Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 17: Slaves fighting for freedom

Abraham Lincoln, still the Great Emancipator?

The New York Review of Books runs a lot of essays on the Civil War. Usually they are in the form of book reviews. But that publications reviews normally use the books under consideration to form analytical essays they may go well beyond commenting on the books themselves.

James McPherson, an historian who has a major role in popularizing serious, reality-based history of the Civil War and related topics, has a number of NY Review pieces. Including a recent one, They Chose Freedom 03/20/08 issue, reviewing A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Own Narratives of Emancipation by David W. Blight (link is behind subscription).

McPherson discusses two major themes in the history of the end of slavery. One is the action of the slaves themselves in seeking freedom and forcing the issue onto the top of the national political agenda. The other is the role of the abolitionist movement, and of Abraham Lincoln and his Emancipation Proclamation in particular.

Here's how McPherson frames the issues:

The traditional answer to the question "Who freed the slaves?" was Abraham Lincoln. But many black and other historians have placed greater emphasis on the initiative of the slaves. These slaves saw the Civil War as a potential war for abolition well before Lincoln did. By coming into Union military lines in the South, they forced the issue of emancipation on the Lincoln administration. "While Lincoln continued to hesitate about the legal, constitutional, moral, and military aspects of the matter," wrote the black historian and theologian Vincent Harding in 1981, "the relentless movement of the self-liberated fugitives into the Union lines" soon "approached and surpassed every level of force previously known." Making themselves "an unavoidable military and political issue...this overwhelming human movement...of self-freed men and women...took their freedom into their own hands." The Emancipation Proclamation, when it finally and belatedly came, merely "confirmed and gave ambiguous legal standing to the freedom which black people had already claimed through their own surging, living proclamations."

During the 1980s this self-emancipation thesis became dominant. It won the imprimatur of the foremost scholarly enterprise on the history of emancipation, the Freedmen and Southern Society project at the University of Maryland. By acting "resolutely to place their freedom—and that of their posterity—on the wartime agenda," wrote the editors of this project, the slaves were "the prime movers in securing their own liberty." One of the historians associated with the Freedmen and Southern Society project, Barbara J. Fields, gave wide currency to this theme in her eloquent statements on camera in the Ken Burns PBS documentary The Civil War (viewed by more than forty million people), and in the book that accompanied the series. "Freedom did not come to the slaves from words on paper, either the words of Congress or those of the President," said Fields in 1990, but from "the initiative of the slaves" who "taught the nation that it must place the abolition of slavery at the head of its agenda." A decade later Lerone Bennett Jr. declared that Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation was a hoax. He "did not intend for it to free a single Negro.... Lincoln didn't make emancipation; emancipation, which he never understood or supported or approved, made Lincoln."

One of the problems that writers and historians face in dealing with an issue as much studied as the American Civil War is that so much has been researched and written about, how do you come up with a fresh perspective? Academics, especially early in their careers, are under pressure to demonstrate that they've done original research that will get them published and earn reviews that say their work has "made a significant contribution" to their subject field.

That's part of the reason you get oddball arguments like the one that Lincoln "did not intend for [the Emancipation Proclamation] to free a single Negro.... Lincoln didn't make emancipation; emancipation, which he never understood or supported or approved, made Lincoln."

In fact, arguments like that are favorites of neo-Confederate pseudohistory. The neo-Confederate versions would run something like this: "The Civil War had nothing to do with slavery. The North didn't want to free the slaves. It wasn't even their official policy until the middle of the war. Lincoln himself didn't even intend for the Emancipation Proclamation to free the slaves. It was originally supposed to be a hoax. So slavery had nothing to do with the war."

McPherson's explanation seems fairly obvious, that both the slaves' action for self-emancipation and the actions of the federal government played their parts. Given the conditions of slavery and the South's extreme fears of "servile insurrection", it's only speculation as to whether a massive slave uprising could have been achieved or as to how long that would have taken to develop.

As McPherson relates:

The Emancipation Proclamation officially made Union soldiers into an army of liberation. Northern troops carried copies of the Proclamation and distributed thousands of them as they penetrated into the heartland of the Confederacy. By the war's last year, more than 10 percent of these soldiers of freedom were black, most of them former slaves. That army was chiefly responsible for the freedom of slaves who came within its purview. By the end of the war, David Blight estimates, "some 600,000 to 700,000 out of the nearly four million African American slaves had reached some form of emancipation" by this process. But most of them had done so by the Union army coming to them rather than by them escaping to the Union army. The remaining 3.3 million slaves achieved freedom by the Thirteenth Amendment, whose adoption was possible only through Union military victory. And no one deserved more credit for that victory than Abraham Lincoln, commander in chief of an army of liberation.

