Confederate "Heritage" Month 2011, April 22: Andrew Nelson Lytle on backwoods history

Southern Agrarian Andrew Nelson Lytle's "The Backwoods Progression," his history of the development of rural life in American history, appeared in the 1:4 (1933) number of The American Review. Its main value for me is the chance it gives me to defend the two patron saints of the Democratic Party.

Robert Barnwell Rhett (1800–1876): Not an Old Hickory sort of guy

As history, it's not very impressive. But it does illustrate something about Lytle's version of the Southern Agrarian ideology. His criticism of Thomas Jefferson illustrates how much Lytle's thinking falls within the tradition of late 18th century, anti-democracy thought:

The weak point in Jefferson's defense [of property rights] was his own belief in a distorted conception of property, albeit a specific kind, landed property and the kind of life it supported. This meant that his political activity concerned itself fundamentally with the same thing the Federalists espoused: the principle that the chief duty of the State is the protection of the property of individuals and aggregates of individuals. This is certainly one duty of government, but only as a means of guaranteeing the security and self-perpetuation of the family. Prohibiting kings, then allowing private citizens to own the State is certainly hopping from a very slow pan to a very hot fire. Instead of laying the broad foundations a State needs to rest upon - and these foundations are best laid upon the dogma of one religion - he raised the question as to which will, the middle-class or the agrarian, would own the continent.

The aesthetic joys of the rural life clearly weren't the only concerns of the Southern Agrarians.

I am impressed with Lytle's comments on the historical significance of Andrew Jackson. Although I approve what he finds reprehesible. Speaking of the Nullification Controversy with South Carolina, Lytle writes:

South Carolina, under the prompting of such men as Rhett and Hammond, made such active opposition that the great leader of the state, Calhoun, abandoned his nationalistic stand and proposed his Nullification theory of redress. Andrew Jackson's romantic idea of the Union and his dislike of Calhoun joined together in his stubborn mind to play him into the hands of the enemy. Although he had destroyed the National Bank, he threated to send troops into Carolina to make tariff collections. For a moment war seemed inevitable; but Henry Clay came forward with a compromise, Calhoun accepted it. The Congress voted favourably on Jackson's force bill, and voted to reduce the tariff. Two great blows to State rights were struck at once. The South got temporary relief, and for this relief agreed to a sacrifice of principle. There can be no compromise between two antithetical ways of life. What appears a compromise is a postponement of the issue. The South, by accepting this postponement, doomed itself to ruin. The high prejudices of his heart and a limited political vision led Jacxkson to squander the great strategic moment by which his backwoods could have established its rule. Life a good backwoodsman, he took "the responsibility" and Calhoun refused it; but the South, not Calhoun or Jackson, suffered the consequences.

Jackson's "romantic idea of the Union" was his notion of the United States as a united country based on democracy. He articulated the idea of democratic national patriotism to which the North held in the Civil War and which still defines the formal notion of American patriotism today.

As Lytle says, Jackson backed "the enemy". Or rather what was considered "the enemy" in the eyes of the enemies of democracy, the enemies of America, the enemies of the Constitution. This is what makes the image of Andrew Jackson, despite his very real faults, especially on slavery and Indian relocation, such an important symbol of American democracy. A wealthy man, he sided with the small farmers and the urban workers against the concentrated economic power facilitated by the Bank of the United States. A slaveowner and a supporter of slavery, when forced to choose between Calhoun's anti-patriotic defense of slavery in the Nullification Controversy, on the one hand, and democracy and American patriotism on the other, Jackson made the right choice. In an important sense, Lytle is right in saying that the slave South "doomed itself to ruin" in the Nullification Controversy. And to the extent that is true, to that same extent Andrew Jackson was the executioner.

Lytle, of course, sides with Calhoun. His shares the anti-democratic tradition of Calhounian thought his fellow Southern Agrarian Frank Owsley expressed in the previous issue of The Southern Review.

