase, the War of 1812 and the Battle of New Orleans. That doesn't make American policy toward the native peoples of North America moral or pure. It doesn't make imperialist wars acceptable. But it's part of real history. And to ignore real democratic advances or the flawed human beings who achieved them and came to symbolize them is also ahistorical. And not a meaningfully "left" approach to history.

It's foolish from a left or left-liberal perspective to celebrate a monarchist like Hamilton as a democratic hero but dismiss Jefferson and his democratic tradition entirely. It would be even more absurd to ignore the radical difference between John Calhoun and his followers, on the one hand, and Andrew Jackson and the Jacksonian reformers, on the other.

As I've noted before, John Brown is the figure on which the half-baked Democratic historical view that Yglesias describes always founders. John Brown was an anti-slavery activist who took an active part in the guerrilla war between pro- and anti-slavery forces in "Bleeding Kansas." And his failed raid on Harper's Ferry was part of a serious plan to set up armed resistance units in the Appalachians to encourage runaways and harass slaveowners with guerrilla tactics. So his antislavery credentials are solid! He was also unusual among white men in not only opposing slavery but advocating for political and social equality for blacks. And for women. He's one of the few famous white men of pre-Civil War America that advocated racial and gender equality in a way that would today be considered mandatory for a Democratic politician, and to which even many Republicans politicians feel they need to make rhetorical nods.

But, oh, that guerrilla war against slaveholders and their armed supporters ... That makes him a "terrorist" by today's standards. Even though it was proslavery guerrillas he was fighting against in Kansas, i.e., also "terrorists," good egalitarian white liberals in the United States tend to shy away from taking him as any kind of acceptable model, symbol, or hero. Because people who quake at Republicans calling them "socialists" - or even "liberals"! - certainly don't want to be caught saying nice things about the "terrorist" John Brown. It doesn't fit into Hamiltonian narrative that venerates Alexander Hamilton and John Quincy Adams, also anti-slavery but as much of an advocate for the narrow class interests of the wealthy as Hamilton himself.

Any view of 19th-century US history that celebrates the liberation of the slaves at the hands of the Union Army but is too squeamish to acknowledge the democratic, political, and moral necessity of the anti-slavery guerrilla war against the Slave Power's supporters in Kansas is seriously lacking something.

Yglisas also comments, "Lincoln is, obviously, the president who freed the slaves and saved the Union. Alongside George Washington he's the conventional choice for greatest American president." Yglesias doesn't elaborate on the status of George Washington, although he seems to grudgingly concede his importance in American democratic history in that comment.

Which brings up another problem with the Hamiltonian corporate Democratic historical narrative. Lincoln the Great Emancipator had his own model Presidents. But his two main models were ... Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, both condemned to the dustbin of American history by the Hamiltonian outlook. How is it that the Great Emancipator took those two Presidents as the model for his own democratic project? The Hamiltonian view finds that very hard to explain. For a more straightforward democratic left view, it's fairly obvious.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2018 for April 29: History of a white racist symbol

Bill Black tells the story of how a persistent anti-black racist symbol came to be in How Watermelons Became a Racist Trope Vox 12/08/2014:

... the stereotype that African Americans are excessively fond of watermelon emerged for a specific historical reason and served a specific political purpose. The trope came into full force when slaves won their emancipation during the Civil War. Free black people grew, ate, and sold watermelons, and in doing so made the fruit a symbol of their freedom. Southern whites, threatened by blacks’ newfound freedom, responded by making the fruit a symbol of black people’s perceived uncleanliness, laziness, childishness, and unwanted public presence. This racist trope then exploded in American popular culture, becoming so pervasive that its historical origin became obscure. Few Americans in 1900 would’ve guessed the stereotype was less than half a century old.

He traces the use of watermelon as a symbol of contempt to "the early modern European imagination" in which "the typical watermelon-eater was an Italian or Arab peasant." when transplanted to North America, this hostile image took on a more particular racial aspect:

These tropes made their way to America, but the watermelon did not yet have a racial meaning. Americans were just as likely to associate the watermelon with white Kentucky hillbillies or New Hampshire yokels as with black South Carolina slaves. ...

This may be surprising given how prominent watermelons were in enslaved African Americans’ lives. Slave owners often let their slaves grow and sell their own watermelons, or even let them take a day off during the summer to eat the first watermelon harvest. ...

But Southern whites saw their slaves’ enjoyment of watermelon as a sign of their own supposed benevolence. Slaves were usually careful to enjoy watermelon according to the code of behavior established by whites. When an Alabama overseer cut open watermelons for the slaves under his watch, he expected the children to run to get their slice. One boy, Henry Barnes, refused to run, and once he did get his piece he would run off to the slave quarters to eat out of the white people’s sight. His mother would then whip him, he remembered, “fo’ being so stubborn.” The whites wanted Barnes to play the part of the watermelon-craving, juice-dribbling pickaninny. His refusal undermined the tenuous relationship between master and slave.

Black closes his piece with this useful observation:

It may seem silly to attribute so much meaning to a fruit. And the truth is that there is nothing inherently racist about watermelons. But cultural symbols have the power to shape how we see our world and the people in it, such as when police officer Darren Wilson saw Michael Brown as a superhuman “demon.” These symbols have roots in real historical struggles—specifically, in the case of the watermelon, white people’s fear of the emancipated black body. Whites used the stereotype to denigrate black people—to take something they were using to further their own freedom, and make it an object of ridicule. It ultimately does not matter if someone means to offend when they tap into the racist watermelon stereotype, because the stereotype has a life of its own.

A much longer version of Black's article appears in How Watermelons Became Black: Emancipation and the Origins of a Racist Trope Journal of the Civil War Era (March 2018)

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2018, April 28: A convert's story

Or maybe it's more of a growing-up story. William Black in Confessions of a former neo-Confederate Vox 12/16/2016 about visiting the Jefferson Davis Monument in Kentucky with his wife and father-in-law. He explains how he grew up absorbing the neo-Confederate worldview:

Less than a decade ago I was one of those people my father-in-law was afraid of. I believed slavery in the antebellum South wasn't as awful as some people made it out to be. I believed the Confederacy seceded to preserve states’ rights, not slavery. I thought Reconstruction was a mistake, a prime example of federal overreach. And I insisted the Confederate flag was a symbol of Southern pride, not racism. If Dylann Roof had gone to my high school and we had talked about American history, we would have agreed on a lot.

I worry sometimes it’s too easy to dismiss neo-Confederates as a fringe group. With every victory in the campaign against Confederate iconography in the public square — a flag removed from the South Carolina statehouse grounds, a Jefferson Davis statue taken down at the University of Texas — the Lost Cause seems weaker and less relevant.

But neo-Confederate ideas are more pervasive than we like to admit. They’re not limited to the South or the far right. And they’re harder to rout out than a few flags and statues. In January [2016] we heard Hillary Clinton repeat the old Lost Cause line that Reconstruction should have been less “rancorous” and more “forgiving” of former Confederates, gliding across the fact that this would have occurred at the expense of black people’s freedom. [my emphasis]

He tells the story of how he watched the Ken Burns' documentary series on the Civil War as a 12-year-old and found elements of it that resonated with neo-Confederate sentiments that he had experienced growing up in Tennessee:

I quickly devoured all 11.5 hours of the series, and though the documentary is far from neo-Confederate propaganda, I was drawn to its Lost Cause elements. There were the magnolia-drenched words of novelist Shelby Foote, who blamed the war on the American people’s failure to compromise. There was the story of how the Northern Lights made an unusual appearance after a Confederate victory in Fredericksburg, Virginia, which Lee’s men saw as a sign of God’s favor. There were the final words of Stonewall Jackson, accidentally shot by one of his own men: “Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees.” When the narrator related how, at the 1913 Gettysburg reunion, veterans from the opposing sides embraced and shook hands over the stone wall at the Angle, I cried.

