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.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2018, April 8: Jefferson, Jackson, the American democratic tradition and antislavery

I've expressed my reservations about the arguments made by Forrest Gabors in From Oligarchy to Republicanism (2017). One of those reservations is that his positive presentation of the Republican Party position on what he describes as "regime change" during Reconstruction is uncomfortably consistent with present-day neoconservative demands for "regime change" in Iran and various other countries.

But his account of the Republican position on the Slave Power and Reconstruction does provide a welcome alternative to the brand of Whig history that the left and center-left in the US have largely adopted at the moment in which the monarchist and advocate of government-by-corruption Alexander Hamilton and the plutocratic John Quincy Adams are the stars with Abraham Lincoln as the superstar Great Emancipator, while leaders like Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson are considered as something like contemptible hypocrites and villainous evildoers.

Now, there's nothing wrong with writing the history of Whigs. (Lincoln was a Whig before being a Republica, BTW.) Or of warmongers. Or of crackpot rightwing political sects from the Anti-Masonic Party on.

But I've yet to see a way to understand the growth and expansion of democracy without understanding that the process was a historical movement from not-democracy to democracy. And there's no reason to think that process is completed. Or to assume that the process takes place without resistance or setbacks or reversals.

Democracy in practice has its shadow sides. And it's indispensable for honest history that those sides be recognized.

America in 1776 started a national-independence revolution that was widely and rightly understood as the most democratic movement of the time that successfully took on the world's most powerful empire of the day. The Constitution of 1789 and the system it established became the model for the new Latin American nations and was seen by European liberals as the most advanced democratic republic in the world.

The British took pleasure in pointing out that the great American democratic republic was also a slave republic. Even though the slaveholding states that rebelled in 1776 were slaveholding British colonies immediately before that. Despite the cynicism and hypocrisy with which that criticism was often made, it was true. Just because it functioned as British propaganda doesn't mean it was wrong. And, like the Northern US banks and shipping companies, British firms also profited from American slavery in the cotton trade. So much so that it touch-and-go during the first years of the Civil War whether Britain would recognize the Confederacy as an independent country, which would have made the Union cause much more difficult and even opening the possibility of a formal or de facto alliance of Britain with Confederacy.

In other words, the American Revolution was a messy and contradictory enterprise, like every other drastic political change in history. Purity in political movements hard to find. As Hegel famously observed, "history is not the soil in which happiness grows. The periods of happiness in it are the blank pages of history." (From his Lectures on World History) Substitute "pure political movements" for "history" and the statement is at least equally true.

But looking in what direction a political movement or process is heading is a different story. Those are results we can see, whether or not we like the picture they present.

In the context of the concerns in the forefront of historians' considerations today, even the post-Civil War Reconstruction regimes would qualify only as deeply flawed and very limited democracies. Although there were scattered periods of women voting prior to the Civil War, When the Territory of Wyoming recognized women's right to vote in 1869, they were unique in doing so in the United States. Women's suffrage in the US was established nationally only in 1920 in the US.

And, of course, Native Americans were the targets of discrimination, relocation, plundering, murder and a long series of what were known as Indian Wars. There's no way to tell that story without several variants of Europeans looking very bad: British, English, Spanish, French, Americans, Canadians, Mexicans. Something that Nabors highlights in his book is that Republicans before and after the Civil War advocated radical versions of democratic land reform. But not only was all that land previously occupied by Indians, although not "owned" in the European sense. And part of those radical land reform proposals had to do with distributing territorial land. Or, in other words, distributing land taken from Indians by force and violence to distribute to white men.

And yet democracy grew and expanded. And eventually the American political community expanded to include the vote and full citizenship for blacks, women, and Native Americans. Nabors recounts how the pro- and anti-slavery disputants each claimed to be the true representatives of the tradition and values of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. And in doing so, they confronted the contradictions between the ideals of democracy and equality, on the one hand, and the reality of slavery. A big part of his focus is how white citizens - essentially all of whom shared some kind of white supremacist ideas - came to see it as part of their own interest in democratic rights and freedoms for themselves required them to destroy slavery and make the slaves free people and even voting citizens.

But those ideas didn't drop down from Heaven on the day in 1860 when South Carolina declared its secession from the Union. They were deeply rooted in the ideas of of the Revolution and the Constitution and the ways in those ideas were incorporated of their understanding of their individual and group interests. Abraham Lincoln gave particular emphasis to the Declaration itself. He made this well-known observation in a letter to Joshua Speed (08/24/1854):

I am not a Know-Nothing [i.e., not an adherent of the anti-immigrant American Party]. That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor or degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that "all men are created equal." We now practically read it "all men are created equal, except negroes" When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read "all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics." When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty -- to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy [sic].

As President, Lincoln, who was an abolitionist and dead set on stopping the expansion of slavery, claimed Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson as the Presidents to whom he looked as models for his own Presidency. The two Presidents who founded the Democratic Party that now can't even be bothered to invoke the democratic traditions of which they were a part. Even allowing an anti-democratic malicious clown like Donald Trump to pose as a Jacksonian.

Nabors gives this example of how the Jacksonian reformers in the Democratic Party later found their way into the Republican Party when the Democratic Party converted itself into the party of John Calhoun. How people today can fail to distinguish the radical difference between the Jacksonian tradition and that of John Calhoun still bewilders me:

James Blaine dated Van Buren’s defeat in 1844 as the beginning of Calhoun’s total influence over the Democratic Party, but it “moved so rapidly and so far, that men in the North, who wished to remain in the ranks of the Democracy, were compelled to trample on the principles, and surrender the prejudices, of a lifetime.” In particular, Reconstruction Republicans who were former Democrats deplored the transformation of their party. John Hale had left the Democratic Party and successively joined the Liberty, Free Soil, and Republican Parties. He remembered Van Buren’s surprising demise at the 1844 convention, with the words, “I repeat but history when I say that the breath of slavery has made and unmade the public men of this country.” The old Democratic Party led by Andrew Jackson, said George Williams, had opposed “monopolies, class legislation, and the unjust and artificial distinctions of society.” But “Calhounism however found its way into the party and worked like poison. Contrary to the teachings of the Fathers that Slavery was a political, social and moral evil, it came to teach the ethics of Calhoun that Slavery was a political, social and moral blessing.” [my emphasis]

Nabors also describes an early version of what we now call "voter suppression" directed by the planters and their flunkies against ordinary white workers and farmers in the South, in which votes had to be cast by voice, about as far removed from a secret ballot as it could be.