McPherson notes that in the two slave narratives under review, both men escaped to Federal lines during the war itself. And both of them reported being well received by the white Union soldiers:

The welcome that Turnage and Washington received from Union soldiers challenges - or at least qualifies - the accounts by many historians that emphasize the racism and anti-black hostility of most soldiers. Both men have nothing but good words to say about their experiences after they reached Union lines. If they had been writing for a public (and predominantly white) readership, of course, we would be properly skeptical of such statements. But they were writing for themselves and their families and we may infer that they were writing what they actually felt. There were many racist Union soldiers, to be sure. And the light color of both Washington and Turnage probably worked in their favor. Washington was so light that the Union soldiers he first encountered thought he was a white man and were astonished to learn that he had been a slave. His reception, and Turnage's, might have been considerably less friendly if they had been really black.

Reality-based history, there's a lot to be said for it.

Tags: american civil war, confederate heritage month 2008, james mcpherson, us civil war

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 7: Lincoln, slavery and race

A recent article provides a good analysis of Abraham Lincoln's position on slavery and race: What Did He Really Think About Race? by James McPherson New York Review of Books 03/29/07 issue. (The New York Review puts its articles behind subscription after a few weeks, but this one is accessible at the time of this writing.)

McPherson is reviewing The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics, a new work by James Oakes, one of the leading Civil War historians. He opens with this illustration of why this is a challenging subject:

Abraham Lincoln was "emphatically, the black man's President," wrote the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass in 1865, "the first to show any respect for their rights as men." A decade later, however, in a speech at the unveiling of an emancipation monument in Washington, Douglass described Lincoln as "preeminently the white man's President." To his largely white audience on this occasion, Douglass declared that "you are the children of Abraham Lincoln. We are at best only his step-children." Later in the same speech, Douglass brought together his Hegelian thesis and antithesis in a final synthesis. Whatever Lincoln's flaws may have been in the eyes of racial egalitarians, he said "in his heart of hearts he loathed and hated slavery." His firm wartime leadership saved the nation and freed it "from the great crime of slavery.... The hour and the man of our redemption had met in the person of Abraham Lincoln."

We'll let McPherson slide for confusing Kantian dialectics with Hegelian. But this contradictory image has given rise to various interpretations of Lincoln's positions over the decades, not all of them sound or honestly offered. Neo-Confederates have tried to argue that Lincoln was as much a racist as anyone else, as part of the Lost Cause mythology that slavery had nothing to do with the war. The idea being that a racist President would never have fought a war to abolish the Peculiar Institution.

The fundamental reality in a republic for whites that also maintained large-scale chattel slavery for most blacks, virtually no politician in the 1850s could have come to power with a straight-out abolitionist and equal rights program and hoped to be elected to Congressional office, much less the Presidency.

In any case, "sincerity" is a greatly overrated virtue in politics. Sure, I would prefer to have a Congress full of saints - who agree with me on the important issues, of course! But especially in our present-day situation, if we can't get politicians who are law-abiding and effective in getting constructive things done, I'm willing to have sainthood and sincerity take lower priorities until some Golden Age when settling for merely human government is no longer necessary. I expect it to be a long wait.

A main point of McPherson's in this essay is, in fact, the differing roles of reformers, in this case the abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass, and of politicians:

James Oakes believes that Lincoln possessed as much "anti-slavery conviction" as Douglass himself. "I have always hated slavery," said Lincoln in 1858, "as much as any Abolitionist." The difference between the two men was one of position and tactics, not conviction. Douglass was a radical reformer whose mission was to proclaim principles and to demand that the people and their leaders live up to them. Lincoln was a politician, a practitioner of the art of the possible, a pragmatist who subscribed to the same principles but recognized that they could only be achieved in gradual, step-by-step fashion through compromise and negotiation, in pace with progressive changes in public opinion and political realities. Oakes describes a symbiosis between the radical Douglass and the Republican Lincoln: "It is important to democracy that reformers like Frederick Douglass could say what needed to be said, but it is indispensable to democracy that politicians like Abraham Lincoln could do only what the law and the people allowed them to do." (my emphasis)

To state the obvious, pleading "the art of the possible" is far more often an excuse for not doing something that a real reason for tactical maneuvering. But it makes a good excuse because it is a reality.