Now a history scholar, Black recounts his own experience as a history-nerd teenager coming to understand the ideological and false nature of the Lost Cause/neo-Confederate narrative.

He talks about how much of real history is obscured in the Lost Cause account:

Nor was slavery a mere wedge issue. Serious money was at stake. Slaves were worth more money in 1860 than all of America's factories, railroads, and banks combined. And it wasn't just slaveholders who had a stake in the so-called peculiar institution, because every white Southerner, even the poorest dirt farmer, drew comfort from the knowledge they would never be on the bottom rung of society so long as slavery remained in place.

The Confederates were clear: They were seceding to protect slavery. Just read Mississippi’s secession ordinance: “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world.” Or read the Confederate vice president’s proclamation that the “cornerstone” of the new nation was “the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man.”

This is a useful reflection on his part that gets to the issue of "anachronism," in the sense of applying prominent present-day perspectives to earlier periods in which those ideas were not dominant, and possibly not even recognizable in the earlier context:

I look at my own past — valorizing slaveholders and traitors, whitesplaining history to my middle school teacher and to my classmates — and I cannot be sure, as many white liberals are, that if I had lived in the 19th century I would have been an abolitionist. I cannot be sure I do not even now support systems of cruelty and injustice that future historians will view with clear-eyed contempt.

An added note on the Jefferson Davis Monument. The conservative writer Robert Penn Warren, a onetime figure in the Nashville Agrarian group, used his youthful visits to the Jefferson Davis Monument as it was under construction as a introductory narrative in his book-length essay, Jefferson Davis Gets His Citizens Back (1980).

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 27: Contemporary neo-Confederacy

This is another present-day example of thriving neo-Confederate ideology, rpoerted by Daniel Walters in Does this anti-"sodomite," slavery-defending, Holocaust-denying Idaho pastor lead a hate group? Inlander 04/26/2018.

It's about a rightwing extremist Christianist leader, Warren Mark Campbell, pastor of the Lordship Church in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho:

“Any of you kids recognize who this is?” Campbell tells the crowd of children.

He's holding up a picture of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. He calls Lee a “great Christian general.” He praises Stonewall Jackson’s Christian leadership. He laments that people are opposed to flying the Confederate battle flag.

"We're not going to give that up to a politically correct ideology," Campbell says.

Campbell calls himself a "strong advocate of the Confederacy."

He returns to few sermon topics as eagerly as the Civil War. But he doesn't call it the Civil War. He calls the Civil War the "War of Northern Aggression," or, even more dramatically, "Lincoln’s war against Christianity.”

It's a common neo-Confederate belief. The war was a battle between good and evil, they say. The South was on the side of the good, while the North was evil. Campbell compares Lincoln to Hitler, focusing on atrocities carried out by Northern generals.

Even today, Campbell preaches, the damage Abraham Lincoln did to the Union remains. He says states are “coerced at the point of the gun to remain in the Union,” comparing states’ relationship with the federal government to the relationship of a lamb in the jaws of a wolf.

He says the nation has been propagandized for the last 150 years about the Emancipation Proclamation, noting that Lincoln only initially freed the slaves in the South, not the North.

“He thought by doing this the slaves would go against their masters and against their wives and the war would end immediately,” Campbell preached in an Independence Day message. “It didn’t happen that way. Because so many blacks fought on the side of the South, because they loved their masters.”

For a moment, set aside the historical distortion of the notion that large numbers of black Southerners fought on behalf of the South. [my emphasis, internal links omitted]

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2018 for April 26: Andrew Johnson in 1866

Charlie Pierce described President Trump's appearance on "FOX and Friends," the one in which he offered some history of Abraham Lincoln, in this way: " On Thursday morning, he called in, and, over the next several minutes, had what can be gently called an 'episode.'" (The President Is a Few Bulbs Short of a Chandelier Esquire Politics Blog 04/26/2018)

And he shared a bit of Reconstruction history:

On the electric Twitter machine Thursday morning, historian Heather Cox Richardson hipped us to an inexact, but interesting, historical parallel to our current moment. In 1866, President Andrew Johnson was running out of friends. Lincoln Republicans distrusted him because he was a Democrat from the South, and because he was coddling the formerly treasonous, and also because he was sockless drunk about half the time. Frustrated with his rejection by what we would today call “the establishment,” Johnson decided to hit the road prior to the that year’s midterm elections and take his case to The People. This did not go well.

Johnson barnstormed the country, deep in his cups much of time. On what he called his “swing around the circle," Johnson blindly lashed out at his many enemies, real and imagined, in a fashion that one historian has called “ill-tempered, semi-insane, and thoroughly undignified.” One of his main campaign planks was to suggest that the states refuse to ratify the 14th Amendment. He accused the Lincoln Republicans of fomenting violence among the newly enfranchised African-American citizens. He even blamed Republicans—and black people—for the white supremacist rebellion in New Orleans. There was a catastrophic appearance in Cleveland when Johnson was heckled and began raving back in response.[my emphasis]

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2018 for April 25: Did you know this about Lincoln?

I'm a day behind. And I'm going to cheat a bit, because this post is in yesterday's slot, but it's something that happened today. This one is too good to pass up.

Our distinguished President appeared on his favorite daily show "FOX & Friends Today." He got into history a bit. Drawing from the Washington Post transcript (Aaron Blake, Trump’s unwieldy ‘Fox and Friends’ interview, annotated 04/26/2018), Brian Kilmeade asked, "Have Republicans done a bad job ignoring the black community up until now?"

Trump responded:

TRUMP: You know, I think it was just a custom. People don’t realize, you know, if you go back to the Civil War it was the Republicans that really did the thing. Lincoln was a Republican. I mean, somehow it changed over the years, and I will say I really believe it's changing back. Remember, I was going to get no black votes?

DOOCY: Right.

TRUMP: I was going to get none? Well, I got a lot. I got a lot of support, you know, and I should have gotten much more. Now — in fact, I used to go around saying what do you have to lose? I'd say that at speeches, remember? I'd go into a stadium. I'd talk about the African American vote. I said the education is not good. The — obviously, the law enforcement that your community — the crime is at levels that nobody's ever seen before. You know, I'd go through like seven, 10 stats. I'd say vote for me. What do you have to lose?

DOOCY: Right.

TRUMP: So now they've voted for me, crime is way down, and really importantly, the unemployment picture —

DOOCY: [Um-huh].

TRUMP: — is the best it's been in the history of our country for African Americans.

Wow. Just, wow.

The full video is available at President Trump: I would give my presidency an A+ FOX News 04/26/2018.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2018, April 24: Slavery and white racism

I always appreciate irreverent observances of Confederate "heritage" days:

In the real world, white Unionists in the free states largely shared basic white supremacist ideas with Southern slaveholders and their supporters. Although the dominant propaganda justification for slavery in the South in 1860 was a more intense and toxic version that held black people to be permanently suited only for slavery. And the rejection of democratic principles that implied was leading the slave states farther and farther away from democracy for whites, as well.

But slavery was a distinct issue. And by the end of the Civil War, many Union soldiers had not only seen the horrors of the Civil War that the slaveowners brought on to defend their Peculiar Institution, as they called it. Many of them had their first contact or extensive involvement with slaves, and had seen black Union troops performing bravely and ably in the Union cause, while the defenders of slavery were killing US soldiers in the service of treason.

So many Northerners who had previously been indifferent to slavery or not especially concerned about seeing it ended before the war now deeply despised it and understood its destructive effects on a democratic Republic like the United States.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2018, April 23: Secession in Mississippi and the issue that prompted it

Earlier this month, I quoted from an essay by Percy Lee Rainwater (1888-1964) on the politics of secession in antebellum Mississippi. He also had a book on the topic, Mississippi: Storm Center of Secession, 1856-1861 (1938), which incorporates the previously mentioned essay.