This method of voting exposed the elector to the candidate’s control by means of bribery, pressure, or intimidation. In addition, it could reverse the effect of the central reform of the Jacksonian democracy movement — the elimination of property qualifications for voting. If the elector was landless or a tenant but had to express his choice by voice vote at the polls, the individual’s fear of the landlord or employer could more easily induce him to vote as the landlord wished, increasing the landlord’s control of election outcomes. Madison expressed this concern in the Federal Convention of 1787, when he predicted that if the propertyless obtained suffrage, they would become the “tools of opulence and ambition.” His intention was not to limit the republican liberty of the people; rather, he intended the opposite. In the same context, he said, “The right of suffrage is certainly one of the fundamental articles of republican government” and that a “gradual abridgment of this right has been the mode in which aristocracies have been built on the ruins of popular forms.” The apparently democratic reform of giving suffrage to the propertyless would actually augment the ruling power of oligarchy, not restrict it, and Madison wished to check that result. Viva voce voting assisted the oligarchy, under democratic guise. [my emphasis]

The 19th century USA had slave revolts and women's suffrage campaigns, utopian movements and religious revivals, public dissent and passive resistance, democratic societies and labor unions, all of which provided some ways for which those excluded from full citizenship ways to exert pressure for democratic change: women, slaves, free blacks, immigrants, non-Protestant religious groups, even Native Americans.

But they also appealed to democratic principles put into effect by war and revolution and political struggle among the dominant white male political community. That was real history. American democracy wan't born by Immaculate Conception.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2018, April 7: Republicanism vs. oligarchy?

I'll have more to say about Forrest Nabors' From Oligarchy to Republicanism (2017). But here I'll summarize what I see as the three key limitations of his approach to explaining the Civil War with the model of Northern republicanism versus Southern oligarchy:

1. He uses the terms republic and oligarchy in an abstract way but nevertheless tries to distinguish sharply between the two
2. But the economic part of his argument largely skips over the extensive work done on the nature of the pre-Civil War economy
3. While the focus on the Republican Party and its antiwar militancy is enjoyable to see, it means almost by definition that the voices of more radical activists and slave resistance are forced more into the background.
4. The way he stresses what he calls the revolutionary nature of the South's cause and the conservative nature of the North's response muddles the history, at best, and arguably even inverts it.
5. Defining the war as fundamentally caused by the difference in political systems does wind up demoting slavery as the cause of the war, which is always a worrisome sign.

This is one of Nabors' formulation of his position, which he presents as a confirmation of the Republican political description of the Southern slaveocracy:

New Northern industrialists were becoming wealthy, in addition to the Southern slaveholders. Noting this, one economic historian collapsed the difference between the two sections, commenting, “In the North the top one percent of the wealth holders were mainly urban merchants and manufacturers whose businesses were based on wage labor, while in the South the top one percent were mainly rural planters whose businesses were based on slave labor. On this basis, it was claimed that the North and South were both “plutocracies.”

Setting aside the fact that this statement passes over wealth mobility, sector diversification, and other metrics of general economic benefit to the citizenry, sovereign rule of the few and concentrated wealth at the top of the scale are not the same. Sometimes they overlap and sometimes they do not. In a model republican society, political and social equality prevails despite property inequality. But in a plutocracy or oligarchy, wealth is the distinctive ruling principle. In an oligarchy wealth determines rank; those unequal in property are absolutely unequal. Therefore, even if the same quantitative pattern of wealth distribution prevails in republican and oligarchic society, those patterns produce very different results, because the political standing of wealth is qualitatively different. [my emphasis]

Briefly put, Nabors claims that wealth and the wealthiest class were not dominant politically in the North, but were so in the South. The voice of the (white male) people were certainly more able to exert their weight on the state and local governments for the benefit of ordinary people. The Jeffersonian and Jacksonian movement were very important historical periods in which the (white male and often slaveholding) leaders represented the interests of the common people in substantial ways and served to expand the franchise. The Jacksonian movement even included the nascent labor union movement.

But both North and South were capitalist economies and they did function under the same broad Constitutional system. Both had considerable concentration of wealth, as the controversy between the Jacksonians and the Bank of the United States made dramatically visible. And as many historians have shown in great detail, Northern shipping and financial interests were also part of the slave system and some of them profited greatly from it. The infamous Draft Riots in New York City during the Civil War which featured deadly white racist violence against blacks were related in part to those Northern interests that profited from slavery and were pro-Confederate Copperheads.

Slavery was physically restricted to the South. But slavery was part of a national economy and protected by the national government. The North was more egalitarian in its economy and society, as Nabors rightly argues, and that was due to the fact that the North was based on a free labor capitalism while the Southern economy was based on slavery. But the rich man's voice always spoke much louder in both sections than the poor man's. And the franchise was restricted to men in both sections alike.

Again and again, he describes that Southern rebellion as a revolution and the Republican and Union cause as counter-revolutionary. That's also an abstract way to look at it, although colloquially an attempted overthrow of an established government from within is called a revolution

In the terms of the time, though, the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation changed the war from a conventional war directed at restoring the status quo ante into a revolutionary war aimed at overthrowing the social and economic system of the South based on slavery. And the mass exodus of slaves away from the plantation as word of the Proclamation spread, the effect on the South's economy was a very significant factor in the Union war effort. That sounds more like a revolutionary general strike than a conservative counter-revolution.

Both North and South claimed to be defending the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the 1789 Constitution. In that sense, both sides were claiming to be the conservatives. But from a democratic point of view, the Northern cause was the one legitimately defending those principles. In the sense of establishing full classical republican democracy, the Union cause was a continuation of the American Revolution. While victory for the Southern cause would have meant the maintenance and expansion of the slave system and would have continued the antidemocratic trends associated with it that Nabors describes well.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2018, April 6: Planters vs. democracy

Continuing my comments on Forrest Nabors' From Oligarchy to Republicanism (2017), in Part 2 of the book Nabors makes his own evaluation of the Republican claims against the Southern planter class and their system. And he delivers some solid and impressive arguments that the basic Republican indictment was very realistic. He writes at some length about how the Southern planters' suspicion and hostility of education for most whites seriously restrained the growth of public schooling in the South compared to the North.