Lytle explains who the Confederates were supposedly forced into their treason and their war to destroy the American government by those evil Yankees and especially by that Southerner Old Hickory:

There was after this [Jackson's defeat of the secessionists in the Nullification Controversy] only one avenue left open to the South - secession. Calhoun still hoped to concetrate Southern leadership and make the fight within the Union. But his plans of effecting his ends by controlling the Democratic Party failed. With desperation he took up a last position, secession through the common action of all the Southern States. But Clay's American plan - an extension of capitalism - and his compromises, the god of all opportunists, had done their work. In this crisis Calhoun's chief lieutenant, Robert Barnwell Rhett, proposed a policy of coercion. He contended that if one State acted separately, the other State, all believing in their own sovereignty, would follow the lead. He supported his contention by reminding his political peers that the revolt against England did not take place until the tea had been thrown into Boston Harbour.

At least one Southern Agrarian in 1933 was looking at the Tea Party as a useful symbol to defend the white South!

When common action did take place, it came about by South Carolina's single-handed withdrawal; but it came ten years too late and brought Appomattox, not independence.

And he notes in the Calhounian demogogic mode, "The fall of the Confederacy removed the last great check to the imperialism of Big Business."

John Calhoun and Robert Barnwell Rhett, fighters for the workers' revolution! This is the kind of idiocy to which the neo-Confederate/Lost Cause line of thinking inevitably leads.

Tags: andrew jackson, confederate heritage month 2011, frank owsley, frank owsley, john calhoun, slavery, southern agrarians, us south, white racism

April 21: Frank Owsley on the "Scottsboro boys" case (3)

This is the third of three posts on Southern Agrarian Frank Owsley's essay, "Scottsboro, the Third Crusade: The Sequel to Abolition and Reconstruction" American Review 1:3 June 1933. In the previous two posts, I talked about the contemporary concerns of the piece with defending Southern segregation from Yankees who wished to make "outside interference with the relationship of the whites and blacks in the South." In the first two posts, I discussed the 1933 setting of his essay and the pre-Civil War anti-slavery movement, which Owsley counts as the third and first crusades, respectively, of the North against the white South. In this post, I focus on Owsley's second crusade, postwar democratic Reconstruction.

I'm concerned with the way he uses neo-Confederate/Lost Cause history to provide an ideological frame for his contemporary (1933) application of segregationist ideology.

In Owsley's pseudohistory, the Radical Republicans after the Civil War "preached to the naive and childish blacks" of the South, "incendiary doctrines calculated rouse the wildest passion so revenge against their former masters." They promised the freed slaves "that the property of the white would all be confiscated and given to the Negro." Congressman Thaddeus Stevens and other Radicals, Owsley says, "promised to give the Negro social and political justice - at the cost of Southern white extermination, if need be."

These claims are examples of what is known in technical terms as bald-faced lies. More colorful and informal terms also come to mind.

But I wonder if Wendell Berry would find it a case of "racist by association" if we associate Owsley with those of his own words in this essay.

The South during this period suffered from "Negro rule," which is apparently Owsley's synonym for democratic governance in which African-Americans were officially regarded as equal citizens to whites. The suffering of the persecuted whites was world-historical, in Owsley's Lost Cause version: "The South thus reconstructed probably had no counterpart in the history of the world." There's actually a touch of truth in that. The formal extension of the vote to white males and the moves toward democratic land reform were far more advanced democracy than that seen in most of Europe or other parts of the world at the time. But that's not what Owsley means.

Owsley's pseudohistory here serves to justify his warning discussed in the first of these three posts that if the Yankees didn't stop pointing to injustices of Southern segregation - in Owsley's view that was being done by a conspiratorial alliance of Herber Hoover Republicans and the Communist Party! - then the Ku Klux Klan would start murdering Southerns blacks and it would all be the Yankees fault. Here's how he projects that justification for white racist violence back into Reconstruction:

The white man, especially the small farmer and the poorer classes, returned the hatred of the Negro with interest. The slave-holder of former days was more tolerant of the Negro's irresponsible acts, for he regarded the Negro as a juvenile race badly advised; but being human, he came to distrust and n many cases to hate the Negro. Despite the military support given the Negro governments, retaliation was frequent and violent. ...