Rainwater describes in some detail the members of the Secession Convention that declared secession in 1861 , including their professions and major factions in the secession debate. He constructed this instructive table on the 100 members of the convention relying on The Mississippi Slave Schedule for 1860:

Out of 100 members of the convention, all but 18 directly owned other human beings as property. Using the lower end of the range, members of the Secession Convention owned at the very minimum 2,599 slaves among them. At the mid-range, the number of slaves owned would be 3,364.

But Rainwater is clearly impressed with this group in this 1938 book, describing it as "having every desire for the restraints of law and embracing no cabal of disappointed factionalists striving for illegitimate power." He even enthuses, "The convention was composed of some of the purest, the ablest, and the most opulent men in the state."

All but 18 of whom owned other human beings as property.

But, the neo-Confederates tell us, secession wasn't because of slavery. No, it was about Honor, Courage, Defense of Home, States Rights and it was all the fault of the damnyankees, anyway.

Oddly, though, even in Rainwater's account, they seemed to have been singularly focused on a particular issue:

All members of the convention, of whatever party — although finding the doctrine of States Rights both a convenient plea in estoppel of Northern aggression and, in the case of almost all, a legal right of secession — were united upon the great question that the institution of slavery ought and must at all hazards be preserved. The best means to be employed for making secure the institution of slavery was the sole great question which divided the convention. Every other question was incidental to, and revolved about, this one question upon which all were agreed. [my emphasis]

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2018, April 22: Kenneth Stampp on Ulrich Phillips' treatment of slavery

In some earlier posts this month, I looked at an essay by historian Ulrich Phillips (1877–1934), a major historian of slavery but one with a distinctly benign view of the Peculiar Institution, i.e., a proslavery view.

Kenneth Stampp (1912–2009) was one of the major historians who pushed back against the proslavery historical view, notably with The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (1956), and against that of the neo-Confederate Dunning School of historians.

In The Historian and Southern Negro Slavery American Historical Review 57:3 (Apr 1952), he discusses Phillips' approach, noting also Phillips had done important empirical research:

No student could begin to understand the complexities of the slave system without being thoroughly familiar with the findings and varying points of view of such historians as Ulrich B. Phillips, Herbert Aptheker, Lewis C. Gray, John Hope Franklin, Avery Craven, Carter G. Woodson, Frederic Bancroft, Charles S. Sydnor, John Spencer Bassett, and many others.

Among these scholars, the late Professor Phillips has unquestionably made the largest single contribution to our present understanding of southern slavery. It may be that his most durable monument will be the vast amount of new source material which he uncovered. But Phillips was also an unusually able and prolific writer.

In that essay, Stampp criticizes historians who generalize in a proslavery mode about the supposed benign, patriarchal care that owners supposedly provided their slaves:

... the evidence hardly warrants the sweeping pictures of uniform physical comfort or uniform physical misery that are sometimes drawn. The only generalization that can be made with relative confidence is that some masters were harsh and frugal, others were mild and generous, and the rest ran the whole gamut in between. And even this generalization may need qualification, for it is altogether likely that the same master could have been harsh and frugal on some occasions and mild and generous on others. Some men become increasingly mellow and others increasingly irascible with advancing years. Some masters were more generous, or less frugal, in times of economic prosperity than they were in times of economic depression. The treatment of the slaves probably varied with the state of the master's health, with the vicissitudes of his domestic relations, and with the immediate or subsequent impact of alcoholic beverages upon his personality. It would also be logical to suspect-and there is evidence that this was the case-that masters did not treat all their slaves alike, that, being human, they developed personal animosities for some and personal affections for others. The care of slaves under the supervision of overseers might change from year to year as one overseer replaced another in the normally rapid turnover.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2018, for April 20: Unsettled issues from the Civil War?

Uwe Bott has an essay on the lasting effects of the American Civil War, The War That Never Ended The Globalist 04/07/2018.

He makes this point on Abraham Lincoln's election, "Lincoln’s election was in part the result of divisions among Democrats. Lincoln’s opposition to slavery was laudable. However, to him it was far less a humanitarian concern than a smart position in the political power struggle between the North and the South over representation and taxation."

While this is a point that involves judgment and not just factual occurrences, it's wrong. Lincoln was seriously opposed to slavery, seeing it as a moral evil and a threat to democracy in the US. He shared the white supremacist assumptions of most of his fellow white Americans and emphatically denied prior to the war that he wanted social equality for blacks. Although he did insist on civil equality before the law.

He describes the Republican Party's Southern Strategy identified with Richard Nixon and connects it to the situation prior to the Civil War that gave Southern states disproportionate power over the national government through the 3/5 clause of the Constitution, "The industrial and industrious Northeast and Western coastal states are politically underrepresented and fiscally exploited by a conservative, backwards and economically weak South."

That strikes me as more of a metaphor than substantive connection, but it's an interesting one. He makes the point by emphasizing the structure of the US Senate, in which each state has two Senators regardless of population:

... the Senate is even more dysfunctional today as it was back then because many more small states were added after 1861.

As a result, large states (and the vast majority of Americans) are effectively tyrannized by the increasingly extremist majority of Republican senators representing small states.

Two senators serve the population of 574,000 souls in the state of Wyoming, while the same number of senators serve 40 million people in California.

In fact, if you look at senatorial races in 2016, 2014, and 2012 combined – a period during which all 100 seats of the U.S. Senate were up for election – Democrats received more than 10 million more votes in all senatorial races than Republicans. In a proportionate voting system, this would lead to a current Democratic majority of 54-46, rather than the Republican majority of 51-49.

This is true. But it's not different from what it was prior to Civil War. The 3/5 Compromise in the Constitution gave the slave states a "slave bonus" in the allocation of the number of seats in the House of Representatives, because 3/5 of slaves were counted as part of the state's population for allocation purposes but none of those slaves could vote.

He goes on to describe the effects of gerrymandering that does give Republicans an unfair advantage today in the House. And he also describes a similar effect in the Electoral College in selecting a President.

Those are important points. But in his introductory paragraph, it frames it, "It is easy to date the “official” American Civil War. It occurred between 1861 and 1865. It is far more complex to answer the question whether the Battle of Appomattox truly resolved what so deeply divided the United States of America back then." And his essay looks at that problem in the context of the structural issues of how the Constitution sets up the federal government.

But the issue that produced a Civil War in the context of those structural issues was slavery. And that issue was settled by the Civil War.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2018, April 19:: Who were the Mississippi secessionists?

In the last post in this series, I discussed how Percy Rainwater in his essay An Analysis of the Secession Controversy in Mississippi, 1854-61 by Mississippi Valley Historical Review 24:1 (Jun., 1937) made clear the centrality of the slavery issue in the secession debate in the state of Mississippi.

That is heresy to the main Lost Cause narrative, which tries to minimize the role of slavery in secession, stressing instead abstract legal issues, or offenses to Southern Honor,or the difference between a Northern industrial economy and a Southern agricultural one. But Rainwater was put in the same situation as other Lost Cause advocates when they talk about the history leading up to the Civil War, they can't avoid talking about slavery. Even if they jump through hoops to argue that controversies over slavery weren't really over slavery.

One of the arguments he makes is that most slavewoners were cautious businessmen who were reluctant to embrace slavery:

From 1854 to 1861 agitation for secession in Mississippi increased with accelerated momentum. In the early stages of the renewed controversy, it was largely the active, restless, and politically ambitious element, represented by the lawyer-politician and the country editor, which incessantly rang the fire bells in order to arouse a not uneasy social order against the approaching and consuming blasts of abolitionism. Conservative men of property, desiring to be let alone that they might enjoy the fruits of their prosperity, not only held aloof but positively condemned the new agitation. But an equally loud and fanatical minority in the free states played, through the press and from the platform and the pulpit, quite unintentionally into the hands of the secession agitators in Mississippi, as elsewhere in the South.

