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.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2017, April 11: Missouri crisis as a turning point

I've learned a lot about the evolution of the slavery issue in the US from the work of William Freehling, particularly in his two-volume The Road to Disunion. In the first volume, Secessionists at Bay, 1776-1854 (1990), he writes about the Missouri crisis, which he here calls the Missouri Controversy:

According to the current conventional wisdom, the South gave up the attempt to abolish slavery after reformers' first real test. The Missouri Controversy of 1819-20 supposedly annihilated "Jeffersonian antislavery," with Thomas Jefferson himself slaying his offspring. Jefferson's 1820 letter after the Missouri Compromise to Congressman John Holmes is the supposed critical proof that the Sage of Monticello drew close to John C. Calhoun.

Jefferson's Holmes letter does reveal revised tactics. But this and other evidence hardly shows that southern apologists became warriors for slavery's perpetuation. Instead, the Missouri Controversy scared the Jeffersons towards new efforts to remove slaves from America.

I plan to discuss his analysis further in following posts.

But Freehling makes several points critical to understanding how the slavery issue played out in real time. The Missouri crisis was an inflection point in various ways. After that time, the typical justifications of slavery changed from the necessary evil kind of justification favored by Jefferson to the Calhounian defense of slavery as a good thing and the necessary foundation for white republican civilization. It also marked a turning point in which Northern Republicans and the remnants of the Federalist Party embraced emancipation as a partisan club to use against the southern Republicans and the Jacksonian Democrats north and south. And it marked a public outbreak of the real contradictions between democracy and slavery, and between democracy and the economic liberalism of the time. American slavery was a capitalist institution. And the defense of private property in the US of 1820 also meant the defense of private property in human flesh, which is what slavery was.

Andrew Jackson, man and symbol

"Our commitment has been, since the days of Andrew Jackson, to all those he called 'the humble members of society--the farmers, mechanics, and laborers.' On this foundation we have defined our values, refined our policies and refreshed our faith." - Edward Kennedy, Speech to the 1980 Democratic National Convention 08/12/1980

"President Obama is [the Tea Party's] target because the people have put him in his office and he stand in the way of the extremists. They are against him precisely because he's making progress. ... So they will say anything to tear down the President. But they are at war with more than President Obama. They are at war with President Andrew Jackson. That's how far back they want to go. They want to go back [to] the 1830s. They want to go back to before the Civil War, 'lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification,' to quote Martin Luther King, Jr. in his famous 'I have a dream' speech." - Sidney Blumenthal to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, 2010 (Oliver Darcy, Sid Blumenthal Unloaded on Tea Party in ‘Confidential’ Three-Page Memo to Hillary Clinton The Blaze 08/31/2015)

Andrew Jackson has gotten criticism from some liberals lately, partly with good cause. But for those of us not ready to surrender all the leading figures of early American history and its lasting heritage entirely to the conservatives, Jackson represents some not just important but critical in the American democratic tradition.

The site for the Hermitage, at Jackson's plantation home, where he and his wife Rachel are buried, currently gives this general description:

America during the Age of Jackson was a nation brimming with possibility and growing into a golden, young adulthood. Though born far from the wealth of the northern elite, Jackson was able to expand the powers of the President beyond any before him. The result was indelible changes in the government.

Though Jackson also fought hard to restore a nation of “We the People” and give voice to all those he represented as President, this expansion of democracy did not include everyone. Slavery remained a pervasive part of American society as did the continuing displacement of Native Americans. Opportunities for women and free blacks were still largely nonexistent under Jackson’s presidency.

Nevertheless, Jackson helped to inspire a uniquely American sense of promise and hope; the idea that anyone can succeed through hard work and natural ability, rather than through unearned power and privilege.

Chauncey DeVega, who is always worth listening to, refers us to this post from Werner Herzog's Bear, America Has Its Own Antecedents For Trump 08/31/2015.

And I like a lot about WHB's analysis. He gives a meaningful list of characteristics that establish a strong resemblance to what most people once recognized as fascism and the current edition of Donald Trump. Then he writes:

I tend to shy away from calling people fascists unless they are of the avowed Golden Dawn variety, mostly because it diverts political debate into obfuscating semantics. I also shy away a little bit from using that word in an American context. The fascist movements in Europe were innovative because they were on the Right, but based in a populist nationalism, rather than the old elites of the church, monarchy, and nobility. Those institutions don't exist in America, which is why extreme right wing populism has taken a slightly different form.

I like his caution on using the "fascism" label. And I also like his description of Trump's similarities to George Wallace.

But his description of The General (Jackson) is another question:

As I have written before, I think it all starts with Andrew Jackson. Jackson's white nationalism appealed directly to the mass of rural white men. He brazenly ignored the Supreme Court and pushed to deport the Cherokee to Oklahoma in a shameful ethnic cleansing. Trump's deportation advocacy ought to be seen in light of the Trail of Tears. Trump's immigration proposals come out of a belief that this is a white man's country, a basic principle of Jacksonianism. Jackson also set his sights on [the] elite, attacking the Second Bank of the United States, and acting contemptuous of those more established in Washington. Later Southern populists like Ben Tillman, who attacked elites while simultaneously enforcing white supremacy carried on the Jacksonian spirit until the end of the 19th century.