He describes the debates over public education in North Carolina in the early nineteenth century, "The legislature of North Carolina did nothing to establish free schools for decades, despite the requirement in their constitution, while the population of North Carolina sank into deeper illiteracy and ignorance. The Georgia Legislature also flouted its constitutional requirement and instead followed the example of South Carolina and Virginia." In the late 1830s, popular demand from free whites persuaded the state government to expand public education. Still, "North Carolina had the highest adult illiteracy rate in the nation but a public school attendance rate rivaling the free states by 1860."

He also describes various ways in which the planters restricted the vote and political freedoms for poor whites. And a lot of the white people were poor, not least because the planters maintained a much more concentrated ownership of land compared to the North, where property was more widely distributed among the population which was predominantly rural and agricultural in the whole country. He notes, "A general estimate of landless whites for the whole slave South is between 30 and 50 percent of the white Southern population."

He gives this memorable example from John Calhoun's home state of South Carolina, which not by accident was the hotbed of Southern sedition and the first state to secede from the Union, of how the planter class skewed the state's political institutions to their disproportionate favor:

The people were not sovereign in South Carolina. The property qualifications for representative, for senator, and for governor were quite high,152 ensuring that citizens of modest means could not stand for those offices.153 Members of the legislature’s lower house, the popular branch, had to own five hundred acres of land or ten slaves, and twice those property qualifications were required for members of the upper house. Voters outside cities had to own at least fifty acres of land, but even if the freeman could meet the property requirement, voting power diminished outside of areas where slavery was dense. This was because the apportionment of the lower house’s districts was determined by a ratio of white population and wealth, and in weighing wealth the constitution gave greater representation to areas dense with slaves.

Although access to the ballot changed over time and restrictions were not uniformly severe in all slave states, Nabors is right in concluding from this situation, "The slaveholders controlled government in the antebellum South."

This is the real value of From Oligarchy to Republicanism. It not only shows how undemocratic the slave states had become even for free whites, and validates the contemporary broad Republican analysis of the Slave Power as accurate. (Although he distances himself from the "Slave Power" concept.) And he paints a helpful picture showing how the criticisms of the slave system mentioned in this series of posts are not "anachronistic" judgments, i.e., made in retrospective with knowledge and perspectives not available to contemporaries. The Republican Party was making these criticisms and pointing out the very real problems and dangers in slavery in real time. And doing so in terms that are still recognizable as valid after more than 150 years.

But I have reservations about Nabors' overall case that the central political conflict that led to the Civil War is best understood as the conflict between the republicanism of the North versus oligarchy in the South.

I'll use this striking but puzzling reference that Nabors makes as a way to begin framing my reservations in a bit of a roundabout way: "It should be noted that this analysis republicamism vs. oligarchy] chafes against the theoretical premise of Marxist or Marxian analysis that still prevails in scholarship and tends to hold that relative wealth always determines social and political rank." (my emphasis)

Marxist scholarship dominates "scholarship"? If even a majority of Southern historians consider themselves Marxists, they seem to keep it remarkably well concealed. Even if we assume he meant that to characterize only the more narrow argument that Southern oligarchy was somehow fundamentally different from Northern capitalist republicanism, it still doesn't really make any sense. Karl Marx himself and his close collaborator Frederick Engels wrote extensively about the Civil War and followed it closely. They understood very well the difference between the American and Confederate form of government, and the preceding Northern/Southern difference in antebellum times.

As James Oakes notes in the essay I cited in an earlier post in this series, Marx was working with the classical bourgeois/capitalist economic theory of surplus value and shared the classical economic assumption that chattel slavery was less efficient than free labor and therefore slavery couldn't survive indefinitely in a capitalist economy. And while there has been about as many variations of Marxism as there have been people who identified as Marxist, those who adopted his view of historical development were, if anything, particularly insistent in emphasizing the differences in the economic nature of the slave and free economies in the US and their implications for the form of government.

So does Nabors mean his comment about Marxism dominating the scholarship on the subject in a crass polemical sense? Today's Republicans routinely refer to Democrats as socialists and Marxists, and the alt-right love a crackpot theory about "cultural Marxism" which they take as dominating American culture for decades. And, as I mentioned earlier, Nabors also quotes the hardcore neo-Confederate historical Thomas DiLorenzo seemingly dismissing historians who don't accept a view of slavery as essentially benign as "Marxist revisionists."

So I don't think we should discount the conservative polemical edge in Nabors' use of the "Marxist" label.

But I do know of one actual history of slavery by an avowed Marxist that highlights an important point that directly relates to the distinction on which Nabors insists between republicanism in the North and oligarchy in the South. I'm referring to The Negro People in American History (1954) by the longtime US Communist Party leader William Z. Foster. He died in Moscow in 1961 and received a state funeral in the Soviet Union. So it's safe to say he really was a Marxist in his own understanding and everyone else's.

He made this memorable observation about the prewar North-South polemics:

The furious debates of the 1850's over the question of slavery presented a rare spectacle of the ·two quarreling sectors of capitalism - the Southern planters, with their obsolete production system, and the Northern industrial capitalists, representing the interests of capitalism as a whole. They exposed and denounced each other's system of exploitation, and many true words were spoken in these mutual unveilings. Never, in any country, have the sinister workings of capitalism been so thoroughly aired from within. [my emphasis]

That memorably phrased comment raises an important point that bears directly on a problem that call into question the conclusions to which Nabors comes about the conflict between Northern republicanism and Southern oligarchy. I'll go into that in the next post. But for now, Nabors would no doubt be relieved of not being suspected of sharing a "Marxist" view of antebellum history.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2018, April 5: When the Republican Party believed in radical democracy

I've been referring in this year's posts to Forrest Nabors' From Oligarchy to Republicanism (2017), a blook which examines the background of Republican Party political thinking at the beginning of and during Reconstruction by looking at the antebellum history.

Founded in 1854 as an antislavery party dedicated to stopping the further extension of slavery, the presented an outlook on the chronic crises over slavery in the 1850s that Nabors describes this way:

They presented detailed analyses of Southern political society that complemented and cohered with each other. In their analyses, the oligarchic rulers of the South were the root cause of all the major political difficulties of their national era. The oligarchy was the offspring of domestic slavery, and for that reason they proscribed domestic slavery as a political evil as well as a moral evil.

Since I'm particularly fond of the history of the early American and antebellum periods, it's enjoyable to read his quotes from Republicans of the 1850s describing their approach in a formal way. Older language tends to have an aura of greater seriousness and dignity for contemporary readers. And before loudspeakers, radio, and TV, political speakers had a style of oratory that was intended to project the speaker's voice directly to the entire audience being addressed. So those speeches can come off now as eloquent, grandiose, or bombastic, depending on taste.