As a historical description, this is fairly disingenuous on its face. All those named types - "the active, restless, and politically ambitious element, represented by the lawyer-politician and the country editor" - were very aware that the slaveowning planter class was the dominant social and political force in Mississippi. The notion that secession was somehow a demand of the common people against the planter class is, well, not very convincing.

This is a long-standing trope in the neo-Confederate/Lost Cause narrative in support of the post-Reconstruction Segregation 1.0 system. It was typical for white communities to blame lynchings or other racist violence against black people on the "rednecks out in the country." Certainly not the respectable white leaders of the town or city! "Redeemer" Mississippi Sen. L.Q.C. Lamar had his own version of this, giving moderate-sounding speech on North-South reconciliation in Congress, while agitating on the side of violent white supremacists back home in Mississippi. We saw an iteration of this in the 1950s and 1960s in the face of the Post-World War II civil rights movement, where business leaders tried to present themselves as the sensible moderates who disapproved of the "violent excesses" of the Klan rabble. Well, the businesspeople were at least probably less inclined to use the n-word.

Rainwater tosses out the Fanatics On Both Sides version of the run-up to the Civil War. But there were enough fanatics on one side to start a massive armed rebellion, seceding from the Union, seizing federal property, writing their own Constitution. I'm just sayin'.

Rainwater ties all this together with a version of yet another favorite segregationist revisionist view of history. If the secessionist rabble hadn't imposed treason and rebellion on their betters in the planter class, slavery would have had a better chance of surviving. Or, alternatively, it would have just faded away peacefully if those pushy, rude damnyankee fanatics hadn't been so obnoxious about the whole thing.

He does admit, though, in those speculations he is trying "to argue without the record."

Not exactly. The Republican program of halting the spread of slavery would have doomed the Peculiar Institution. And the power of federal patronage would have also given the Republicans a foothold to start building a party presence in the slave states.

The other possibility was unlikely. Because the Confederate defenders of slavery insisted on the superiority of slavery and were dead set on expanding it, not only geographically but even into industrial settings.

The latter is also a version of the eternal argument of the phony moderate, who claims to be in favor of some reform like desegregation, and praises the virtues of patience and gradualism. But their real ire is reserved for those who actively try to bring about the change. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter From Birmingham Jail" addressed just that kind of "moderate."

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2018, April 18: The secession controversy in Mississippi

Catching up again, here with the post for yesterday's date, I'm looking at another older journal article taking a version of the Lost Cause perspective, An Analysis of the Secession Controversy in Mississippi, 1854-61 by Percy Rainwater Mississippi Valley Historical Review 24:1 (Jun., 1937).

In the next post, I'll look at a couple of his points that fall into the neo-Confederate spectrum. But, despite operating in that perspective, in this piece his task is to look at the political disputes in Mississippi around secession. Empirical research is always a special challenge for a neo-Confederate perspective. And this essay makes clear that one issue was central to the secession controversy. Speaking of the militant secessionists versus those less convinced, he writes:

Both of these groups regarded the benefits of the Union as secondary to the preservation of slavery, which was the support of the state's social and economic system. In short, all classes in the state, slaveholders and non-slaveholders alike, looked upon the society in which they lived as representing the realization of a social ideal sanctioned alike by God and nature. This ideal, on its positive side, was beneficial both to the master and the slave; and, although social and economic lines between white groups were not permanently fixed, the system did provide for a wholesome regimentation of the nether herd. On its negative side, the institution of slavery, with its attendant effects upon all groups and classes, created an atmosphere in which, unlike that in the free states, undesirable and dangerous innovations in the religious life and in the general mores of the people could not live.

All groups in Mississippi in 1860 believed apparently that the social system based upon slavery was economically advantageous and socially elevating, and that only upon such a social soil could the highest type of republican government be built. All groups proceeding, it is true, upon a priori arguments, united in the belief that their social system was superior to that based upon free labor at almost every point by which civilization could be evaluated. When, therefore, the institution of slavery was endangered by the election of Lincoln, both the slaveholder and the non-slaveholder arose with religious zeal to defend their social heritage, which, like their religion, was not a subject for the detachment of the laboratory. The rich and the poor, the high and the low, the slaveholder and the non-slaveholder were "so indissolubly united in feeling and interest," said 0. R. Singleton, "that if you but touch a chord connected with either, it vibrates through our whole social system, and unites in more rapid motion the blood of every heart."

Thus united in their loyalty to a social system whose benefits, all agreed, far surpassed the benefits of the Union, the people nevertheless differed sharply concerning the degree of danger to which Lincoln's election subjected slavery and the effect disunion would have on the future of that institution.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2018, April 17: Two political trends leading up to the Civil War

In my third pass this month at Avery Craven's Lost Cause/neo-Confederate essay Coming of the War Between the States: An Interpretation Journal of Southern History 2:3 (Aug 1936).

He describes how the Northern states had developed into non-slave states and their pernicious about freedom and democracy:

The general period in American history from 1825 to 1860 was one of vast material growth and expansion. But it was also one in which the wealth and power of the few grew disproportionately to that of the many. Democracy was not functioning properly. Liberty was putting an end to equality. I£ some were content, others felt deepest resentments and dreamed of a more perfect society as the political and moral right of an American.

Those decadent Yankees started getting all grumpy about economic slumps, and the gap between rich and poor, and the restrictions on opportunities for the common people. He notes in particular, "the Panic of '37 spread wreck and ruin among them; land legislation lagged behind their demands; internal improvements came all too slowly; prices slumped as home markets broke and "overproduction" glutted the few outside markets they had developed."

And the baneful social phenomena multiplied. There was "unrest," and protest, and (gasp!) labor activism:

The rural North, therefore, throughout the era, was a region of potential and actual unrest. The "average farmer," for whose welfare the American system had been established, resented bitterly the growing importance of the city and the mounting wealth of those engaged in what he considered "minor pursuits." Securing the support of the lesser folk of the towns, only recently come from nearby farms, he launched his protests in various forms, but all in the name of a faltering democracy. The labor movements of the period, says Commons, were "not so much the modern alignment of wage-earner against employer" as they were the revolts of "the poor against the rich, the worker against the owner."

Even worse, people started thinking, "The cause of the oppressed was also the cause of 'righteousness'." The Northern public started obsessing about "democracy and morality." Some were even deciding that "Jeffersonian Democracy was God's chosen form of civil government."

He summarizes the unfolding of these threatening democratic movements in various stages:

The Jacksonian war against "the money power" in an earlier period was "from this same cloth." It represented far more the deep resentments of a "grasping" people than it did a belief in abstract ideals. The same holds, in a degree, for the so-called "free-soil" movement. Historians have largely overlooked the fact that the "liberty groups" with a single human rights appeal failed to gain any great following in the Northwest - but that when Salmon P. Chase, the Democrat, broadened the platform to one in which homesteads, internal improvements at Federal expense, and home markets by tariffs, were included, the moral indignation against slavery rose to a burning flame. A local convention in Chicago in 1848 resolved that the [anti-slavery] Wilmot Proviso "is now and ever has been the doctrine of the Whigs of the free States" and added hastily, "the Whig party has ever been the firm, steady, and unchanging friend of harbor and river appropriations." Lincoln himself would keep slavery from the territories because God had intended them "for the homes of free white people." The Wisconsin farmer, whose interest in Negroes was slight, did not further heckle this great Commoner when the assurance was given that the prime purpose behind his program was a 160-acre farm for all interested persons. Thus the halo of democracy and morality, in part borrowed from the abolitionist, was placed upon the brow of all vital Western needs, and its bitterness from unrealized ambitions became a holy sentiment. [my emphasis]

The trajectory of unfavorable democratic developments in Craven's neo-Confederate view ran from Jeffersonian democracy, to Jacksonian reformism, to the Free Soil and Abolitionist movements to land reform to Lincoln and the Republicans. Jefferson and James Madison were "abolitionist slaveowners," Andrew Jackson was a non-abolitionist slaveowner, but the trend toward expansion of democracy, restriction and abolition of slavery, resistance to concentrated economic power and oligarchic government: those did develop along the lines Craven describes, though from a democratic point of view that was a favorable line of develop, while Craven disparages it. Lincoln himself took Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson as his main Presidential models.