The previous piece he references is from the same blog, Andrew Jackson Still Lives 01/22/2015, in which he makes clear he sees Jackson as part of a conservative tradition that runs until today.

Here I want to make a few comments around the later post.

He calls it "a basic principle of Jacksonianism" that "this is a white man's country." True.

It's also true that for his rival John Quincy Adams "this is a white man's country." Despite his justifiably honored anti-slavery activity.

Daniel Webster, who so decisively shaped American conservatism, also believed "this is a white man's country." The Great Compromiser Henry Clay believed that America was "a white man's country." And Lord knows that's what John Calhoun believed!

But if we compare Jackson to the younger Adams, Jackson was indeed critical of "the elite" - and for very good reasons! And his Administration was far more interested in preserving the privileges and undemocratic power of the elite and its key institution, the Bank of the United States, which Jackson fought effectively. And defeated.

Just as he defeated the secessionism and treason of John Calhoun. In terms of the future of democracy and of America as a democratic nation, there's no question that Jackson was on the side of democracy against the treason of the "slavepower" in the Nullification Controversy.

In other words, I see WHB as indulging in anachronism here, judging Jackson's significance outside of the real historical context of his life and times. In terms of his achievements and significance, we have to look not just the fact that he shared the general conviction among white Americans in his day that "this is a white man's country." We have to look as well in the direction he was headed.

I could try to describe this consideration postmodern style by talking about the importance of the Jacksonian "narrative." But I'd prefer looking at it with more Hegel than Lyotard. If we look at Jackson as acting as the instrument of the World Spirit in moving forward the cause of freedom and democracy, he came with defects that other events and persons that Hegel saw playing that role, like the French Revolution and Napoleon.

To use a current instance of a leader, President Obama will likely be remembered as having pushed forward social progress with Obamacare and peace through his nuclear agreement with Iran. He will also be remembered for his terrible record on secrecy and civil liberties. And for his reckless and destructive interventions in Libya and Syria, even though he wound up taking less destructive actions than his opponents urged.

I suspect another reason Werner Herzog's Bear codes Jackson as a conservative and a predecessor of Donald Trump may be the influence of the historical narrative that sees the Hamiltonian tradition as the predecessor of modern progressive policies like the New Deal, while the Jeffersonian tradition represents a backward-looking, agrarian trend that led to modern segregationist states-rights conservatism. I'm not familiar with WHB's other work, so I'm guessing here.

But it's a historical narrative that I find deeply flawed.

The more relevant predecessor from the period around 1830 for today's rightwing demagoguery is the Anti-Masonic Party, effectively the original group of American crackpot conspiracy-theory political groups. The Encyclopædia Britannica article on the "Anti-Masonic Movement" as of this writing relates

It was the first American third party, the first political party to hold a national nominating convention, and the first to offer the electorate a platform of party principles.

The movement was ignited in 1826 by the mysterious disappearance of William Morgan, a bricklayer in western New York who supposedly had broken his vow of secrecy as a Freemason by preparing a book revealing the organization’s secrets. When no trace of Morgan could be discovered, rumours of his murder at the hands of Masons swept through New York and then into New England and the Mid-Atlantic states.

As Anti-Masonic candidates proved successful in state and local elections, politicians saw the issue’s vote-catching possibilities. Anti-Masonic newspapers flourished in the heated political atmosphere. In September 1831, the Anti-Masonic Party held a national convention in Baltimore, Md., nominated William Wirt for president, and announced a party platform condemning Masonry for its secrecy, exclusivity, and undemocratic character.

It drives me up the wall that our star pundits seem to think Richard Hofstadter and his famous 1964 article The Paranoid Style in American Politics (Harper's Nov 1964) is still the last word on contemporary American rightwing politics. But he's a great historian. And he wrote in that famous article:

The anti-Masonic movement of the late 1820s and the 1830s took up and extended the obsession with conspiracy. At first, this movement may seem to be no more than an extension or repetition of the anti-Masonic theme sounded in the outcry against the Bavarian Illuminati. But whereas the panic of the 1790s was confined mainly to New England and linked to an ultraconservative point of view, the later anti-Masonic movement affected many parts of the northern United States, and was intimately linked with popular democracy and rural egalitarianism. Although anti-Masonry happened to be anti-Jacksonian (Jackson was a Mason), it manifested the same animus against the closure of opportunity for the common man and against aristocratic institutions that one finds in the Jacksonian crusade against the Bank of the United States.

The anti-Masonic movement was a product not merely of natural enthusiasm but also of the vicissitudes of party politics. It was joined and used by a great many men who did not fully share its original anti-Masonic feelings. It attracted the support of several reputable statesmen who had only mild sympathy with its fundamental bias, but who as politicians could not afford to ignore it. Still, it was a folk movement of considerable power, and the rural enthusiasts who provided its real impetus believed in it wholeheartedly. [my emphasis]

The Anti-Mason radical rightwings conspiracists were anti-Jacksonian.

