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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump goes after Andrew Jackson's tree

As someone who insists on recognizing the progressive, democratic nature of much of what we know as the Jacksonian era and Jacksonian movement, it drives me up the wall that the Democrats have surrendered the positive elements that Andrew Jackson symbolized to, not just the Republicans, but white supremacists.

One small, symbolic piece of vindication that shows how phony it is for plutocrat and democracy-hater Donald Trump to claim Andrew Jackson as some kind of soulmate came this week. He's taking down the magnolia tree that Jackson planted in memory of his wife Rachel, who had passed away just before Jackson became President.

Rachel Jackson

Kate Bennett and Jeremy Moorhead report for CNN (Exclusive: Iconic White House tree to be cut down 12/27/2017):

After a brutal presidential campaign in 1828, Andrew Jackson's wife, Rachel, died just days after his election; according to historians, Jackson believed the particularly divisive campaign contributed to his wife's untimely demise. When he took up residence in the White House as a widower following his inauguration, it is believed Jackson insisted on planting a sprout from Rachel's favorite magnolia tree from the couple's farm, Hermitage, in Tennessee.

That tree eventually grew into the sprawling magnolia the American public has come to know and recognize to this day. (A companion magnolia was planted on the opposite side of the South Portico years later for symmetry.) The official Jackson Magnolia has been in the background for numerous historic events, from state arrival ceremonies and Easter Egg Rolls, to thousands of photo ops, social and athletic activities, and countless Marine One departures and arrivals. Ironically, the tree stands directly behind where the press is currently penned during these occasions, now perilously close to the weakened giant.

And if Jackson symbolizes popular democracy - even popular democracy with grim faults - the fate of his and Rachel's tree may represent some grim symbolism of in itself:

In person, while the tree and its trunks appear quite normal from the front side, from the back, the massive hulk of the tree is virtually hollow, with wood chipping away, in places crumbling to the touch.

The Arboretum experts agree the rigging in place is now itself greatly compromised. According to their report, "further cabling and support of the east leader is not an option due to the fragile, almost non-existent lower trunk. There is no longer a sound foundation, and the upper portion lacks sound wood for cabling. This half of the tree is considered a hazard. The west leader, on the other hand, could possibly be saved for a time, but will eventually succumb to the same fate. In addition, the high winds resulting from frequent helicopter landings complicates the future of the limb. It may fail in an unpredictable way."

See also: Historic White House Jackson Magnolia Tree to be Cut Down US News & World Report 12/26/2017

Mark Twain's white suit and Andrew Jackson

I hadn't realized before, or maybe I had forgotten, that Sanuel "Mark Twain" Clemons used his trademark white suit as a political and moral statement. Which suggests an interesting counterpoint to Johnny Cash's "Man in Black" self-branding, both of them representing a statement of solidarity with the downtrodden.

Tracy Fessenden writes about Clemon's white suit in Culture and Redemption: Religion, The Secular, and American Literature (2007):

While the white suit would become identified with Mark Twain as indelibly as the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the memorable dress belongs to a period of largely forgotten production, speculative narratives that break off without finishing and polemics that went unpublished in Twain's lifetime. And if the singular white suit stands in ironic contrast to the spotty literary output, it remains at least as difficult to read. Obviously, unreliably, the white suit projects a white persona: in Pudd'nhead Wilson, we recall, the infant slave Chambers becomes the white slave owner Tom Driscoll by being dressed in his master's "holy" clothes, his white Sunday gown ... In his white linen or silk-lined flannels Twain must have reminded audiences of the rajas who, according to Following the Equator, wrested the control of India from "Hindoo and Mohammed rulers" and "establish[ed] British superiority there." In Following the Equator, written just as the United States was launching the imperialist career that would soon eclipse Britain's, Twain confessed that his own and his Anglo-Saxon companions' white "Christian" clothes were in fact "a lie": "they are on us to expose us, to advertise what we wear them to conceal"; "they are ... a pretence that we despise gorgeous colors"; "yes, our clothes are a lie ... [T]hey are the ugly and appropriate outward exposure of an inward sham and a moral decay." [my emphasis in bold]

Clemons, in Fessenden's reading, presented himself as a proud representative of white American democracy while he simultaneously insisted on the deeply contradictory nature of that condition:

In pronouncing his White House and Savage Club audiences "unclean" Twain makes the white suit an invisible reproach to these sacred whites, to what in his "Greeting to the Twentieth Century" he calls the "stately maiden named Christendom," who "return[s] bedraggled, besmirched, and dishonored from pirate-raids in Kiao-Chou, Manchuria, South Africa, & the Philippines, with her soul full of meanness, her packet full of boodle, and her mouth full of pious hypocrisies. Give her soap and a towel, but hide the looking-glass."