But what is true of a democracy is not always true of less participative forms of government. And in the 1850s, the United States had a democracy for white men, not for women or blacks or Native Americans. Not even close. Some women had been able to vote around 1800, but that enlightened practice had largely faded by the 1850s.

That's why, even in these days where the extra-legal violence of terrorism is deeply suspect for good reasons, from today's perspective we can't dismiss the goals of old John Brown out of hand and write him off as a simple fanatic. John Brown did stand for something very much like the concept of equal rights for all people in the sense that we know it today. In actual practice, we only got to some like Brown's understanding for freedom and equality by going through the process that made Lincoln, not Brown, the Great Emancipator. But Brown also is a reminder that it's not entirely an "anachronism" (reading present standards into the past) to evaluate politics of the 1850s from the standpoint of racial and gender equality, however low either of them were on the nation's list of priorities then. The 13th and 14th Amendments did establish racial equality for men in the Constitution in a basic sense, though that reality has yet to be fulfilled today. There's an argument to be made that the 14th Amendment establishes legal equality for women, as well, though the Supreme Court has never accepted that interpretation (although I believe they came within one vote of doing so on one occasion.)

And Douglass, who was a great admirer and partial co-conspirator of Brown's who also shared his general view of human freedom, was not willing at critical moments to be pure rather than effective:

But in Douglass's view, Lincoln backslid after issuing the proclamation. Just as the President had seemed too slow in 1862 to embrace emancipation, he seemed similarly tardy in 1864 to embrace equal rights for freed slaves. For a time Douglass even supported efforts to replace Lincoln with a more radical Republican candidate for president in the election of 1864. In the end, however, when the only alternative to Lincoln was the Democratic nominee George B. McClellan, whose election might jeopardize the antislavery gains of the previous two years, Douglass came out for Lincoln. "When there was any shadow of a hope that a man of more anti-slavery conviction and policy could be elected," he wrote, "I was not for Mr. Lincoln." But with the prospect of the (miscalled) Democratic party ... clearly before us, all hesitation ought to cease, and every man who wishes well to the slave and to the country should at once rally with all the warmth and earnestness of his nature to the support of Abraham Lincoln.

And as a contemporary of Lincoln's who long survived him, Douglass' placing of Lincoln in the context of his times - "context" also being a favorite excuse of the reactionary and the complacent - is hard to ignore:

Looking back in 1876, Douglass acknowledged that while from the standpoint of the abolitionists "Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent," he was considerably to the left of the political center on the slavery issue. "Measure him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult," and Lincoln "was swift, zealous, radical, and determined." Oakes carries this point a step further. Lincoln the politician was a master of misdirection, of appearing to appease conservatives while manipulating them toward acceptance of radical policies. Douglass and many other contemporaries failed to appreciate or even to understand Lincoln's political legerdemain. Many historians have similarly failed. But Oakes both understands and appreciates it, and he analyzes with more clarity and precision than anyone else the "typically backhanded way" in which Lincoln handled slavery, which "obscured the radicalism of his move." (my emphasis)

Douglass was the leading African-American abolitionist of his time. The fact that he regarded Lincoln as compared to most whites as "swift, zealous, radical, and determined" to abolish slavery says a lot.

McPherson, citing Oakes, brings up a wrinkle that I've never seen mentioned before. When Lincoln reversed the local emancipation action by the flamboyant and mercurial John Charles Fremont in Missouri early in the war, he also used that action to established the practice and principle that the "confiscation" of slave property by the Union Army meant that the human being so confiscated were thereby liberated from slavery.

This doesn't get at the question of whether Lincoln's motivation in that case, fear that the border slave states would go over to the Confederacy, was well-founded. But it does give an important perspective on Lincoln's view of slavery.

McPherson provides other examples that give similar glimpses into Lincoln's thinking on this issue.