The Negro should have learned then that in the end the relationship good or bad between himself and the white race of the South must be settled between them and that no outside power could dictate permanently the terms of this relationship. He was quickly disfranchised by indirection - and constitutionally, for the Supreme Court has not been able to void the legislation by which it was done - driven from politics, brought under rigid social discipline, in short completely subordinated socially, economically, and politically. The white race disciplined him severely for his conduct during reconstruction.[my emphasis in bold; italics in original]

No, there is no language from Owsley in this essay to indicate that there was anything regrettable about this, except the sneering reminder that "the Negro" had better learn his lesson or the "white race" will again discipline "him severely." He continues directly:

At length, however, with outside interference largely removed, old friendships were renewed between the races; new ones were formed until something of the old affection which had existed between the black man and white man returned. His condition gradually improved; though he has never yet been given back the ballot nor allowed to sit on juries. The experience of reconstruction was too bitter to be soon forgotten. It has formed and will continue for many years to form the background of Southern social and political attitudes. In considering any political action either state or national, the Southern white first considers how that action will ultimately affect the relationship between the races. It has crippled and at times destroyed the political value of the South in the national councils; it has created and will indefinitely perpetuate the solid South, solid against the Republican Party. [my emphasis]

If we understand that by the "experience of reconstruction" Owsley means the thoroughly dishonest Lost Cause pseudohistory of Reconstruction, that last quote is accurate. Lost Cause ideology about the Civil War and in particular about Reconstruction was the framework for segregationist and white-supremacist politics in 1933.

And I also wonder if Wendell Berry would find it a case of "racist by association" if we associate Owsley with his own words in those quotations.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2011, frank owsley, frank owsley, john calhoun, reconstruction, southern agrarians, us south, white racism

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2001, April 20: Frank Owsley on the "Scottsboro boys" case (2)

This is the second of three posts on Southern Agrarian Frank Owsley's essay, "Scottsboro, the Third Crusade: The Sequel to Abolition and Reconstruction" American Review 1:3 June 1933. In the first post, I talked about the contemporary concerns of the piece with defending Southern segregation from Yankees who wished to make "outside interference with the relationship of the whites and blacks in the South." In this post, I'm concerned with the way he uses neo-Confederate/Lost Cause history to provide an ideological frame for his contemporary (1933) application of segregationist ideology.

John C. Calhoun

The first crusade in Owsley's historical trilogy of grievances inflicted on the white South by the damnyankees was abolition. Owsley's Lost Cause perspective dictated that he had to deny that slavery was in any way really the cause of the Civil War. As usual, such claims don't bear close scrutiny. Owsley's twist is that there was a basic competition between the industrialists of the North and the beautiful agrarian society of the South. The fact that one was based on free labor and the other on chattel slavery is somehow supposed to be incidental in this particular Lost Cause twist. But in Owsley's construction, the anti-slavery movement in the North was a sinister plan by the evil Yankee industrialists against the white South:

In order to subordinate the South it would be necessary to destroy [the] balance [of power between the North and South]. But the industrialists, carefully coached by their lawyers and statesmen and "intellectual" aides, realized the bad strategy of waging a frank struggle for sectional power; they must pitch the struggle upon a moral plane, else many of the intelligentzia [sic] and the good people generally might become squeamish and refuse to fight. Shibboleths and moral catchwords must be furnished. It was therefore found convenient to attack slavery as an evil and the slaveholder as a criminal, in fact to impugn the morality of the South, in order to create opinion in the East and North in favour of the industrialists' plans of Southern restriction.

The actual history of the abolition movement - including the sometimes violent rejection of it in the North - the need for fugitive slave laws to return human property that had absconded from the humane and civilizing conditions of slavery, the slave revolts and the paranoid panics over possible slave revolts that increasingly characterized conditions in the slave states: all of that has to be ignored or minimized for the Lost Cause pseudohistory to maintain a thin film of credibility even to those predisposed to accept it. For the Lost Cause, abolition was just a nasty Yankee plot against the put-upon whites of the South.