Clemos Clemons, like other radical critics of American problems before and after, contrasted the ideals and preferred self-identification of the dominant American culture to the actual practices of the nation and its social reality:

If the spectacularly unblemished white suit would seem to distance Twain from an ensoiling "Christendom," however, it offers no comparable exemption from "whiteness." In "The Stupendous Procession," another of the unfinished narratives from Twain's white-suited period, modern nation-states parade with symbols of their territorial conquests, whiteness trumpeting its own ability to contain, as it were, all colors. America, the last and largest in the procession, marches with banners that pointedly revise the Declaration of lndependence - "All white men are born free and equal"; the Fourteenth Amendment - "white slavery shall no longer exist where the American flag floats"; and the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" - "Christ died to make white men holy; he [Abraham Lincoln] died to make white men free."

Someone once asked me if the use of Andrew Jackson's symbolism for this blog was meant satirically. It was a good question. And I remembered it when I read the passages in Tracy's book I just quoted.

Jackson is interesting to me as an historical figure in much the same way John Brown or Newton Knight, the subject of a new film, Free State of Jones, scheduled to be released this year:





Brown by resisting the national government dominated by the Slave Power, and Knight by resisting the traitorous slaveowners revolt against democracy that was the Confederacy, both in their own ways embodied the democratic spirit and the historical trend of the democracy by resisting the established orders of which they were a part, both of which claimed to represent the American ideal of democracy. Though in the case of the Confederacy, the remnants of electoral democracy for whites were embedded in an open rebellion against American democracy that aimed to press forward the development of the fundamentally antidemocratic slave system.

Jackson and the Jacksonian movement represented radical democracy of their time. To borrow one of Joan Walsh's favorite phrases, it represented the "left wing of the possible" at the level of the national government in the US at the time.

As I've said repeatedly here, in addition to heading a movement that expanded the franchise, supported the nascent organized labor movement and encouraged a new level of popular organizing and political participation, Jackson's Presidency is associated particularly with three major events, two of which were democratic and progressive, the other far more problematic. The successful fight against the Bank of the United States as a major tool of organized money and Jackson's successful stand against John Calhoun's secessionist move in the South Carolina Nullification Controversy were the first two. The Indian Removal Act was the third.

And the latter, reactionary and destructive as it was from any kind of democratic or humane view today, was very much a part of white democracy and the Enlightenment view of the Indians as "savages" and "natural peoples" who had to be "civilized" by white Europeans, or Americans, in this case.

Mark Twain used his white suit to both affirm to the ideals of democracy and of a humane spirit of religion while simultaneously reminding people of the dark side of real existing white democracy, particularly its brutal practice of imperialism and white racism.

The symbol of Andrew Jackson here represents a recognition that democracy advances through people committed to advancing it, even against their own conventionally-perceived self-interest. In Jackson's case, he was a rich man who defended the interests of the common people against the Money Power with which he could easily have identified. He was a slaveowner and a supporter of slavery who in the Nullification Crisis took the side of democracy and American patriotism against the incipient revolt of the slaveowners class of which he was a member.

But Jackson is also a symbol that reminds us, like Twain's white suit, that "democracy" for white people is not the sum total of all virtues, that democracy can and does inflict needless cruelty on the Other, whether the Other is American Indian or Philippine peasants or Arab noncombatants today who fall victim to our freedom bombs or unarmed African-Americans who receive vigilante "justice" at the hands of white racist police.

But in the end, human history is made by real human beings. Real human beings that still often produced the results that Hegel gloomily described: "World history is not the ground of happiness. The periods of happiness are blank pages in it ..." - Hegel, Philosophy of History (German original: "Die Weltgeschichte ist nicht der Boden des Glücks. Die Perioden des Glücks sind leere Blätter in ihr ...")

But we also have to recognize the moments that point in a different direction. Polluted as they are with dark side of our human species.

Andrew Jackson as a 21st-century political symbol

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

There's a new round of discussion about the contemporary role of Andrew Jackson as a symbol, specifically for the Democratic Party.