Of course, Congressional speeches were only one form of political speech. You can be sure that the language being used in Bleeding Kansas in the early years of the Republican Party's existence was often far from eloquent, dignified, or polite.

In describing the Republican political outlook of that time, Nabors assembles an impressive collection of their indictment of the slave system and how it encroached on democratic rights even in the free states but also deprived non-slaveholding whites of their democratic freedoms. There was the Compromise of 1820, aka, the Missouri Compromise, which admitted Missouri as a new slave state along with Maine as a new free state. The tough debate over that agreement illustrated that the even split of Senators between slave states and free states could be used to block legislation further restricting slavery.

But slave states were also advantaged by the infamous three-fifths clause of the 1789 Constitution, which allowed three-fifths of the slaves to be counted as population for the purposes of allocating the number of House Representatives for each state. But, of course, only free white men - and not even all of them - could vote in the elections. The partially-counted slaves didn't have even a partial vote. So the Constitution itself had built in a "slave bonus" in Congressional representation that free state voters rightly understood as being both unfair and undemocratic.

As time went on, more and more restrictions were placed on free citizens' rights, particularly but not exclusively in the slave states. There was the "gag rule" that began in the 1830s, under which antislavery petitions sent to Congress were permanently tabled (postponed) by the House of Representatives, abridging in practice the Constitutional right to petition the government over popular grievances. Antislavery literature started being seized by postmasters in the South.

The Virginia state legislature famously debated ending slavery in the states during 1831-32. But no further such open debate took place in the future Confederate states after that. And free whites speaking or writing against slavery were persecuted, beaten, and even murdered.

By 1954 when the Republican Party was founded, this process on encroaching on rights had grown drastically. That year also start of the mini-civil war in Kansas Territory, where slaveowners sought to intimidate, expel, or kill settler who opposed slavery. The much stringent Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 had replaced the previous one of 1793. People in free states greatly resented being coerced into supporting a slave system which Northern whites came to despite more and more over time. And then, of course, the Dred Scott decision of 1857 not only required free states to recognize the legal bondage of slave brought into a free states by the owners. It also declared that the Constitution provided no Constitutional protection to even free black people. It also very obviously laid a legal precedent for the Supreme Court to declare later that free states couldn't even ban slavery.

Nabors quotes some ringing endorsement of democratic liberty from the Republicans, denouncing the Southern oligarchy and pointing out how it abridged white Southerners' rights and how slavery damaged them economically. He quotes from Massachusetts Congressman Daniel Gooch in 1861:

Why this difference? The people of the North know and understand everything that pertains to the South. Your newspapers are found in all our villages, and are read by all classes of men. Southern men speak freely their opinions at the North, both in public and private. Freedom of speech and the press, liberty of thought and action, are everywhere protected. We ask no safeguard against error, but truth. Not so in the South. Your people do not understand the feeling, principles, and motives of the people of the North. No northern man, who honestly represents the sentiments of the North, is permitted to speak to your people. No northern newspaper, representing the political sentiments of the North, is permitted to enter or be read in your States. All that your people know of the principles and intentions of the Republican party they have learned from our political opponents.

Yes, the Republican Party in those days could defend the liberties of the common people against oligarchs, rail against slavery and its perpetrators, and condemn the exploitation of working people. They even could and did demand democratic land reform! That idea went down in history as "20 acres and a mule," though even at its most radical, Reconstruction land reform never was that egalitarian.

But Republican President Abraham Lincoln in first Message to Congress of 12/03/1861 declared, "Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration."

I'm going to have more to say about Nabors' book in coming posts. But this seems like a good place to leave it for know, wondering at what the Republican Party once was.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2018, April 4: Two camps of Reconstruction Historians

This 15-minute video of Kevin Levin at the Georgia Historical Society is a good introduction to the main issue of this post. He talks about how important it is not only to pay attention to primary source material but also knowing how to use it. He uses an example contemporary photos showing black men wearing Confederate uniforms being widely circulated via social media but misinterpreted as black Confederate soldiers, out of some combination of carelessness, lack of knowledge of the relevant context, and the desire to create neo-Confederate propaganda. (He uses the word "propaganda," but I know from his blog and online discussions that he generally tries to avoid "neo-Confederate," essentially because he thinks it's too vague a term to be adequately descriptive.)

He talks here about how he tries to get students to use primary sources online and to understand that "history is a constantly evolving discussion" rather than a fixed body of knowledge and conclusions.

Of course, pseudoscientists and pseudohistorians and con men (is there a gender-neutral for that now, like "con-sters"?) will make similar claims about how "scientists are still disputing the existence of X" simply to create doubt or flat-out dismissal of claims that are scientifically/scholarly sound. See: Climate change, denial of. That's not what Kevin does in his work. He's focusing attention on the fact that empirical evidence like the "Black Confederate" photos have to be understood in realistic context, and on how working out the meaning of facts and the broader interpretation of historical processes takes place through written and spoken dialogue in which people discuss how different perspectives and expertise shed a particular light on them.

The notion of "objectivity" is a good one if its understood in a reasonably limited sense. But what media critic Jay Rosen calls "the voice from nowhere" in news reporting is not what objectivity means. Objectivity involves an openness to consider facts that might challenge the prior assumption of the observer in some way. It doesn't mean that the claim of someone saying the mercury is the cure for all ills should be given the same weight as the entire medical profession saying it's not. In other words, journalists and scholars and even "amateur" researchers who expect to be taken seriously have to judge the importance of topics and evidence and remember that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

So, everyone has a perspective. Which is not the same as bias. Guarding against the latter is one reason peer-reviewed science publications require disclosure of financial ties of the author that might create an incentive to favor a particular view of available evidence. And perspective can include political or philosophical views, but perspective also relates to expertise. To return to Kevin's example, someone who knows about various kinds of related primary material has a perspective when they look at at Black Confederate photo that others may not have.

Forrest Nabors in From Oligarchy to Republicanism (2017) talks about perspectives when he reviews the treatment of slavery by what he conventionally describes as the Dunning School, revisionists, and postrevisionists. The Dunning School is a body of historical work associated with the approach of the historian William Dunning (1857–1922), who presented slavery in a relatively benign light and treated Reconstruction in ways very favorable to the segregationist approach with which neo-Confederate ideology is so closely associated. The revisionist school was a historical trend that maintained a kind of underground existence all along, particularly among African-American historians, but rose to predominance in the 1960s and 1970s. John Hope Franklin and Kenneth Stampp are two of the better-known revisionist scholars. Nabors uses Eric Foner as a representative of postrevisionism.

