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.