Especially in these strange times where the Democratic Party declines to claim its own founders and the corrupt, democracy-hating plutocrat Donald Trump adopts Andrew Jackson as a major symbol - a truly twisted and bizarre development - I should add that none of these developments were democratically pure by 2018 standards. The women's movement for the vote and legal equality had begun, but American women were second-class citizens, at best. Even white Abolitionists generally accepted some kind of white supremacist outlook, with even some of the most militant and serious anti-slavery activists embracing the fantasy of of mass colonization of black Americans to Africa. Or, mass deportation, to put it less euphemistically. Even those egalitarian land policies Craven mentions were heavily predicated on current and former Indian lands being distributed to white settlers and the native peoples displaced. And the list goes on.

But the single biggest and most consequential political conflict was over slavery with all its class, racial, and political aspects. And the developments that led eventually to the defeat of the slaveocracy and the abolition of chattel slavery did travel the historical path Craven describes (in a hostile mode). And the road that led to secession goes through the political trend represented by John Calhoun, Jackson's great adversary in Nullification Controversy. Craven clearly sympathizes with the Calhounian tradition:

When James K. Polk was elected president in 1844, certain old leaders such as Martin Van Buren, Francis Preston Blair, and Thomas H. Benton were pushed aside. Each in turn blamed John C. Calhoun and the slave interests; each in a different way added to the impression that the party was no longer a fit place for those who followed the immortal Andrew Jackson.

This is a big problem not only with the pseudohistory that makes Donald Trump the Second Coming of William Jennings Bryan. It's also a problem for what seems to be the currently dominant left/left-liberal view of American history, in which the monarchist Alexander Hamilton that believed democracy could function only through massive corruption is a great hero and Jefferson and Jackson are not only personally dastardly but contemptible in their political and political heritage.

It's just not possible to understand the history leading up to the Civil War without understanding the fundamental difference between the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian trend and the Calhounian trend. One led to an expansion of democracy and the presentation of the United States as a democratic Republic. The other led to a civil war in defense of slavery. That's a big difference.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2018, April 16: Avery Craven on John Brown and "Albert G. Brown of Mississippi"

I'm returning today to Avery Craven's Lost Cause/neo-Confederate historian Coming of the War Between the States: An Interpretation Journal of Southern History 2:3 (Aug 1936). He uses the figure of John Brown to give a race-based justification of the Southern secession. He argues that John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry decisively turned white opinion in the South toward secession:

But the John Brown raid was another matter. It put reality into the much discussed program of Yankee "money-changers," "peasant farmers," and the "long haired men and short haired women" of the North. The sharpest resentments and deepest fears of which a people were capable broke loose. A race war was impending. And that was a poor man's problem. Albert G. Brown of Mississippi put it this way:

The rich will flee the country. ... Then the non-slaveholder will begin to see what his real fate is. The Negro will intrude into his preserve ... insist on being treated as an equal ... that he shall go to the white man's bed, and the white man his ... that his son shall marry the white man's daughter, and the white man's daughter his son. In short that they shall live on terms of perfect social equality. The non-slaveholder will, of course, reject the terms. Then will commence a war of races such as has marked the history of San Domingo. [my emphasis]

Let's start with some basic debunking. There was no "race war" impending. Panics about slave insurrections were a common feature of the paranoid Southern environment. Such panics were far more frequent than actual attempts at anything like a slave rebellion, though of course there were some instances of those occurring, and for obvious reasons. But the panics generally featured their own kind of violence with murders of slaves and free blacks. In effect, they were episodes of sporadic white terror against blacks.

Brown's raid did send Southern slaveowners into new rounds of panic. Although his plan was not to provoke a slave insurrection. The plan was to establish guerrilla bases in the Appalachian mountains from which they would encourage slaves to flee their plantations and harass the slaveholders.

Lost Cause accounts like Craven's also typically downplay white Southern opposition to secession, which was significant even in 1861, though that shouldn't be equated with Unionism, much less opposition to slavery. Though both sentiments were also present.

But who is this "Albert G. Brown of Mississippi"? Is he just some random farmer speaking about the fears of the reg'lar white folks?

Actually, he was Albert Gallatin Brown: Fourteenth Governor of Mississippi: 1844-1848 (David Sansing, Mississippi History Now Dec 2003. He also was one of the Mississippi's two Senators in the runup to the Civil War, along with future Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Sansing writes:

After he was elected to the United States Senate, Brown became one of the most ardent defenders of states’ rights and was one of the South’s first advocates of secession. After Mississippi seceded and joined the Confederate States of America, Brown resigned his U.S. Senate seat and organized a military company known as Brown’s Rifles. Brown was stationed briefly in Virginia before his election as one of Mississippi’s two members in the Confederate Senate where he served until the end of the Civil War. [my emphasis]

The Wikipedia entry for him (04/16/2018) elaborates:

He was ... a Fire-Eater [militant secessionist] and a strong advocate for the expansion of slavery. In 1858, he said: "I want a foothold in Central America... because I want to plant slavery there.... I want Cuba,... Tamaulipas, Potosi, and one or two other Mexican States; and I want them all for the same reason - for the planting or spreading of slavery." (Akhil Reed Amar, America's Constitution, A Biography (2005) 267, quoting M.W. Mcklusky, ed., Speeches, Messages, and Other Writings of the Hon. Albert G. Brown (1859), 594-5) Indeed, he went on to say, "I would spread the blessings of slavery, like the religion of our Divine Master, to the uttermost ends of the earth." (internal links omitted)

I followed up Craven's source for the Brown quote: Percy Lee Rainwater, "The Presidential Canvass of 1860 in Mississippi," Mississippi Law Journal V:4 (1933). Although, oddly, his article cites the journal only by its subtitle, Journal of the Mississippi State Bar. Brown's hair-raising rhetoric about rampaging black rapist rebels was from a long 1860 letter Brown wrote for publication, later published as a pamphlet, making the case for secession in defense of slavery.

Albert Gallatin Brown (1813-1880)

The following passage from that letter/pamphlet is interesting in two ways. One is that Sen. Brown certainly seemed to think the current crisis was about fighting for preservation of slavery. And, despite claiming to speak on behalf of the ordinary white man, he certainly seemed to think that Southern non-slaveholders needing some persuading on undertaking secession to defend the Peculiar Institution:

Does the non-slaveholder own land? What will his land be worth when slavery is abolished? Is he the owner of cattle,horses, and other property? What will all these be worth in a free negro community? Does he live by cultivating the soil? Who creates markets and builds railroads, and provides other wise, by his money and his brains, for the most profitable means for selling the products of the soil? The slaveholder. Who gets the benefits of these markets, railroads, and other profitable means, and with comparatively little cost? The non-slaveholding farmer. Then, let him not say 'I own no slaves, and therefore have no interest in the question.

Is he a mechanic? Who is his best and most profitable employer? The slaveholder. Is he a merchant? Who buys most of hiss goods? The slaveholder. Is he a lawyer or doctor? Who pays him the most fees? The slaveholder. Does he, in short, rely on his muscle or his brain for bread? Who is his best customer9 The slaveholder. Then let no man of any occupation, trade or profession, say 'I own no slaves, and therefore I have no interest in the question.

All are interested all have an immediate, positive and PECUNIARY interest in the question, and all ought, as I have no doubt all will, stand up manfully in its support.

Kind of an 1860 version of trickle-down economics, we might say.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2018, April 15: Avery Craven's neo-Confederate version of the origins of the Civil War

I'm finally caught up with today's date on this year's series of posts.