A useful perspective on Jackson and his movement comes from three historians in the American liberal tradition, Samuel Eliot Morrison, Henry Steele Commager (who was a big influence on my own thinking in college) and William Leuchtenburg in their A Concise History of the American Republic (1977). They are generally critical of him, claiming that he "was no champion of the 'common man'" - then continuing immediately to say "they [the common men] loved him because he proved that a man born in a log cabin could get rich and become President; and, perhaps most of all, because his victory at New Orleans transformed the War of 1812 from a rout to a glorious vindication of American valor." And they describe Jacksonianism as follows:

Jacksonian Democracy was a national movement in that it opposed disunion and knew no geographical limits; Jackson men in Maine and Louisiana uttered the same cliches. But it was anti-national in rejecting Clay's 'American System.' The Democracy [i.e., the Democratic Party] wanted roads, canals, and (in a few years) railroads to be chartered and aided by the states, but no Federal Government messing into the operations. Jacksonians spoke for the men on the make who resented government grants of special privileges to rival entrepreneurs and who distrusted the positive state. Opponents of artificial distinctions and advocates of greater popular participation in politics, the Jackson men identified themselves with the movement toward more equality. Yet they believed in equality only for white men ; they were far less charitable toward the Indian and the Negro than their 'aristocratic' foes. Jacksonian Democracy was not ' leveling' in the European sense, having no desire to pull down men of wealth to a common plane; but it wanted a fair chance for every man to level up. In the states, Jackson Democrats sometimes, but not invariably, favored free public education and a somewhat cautious humanitarianism, but dissociated themselves from most of the 'isms' of the period, such as abolitionism and feminism. In general, they shared that contempt for intellect which is one of the unlovely traits of democracy. There was no contact between political democrats like Jackson and democratic philosophers such as Emerson , and Old Hickory cared not a whit. The jackass as symbol of the Democratic party was first used by the Whigs as a satire on Jackson's supposed ignorance; the party not only joyfully accepted this emblem, but has retained it to this day.

The reference to distrusting "the positive state" is a bit of an anachronism of its own. And at least an echo of the image of a forward-looking Alexander Hamilton who opposed backward, parochial Jeffersonianism. Although Commager was a huge admirer of Thomas Jefferson.

But especially considering their account is unenthusiastic about Jackson, that paragraph gives a idea of why Jackson became a symbol of progressive, democratic politics.

I just saw this today from the Hermitage site: "Jackson’s pet parrot, Poll, attended his funeral service, but had to be removed after he started cursing at the mourners."

This got me thinking about what the parrot might have been saying. I imagine him mimicking Jackson's voice and saying things like, ******* that rotten *********** John Calhoun! I should have hung that ******* *******!!

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.

John Calhoun and the Tea Party Republicans

Richard Sale has some thoughtful observations about the Fort Sumter Republicans in Concurrent Majority Sic Semper Tyrannis 10/09/2013.

John Calhoun (1782-1850) was the political and intellectual godfather of secession and the Civil War, one of the true villains of American history. And I'm talking Dick Cheney levels of villainy. He has the reputation of being a significant political theorist, largely on the dubious virtues of his snooze-inducing books, A Disquisition on Government and A Discourse on the Constitution and Government of the United States.

John Caldwell Calhoun (1782-1850), by some reports later reincarnated as Dick Cheney

Gerald Capers in his article on Calhoun in the Encyclopædia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite (2012) calls him, not without ambiguity, "a genius unto himself." (The Britannica is my baseline for stolid respectable opinion.) "Calhoun's two books on government, published posthumously, and his many cogent speeches in Congress have gained him a reputation as one of the country's foremost original political theorists. He has been credited with preceding Karl Marx in advancing an economic interpretation of history." Richard Hofstadter famously portrayed Calhoun as "the Marx of the Master Class."

And Calhoun certainly was influential. But however sophisticated or creative his political ideas were in some kind of larger picture, their focus was preserving the institution of slavery in the American South. Sale explains his theory and how it broadly relates to current events - oddly without the word "slavery" appearing in his post, though race does - as follows:

It was John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, who in 1833, invented the idea of the "concurrent majority," the strategy being used by the Tea Party today. As a person, Calhoun was a dour, humorless intractable man. He was entirely addicted to complex abstractions. His thought had a white-hot and relentless intensity. He would wander about and mutter, "This indeed is a real crisis." As he was dying, a friend asked him to sum up his life, and he replied, "I see nothing to repeat and little to correct," practically the same words President George W. Bush used in describing his presidency. But make no mistake and don’t be distracted. Intellectually, Bush wasn't within shouting distance of Calhoun.

As a thinker, Calhoun was concerned about the power of section versus section, obsessed by the waning power of the South which he felt was being increasingly overwhelmed by the growth of the North. As a result, Calhoun pronounced the South "a fixed and hopeless minority." In other words, the white people of the South were being denied the means to make their power nationally felt, thanks to the majorities of the North. If you think of the shrinking numbers of white people that will live in America in ten years, the growing number of Asians, Hispanics, gays, etc. the "white" Right Wing Republicans and Tea Party people would probably say the same thing about America today that whites in America "are a fixed and hopeless minority." Think of the eve of last year’s election when Bill O'Reilly cried out in anguish that America wasn't "white" any more. That observation encapsulates the major Tea Party fear.