He summarizes the difference among the three schools this way. referring to Foner's classifications:

The Dunning School deplored the Reconstruction Congress for imposing black citizenship on beleaguered Southern whites. The revisionists of the second phase vindicated the Reconstruction Congress for attempting to affirm the citizenship of black Americans and lauded the efforts of the emancipated to live as free citizens. The postrevisionists of the third phase deplored the Reconstruction Congress for not doing enough to defend or advance black citizenship. ...

Another way to reframe the same body of literature, a way that more explicitly recognizes the organizing principles of the respective groupings, is to dispense with time altogether and to divide all of the scholars into one of the two camps into which they consciously settled: an equalitarian camp for black citizenship and a white-supremacist camp against black citizenship. The difference between the so-called revisionists and postrevisionists is really between equalitarians and uncompromising equalitarians, reflecting the difference between more and less demanding standards by which they judge prior conduct. [my emphasis]

"Equalitarian" is a less used term for the more familiar "egalitarian." But so far as I'm aware, "equalitarian" doesn't have any particularly distinct meaning or common usage.

If that sounds like Nabors is viewing all three as similar forms of inadequate perspective, his further argument reflects that, as well:

Scholars in both camps ["equalitarians" and white-supremacists] have always recognized that their work necessarily drew them into their contemporaneous battles over civil rights, because their work has had real political consequences in assisting respective movements for and against equal citizenship. The lines between scholarship and political activism have always been blurred, down to the present day. ...

Because scholarship has played a role in the battles for civil rights, it has been difficult to maintain philosophical distance. This has occurred despite the urging of Howard K. Beale to maintain that distance in his 1940 essay, “On Rewriting Reconstruction History,” which began, “For many years both Northerners and Southerners who wrote on Reconstruction were dominated by sectional feelings still embittered by the Civil War.” As a result, Beale noted, our “understanding of the bewildering complexity of conflicting interests and social phenomena of the day has been lost in the midst of historians’ proud or unconscious partisanship.” [my emphasis]

Nabors offers his republicanism/oligarchy frame as a more scholarly and less politically influenced than, well, basically all previous civil war scholarship. It's not unusual for scholars to make overly sharp claims for their own innovative approach.

But he also uses a kind of both-sides-do-it comparison to illustrate the differences between the two camps he designates:

Adherents on both sides adopted clear and sometimes strident moral positions on the question, and both often condemned Reconstruction Republicans, either for supporting black citizenship or for not supporting black citizenship. A Dunningite lamented that “savage political leaders” like Senator Charles Sumner (“whose chief regret had been that his skin was not black”) gave the ballot to “three millions of former slaves, some of whom could still remember the taste of human flesh and the bulk of them hardly three generations removed from cannibalism.” Scholars on the other side of the issue blamed Republicans for allowing “counter-revolution in the South after Reconstruction,” which “was as dramatic as it was ugly,” ending in “constitutional disfranchisement, state-sponsored segregation, widespread spectacle lynching and black rural poverty.” And the scholars attacked each other’s positions on the central question that divided them. A contemporary Dunningite praised the “excellent scholarship” of Claude Bowers, averred that “Dunning and his disciples provided accurate descriptions of ex-slaves,” and attacked the “Marxist revisionists” for being outraged by those descriptions. A critic of the Dunning School imputes to them the view that “blacks were inferior beings ... little better than beasts.”

For more than one hundred years, Reconstruction scholarship has been shaped by moral warfare of this kind. [my emphasis]

So, we have Both Sides. One Side refers to black citizens as “three millions of former slaves, some of whom could still remember the taste of human flesh and the bulk of them hardly three generations removed from cannibalism.” To say that it's a sleazy, false, and racist claim would be to confer it more legitimacy than it deserves. (One of the books by prominent antebellum slavery defender George Fitzhugh was entitled Cannibals All! or, Slaves Without Masters (1857). It also worth noting that the historian he cites complaining about "Marxist revisionists" is Thomas DiLorenzo, one of the more notorious neo-Confederate historians, of the extreme conservative Ludwig von Mises Institute. Links to various of his articles can be found at the neo-Confederate, paleo-conservative LewRockwell.com, including "The Real Lincoln" and NY Leninist Times." Sourcewatch features a profile of him. In the cited article from a Mises Instiute publication, DiLorenzo refers to the Civil War as the "War for Southern Independence," a polemical phrase of neo-Confederates. (The Consolidation of State Power via Reconstruction, 1865–1890” Journal of Libertarian Studies 16:2; 2002)

Then there's the Other Side, the "equalitarians." Nabors quotes one of them as describing the anti-Reconstruction "Redemption" movement as bringing "constitutional disfranchisement, state-sponsored segregation, widespread spectacle lynching and black rural poverty.” All of which is empirically accurate and extremely well documented. And all accomplishments of which the Redeemers were extremely proud. And on purely empirical grounds, the Dunning School's description of the realities of American slavery has been challenged in important ways, notably by Kenneth Stampp's The Peculaiar Institution (1956), to mention just one important example.

So, One Side repeats sleazebag white racist propaganda. The Other Side recounts the story of a verifiable past.

Both Sides Do It!

This suggests that Nabors' republicanism/oligarchy theme deserves close scrutiny for possible anachronistic ideological implications, i.e., current political perspectives read back into the antebellum/Civil War/Reconstruction period.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2018, April 3: Theory, slaveholder power, and ideology

An essay by James Oakes which I discussed on the Confederate "Heritage" series of post exactly seven years ago (Confederate "Heritage" Month 2010, April 3: Slavery, race and classical economics 04/03/2018) is helpful in providing a broader historical and ideological view that helps to understand the theoretical framework that Forrest Nabors employs in From Oligarchy to Republicanism (2017).

Nabors frames his account of Republican policy toward slavery and the South before and after the Civil War in terms of the North being a "republic" as conceived by the Constitution, while the South was developing into an "oligarchy." He describes this process as a "revolutionary" transformation by the South directed against Northern Constitutional republicanism.