While it doesn't resolve all the questions around it, Lincoln did use white racism as a way to, as McPherson puts it, "separate the issue of bondage from that of race." That is, to reassure white voters that they could hate both slavery and black people. He gives this as one example:

Lincoln's racial attitudes were also a target of Douglass's criticisms until 1864. On this subject, Oakes offers some original and incisive insights. The main charge of racism against Lincoln focuses on his statements during the debates with Stephen A. Douglas in 1858. Lincoln rejected Douglas's accusation that he favored racial equality — a volatile issue in Illinois that threatened Lincoln's political career if the charge stuck. Goaded by Douglas's repeated playing of the race card, Lincoln declared in one of the debates that "I am not, nor have ever been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races." It would be easy, comments Oakes, "to string such quotations together and show up Lincoln as a run-of-the-mill white supremacist." But in private, Lincoln was much less racist than most whites of his time. He was "disgusted by the race-baiting of the Douglas Democrats" and he "made the humanity of blacks central to his antislavery argument." In a speech at Chicago in 1858, Lincoln pleaded: "Let us discard all this quibbling about...this race and that race and the other race being inferior, and therefore they must be placed in an inferior position," and instead "once more stand up declaring that all men are created equal."

Whether that approach of partially using white racism to oppose slavery - for many and probably most whites, absence of slavery meant the absence of blacks or at least no more than a small presence - was the best political strategy is a meaningful argument. But it's also important to recognize that there was more to Lincoln's public pronouncements on race to an all-white electorate than simple racism or bigotry.

McPherson puts Lincoln's public support of colonizing American blacks to Africa, a scheme which was always a crackpot idea though it had wide support among white abolitionists, in a similar light:

After issuing the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, Lincoln never again mentioned colonization. He also stopped using racism as a strategic diversion. By March 1863 he strongly endorsed the recruitment of black soldiers to fight for the Union, and in response to prodding by Douglass and other abolitionists he supported passage of legislation to equalize the pay of black and white soldiers. In the last year of the war, the President also endorsed giving the right to vote to two overlapping groups: literate African-Americans and all black veterans of the Union army.

When Lincoln came under enormous pressure in the summer of 1864 to waive his insistence on Southern acceptance of the abolition of slavery as a precondition for peace negotiations, he eloquently refused to do so. "No human power can subdue this rebellion without using the Emancipation lever as I have done," he insisted. By that time more than one hundred thousand black soldiers and sailors were fighting for the Union. "If they stake their lives for us they must be prompted by the strongest motive," the promise of freedom. "And the promise being made, must be kept." To jettison emancipation would ruin the Union cause itself.... Why should they give their lives for us, with full notice of our purpose to betray them?... I should be damned in time & in eternity for so doing. The world shall know that I will keep my faith to friends & enemies, come what will. (my emphasis)

Tags: abraham lincoln, civil war, emancipation proclamation, frederick douglass, james mcpherson, slavery, stephen oakes, us civil war

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 1: Memory at war with history

This is my fourth year of a blogging counter-observance of Confederate "Heritage" Month. It was orginally inspired by a daily selection of quotes that Edward Sebesta was highlighting on his Web site at the time pointing out what the neo-Confederate/Lost Cause outlook was really about.

To a large extent, I've used these posts as an opportunity to indulge my interest in Civil War history and prewar history. The Lost Cause view of the Civil War and its causes is similar to Holocaust denial in that it uses a narrative about historical events as an ideology for a present-day outlook: anti-Semitism in the case of Holocaust denial, white racism in the case of neo-Confederate/Lost Cause advocacy.

And like Holocaust denial or Christian-fundamentalist creationism, it's also aimed at what Chris Hedges describes at making facts and opinions interchangeable, in order to substitute a destructive, deceptive ideology for a reality-based understanding of the world.

In that sense, any kind of reality-based look at Civil War and "antebellum" (prewar) American history is useful in countering the dishonest way of thinking associated with the neo-Confederate, white supremacist outlook.

But, as Sebesta continually reminds us at his Anti-Neo-Confederate blog, neo-Confederate ideology is not primarily a view of history, though neo-Confederates certainly try to exert an influence on "heritage"-related events and sites such as public statues, museums, historical commemorations and even plantation tours. Sebesta writes about the latter in Behind the Plantation Facade, Historical Societies and selective memory 12/23/06:

Just be aware, whether it is in Vermont or Georgia, or California or Minnesota, that often the "history" given out by historical organizations isn't but a frothy fantasy of the past, and this in itself is a political agenda. It is often a back door access to your thinking. Can you enjoy a beautiful plantation house, without subconsiously buying into certain views and fantasies? It is a question I can't definitely answer.

In this year's "Heritage" posts, I'm going to be a bit more eclectic in the topics. Fortuitously, my copy of the just-published second volume of William Freehling's history of prewar politics, The Road to Disunion, Vol. 2: Secessionists Triumphant (2007), just arrived a couple of days ago. So that alone should provide topics for some history-related posts. But I will probably be doing some posts on other aspect of neo-Confederate/Lost Cause ideology, as well.