The concept of the concurrent majority was a device to boost certain interests at the expense of others. We have all read items that have highlighted the role of Right Wing billionaires who are funding and supporting certain candidates who are working to restrict weaken and hamper the rights of minorities to prevent them from becoming majority voices. To the Tea Party, any minority that enjoys any degree of majority support is an enemy. We usually think of minorities as a group laboring to become part of the majority. A Virginia politician, William H. Roane, in the 1850s said that he thought that chief right of minorities was that of "freely, peaceably and legally converting themselves into a majority whenever they can." To prevent certain rising minorities becoming part of the national majority is the aim of the Tea Party program.

The brilliant American historian, Richard Hofstadter, said that the concurrent majority was designed specifically "to protect a vested interest of considerable power.["] [my emphasis]

Capers describes the Calhounian theory in its original historical context this way:

In the summer of 1831 he openly avowed his belief in nullification, a position that he had anonymously advanced three years earlier in the essay South Carolina Exposition and Protest. Each state was sovereign, Calhoun contended, and the Constitution was a compact among the sovereign states. Therefore, any one state (but not the United States Supreme Court) could declare an act of Congress unconstitutional. The proponents of the nullified measure, according to the theory, would then have to obtain an amendment to the Constitution — which required a two-thirds vote of each house of Congress and ratification by three-fourths of the states — confirming the power of Congress to take such action.

Although the tariff was the specific issue in the nullification crisis of 1832–33, what Calhoun was actually fighting for was protection of the South's "peculiar institution," slavery, which he feared someday might be abolished by a Northern majority in Congress. The tariff, Calhoun put forth in one of his public letters, is "of vastly inferior importance to the great question to which it has given rise…the right of a state to interpose, in the last resort, in order to arrest an unconstitutional act of the General Government."

Hofstadter in From Calhoun to the Dixiecrats Social Research 16/2 (June 1949) noted an important and revealing feature of Calhoun's eventual conception:

Actually, the South had little recourse except to the threat of leaving the Union in order to gain a formal constitutional guarantee of the concurrent majority. Calhoun's final version of this device was a dual executive; each section was to elect one member, each member was to have veto power. This concession could be won, he reminded southerners, only if they abandoned internal party division and manifested complete solidarity and militancy.

This would presumably guarantee the ultimate in the bipartisanship that our star political commentators in the US today cherish so much.

Richard Current in his wonderful 1963 biography, John C. Calhoun, reported that the defender of slavery had a high opinion of his own significance: "Obviously Calhoun ... thought of himself as the Newton, the Galileo, of political science." (p. 110)

But he also writes of Calhoun's political theory:

Probably he was the most systematic thinker among the active American politicians of his time. His argument was, and remains, persuasive. Once his assumptions are granted, his reasoning proceeds pretty well from one step to another, and his conclusions follow almost, but not quite irresistibly. Thus his basic postulates regarding sovereignty lad to his conception of the constitutional compact, and this in turn to his position on nullification, secession, and slavery in the territories.

Even if his assumption be accepted, however, his argument reveals gaps, inconsistencies, contradictions, and downright errors once it is closely examined. If his assumptions are challenged, the whole structure begins to shake. And if they are rejected, it falls in a heap. (P. 112)

This lack of coherence and cynical flexibility in argument is something his spiritual heirs share.

Calhoun's theory revolved around the defense of slavery. Period. As Current puts it, "He was taking a concept that had been invented to defend the divine right of kings and he was using it to defend the divine right of slaveowners." (p. 113) And his theory that ostensibly was meant to protect the rights of minorities, the only minority he was focused on protecting was that composed of white slaveowners. The minority of black Americans, slaves and free, was not one Calhoun had the least interest in protecting. Just the opposite. As Capers puts it, "Although Calhoun is remembered as the defender of minorities, he had no use for any minority — certainly not labourers or abolitionists — except the Southern one. His solution to the problem of the preservation of the Union was to give the South everything it demanded." Hofstadter in 1949 observed:

... although Calhoun has been frequently hailed as a pluralist, his political analysis was essentially dualistic~ So long as he could talk in terms of the protection of "the minority," against the tyranny of "the majority," his ex parte pleading for the southern cause could masquerade plausibly as a universal concern for political restraint, balance, and the general good.

It's pretty obvious how that kind of thinking would be attractive to today's Fort Sumter Republican Party. The whole point of his political theory was to give the white slaveholding minority of the South a veto power over anything and everything the national government might want to do. Which is what today's Republican Party is trying to do in the current government shutdown/debt ceiling fight. Hofstadter wrote of the Dixiecrats in 1949:

Their essential strategy hinges upon the effective marshaling of a minority [pro-segregation Southern whites] in a solid bloc, but they must condemn the same strategy when it is adopted by enfranchised and politically self-conscious Negroes. Thus Governor [Fielding] Wright [of Mississippi], in his speech accepting the vice-presidential nomination of the Dixiecratic party declared: "Government by bloc, by vociferous minorities, is a cowardly thing. It is a disgrace to America. It paves the way for ultimate dictatorship or socialism."