I guess it was a good move to use "Old Hickory" in the name of this blog instead of Jackson's name explicitly!

It makes me recall that when I started this blog in 2003 with this same name, originally on AOL, I had a couple of things very much in mind. One was my disgust at neo-Confederate ideology. The State of Mississippi had a special referendum election in 2001 to vote on getting rid of the Confederate battle flag symbol on their state flag. It was the only issue on the ballot. And a solid majority, including a heavy majority of white voters, voted to keep the Confederate version of the state flag. It was one reminder among other of the virulence of segregationist thinking, bolstered as it has always been by neo-Confederate ideology and symbols.

As the Andrew Jackson logo on the right side of the blog that has been there for years says of Jackson, "He stood up against the secessionists and the economic royalists." What makes his image a potent one in my mind against neo-Confederate symbolism is that Jackson was a slaveowner and supporter of slavery who nevertheless chose democracy and national unity against the narrow interest of the Slave Power as embodied in John C. Calhoun and his supporters.

President Andrew Jackson History.com n/d; accessed 07/25/2015:

He was also a wealthy man who in the conflict over the Bank of the United States chose democracy and the empowering of the "common man" over the narrow interest of his own class.

Which brings me to the other thing that was particularly on my mind in 2003. The Democratic Party, which honors Jackson as one of its founding spirits along with Thomas Jefferson, was in many ways flat on its back in 2003. The Party had collectively rolled over and played dead when Bush and Cheney and the corrupt Supreme Court stole the 2000 election and handed the Presidency to Dick Cheney. After that, they collectively rolled over for the authoritarian USA PATRIOT Act and allowed the criminal invasion of Iraq to proceed with minimal resistance despite the remarkable popular opposition and activism that opposed it.

Jackson symbolizes the very opposite tradition in the Democratic Party: democratic activism, mass mobilization, the fight against antidemocratic power and privilege. The Jacksonians even believed and publicly argued that Jackson had been cheated out of the Presidency in the election of 1824 by a "corrupt bargain" on the part of John Quincy Adams on behalf of the Money Power, or what Franklin Roosevelt would later call "the economic royalists."

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. wrote in his now much-criticized The Age of Jackson (1945):

So superb a self-sufficiency could be effective only when matched by an equally superb self-control. Again contrary to the Jackson myth, there was small basis for the picture of uncontrolled irascibility. Jackson, who knew his reputation, never hesitated to exploit it. "He would sometimes extemporize a fit of passion in order to overwhelm an adversary, when certain of being in the right," said one observer, "but his self-command was always perfect." His towering rages were actually ways of avoiding futile argument. To committees which called on him to protest his financial policy, he would fly into vehement denunciations of the moneyed monopoly. When they left in disgust, he would coolly light his pipe and, chuckling "They thought I was mad," remark blandly on the importance of never compromising vital issues; one always lost friends and never appeased enemies.

This was the kind of spirit that the netroots were looking for in their Democratic leaders in 2003. It was this spirit that many saw in Howard Dean and his Presidential campaign, the kind many saw (perhaps somewhat overoptimistically) in Barack Obama, the kind we see now Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, the kind that even Hillary Clinton now feels it necessary to display. It's the kind of fighting spirit that we've seen in movements like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives matter and in the present-day netroots movement itself.

As much as I value utopian political theory for the insight and inspiration it can give, I've always thought it was important to understand what is happening in real existing politics. And personal symbolism is important. However important principles and programs are, the people that democracies elect to office are human beings. People vote for individuals, however much they have partisan or principled considerations in mind. As we saw in recent days, Bernie Sanders' principled positions are not a replacement for how he interacts with real live voters, such as the Black Lives Matter protesters who challenged him at the Netroots Nation convention last week.

I don't defend Jackson's support of slavery. Nor his Indian policy. His Indian policy, particularly the Indian Removal Act which along with the fight against South Carolina nullification and the Bank of the United States was among the three most historic achievements of his Presidency. It isn't anachronism to say that. The policy was hotly disputed in Congress with clear arguments against it's morality.

The wrongness of the Indian Removal act is not mitigated by the fact that every other white American had bad ideas about Indians and Indian policy with exceptions like fur traders and Herman Melville. The latter had actually lived among aboriginals in the South Sea. Fur traders often integrated closely with Indian tribes with whom they worked.