Today I'm looking at another scholarly journal article by another well-known historian of the Lost Cause/neo-Confederate persuasion, Avery Craven's Coming of the War Between the States: An Interpretation Journal of Southern History 2:3 (Aug 1936).

Nobody called it "the War Between the States" at the time it was happening. It was a civil war, known in the official US records as the War of the Rebellion. But War Between the States is a polemic, neo-Confederate label for the conflict. And that is the narrative on which he relies.

Slavery, of course, didn't cause the war in this account. It was because the North rejected the "strict adherence to the Constitution" insisted upon by the slave states. This was the legalistic version that Jefferson Davis advocated in his memoirs. "[I}n its own eyes, the South was the def ender of democratic government against the onslaughts of those who would distort sacred institutions in order to promote their own material interests. All that the Revolution had won, all that 'the [Founding] Fathers' had achieved, was involved in the struggle."

But, as always, when any kind of empirical realities are developed around the various alternative causes promoted by the neo-Confederates, it still comes back to slavery:

When opposition to slavery developed, a new threat of economic loss, now joined with fear of racial conflict and social unrest, was added. When that drive became a moral attack on the whole Southern way of life, the defense broadened in proportion and emotions deepened. The Constitution was not enough against those who would not respect its provisions; the whole South must become unified for political efficiency. The section must have that security which the Constitution guaranteed and an equal right to expand with its institutions as a matter of principle. Keen minds set to work to reveal the virtues in slavery and the life it permitted in the South. When they had finished a stratified society, with Negro "mud-sills" at the bottom, alone permitted genuine republican government, escaped the ills of labor and race conflict, gave widest opportunity for ability and culture, and truly forwarded the cause of civilization. The stability and quiet under such a system were contrasted with the restless strife of the North which was developing socialism and threatening the destruction of security in person and in property. The Southern way of life was the way of order and progress. [my emphasis]

Just not progress in democracy or freedom.

Abraham Lincoln in this account was a blithering fanatic:

Abraham Lincoln, in his "House Divided" speech, prevented himself and his party from being thrust aside by a desperate appeal to old moral foundations. Though his own policy and that of "Judge" Douglas gave identical results, the latter was not born of moral conviction. And until the issue was conceived in terms of "the eternal struggle between two principles-right and wrong-throughout the world" the fight must go on. That is why a man who was willing to save the Union at the cost of a bloody civil war, even with slavery untouched, would not save it by a compromise which yielded party principle but which did not sacrifice a single material thing. The party was one with God and the world's great experiment in Democracy.

I'll leave it for others to sort out whose side God was on. Lincoln himself was restrained on the topic. Lincoln in his Second Inaugural Address in 1865, famous for his "with malice toward none" phrase:

One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. [my emphasis]

Not only Lincoln but everyone else during the Civil War itself knew that slavery was its cause.

Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding.

Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged.

The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.

"Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether." [my paragraph breaks]

But were Lincoln and the Union on the side of democracy in the Civil War? Absolutely.

Confederate "Heritage" Month, August 14: Ulrich Phillips and the white supremacist narrative

Still catching up on this month's series, and returning one more time to the essay by slavery historian Ulrich Phillips, The Central Theme of Southern History (American Historical Review 34:1; Oct 1928). Phillips, despite being a legitimate important historian on the basis of his research, nevertheless organized his material on the basis of a proslavery and white supremacist narrative. And this essay fully reflects that.

And this was not an essay in some cheap political pamphlet. The American Historical Review was and remains a major scholarly journal. He was writing with the cachet of highbrow respectability.

The essay is about what he calls Southern unity and "solidarity," meaning in his case white Southern segregationist unity around segregation, white supremacy, and Jim Crow laws in what became known as the Solid South reliably dominated by segregationist Democrats. He views the "Redemption," aka, the overthrow of democratic Reconstruction governments in the South by force, violence, intimidation, and fraud, in a favorable light.

But, he warns, the white Southerners could never truly feel secure in their dominance, "because the negro population remains as at least a symbolic potentiality." As opposed to, say, human beings with the right to full American citizenship including the vote (for black men, anyway). This "at least a symbolic potentiality" created "a certain sense of bafflement and of defensive self-containment." Which I suppose is a highbrow euphemism for white racist hatred and fear.

And he explains approvingly the white majority's response:

... by Southern hypothesis, exalted into a creed, negroes in the mass were incompetent for any good political purpose and by reason of their inexperience and racial unwisdom were likely to prove subversive. To remove the temptation to white politicians to lead negroes to the polls again, "white primaries" were instituted to control nominations, educational requirements for the suffrage were inserted in the state constitutions, and the Bryanizing of the Democratic party was accepted as a means of healing a white rift. Even these devices did not wholly lay the spectre of "negro domination"; for the fifteenth amendment stood in the Constitution and the calendar of Congress was not yet free of "force bills".

The white primary meant allowing only whites to vote in the Democratic nominating primaries. Since the Democratic nominee was all but automatically going to be the elected candidate in the general elections statewide in and in most Congressional and legislative districts. The literacy requirements - which some Republicans are making noises about trying to revive - was another technique for disenfranchising black citizens. These allowed the local, usually white, voter registrar to wave through even the most illiterate whites as passing the test, while black college professors could be disqualified.

This is worth noting. The Segregation 1.0 system did not explicitly exclude black voters. The Southern states found it necessary to make that much of a concession to the Reconstruction Amendments to the Constitution. And not all black voters were disfranchised in the old Confederacy. And, in addition, some poor whites were disenfranchised by the voter suppression measures such as the poll tax.

Phillips' reference to "Bryanization" refers to the power of the Populist movement in some areas of the South. As Phillips explains, also with obvious approval of the white-supremacist counter-measures:

A dozen years sufficed to restore white control, whereupon they began to differ among themselves upon various issues. Many joined the People's party; and in some quarters a fusion was arranged of Populists and Republicans to carry elections. In the stress of campaigning this threatened to bring from within the South a stimulus to negroes as political auxiliaries.

Some Southern Populists actually did challenge the segregation system and build biracial coalitions.

Phillips was right in understanding that the white powers-that-be saw that development of potentially dangerous to their system. In that essay, though, he does not acknowledge that the white solidarity was one that had to be maintained with some considerable effort on the part of the ruling groups. There was more going on than unanimous white agreement on the superiority of current social arrangements in the South.

By the time of Phillips' 1928 essay, the Populist threat was in abeyance for the moment. Though defenders of the Solid (White) South knew that the threat was chronic. And the threat of the US Constitution and the American way of life confronting the segregation system, as Northern democracy had earlier confronted the threat of the slave system, was always hanging in the air:

... white Southerners when facing problems real or fancied concerning the ten million negroes in their midst can look to the federal authorities for no more at best than a tacit acquiescence in what their state governments may do. Acquiescence does not evoke enthusiasm; and until an issue shall arise predominant over the lingering one of race, political solidarity at the price of provincial status is maintained to keep assurance doubly, trebly sure that the South shall remain "a white man's country".

This was a backhanded concession on Phillips' part that Southern racial practices actually were the Other of American democracy.

It's worth stressing again. This was not a fringe crackpot position that Phillips was taking in 1928. It was considered entirely respectable even in the scholarly mainstream.

Confederate "Heritage" Month, August 13: Ulrich Phillips on white racism among nonslaveholders in the South

Still catching up on the Confederate "Heritage" Month posts

I'm continuing here with discussing the essay by slavery historian Ulrich Phillips, The Central Theme of Southern History (American Historical Review 34:1; Oct 1928). Phillips' friendly view of slavery was very much in line with the Lost Cause/neo-Confederate historical narrative supporting segregation and Jim Crow laws. In the last post, we saw how in his view of Southern history it was not slavery that caused the Civil War, but argued that slavery was rather only a means to the end of protecting "white supremacy and civilization."