Nabors relies heavily on political theory in his narrative. Oakes' "The Peculiar Fate of the Bourgeois Critique of Slavery" (in Slavery and the American South, Winthrop Jordan, ed.; 2003) focuses instead on how slavery was regarded from the viewpoint of classical economics in the tradition of Adam Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment. Classical economics, accepted in some form by most early American leaders, held that slave labor was inherently less efficient than free labor, largely on the grounds that slaves were cut off from aspiring to an increase in their personal wealth and property. At the time of the American Revolution, that economic assumption was used to argue that slavery would fade out due to its inherent economic inefficiency compared to non-slave enterprise.

But as time went on, slaveowners developed a different argument. They stuck to the basic assumption on the superiority of free labor. But they introduced a biological-racist argument of a kind still familiar to us today in new iterations, in which they argued that black people were inherently and irreparably inferior to whites and slavery was not only required to get maximum economic performance from them and was also the best system for the good of the black race themselves.

I discuss this line of thought in more detail in the post on Oakes linked above. I'll also mention here that William Freehling examines the changing justifications for the continuation of slavery and the development of racial ideology in early America and the antebellum period at length in his two-volume Road to Disunion history.

One technological development that had a major impact of the development and the ideology of slavery was the invention of the cotton gin in 1793. James Brewer Stewart explains ("Antislavery and Abolitionism in the United States, 1776–1870" in Cambridge World History of Slavery, Vol. 4; 2017), "Eli Whitney’s new cotton gin created vast opportunities to adapt enslaved labor to an extraordinarily profitable commodity, short-staple cotton, and the rich soils of these newly forming states promised its limitless cultivation. By 1840, slavery constituted the nation’s second largest capital asset, exceeded only by investment in real estate itself." To be clear, the "capital asset" of slavery was the live bodies of human beings owned as property by others.

Eli Whitney (1765–1825)

What attracted my interest to Nabors' book was his focus on the ways in which American whites came increasingly to see slavery as a danger to their own freedom and political institutions.

In neo-Confederate pseudohistory, when its advocates talk about the Civil War itself, they try to discredit the idea that slavery played any role in it. So we hear claims from them like: "Northern whites were racist against blacks, too." "Most Confederate soldiers didn't own slaves so why would they fight for slavery?" "Freeing the slaves wasn't one of the Union war aims when the war started."

Understanding why those arguments are so empty requires knowing something about the prewar politics of slavery. Particularly when we're looking for the causes of a war, the events leading up to it are always necessary to understand. Things that happen during the war can be understood in connection to prewar events. But events during the war can hardly be taken as having started the war.

As mentioned in an earlier post, Nabors defines the purpose of his book as understanding specifically the ways in which the Republican Party talked about the conflict between the slave states and the free states. The Republican Party was founded in 1854 as a party committed to preventing the spread of slavery beyond existing slave states.

Nabors makes it clear even in the Introduction that even though "the antebellum South" was "where the cause of the national
crisis is found, the "supreme cause of this recurring conflict was the rise of the oligarchy in the South, the independent variable that is underrated or missed by many studies of the period."

On the one hand, this formulation seems to recognize that class structure and dynamics were major factors and that in particular it was the ruling group in the South that generated the crisis from which the Civil War resulted.

On the other hand, this framing also demotes slavery as a cause of the war. And this immediately is a warning sign to people familiar with the historical disputes, including the neo-Confederate claims. So we'll look at it more closely in further posts.

Here I'll just mention a short version of the question this raises. The "oligarchy in the South" ruled an economy based on slavery. It wasn't an "independent variable" from slavery. It was an economy based on slavery. So why use the more limited version that Nabors provides, in which the main owners of capital and the masters (in more than one sense!) of the economy and government there are rhetorically separated from the core element of its economic system and the most controversial one?

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2018, April 2: "Regime change" in the South

I'm going to engage in some detail with Forrest's Nabor's arguments in his book, From Oligarchy to Republicanism (2017) .

But I do want to say something about his enthusiasm for "regime change," a term he repeatedly uses in an approving sense for Reconstruction. He even implicitly criticizes Andrew Jackson in the Nullification Controversy for not sending in federal troops to South Carolina instead of resolving the dispute nonviolently while clearly upholding the Constitution and federal supremacy.

Those of us who have been engaging the pseudohistorical arguments of the Lost Cause for a while have learned to be alert for formulations that may be read as sidelining slavery as the central cause of the Civil War. As anyone who has been doing so is aware, all those arguments wind up back with slavery at the center when you pull on the string a bit.

Nabor argues, "The ultimate goal of the Republican Party, the war, and Reconstruction was the same, to preserve and advance republicanism as the American founders understood it and wished it to be advanced, against its natural, existential enemy, oligarchy." He's making an argument that the North was a republic, while the future Confederate states developed into the political form of oligarchy. This argument doesn't have to lead to ignoring slavery's overriding importance. It can even clarify important aspects of the process that lead to civil war.

It even sounds like an approach that Bernie Sanders and his fans might favor. But sometimes progressive-sounding formulations are deceptive. And given the disasters of American foreign policy adventures aimed at regime change in recent years (and no so recent ones) his stress on "regime change" as the Northern project for the South should raise an eyebrow.

Earlier this year, Nabor published a prowar piece at The Federalist website, Why The Time Is Ripe For A Free Iran 01/11/2018. He writes:

If different types of political regimes are plants that grow, the soil is the people, and different types of soil determine what kind of political regime is possible in a given nation. The rise, prosperity, or fall of a political regime depends upon the customs and temper of a people that have developed since time immemorial and are not easily changed.

This doesn't exactly sound like the kind of classical liberal republicanism that he enthusiastically promotes in his book. But it does have relevance to his version of the story of Reconstruction that he tells.

In retrospect, he says such was not the case in Iraq in 2003, i.e., the "customs and people" being ready, so it was a mistake to expect that. Although it's not clear in this article that he's criticizing the invasion rather than the neocon's starry-eyed expectations for exporting democracy in a kind of liberal-Trosksyist war of liberation.

But in the case of Iran 2018, Nabors is promoting the same kind of cheery expectations that pre-Iraq War neocons were pushing back then. And apparently with similar disdain for any realistic evaluation of the actual prospects:

In Iran the case is different. Iranians are a great people well prepared for successful self-government and boast one of the oldest and most refined cultures in human history. Unlike Sunni Islam, their version of Islam always recognized the separation of mosque and state, a tradition that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini struggled to reconcile with his goal of preserving Islamic purity in modernity. He finally abandoned the attempt, but that tradition is still remembered by Shiites and has shaped the political principles that they hold today.