1947 campaign poster for Fielding Wright (1895-1956)

As Current explained in 1963, Calhoun's race-based strategies of resistance found their true heirs in segregation and its strategy of massive resistance to integration, i.e., to adopting the American form of government:

Wherever a White Citizen's Council meets in Mississippi, or a similar group in another of the Southern states, there is to be sought, nowadays, the true spirit of Calhoun. It is to be sought in the activities of conservative - or reactionary - Southern whites. The way they use the lobby, the bloc, the party constitution, and other political devices can be considered as essentially Calhounian.

These white Southerners now face problem quite similar to the one that Calhoun faced more than a hundred years ago. They talk of maintaining white supremacy and he talked of protecting slavery. The problem remains that of defending, against external attack, institution based upon a belief in human inequality. (p. 148; italics in original)

Hofstadter in 1949 emphasized the reactionary nature of Calhoun's basic political theory: "Although Calhoun was notable for his realism as a social thinker, there was little place in his philosophy for social change."

Tags: john calhoun, republican party, tea party, segregation, white racism

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2013, April 12: Again with Madison and nullification

The Nullification Controversy (or Nullification Crisis) of 1832-3 was an important moment in the development of the conflict between slave and free states which eventually led to the Civil War.

An older US history text, A Concise History of the American Republic (1977) by Samuel Eliot Morison, Henry Steele Commager and William Leuchtenburg recalled that it was one of two major events that secured Andrew Jackson's reputation: "Andrew Jackson's high place in history derives from the way he confronted the two great issues of his presidency: the nillification that threated the Union and the war on the Bank of the United States that arrayed the Jacksonians against the 'money power.'"

As to Jackson's Presidency, his successful sponsorship of the Indian Removal Act also counts as one of his major achievements, and certainly serves to qualify his deservedly "high place in history." The two acts that Morison et al mention greatly advanced the cause of democracy and equality; the Indian Removal Act is a blot on the history of American democracy. That Act is a different kind of embarrassment for neo-Confederates, though. It was, even more so than the Nullification Crisis, a case in which the vote split along sectional lines and was not about slavery. However, in this case the Southerners (including Jackson) were supporting a measure that overrode states rights, a irony that the opponents of the bill were more than happy to point out.

James Madison, 4th President of the United States and opponent of secession

But my focus here again is on the Nullification Controversy and James Madison's reaction to it, some of which I discussed in yesterday's post. Morison et al quote Madison at the end of this summary of the nullification theory elaborate by John C. Calhoun, who with this act began his career of treason to the United States:

Calhoun, once an enthusiastic nationalist, now believed that he had made a grave mistake, for protection had turned out to be an instrument of class and sectional plunder. In a document called the South Carolina Exposition, approved in 1828 by the legislature of that state, he set forth a new doctrine - nullification, though his authorship was secret. The Constitution, he asserted, was established not by the American people, but by thirteen sovereign states. Sovereign in 1787, they must still be sovereign in 1828. Since the Federal Government was merely the agent of the states, a state convention, the immediate organ of state sovereignty, could take measures to prevent the enforcement within state limits of any Act of Congress it deemed unconstitutional. Calhoun, however, recognized one constitutional authority superior to the interpretation of a single state, an interpretative federal amendment adopted by three-fourths of the states. Under the nullification doctrine, South Carolina insisted on the right to disobey the laws of the Union while claiming the privileges of the Union. Calhoun's sincerity and intelligence cannot be doubted, but as the aged Madison declared, 'For this preposterous and anarchical pretension there is not a shadow of countenance in the Constitution.' [my emphasis]

In an earlier work, The Oxford History of the American People (1965), Morison had described the Exposition's Calhounian political theory this way: "Nullification was based on two postulates: the common assertion that the Federal Constitution was a compact between states, and the theory of indestructible sovereignty."

The pretext and public justification of South Carolina's act of defiance was the Tariff of 1828, which opponents described as the Tariff of Abominations.

But the underlying theme, the real basis for the nullification attempt of Calhoun's theories to justify it and otherwise defend slaveholders against the will of the democratic majority, was slavery. After Jackson had ended the crisis in early 1833 with the Force Act clearly establishing federal authority to enforce the laws in South Carolina and a compromise tariff more to South Carolina's liking, he predicted that the "next pretext" for such an attempt "will be the Negro, or slavery question."

Madison also recognized that some compromise on the tariff had to be part of the solution, though he was bitterly opposed to the nullification doctrine and South Carolina's backing of it. The tariff had been in part a political ploy, as Morison et al describe it, "It was a politicians' tariff, concerned mainly with the manufacture of a President [in the 1928 election]. Pro-Jackson congressmen had introduced a bill with higher duties on raw materials than on manufactures, hoping that New England votes would help defeat it and the onus fall on [then-President John Quincy] Adams, but the strategy misfired, to the South's chagrin." Proposing something you don't actually want passed can be a tricky business!