He also offers a version of the favorite neo-Confederate argument that the Civil War couldn't have been about slavery because the Confederate soldiers were mostly not slaveowners. As a historical position, that doesn't rate as much more than a throwaway talking point. But people hearing it for the first time may be thrown off, because it doesn't occur to most people at most times that the goals or originating causes of a war can somehow be measured by the the personal opinions or ordinary foot soldiers or their personal economic backgrounds. And both the Union and the Confederacy relied on conscription. Both of them offered exemptions to wealthier men who could pay a personal bounty. The Confederacy's version also exempted slaveowners with 20 or more slaves. So the largest slaveowners were exempted from compulsory military service. But even though the ownership of slaves was heavily concentrated, there were whites - and sometimes Indians and even occasionally free blacks - who owned one or a few slaves. So not only was slave ownership not confined to large planters, that also meant that ordinary farmers could aspire to become successful enough to own one or a few slaves. So even ordinary Confederate soldiers could aspire to become slaveowners.

Phillips does at least allude to "militia musters," the slave patrols in which nonslaveowning white citizens were required to participate. Their role was to patrol for slaves away from their plantations without proper papers. It also gave the white men on the patrol the chance to bully both slaves and free blacks with impunity. It was a key institution in giving nonslaveowning whites a psychological stake in the slave system.

Phillips tries to argue that nonslaveowners were the main source of white racism and anger against Northern Abolitionists:

The reason for this apparent anomaly lay doubtless in the two facts, that men of wealth had more to lose in any cataclysm, and that masters had less antipathy to negroes than non-slaveholders did. In daily contact with blacks from birth, and often on a friendly basis of patron and retainer, the planters were in a sort of partnership with their slaves, reckoning upon their good-will or at least possessing a sense of security as a fruit of long habituation to fairly serene conditions. But the white toilers lived outside this partnership and suffered somewhat from its competition. [my emphasis]

The concept of a "partnership" in which one party literally and legally owns the other is an, uh, intriguing concept.

Phillips in that essay pretty much breezes by the fact that hostility against slavery generally coexisted with hostility to the presence of black people, because black people were associated with slavery. That's not said to excuse the attitude, but rather to say that without recognizing that connection the dynamics of the politics of slavery among whites is more difficult to understand.

It was also the fact that Abolitionist advocacy was suppressed in the slave states with increasing intensity in the decades before the Civil War.

But it's also the case that Southern whites were very aware of the central role of slavery in the politics leading up to the Civil War. And, of course, the advocates for secession put the defense of slavery front and center in their demands. Phillips even notes that in the 1850s, "legal sanction for the spread of slaveholding, regardless of geographical potentialities, became the touchstone of Southern rights."

Confederate "Heritage" Month, August 12: Ulrich Phillips on white supremacy and Southern unity

I've gotten a couple of days behind on the Confederate "Heritage" Month posts, but I'll do some catching up.

Ulrich Phillips (1877-1934) was a major historian of American slavery. John David Smith in the linked article in the New Georgia Encyclopedia praises Phillips' scholarly work and presents it in a relatively benign light. Although his final sentence in the piece is, "Today historians remember Phillips as a path-breaking scholar, as a pioneer in the use of plantation and other southern manuscript sources, as the inspiration for the "Phillips school" of state slavery studies, and as a conservative, proslavery interpreter of slavery and the slaves."

Phillips' relatively short scholarly essay The Central Theme of Southern History (American Historical Review 34:1; Oct 1928) was an influential one. He tries to describe the defining, unifying core of Southern American identity. He explains that the US South:

... is a land with a unity despite its diversity, with a people having common joys and common sorrows, and, above all, as to the white folk a people with a common resolve indomitably maintained - that it shall be and remain a white man's country. The consciousness of a function in these premises, whether expressed with the frenzy of a demagogue or maintained with a patrician's quietude, is the cardinal test of a Southerner and the central theme of Southern history. [my emphasis]

And he gives the following historical narrative as its context:

It [Southern unity] arose as soon as the negroes became numerous enough to create a problem of race control in the interest of orderly government and the maintenance of Caucasian civilization. Slavery was instituted not merely to provide control of labor but also as a system of racial adjustment and social order. And when in the course of time slavery was attacked, it was defended not only as a vested interest, but with vigor and vehemence as a guarantee of white supremacy and civilization. Its defenders did not always take pains to say that this was what they chiefly meant, but it may nearly always be read between their lines, and their hearers and readers understood it without overt expression. Otherwise it would be impossible to account for the fervid secessionism of many non-slaveholders and the eager service of thousands in the Confederate army. [my emphasis]

Smith mentions this essay in his biographical sketch, "In 'The Central Theme of Southern History' (1928), Phillips maintained that the desire to keep their region 'a white man's country' united southerners."

Expressed with that one-sentence summary, we could imagine that Phillips expressing a harsh critical judgments against attitude on the part of Southern whites. But in the paragraphs I've quoted, it's already clear that was not the case. One thing is striking is that Phillips takes "the South" to be white men. Southern women had the vote by 1928, and "man" was often used in a generic sense, but we wouldn't be far wrong in assuming that he explicitly mean white man in speaking of the "white man's country." Texas did have a female governor 1925-27, Miriam "Ma" Ferguson, who is probably most remembered for an apocryphal comment attributed to her: "If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it ought to be good enough for the children of Texas."

It's also notable in the latter paragraph quoted, Phillips describes slavery as having been formed for "control of labor" but also to insure "racial adjustment and social order," i.e., the subordination of blacks to whites. This reads very much like projecting the dominant white supremacist ideas of the notoriously anti-immigrant US in the 1920s back onto the 18th and 19th century development of American slavery. We've seen in earlier posts that the Revolutionary generation viewed blacks as generally inferior to whites. But they also justified slavery as a system that was necessary to the raise the African race to white American levels of civilization.

Pseudoscientific theories of inherent racial inferiority came to be the leading ideological justification for slavery by the Deep South slaveowners particularly after the Missouri Compromise of 1820. But establishing slavery for the purpose of "racial adjustment and social order" makes no sense, since there was no problem of "race control" involving blacks in the British colonies until the British had imported large numbers of African slaves. And Phillips even simplicity recognizes that in the immediately preceding sentence!

If anything, it would be much more accurate to say that slavery was restricted to blacks in the British colonies in North America for the purpose of controlling slaves, so the slavery system could be administered as a system of racial control.

How those arguments of Phillips' fit into the larger Lost Cause/neo-Confederate historical ideology is an interesting question. The Lost Cause narrative from immediately after the war insisted that slavery was not the cause of the Civil War nor the primary thing that the Confederacy was defending. Phillips' account quoted above implicitly recognizes the centrality of slavery to the conflict. But he emphasizes that defending slavery was only a means to the end of protecting "white supremacy and civilization." Though he does feel compelled to concede that slavery's "defenders did not always take pains to say that this was what they chiefly meant," he hastens to clarify that "it may nearly always be read between their lines, and their hearers and readers understood it without overt expression." (my empnasis)

This may seem like quite a lot of hairsplitting to say that the Lost Cause wasn't about slavery, it was about defending white supremacy and slavery was only a means to that end. But this kind of headache-inducing argument is very common in neo-Confederate ideology. Phillips goes on to say, "Otherwise it would be impossible to account for the fervid secessionism of many non-slaveholders and the eager service of thousands in the Confederate army." This is also a variant of a common neo-Confederate claim, which says that the fact that so many nonslaveowners fought for the Confederacy is proof that the war wan't "about slavery."