As American statesman James Madison observed, respect for religious liberty is the key to all liberties, and the Iranian people seem to be prepared to adopt this principle. Among Islamic peoples the Iranians are generally the least fundamentalist, the most highly educated, and more disposed to treat women equally. Iranian women are professors, lawyers, doctors, engineers, and in business.

The practice of some crucial democratic norms in Iran is 100 years old. Although Reza Shah forced the Iranian people to adopt western customs in the twentieth century, those customs have held. Although the ayatollahs established an Islamic Republic in 1979, the republican part was genuine. The all-powerful mullahs do superintend the government but to a considerable degree, their constitution has generally permitted the Iranian people to participate in political institutions.

Iraq was known in 2003 as having the most equal status for women among Arab countries and the professions were open to women there, too. This sounds for all the world like the pre-Iraq War propaganda that the Iraqi people would welcome us as liberators and be dancing in the streets, or whatever.

Let's just say it's doubtful that Iranians will welcome a war on their country by the US and whatever allies are foolish enough to jump on that bandwagon, no matter who much empty propaganda about bringing the blessings of liberty and democracy and equal rights for women to the Iranian people, who of course we love, and we will only be bombing and killings them because we love them them and care about their freedom so very much. Especially the Trump Administration. Especially if we're doing so in concert with Israel and Saudi Arabia, the latter of which is one of those backward Sunni nations Nabors gripes about.

Remember how prior to 2001, "Shiite" was a synonym for religious fanaticism in the American political vocabulary? Times change, I guess.

Nabors also expects great benefits. Do I need to recall the great benefits we were sure to get from a liberated Iraq? He writes, "That revolution in Iranian government could change the world vastly for the better. Around the globe, the positive influence of a friendly, self-governing Iran would be substituted for the negative influence of hostile mullahs. The change is badly needed." (my emphasis)

And he endorses the Trotskyist-neoconservative insistance on regime change wars. For the good of the conquered liberated, of course:

Most important of all, the Iranian people would finally regain possession of their liberty that we in the West believe all people have a right to enjoy. Western support, indifference, or opposition to this aim for which they are now bravely staking their lives is a grave moral question as well as one that involves our self-interest. [my emphasis]

Nabors in that article seems to be ignoring his own warning in the book:

Regime change is unpredictable and often produces deformed progeny rather than the perfect offspring prayed for. ... .. even the destruction of the worst regime and the attempt to substitute a better regime can release unanticipated new evils into society that had been held in abeyance by the old regime.

And he immediately links that comparison to the disastrous results of the Iraq War. He draws this parallel to Reconstruction, "regime change in the South after the Civil War precipitated appalling violence upon black Americans." (my emphasis) One who has paid attention to the various forms in which neo-Confederate assumptions pop up in surprising place, it's significant that in that formulation, Nabors puts the blame for the terrorist violence practiced again African-Americans in the South during Reconstruction on the regime change imposed by the victorious federal government. Nabors seeming preference for the "republican" form over government over the oligarchical one in the book can apparently functions as a two-edged blade.

He continues, "The prior oligarchic regime [in the South before the Civil War] created the hatreds and rivalries, but while the oligarchy ruled, it restrained mass violence. When the armies of the North brought republican government to the South, they not only liberated the people, but also unchained those latent hatreds." It's not at all difficult to read that statement as saying the slaveowners kept white racist violence under control, but the damnyankees came and messed everything up and they're to blame for all the beatings, lynchings, and murders of black people that occurred after the war. He even cites neoconservative philosophical guru Leo Strauss to support part of that position.

In later posts, I'll look more at how he develops that line of argument.

Referring to Nabors' contemporary political advocacy, or war advocacy in this case, isn't meant as an ad hominem dismissal of his historical argument.

But neo-Confederate pseudohistory is also highly ideological, and for many it forms part of a worldview that is very much focused on current goals. So it's worth keeping in mind.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2018, April 1: The continuing power of neo-Confederate symbolism

I started doing an anti-neo-Confederate daily series of posts during April, back in 2004, the first April after I started blogging. This year makes the 15th year I've been doing it. Neo-Confederate groups promote April as Confederate Heritage Month and it has often been officially proclaimed in some states as Confederate Heritage Month. In Texas, for instance, the state legislature in 1999 established it as a recurring designation. (Bryan Register, Texas perpetuates myths with Confederate Heritage Month Austin-American Statesman 03/29-30/2018)

The neo-Confederate ideology and its public symbols, like the Confederate battle flag and statues honoring Confederate leaders who betrayed the United States by engaging in an armed revolt to defend and extend human slavery, have been actively contested in many places over the last year. Most notably and tragically in Charlottesville in August 2017, where neo-Nazis and white supremacists marched in support of a statue of Robert E. Lee chanting, among other things, "Blood and Soil" (one of the most famous German Nazi slogans, "Blut und Boden) and "Jews Will Not Replace Us." That incident ended, of course, with the murder of Heather Heyer and the injury of 19 other counter-protesters by one of the pro-Confederate protesters showing his Honor and Courage by ramming his car into a crowd. (Joe Heim, Recounting a day of rage, hate, violence and death Washington Post 08/14/2017)

This post from the SPLC explains more about the context of the kind of people who were celebrating the memory of Robert E. Lee there: Alleged Charlottesville Driver Who Killed One Rallied With Alt-Right Vanguard America Group 08/12/2018.

President Trump infamously defended the neo-Confederates in Charlottesville (Rosie Gray, Trump Defends White-Nationalist Protesters: 'Some Very Fine People on Both Sides' The Atlantic 08/15/2018):

Speaking in the lobby of Trump Tower at what had been billed as a statement on infrastructure, a combative Trump defended his slowness to condemn white nationalists and neo-Nazis after the melee in central Virginia, which ended in the death of one woman and injuries to dozens of others, and compared the tearing down of Confederate monuments to the hypothetical removal of monuments to the Founding Fathers. He also said that counter-protesters deserve an equal amount of blame for the violence.

“What about the alt-left that came charging at, as you say, at the alt-right?” Trump said. “Do they have any semblance of guilt?”

“I’ve condemned neo-Nazis. I’ve condemned many different groups. But not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me,” he said.

“You had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists,” Trump said. “The press has treated them absolutely unfairly.”

“You also had some very fine people on both sides,” he said.

Despite the weasel-words ("I’ve condemned neo-Nazis"), Trump was clearly defending the neo-Confederates and their ideology, and refraining from a straightforward condemnation of their violence and anti-Semitism or the Nazi slogans they were chanting.