As Madison put it it in a letter to Henry Clay of 03/22/1832:

I fear that without alleviations separating the more moderate from the more violent opponents, very serious effects are threatened. Of these the most formidable & not the least probable [would] be a Southern Convention; the avowed object of some, and the unavowed object of others, whose views are, perhaps, still more to be dreaded. The disastrous consequences of disunion, obvious to all will no doubt be a powerful check, on its partisans; but such a Convention, characterized as it [would] be by selected talents, ardent zeal & the confidence of those represented [would] not be easily stopped in its career; especially as many of its members, tho' not carrying with them particular aspirations for the honors, &c &c presented to ambition on a new political theatre, would find them germinating in such a hotbed.

(That and the other excerpts quoted here are from The Writings of James Madison Vol. 9, Gaillar Hunt, ed.; 1910.)

Henry Clay would be the sponsor of the compromise tariff that Congress would pass and Jackson sign a year later.

Madison recognized the legitimacy of the right of resistance to unjust authority and the right of revolution, of course. But he emphatically rejected the nullifiers' argument that the Tariff of 1828, their nominal cause, represented anything close to such a jutification:

The idea that a Constitution which has been so fruitful of blessings, and a Union aomitted to be the only guardian of the peace, liberty and happiness of the people of the States comprizing it should be broken up and scattered to the winds without greater than any existing causes is more painful than words can express. It is impossible that this can ever be the deliberate act of the people, if the value of the Union be calculated by the consequences of disunion. (Letter to Nicholas Trist, May 1832))

In a letter to C.E. Haynes of 08/27/1832, Madison argued against Calhoun's theory on the nature of the compact among the states:

And here it must be kept in mind that in a compact like that of the U. S. as in all other compacts, each of the parties has an equal right to decide whether it has or has not been violated and made void. If one contends that it has, the others have an equal right to insist on the validitv and execution of it. ...

It is true that in extreme cases of oppression justifying a resort to original rights, and in which passive obedience & non-resistence cease to be obligatory under any Government, a s1ngle State or any part of a State might rightfully cast off the yoke. What would be the condition of the Union, and the other members of it, if a single member could at will renounce its connexion and erect itself, in the midst of them, into an independent and foreign power; its geographical relations remaining the same, and all the social & political relations, with the others converted into those of aliens and of rivals, not to say enemies, pursuing separate & conflicting interests? Should the seceding State be the only channel of foreign commerce for States having no commercial ports of their own, such as that of Connecticut, N. Jersey, & North Carolina, and now particularly all the inland States, we know what might happen from such a state of things by the effects of it under the old Confederation among States bound as they were in friendly relations by that instrument [i.e., the Articles of Confederation].

And although South Carolina was nominally threatening to nullify federal laws while staying in the Union, Madison knew that secession was implied in the arguments:

I partake of the wonder that the men you name should view secession in the light mentioned. The essential difference between a free Government and Governments not free, is that the former is founded in compact, the parties to which are mutually and equally bound by it. Neither of them therefore can have a greater right to break off from the bargain, than the other or others have to hold them to it. (Letter to Nicholas Trist, 12/23/1832)

He expanded on that idea in a letter to Alexander Rives of January 1833:

The characteristic distinction between free Governments, and Governments not free is that the former are founded on compact, not between the Government and those for whom it acts, but among the parties creating the Government. Each of these being equal, neither can have more right to say that the compact has been violated and dissolved than every other has to deny the fact and to insist on the execution of the bargain. An inference from the doctrine that a single state has a right to secede at will from the rest is that the rest would have an equal right to secede from it; in other words, to turn it, against its will, out of its union with them. Such a doctrine would not, till of late, have been palatable anywhere, and nowhere less so than where it is now most contended for.

These arguments Madison is making about the government compact were based in classical liberal theories of government.

Calhoun's idea of indestructible sovereignty made the novel assertion that "sovereignty" was absolute, that if a state was sovereign in its sphere of authority, that no other sovereignty could be above, including that of the federal government. Here in a letter to Sen. William Cabell Rives of 03/12/1833 who had recently given a Senate speech against it, he indicates how little such a notion had occurred to people before, and how patently ridiculous it struck him to be:

[Your speech] takes a very able and enlightening view of its subject. I wish it may have the effect of reclaiming to the doctrine & language held by all from the birth of the Constitution, & till very lately by themselves, those who now Contend that the States have never parted with an Atom of their sovereignty; and consequently that the Constitutional band which holds them together, is a mere league or partnership, without any of the characteristics of sovereignty or nationality.

It seems strange that it should be necessary to disprove this novel and nullifying doctrine; and stranger still that those who deny it should be denounced as Innovators, heretics & Apostates.