That's a flimsy claim. But Phillips does have some things to say in elaborating that point that are worth considering in the next post in this series.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2018, April 11: Charles Ramsdell, Lost Cause ideologist

The neo-Confederate/Lost Cause version of history was elaborated at a scholarly, "highbrow" level by the Dunning School of Southern history associated with historian William Dunning. This interpretation was the dominant or "hegemonic" interpretation of the Civil War and the antebellum and Reconstruction period during the first half of the 20th century. It was challenged by African-American historians like W.E.B DuBois and some white historians. But it took the post-World War II civil rights movement to unseat it as the predominent understanding of that period among American historians generally.

Fred Arthur Bailey recounts the career of one of the most important and influential of the Dunning School historians, Charles Ramsdell, in The Dunning School (2013), John David Smith et al, eds. He gives a good sketch of how the neo-Confederate narrative was elaborated in professional history and how it was shaped by organized political pressures and funding from conservative Southerners.

The period of 1865-1875, the decade after the war, saw a democratizing movement in the South led by white and black Republicans North and South, enforced with varying levels of enthusiasm by the federal government. Black men had their right to vote recognized, education in basic literacy and more was provided by former slaves, former slaves became free laborers and farmers, and both black citizens and white Republicans became active in Southern politics, all of which had been impossible under the slave system. The first African-American Senator was Hiram Revels of Mississippi, who took the Senate seat once held by Jefferson Davis.

Beginning in 1875, the anti-Reconstruction, anti-democracy "Redeemer" movement successfully pushed back many of the democratic gains of Reconstruction, depriving many black citizens of the vote and making the former Confederacy politically a "Solid South" supporting the Democratic Party, with the Republican Party largely eliminated in the South. "The Klan's successes" in domestic terrorism and intimidation "lead to the restoration of white rule," a laudable goal in the Redeemers' view. The Redeemers' new order promoted an ideological outlook and narrative based on the Lost Cause pseudohistory in which slavery had been benign, slavery had nothing to do with the Civil War, and blacks were naturally inferior to whites.

Bailey's account of Charles Ramsdell's scholarship describes some of the major claims of the Dunning School of Lost Cause scholarship. For instance:

[Ramsdell in 1914:] "How shall we take these ten millions of shiftless, improvident, unmoral, inefficient child-men of an alien race [African-Americans] and convert them into desirable citizens? With individual exceptions, the negro population rests like a great black blight upon the industrial and social life of the South.”

And:

{Ramsdell's] paper, “The Natural Limits of Slavery,” emphasized that though the “peculiar institution” was economically viable in the 1850s, rational men of thought should have realized that it was on the verge of destruction, that within a generation, perhaps sooner, it would have come to its inevitable end. Absent the Civil War and absent the nation-damaging Reconstruction era, inevitable emancipation would have led to reasonable “codes for the control of free negroes” that would have limited the negative effect of black citizenship and enfranchisement.

The Lost Cause narrative, even in its scholarly version, was highly ideological and deeply biased against black Americans and against whites who supported equal rights for them.

But Ransdell adopted a positivist outlook and claimed that he was doing only scientific historical research:

Throughout Reconstruction in Texas Ramsdell portrayed the postbellum decade as a violent epoch in which Texas whites, subjugated by adversaries of their own race — northern-sponsored reformers and politicians — thwarted a scheme to put the defeated slaveholders under permanent subjection to their former slaves. Though by definition the Texas scholar’s commitment to scientific history meant that he forsook the development of a discernable [sic] thesis and considered the personal interpretation of facts a violation of professional ethics, he nonetheless developed powerful themes that he assumed were no more than incontrovertible facts. With the destruction of Confederate authority, traditional southern social relationships stood near collapse, he argued. “The immediate and pressing problem was to preserve the normal balance of society, and to provide for the freedman an industrial position in that society such that agricultural interests would suffer the least possible additional shock.” Southern whites assumed that “free negro labor would be a failure and that a labor famine was imminent.” Subsequent events validated that fear, for to “the childlike negro, concerned only with the immediate present, there was no difference” between working under a labor contract “and his old condition as a slave.” The Texas scholar emphasized that, emancipated from restraint, these newly freed people abandoned their former masters, replacing obedience with “vagrancy, theft, vice and insolence”; and where “negroes had made contracts they broke them without cause, often leaving their families for their employers to feed.” [my emphasis]

This Lost Cause version of history was enforced as the official, allegedly truthful and objective, version of history by Southern legislators and what we now call Confederate "heritage" groups.

Bailey also describes Ranmdell's passion for Southern history and his extensive original research. It's important to keep in mind that even very ideological histories can sometimes present important factual material.

But the larger Lost Cause/neo-Confederate historical narrative is really pseudohistory with a heavy ideological agenda.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2018, April 10: The cotton gin and slavery

I'm returning once more to Forrest Nabors' From Oligarchy to Republicanism (2017), he gives a cogent comment on how the invention of the cotton gin, conventionally credited to Eli Whitney in 1793, helped transform slavery and the debate over slavery.

The general assumption of the Founders was that slavery was so much weaker as an economic system compared to free-labor capitalism (although that term hadn't come into usage yet) that it would soon fade away. "Soon" certainly had a different meaning for the slaves themselves than for their owners. But the abolition of slavery in the Northern states seemed to support that assumption. It had also been generally assumed that when the US banned international slave trading that the relative number of slaves would decline over time.

The historian William Freehling has given really helpful accounts of that process in his two-volume Road to Disunion work.

The relative inefficiency of the slave economy displayed itself over the decades even despite the cotton gin. But that technological innovation made a difference, as Nabors explained:

The Republicans [in their accounts of slavery] pointed to this period [the early Republic] as that during which the slave states were undergoing fundamental change, that is, when the power and ambitions of oligarchy were quietly gestating. The most important event that accelerated this change was a historical accident. Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin at the end of the eighteenth century allowed cotton cultivation over greater parts of the slaveholding states and created the demand for more slaves.

And he cites this observation, "In a public speech to his constituents, Representative Henry Deming of Connecticut declared, 'The invention of Whitney adjusted the social position and relations of our Southern brethren, more decisively, than their cotton-perfecting soil and climate'.”

The PBS webpage for Africans in America (KQED; n/d) notes:

Although there was some hope immediately after the Revolution that the ideals of independence and equality would extend to the black American population, this hope died with the invention of the cotton gin in 1793. With the gin (short for engine), raw cotton could be quickly cleaned; Suddenly cotton became a profitable crop, transforming the southern economy and changing the dynamics of slavery. The first federal census of 1790 counted 697,897 slaves; by 1810, there were 1.2 million slaves, a 70 percent increase.

Anthony Kaye gives a broader look at the invention of the cotton gin and points to another type of innovation that also contributed significantly to the increased productivity of the slave economy (The Second Slavery: Modernity in the Nineteenth-Century South and the Atlantic World Journal of Southern History 75:3, Aug 2009):

Angela Lakwete has debunked the myth that the cotton gin was Eli Whitney's invention. He was one of many mechanics around Augusta, Georgia, experimenting on roller gins to increase output. Manufacturers complained his wire-toothed gin tore and tangled the fiber and impeded textile production down the line. The saw gin that he is remembered for was actually another mechanic's handiwork and appropriated to Whitney in court. Only after a long transition lasting until 1830 did the saw gin become ubiquitous. The cotton gin was thus the work of many hands-mechanics, free and enslaved, who modified and made gins with rollers and saws; forward-looking planters and skilled slaves who adopted the saw gin; all in all, "an industrializing, modernizing, and slave labor-based South."

A skein of biological innovations, long obscured by historians' traditional focus on machinery, was also critical to the expansion of slavery. While machines enabled planters to put more land into cultivation and work more slaves, manipulating the natural properties of cotton and sugar increased the crops that slaves produced per acre. With little knowledge of genetics, a rudimentary understanding of plant breeding, and dogged empiricism, agriculturalists in Mississippi, Tennessee, and Georgia molded short-staple cottons for varied environments from the interior of the seaboard states to the lower Mississippi River Valley.

But technology couldn't save the Slave Power from the effects of its incompatibility with democracy.