And when it comes to national and democratic symbolism, Jackson as a 17-year-old actually fought in the Revolutionary War. It's not much of a stretch to consider him the last of the major Founders of the American Republic. That's not perfection. And it's not utopia. But it's not Aaron Burr or John Calhoun, either - who, ironically, were respectively Vice Presidents to Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson.

General Jackson was also the hero of the Battle of New Orleans of early 1815. It's famous that the war with Britain had officially been concluded at the time of the battle, but neither side had yet gotten word. But if the British Army had won, the peace certainly would not have developed as it did. New Orleans even today is a critical port because of the traffic on the Mississippi River. It was already a critical port in 1814. Whoever controlled New Orleans could control the commerce on the Mississippi River. That was the main reason of Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase. It was a principle of Jefferson's foreign policy that whatever country controlled New Orleans - France, Britain were the most practical options besides the US - was by definition the principal opponent of the United States.

So the Battle of New Orleans wasn't just an early 19-century media event. It was substantively very important. Though the symbolic significance of Jackson's forces defeating those of the mightiest Empire on the planet was also not nothing. It rightly made Jackson a national hero.

The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band's interpretation of Johnny Horton's folk classic, "The Battle of New Orleans":

I opened this post with the famous Hegel quote because it captures an important part of my own understanding of history. When Hegel described seeing Napoleon in the streets of Jena as witnessing the World Spirit on a horse, he didn't mean that he regarded the French General as a god or a model man. He meant that Napoleon signified to him the most progressive force in history at that time.

In the previous post, I quoted California Gov. Jerry Brown saying in Rome:

I think the formation that I’ve undergone growing up in the Catholic faith, the Catholic religion, puts forth a world that’s orderly, that has purpose and that ultimately is a positive. And that’s very helpful when you look at a world that looks very much the opposite, in terms of the wars, the corruption and the breakdown. And so even though from an intellectual point of view it looks very dark, in another sense I have great faith and confidence that there is a way forward.

Whether one takes a Catholic view of history or a Hegelian one or some other kind, it proceeds through flawed individuals. Often deeply flawed ones.

But understanding how history proceeds, the history of democracy or any other aspects, making realistic assessment of those who advanced it, as Jackson did, and those who sought to impede it or take it in a retrograde direction, like John Calhoun.

I'm not willing to cede the progressive side of early American history to conservatives. The only white man of any note that I can think of in the early half of the 19th century who came close to matching prevalent 21st-century notions on race and gender and equal rights was John Brown. Who was (unlike Calhoun or Jefferson Davis) hanged for treason. Also, Brown was a "terrorist", and who wants to identify with one of those? Jackson was a wealthy slaveowner, who nevertheless when it came to choosing between his class and democracy with the Bank and the Nullification Crisis, chose the democratic side and fought for it effectively.

I'm going to try to look at the current media controversy over Jackson's legacy in upcoming posts.

One Nation rally

Dave Neiwert was at the One Nation rally in Washington and has been reporting on it at Crooks and Liars, The One Nation rally: A photo gallery 10/03/2010, along with Nicole Belle, Here's Your Enthusiasm Gap: One Nation Rally Draws More Attendees Than Beck's "Whitestock" 10/02/2010.

This is one of his photos that I especially like:


Dave writes:

-- And, um, so much for that Liberal Media Bias myth, eh? CNN barely covered it at all. Of course, Fox carried nary a word of it. None of the major networks -- CBS, NBC, ABC or Fox -- even bothered to report on it. And over at the WaPo, the story reported only "tens of thousands" attended -- when in fact the numbers clearly exceeded 100,000.

-- In stark contrast to the Tea Parties, there was relatively little kookery at the rally. There was a tiny handful of 9/11 Troofers encamped on the back fringes, and there were some far-left radical groups similarly parked along the edges of the rally. But the masses there were clearly representative of mainstream progressive organizations like the NAACP, AFL-CIO, SEIU, and NCLR. Nonetheless, expect to hear all about how the rally was rife with far-left nutcases from our friends in the wingnutsophere. [my emphasis]

David Dayen reports on the Los Angeles version in One Nation LA Rallies Thousands for Jobs and Justice Firedoglake News Desk 10/02/2010.