This story shows in a vivid way the role that symbolism and the narratives attached to them can play in current politics. I've wondered to what extent Trump's identifying himself with Nazis, or at least refused to unequivocally condemn them and the murder associated with their demonstration, has contributed to his unpopularity among everyone but his hardcore 35%. Because Americans have seen an endless series of movies, TV programs, documentaries, articles, and pictures in which the German Nazis are depicted as Evil Incarnate. If any symbolism is identified in America as a symbol of Evil, it would be the swastika and other images particularly associated with the Nazis.

There's a bit of a perverse kind of internationalism in neo-Nazis choosing a Confederate symbol as a rallying point and even a motive for murder. In Germany and Austria and some other European countries, overt Nazi symbolism is illegal to display publicly. So at least by the early 1990s and probably earlier, the Confederate battle flag was used by rightwing extremists as substitutes for the swastika. I remember in the 1990s visiting in the German tourist area of the Spanish island of Mallorca and seeing a door of what appeared to be a shop that had a Confederate battle flag draped over it. I knew immediately it was a symbol of far-right politics.

Facts matter. And the neo-Confederate ideology is a significant kind of pseudohistory in the United States. It originated with post-Civil War efforts by Southern planters and white leaders to minimize the seriousness of the Confederate rebellion and specifically to dissociate it from the cause of slavery. Northern whites disliked slavery prior to the war, and many hated it. Some supported it. But white supremacy was pervasive in the North as well as the South, though clearly in a more intense, toxic, and treasonous form in the Confederate states. Even intense opposition to slavery could and did co-exist with white racism against blacks.

By the end of the Civil War, not only had the consequences of slavery proved to be excessively deadly and destructive to white people. But many soldiers from the North had seen slavery and slave plantations and fugitive slaves live and in person. So the prewar justifications of slavery as benevolent and necessary had been effectively completely discredited in the North. Anti-Reconstruction white Southerners recognized that they needed to distance themselves from the cause of slavery in order to have any effective credibility even among Northern conservatives.

The revisionist narrative of the history of slavery began immediately after the war and soon acquired the lable "Lost Cause." Historian Caroline Janney writes (The Lost Cause Encyclopedia Virginia 1999):

The term "Lost Cause" is not a product of today's historians; rather, it appears to have been coined by Edward A. Pollard, an influential wartime editor of the Richmond Examiner. In 1866 Pollard published The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates, a justification of the Confederate war effort, prompting the popular use of the term.

Today, "Lost Cause" and "neo-Confederate" can be used interchangeably to describe the same apologetic view of the Civil War and the white supremacist ideology and narrative that was always an integral part of it.

Janney summarizes the Lost Cause/neo-Confederate view of Civil War history as based on six claims:

1. Secession, not slavery, caused the Civil War.
2. African Americans were "faithful slaves," loyal to their masters and the Confederate cause and unprepared for the responsibilities of freedom.
3. The Confederacy was defeated militarily only because of the Union's overwhelming advantages in men and resources.
4. Confederate soldiers were heroic and saintly.
5. The most heroic and saintly of all Confederates, perhaps of all Americans, was Robert E. Lee.
6. Southern women were loyal to the Confederate cause and sanctified by the sacrifice of their loved ones.

Neo-Confederacy incorporates the Lost Cause view of history but is a broader ideology. The SPLC describes the Lost Cause narrative this way (Neo-Confederate n/d, accessed 03/31/2018):

The term “Lost Cause of the Confederacy” refers to a collection of political and historical myths that form the bedrock of many notable neo-Confederate slogans. “Heritage not hate” and “states’ rights” have shared roots in the post-Reconstruction effort to revise the indisputable fact of why the South seceded from the union in the 1860s: slavery.

They define neo-Confederacy this way:

“Neo-Confederacy” refers to a reactionary, revisionist predilection for symbols of the Confederate States of America (CSA), typically paired with a strong belief in the validity of the failed doctrines of nullification and secession — in the specific context of the antebellum South — which rose to prominence in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Neo-Confederacy also incorporates advocacy of traditional gender roles, is hostile toward democracy, strongly opposes homosexuality and exhibits an understanding of race that favors segregation and suggests white supremacy.

An overall conservative ideology, neo-Confederacy has made inroads into the Republican Party from the political right and overlaps with the views of white nationalists and other more radical extremist groups.

In this regard, neo-Confederacy is best viewed as a spectrum, an umbrella term with roots dating back as early as the 1890s. It applies to groups including the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) of the 1920s and those resisting racial integration in the 1950s and 1960s. In its most recent iteration, neo-Confederacy is used by both proponents and critics to describe a belief system that has emerged since the early-1980s in publications like Southern Partisan, Chronicles and Southern Mercury, and in organizations including the League of the South (LOS), the Council of Conservative Citizens and the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

The SPLC article goes on to note that the Lost Cause/neo-Confederate view of history is still influential well beyond the circle of those who would identify with it so closely as groups like the CCC or the SCV. When thinking about groups involved in promoting that worldview, it's important to remember that sectarianism is rampant on the far right and is fought out over slogans and issues that may seem indistinguishable to those not following them closely.

I've generally tried to focus on debunking the pseudohistory aspect of the neo-Confederate narrative in these posts. One recent book I'll be discussing this year is From Oligarchy to Republicanism (2017) by Forrest Nabors, which looks at the ways in which the slavery system, known to opponents at the time as the Slave Power, was perceived by Americans as being in opposition to the basic republican form of government established by the American Revolution and the Constitution. The only Americans who enjoyed full citizenship included voting rights in 1860 were, of course, essentially white men, though free blacks, women, and even slaves were making their demands for citizenship and equality in very significant ways.

Nabors in his Introduction defines the project of his book:

The purpose of this book is to recover how the Republicans in the Reconstruction Congress understood the prior national struggle that decisively shaped their understanding of their task. The premise of this book is that long ago, we, the American people, ceased to be fully aware of what the Republicans believed the cause of their party was and what they resisted when dark clouds gathered above the nation and then when the storm broke. We remember slavery, the principal theme of those days, but we no longer remember how they saw the political conflict at its deepest level and in its most general sense that shook the nation for decades. [my emphasis]

Slavery was at the center of the controversies that led to the Civil War. But in early America and antebellum times, that conflict manifested itself in particular ways and the understanding of it by slaveowners and their opponents evolved from existing understandings of the country and the American political community. Understanding that share a lot with the understandings of 1865 and even 2018. But our time is also separated from there's by radical transformations.