And in that letter he states even more clearly how obvious that secessionist tendencies are at work:

The conduct of S. Carolina has called forth not only the question of nullification; but the more formidable one of secession. It is asked whether a State by resuming the sovereign form in which it entered the Union, may not of right withdraw from it at will. As this is a simple question whether a State, more than an individual, has a right to violate its engagements, it would seem that it might be safely left to answer itself. But the countenance given to the claim shows that it cannot be so lightly dismissed. The natural feelings which laudably attach the people composing a State, to its authority and importance, are at present too much excited by the unnatural feelings, with which they have been inspired at' their brethren of other States, not to expose them, to the danger of being misled into erroneous views of the nature of the Union and the interest they have in it. One thing at least seems to be too clear to be questioned; that whilst a State remains within the Union it cannot withdraw its citizens from the operation of the Constitution & laws of the Union. In the event of an actual secession without the Consent of the Co-States, the course to be pursued by these involves questions painful in the discussion of them. God grant that the menacing appearances, which obtruded it may not be followed by positive occurrences requiring the more painful task of deciding them!

And in a draft letter from sometime in 1833, he addressed Calhoun's notion that special state conventions - like the ones that endorsed secession in 1860-61 - were a uniquely valid expression of the popular will, using the term "popular assemblages". And he also addressed the secessionists' anti-democracy attacks on government by the majority (which at this time still meant a majority of white men, and as Madison even notes in the draft, there were still property requirements for voting in many places):

You justly take alarm at the new doctrine that a majority [Government] is of all other [Government] the most oppressive. The doctrine strikes at the root of Republicanism, and if pursued into its consequences, must terminate in absolute monarchy, with a standing military force; such alone being impartial between its subjects, and alone capable of overpowering majorities as well as minorities. ...

The history of the ancient Republics, and those of a more modern date, had demonstrated the evils incident to popular assemblages, so quickly formed, so susceptible of contagious passions, so exposed to the misguidance of eloquent & ambitious leaders; and so apt to be tempted by the facility of forming interested majorities, into measures unjust and oppressive to the minor parties.

As odd as it seems now, the idea of a "standing military force" of any significant size in 1833 was considered to be in itself an anti-democratic thing.

Even after the South Carolina controversy was settled, Madison continued to see the secessionist sentiment as a threat to the Constitution and democratic government. In a letter to Edward Coles of 08/29/1834, he wrote, "On the other hand what [could] more dangerous than Nullification, or more evident than the progress it continues to make, either in its original shape or in the disguises it assumes. Nullification has the effect of putting powder under the Constitution & Union, and a match in the hand of every party, to blow them up at pleasure." And he saw where the alignment of the slave states with the Calhounian doctrine could lead:

It is not probable that this offspring of the discontents of S. Carolina, will ever approach success, in a majority of the States. But a susceptibility of the contagion in the Southern States is visible; and the danger is not to be concealed that the sympathies arising from known causes, and the inculcated impression of a permanent incompatibility of interests between the South & the North, may put it in the power of popular leaders aspiring to the highest stations, and despairing of success on the Federal theatre, to unite the South, on some critical occasion, in a course that will end in creating a new theatre of great tho' inferior extent. In pursuing this course, the first and most obvious step is nullification; the next secession; & the last, a farewell separation. How near was this course being lately exemplified? and the danger of its recurrence in the same, or some other quarter, may be increased by an increase of restless aspirants, and by the increasing impracticability of retaining in the Union a large & cemented section against its will. [my emphasis]

Madison was annoyed by the kind of criticisms that some opponents of slavery were delivering against the South. But he was clearly unsympathetic, to put it mildly, to the secessionists using it as an excuse. Note here that he identifies slavery as the great dividing issue:

The positive advantages of the Union would alone endear it to those embraced by it; but it ought to be still more endeared by the consequences of disunion, in the jealousies & collisions of Commerce, in the border wars, pregnant with others, and soon to be engendered by animosities between the slaveholding, and other States, in the higher toned [Governments] especially in the Executive branch ["higher toned" here had a positive connotation], in the military establishments provided [against] external danger, but convertible also into instruments of domestic usurpation, in the augmentations of expence, and the abridgment, almost to the exclusion of taxes on consumption (the least unacceptable to the people) by the facility of smuggling among communities locally related as would be the case. Add to all these the prospect of entangling alliances with foreign powers multiplying the evils of internal origin. (Letter to Daniel Drake 01/12/1835) [my emphasis]

Maidson died in 1836 at the age of 85. So we can fairly say that he was very concerned about this issue up until the end of his life. In other words, he went out still fighting against the poisonous slaveowners' ideology of secession.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2013, james madison, john calhoun, nullification controversy

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2012, April 30: Once more with John Calhoun and "Calhounery"

We'll end up the Confederate "Heritage" Month series for this year on a somewhat lighter note.

I've posted more than once this month about John Calhoun, his life, his political theory, his reactionary political heritage. As it happens while deciding what to use as the final post, I came across an article by the humorist Roy Blunt Jr. with the title, "Where's the Big Idea?" and the eye-catching subtitle, "Communism didn't originate in South Carolina for a very good reason" The Oxford American Winter 2005.

Blount relates how an interviewer "took me severely to task for having written ... that Southern culture had not produced much in the way of abstract thinking." The interviewer offered John Calhoun as a prime example of the contrary.

Blount was suprised, because he mainly knew Calhoun from his theory of nullification. "That seemed to me a strategem, rather than an idea in the large, ethereal egghead sense," he says. But he started doing come research on the old traitor.