Tags: establishment press, jacksonian democracy

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2009, April 9: Jacksonian democracy and slavery in Virginia

John Randolph of Virginia

Christopher Curtis writing in "Reconsidering Suffrage Reform in the 1829-1830 Virginia Constitutional Convention" Journal of Southern History Feb 2008 describes a portion of the Jacksonian democratic movement as it applied especially to Virginia.

In a passage that captures well the reality that Jacksonian democracy was both very progressive in expanding liberty and the possibilities of political activity and at the same time drastically limited in comparison to the official standards that would prevail just 40 years later, Curtis writes:

The political realignments anticipating the emergence of Jacksonian democracy have been well documented by political historians of the era. Changes in electoral processes, voter mobilization, and the emergence of nationally recognized candidates with ideologically oriented platforms were reflected in a twin commitment to mass political parties and white manhood suffrage. These realignments thus created the essential mechanisms for establishing modem representative democracy, in which political rights were vested in individual personhood. Political language also played a key role in this democratic development, transforming the image of democracy itself from a form of government that many of the Founders considered seditious into the seemingly natural fulfillment of the principles of the American Revolution. Virginia experienced many aspects of this political transformation, especially the development of the party system, in ways similar to those in other states. In some areas, however, Virginia's experience diverged sharply from national trends in democratic development. Two instances are particularly notable in this respect. First, the process of democratization in Virginia, as in the remainder of the South, was colored distinctively by the presence of slavery. And second, Virginia lagged behind other states in abandoning property qualifications and in adopting white manhood suffrage. Nevertheless, by midcentury the core principle of modem democracy - that political rights and representation were vested in individual persons - was realized in Virginia. Paradoxically, however, this vision of democratic citizenship reached fruition simultaneously with an increasingly ardent commitment to the preservation of slavery.

... Although historians can speak authentically of a national phenomenon called Jacksonian democracy, the particular incidents that motivated this political change necessarily varied from state to state. At least until the Civil War, democratic development in America was an affair from the bottom up.

Curtis in that passage points out the contradictions of Southern slave society, the expansion of democracy for whites coinciding with an increased support for slavery.

I did a big double-take, though, on his comment about democracy being transformed "from a form of government that many of the Founders considered seditious"! A few reactionaries like Alexander Hamilton who supported the Constitution did regard the whole notion of democracy with suspicion. Other reactionaries opposed it. But the notion that the Founders viewed the Constitutional government as a "republic" and specifically not a "democracy" - a notion which has been a particular favorite of the John Birch Society - is just goofy, to use the technical term for it. At the Constitutional convention, the delegates used the terms "republic" and "democracy" interchangeably. They knew that the government they were proposing was not going to be a city-state like classical Athens or a Swiss canton. And they saw the needs for safeguards to protect against what we now call the "tyranny of the majority". But his formulation implying that some significant portion of those early leaders we know as the Founders thought democracy was "seditious" is seriously off-base.

Curtis also describes the way in which the four years of reform in Viginia beginning with the state constitutional convention of 1829 through Governor John Randolph's unsuccessful attempt to abolish slavery in the state in 1832 integrated slave ownership more deeply in Virginia's political ideology of republican government, a deeply contradictory development that was a part of the trends that led eventually to the Civil War. In that process, the "freedom" to own black slaves came to be considered at least for many people and certainly for the slaveowners, a basic part of the "democratic" rights of white men. So when white Southerners talked about defending their "freedom", many of them understood that as meaning in significant part the ability or future prospects of owning other human beings as slaves.

For four years, beginning with the constitutional convention in October 1829, Virginians engaged in a series of public debates that examined fundamental questions of property ownership, law, and republican government. In addition to revising the state constitution, these debates grappled with key political issues that included the appropriate structure of an independent judiciary, the funding of internal improvement projects, the nature of federal relations, and most famously, in the wake of the 1831 Nat Turner insurrection, the future of slavery. A principal consequence of these debates was the reconceptualization of republican political ideals; the traditional common-law concept of freehold citizenship (based on landowning) was replaced by a more democratic belief that diverse forms of property ownership also possessed political value. Most significantly, property rights in slaves became a key ingredient of Virginia's republican political ideology. In this manner, the Virginia debates reflected a sea change in republican political thought whereby the ownership of slaves replaced the ownership of land as the fundamental property relation signifying the virtues of self-government. This transformation in republican ideology represented a necessary precondition for the subsequent development of democracy in a modem slave-owning society.