I'm also going to feature some pictures of the 1995 US Civil War postal stamp series. This heading for the stamp sheet of the collection shows some influence of Lost Cause historiography by using "The War Between the States" as a subtitle:

"War Between the States" has long been the preferred Lost Cause name for the Civil War. Because according to Lost Cause pseudohistory, there was no social conflicts involved of the kind "civil war" implies. It was strictly North against South, with the Southerners bravely defending their homes and sacred honor against violations from Yankee interference with their "states rights". I've addressed how bogus a notion that was in previous Confederate "Heritage" Month posts, to which I've linked indexes at end of this post.

The 1995 stamp series included the Harriet Tubman stamp featured here today. The Postal Service also produced a nicely-done book to accompany the series, with an introduction by historian James McPherson. It was titled The Civil War: A Collection of U.S. Commemorative Stamps 1861-1865, with no neo-Confederate "War Between the States" subtitle.

McPherson writes in the introduction:

Even more than the American Revolution, the Civil War has defined our national character. The violence and valor, and the nobility of the combatants' cause, each fighting to preserve a "sacred" truth, are enshrined in the American consciousness.

The flow of time over the past 130 years, however, allows us to reexamine a softened image, to see the broad contours with a new clarity, and to feel its human side with keener poignancy. An example of this perspective is Ken Burns' Civil War documentary narrated, in part, through the words of the men and women who experienced the war. Their voices speak to us not as Northerners or Southerners, but as Americans caught in a tragic tumult.

Now, James McPherson is a good historian whose entry in the Oxford series of books on American history, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (1988), written to be accessable to a mass audience without sacrificing scholarly quality, has been credited with sparking a much bigger markets for such "popular" histories. He is certainly no friend of Lost Cause pseudohistory.

But that passage just quoted, which presumably was targeted to be as little disturbing as possible for the widest kind of audience, gives some hints of why Lost Cause pseudohistory has as much resilence as it has enjoyed. I won't belabor his use of "national character", which surely he knows has not enjoyed much credibility as a concept among historians for decades. But I will say it's a hokey concept that promotes more fuzzy thinking than clarity of focus.

Popular interest in the Civil War tends to be focused heavily on the war itself, which includes the excellent Ken Burns documentary McPherson mentions there. When looking at the experience of individuals in the war, much of the attention is inevitably focused on battles and the hardships of war, as well as the personal tragedies,sufferings and hopes of the individuals "caught in a tragic tumult", as he puts it there.

But the causes and conflicts leading up to the war don't receive nearly as much attention in popular accounts. Which opens the door for Lost Cause advocates to promote their pseudohistorical narrative about the war, which emphasizes above all that it had nothing to do with slavery.

Ironically, the democratic tendency in history since the 1960s to focus on the experience of ordinary people and not just politicians and generals, also opens the door for Lost Cause spinners to obscure the reasons for the war. Look, a common argument of theirs runs, most Southerners fighting in the war didn't own slaves at all. How can you say they were fighting for slavery?

Most American soldiers in Iraq today don't own oil wells, either. But anyone who actually believes that war has nothing at all to do with oil probably needs to ease up on their OxyContin consumption.

James McPherson himself in For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (1997), which is based largely on original research into letters and other primary sources on the soldiers North and South. There was no military censorship on letters during the Civil War. Soldiers didn't write a lot about the causes of the war. But they didn't need to. Their families and friends to whom they were writing knew what those were.

But the armies fielded by both sides in the Civil War were probably the most literate armies the United States ever had, including today's. Nor were these "kids" for the most part. Many of the soldiers were in their twenties and thirties and were family men and active members of their communities. The preceding decade saw the most heated political debates in the history of the Republic. So even in pre-TV and pre-Internet days, it was hard not to hear about the major disputes over slavery. Soldiers also received newspaper in camp, and their letters indicated that there was intense interest among most of the soldiers when the latest news arrived. So they were informed about what was happening. And, as McPherson found in many of the letters from Southern soldiers, part of the Southerners idea of freedom was the freedom to one day own slaves themselves. The notion that Southern soldiers didn't think that slavery played any role in their cause is just bunk.

Index to Confederate "Heritage" Month postings 2004 05/02/04
Index to Confederate "Heritage" Month postings 2005 04/01/05
Index to Confederate "Heritage" Month postings 2006 04/01/06

Tags: civil war, confederate heritage month 2007, james mcpherson, lost cause, neo-confederates, slavery, us civil war