Owsley, typical of Lost Cause partisans, echoed the slaveowners' pre-Civil War accusations against the damnyankees. Given the ideology of racial superiority that became stronger and stronger over time in the slave South, the reality of slaveowners fathering their own children with their slaves was a particular embarrassment to the owners of human property. Owsley takes up their cause retrospectively by pointing to Yankee hypocrisy:

... when ... the moralist crusaders of the Northeast were painting a picture of universal prostitution and miscegenation in the South, information was available to those same moralists which showed sexual degradation in the factories of the East to have reached depths hitherto unknown in the experience of a modern civilized nation.

Illegitimacy was more common in the industrialized East than in any country in the world. Yet these crusaders offered little criticism of a society which forced young girls into semi-prostitution.

He goes on to gripe about the nastiness of working conditions in Northern factories. All of this was standard slaveowner polemics prior to the Civil War.

Since, as we saw in the last post, Owsley was especially worried about alleged Communist influence over civil rights agitation in 1933, it's appropriate here to quote an observation from Communist Party leader William Foster from his 1954 book The Negro People in American History (1954):

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.

Which is true enough, as far as it goes, although I can't vouch for the international comparison. John Calhoun actually incorporated such a conception of exploiting class differences into his political strategy and theory, as Richard Current explains in John C. Calhoun (1963). At the beginning of the Martin Van Buren Administration in 1837, Calhoun was becoming increasing unhappy with the Democratic Party:

There was much that he disliked about the party, including its name. He was himself no democrat, and he had little in common with the city workingmen to whom, among others, the party catered. That is, he had little in common with them except for the votes which they could cast and which he, in some future presidential election, might receive. In practice he was fond of "the people," including the workers. In principle he feared the "needy and corrupt" many, whom he expected to rise sooner or later in revolt against their betters, the rich and wellborn few. At heart he preferred the Whigs to the Democrats, the party of the rich to the party of the poor.

That appeal to urban labor was key to what "Jacksonian democracy" meant. Calhoun, to put it mildly, was no Jacksonian.

What Calhoun hoped for was an enduring alliance which would include working class Northern voters and Southern slaveholders. And in the service of that goal, Calhoun elaborated a nominally pro-labor viewpoint which, not coincidentally, also served as an indictment of the Northern system of free labor that increasingly competed directly against the slavery-based Southern agricultural economy. Current writes:

"It is useless to disguise the fact," Calhoun frankly informed his fellow senators (1837). "There is and always has been, in an advanced state of wealth and civilization, a conflict between capital and labor."

And he provides the following quotes from the Senator from South Carolina. From 1847:

Where wages command labor, as in the non-slaveholding States, there necessarily takes place between labor and capital a conflict which leads, in process of time, to disorder, anarchy, and revolution, if not counteracted by some appropriate and strong constitutional provision.

For, as the community becomes populous, wealthy, refined, and highly civilized, the difference between the rich and the poor will become more strongly marked; and the number of the ignorant and dependent greater in proportion to the rest of the community. With the increase of this difference, the tendency to conflict between them will become stronger; and, as the poor and dependent become more numerous in proportion, there will be ... no want of leaders among the wealthy and ambitious, to excite and direct them in their efforts to obtain the control.

It worth noting that in 1847 Karl Marx at this time was still an obscure Young Hegelian German scholar and polemicist with a tiny group called the Communist League (Bund der Kommunisten).

Calhoun's condemnation of the evils of industrial capitalism was entirely cynical politics and reactionary political theory. Which is not to say he wasn't correct in some of the things he had to say on the subject.

But the Lost Cause ideology expounded by Owsley in this essay is a direct descendant of Calhoun's pro-slavery positions. What may sound in isolation like perceptive criticism of the evils of the American form of capitalism circa 1933 - the failings of which were painfully evident in the early years of the Great Depression - are embedded in a defense of a Southern Agrarian ideal, which was really a dystopian vision meant to defend the existing system in the South: segregation, sharecropping, thoroughly corrupt politics that were democratic more in form than content, poverty and hopelessness for the majority of the rural population white and black. Owlsey was taking his stand on the grounds John Calhoun and other defenders of slavery had lain years before the Civil War.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2011, frank owsley, frank owsley, john calhoun, slavery, southern agrarians, us south, white racism, william z foster