This was the last major internal attempt in any of the future Confederate states to abolish slavery at the state level. Virginia as part of the Upper South and some other states like Kentucky did still have some open debate over the future of slavery. But in most of the slave states, even a serious discussion of phasing out the "peculiar institution" was effectively forbidden. Over time, the Southern "Slave Power" (as its opponents called the political block dominated by slaveowners) became more and more hysterically afraid of open discussion of slavery. Even when it was occurring in the free states.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2009, jacksonian democracy, slavery

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2006 - April 6: Contradictions of Jacksonian democracy

Sean Wilentz in Andrew Jackson (2005) gives a good summary of the contradictions of Jacksonian democracy that would eventually split the Jacksonian movement and the Democratic Party:


As Jackson noted in his farewell address, sectional divisions over slavery and democracy directly threatened his very conception of democracy. For Jackson, the confrontations were artificial, whipped up by ambitious demagogues in order to distract the electorate from the truly important division between the privileged few and the humble many. But slavery and its expansion were not artificial issues; they were redefining how Americans thought about the few and many; and these clashing views cut to the heart of how Americans thought about democracy. ...


Two decades would pass before the clash between the northern democracy [i.e., the Democratic Party] and the southern democracy shattered Jackson's Democratic Party in all but its name. Yet in the most profound irony of all, the widening of democratic politics that (as Herman Melville would later write in Moby-Dick) "didst pick up Andrew Jackson from the pebbles" and "thunder him higher than a throne" would also render that conflict irrepressible. By expanding popular politics and enshrining the popular will, Jackson and his followers exposed the political system to precisely the kinds of agitation they (and their Whig Party adversaries) hoped to keep forever out of national debates. Using all of the electioneering techniques pioneered by the Jackson Democrats, new movements, factions, and parties would arise and amass popular support over issues connected to slavery - and would elect candidates to national office dedicated solely to addressing whether slavery threatened or embodied democratic values.


Jackson lived long enough to feel these early tremors of the crisis of American democracy over slavery, and he would try to still them with all the strength he could muster. He would never fully comprehend how his own democratic achievements had brought them about, and lead his countrymen, North and South, to begin questioning whether democracy could endure in a nation half slave and half free, a house divided against itself.  (my emphasis)


Wilentz in his Jackson biography does anexceptionallygood job of describing how Jackson and his movement not only made consciously and deliberate choices.  But they also set processes and conflicts in motion whose implications they didn't comprehend and whose further results they could only dimly predict.


These passages from Wilentz are also reminders that in understanding the Civil War and the conflicts over slavery that led up to it, it's important for us to keep in mind that what may look to us like an inevitable process did not appear so to its participants.  Even for the strict Calvinists like John Brown, who believed that God at least had pre-ordained the entire course of human history down to the last detail.  God may have known the future.  But Andrew Jackson, John Calhoun and John Brown did not.


And on the issue of slavery, we are inclined today to view the issue as one of good and right (emancipation) versus evil and cruelty (slavery).  And indeed it was.  Nor is that an anachronistic view, reading current values and assumptions into the past.  There were many Americans and certainly many people in the rest of the world in the time of Andrew Jackson who viewed slavery as a sinful evil.


But the actual participants in the events of those years in the United States didn't have the luxury of making entirely clear-cut choices in the practical issues that slavery presented.  Jefferson, the staunch opponent of slavery, feared the implications of the Missouri Compromise because it was made under a series of assumptions very different that how he had always conceived states rights as a defense of democratic and personal liberties against a potentially tyrannical federal government.


Jackson never faced a direct choice of freedom versus slavery.  But when he found himself in a position in the nullification crisis where he had to defend democracy against a slaveowners revolt, he came down hard on the side of democracy.  His action didn't free a single slave.  But would a genuine opponet of slavery like Thomas Jefferson have been willing to take such a clear stand in asserting federal power against a state's claim to the right of nullification?


The quotes are also a reminder of how important to the future course of events Jackson's stand against secession in the nullification crisis was.  Jackson certainly didn't intend to set off a three-decades-long process of escalating tensions over slavery.  On the contrary, he aimed at calming such tensions down.


But the content of his actions went far beyond their intent.  By establishing the notion of Union and democracy as inseparable, he set the stage for the position that the defenders of democracy and American unity would eventually take when matters reached the point that either democracy or slavery would have to die out.


An Index to Confederate "Heritage" Month 2006 postings is available.