He came across some of the same things that came up here this month, including Calhoun's class theories that led Richard Hofstadter to label him "the Karl Marx of the master class."

But I read up on Calhoun, and learned that he was regarded widely - not just in the South - as the most brilliant political philosopher of his day. Personally, he struck people as a thinking machine. Varina Howell Davis, wife of Jefferson Davis, called him "a mental and moral abstraction." He was haggard and unhealthy-looking, too, so who am I to question his bona fides? A century later, some political historians argued that Calhoun's critique of Northem capitalism anticipated the thinking of Karl Marx. Maybe that's why Southem intellectualism ground to a halt: the twentieth century would have made even less sense if communism had been from South Carolina, for the wealthy, and called Calhounery.

He definitely has a point. In fact, instead of using the phrase "the theology of the Great God Free Market", I may shorten it to just "Calhounery". That's a word that should be an active part of the American political vocabulary.

Blount still wasn't convinced about abstract thinking in the South, though:

Eurocentric philosophy has come to realize only fairly recently, and with great aha's and alarums, that objective rationality is not the default position of the human mind, much less the bedrock of human affairs. In the South, nobody ever thought it was. The South doesn't produce ideas, it produces rhetoricians, yarn-spinners, visionaries, musicians, demagogues ... all sorts of people Plato would have expelled from his Republic.

Blount comes up with an angle on one of the few things I liked about Robert E. Lee:

Consider Robert E. Lee's most famous remark, as he watched his troops win overwhelmingly at Fredericksburg, slaughtering bluecoats by the thousands: "It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it."

A great utterance. But when you think about it, what does it mean? Was General Lee saying that if war were less terrible it would be worse, because we'd get too attached to it? A more logical, proactive utterance would have been, "Boys, war doesn't get any better than this, and it's still too terrible. Let's quit." But of course that wouldn't have done. (How often, in real-life situations, has sweet reason done?) The only thing I can figure is that Lee was warning us against big-time college football.

Again, he has a point!

But in the end, he decided John Calhoun was what blogger Charlie Pierce might call a colossal dick (though Pierce reserves that label for Rick Santorum):

In Virginia a while ago, I came upon a many-volumed encyclopedia of Southern
history printed in 1909. It said that John C. Calhoun "was upholding the rights of the Southern people against the assaults of the abolitionists. The charges made by the latter against the system of slavery he denounced as false. On the other hand, he never grew weary in the work of telling how the Southern people were generously lifting upward the entire body of negro slaves to a higher and nobler plane of life."

On the other hand? What's "on the other hand" about that? Sounds like two sides of the same hand to me. But then "the one hand, the other hand" doesn't make any sense unless the hands are connected by a particular body, and particular bodies tend to be partial to themselves. The body in this case was that of "the Southern people," slaves not being considered, even after forty-four years of retrospect, to be part of that category. We know better than that, now; and heaven help us for what we don't know better than, yet.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2012, john calhoun, robert e lee, slavery, white racism

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2012, April 23: John Calhoun and later reactionaries

Today we have another quote from Richard Nelson Current's "John C. Calhoun, Philosopher of Reaction" The Antioch Review 3/2 (Summer, 1943). This one connects the thinking of the godfather of secession to rightwing groups of more contemporary status in 1943. After noting that some defenders of slavery like Jefferson Davis and George Fitzhugh were more crass in their view that the master himself, Current writes:

But it is the spirit of Calhoun, not that of his more forthright followers, which lives on. It is a spirit that may be about to materialize in new and startling forms. Now, if ever, is the time for right-wing Republicans to join with Bourbon Democrats in the sort of reactionary alliance that Calhoun envisaged. The shibboleths of these allies will be not Nullification, indeed, but certainly State Rights; not the Four Freedoms exactly, but Liberty with the connotations it had for Calhoun and for the American Liberty League. The real objects of their attack will be the social controls which liberals will seek to maintain in the interests of world peace, and the democratic aspirations which have been let slip with the cry of havoc but which cannot be chained up again with the dogs of war. The leaders of the new movement will no doubt point with pride to Thomas Jefferson. But the Sage of Monticello is not their man. Let them look, instead, to the political metaphysician of South Carolina, John C. Calhoun.

Today, we see that alliance between what in 1943 were Southern Democrats and conservative Northern Republican fully realized in the Republican Party. It took a long time. But they have finally achieved it.

And, yes, when the Tea Partiers talk about the Founders, it's John Calhoun on whose thinking they draw, far more than that of actual Founders like Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. Yes, Andrew Jackson actually fought in the Revolutionary War, so he counts as a Founder!

Tags: confederate heritage month 2012, john calhoun, slavery, white racism

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2012, April 22: John Calhoun on slavery and class struggle

"The Southern States are an aggregate, in fact, of communities, not of individuals. Every plantation is a little community, with the master at its head, who concentrates in himself the united interests of capital and labor, of which he is the common representative." So said John Calhoun, leader and theoretician of the Southern slaveowners.

It was Calhoun's formulation of the nature of class conflict in the United States and his attempts to apply its lessons to the politics of defending slavery that led historian Richard Hofstadter to label Calhoun "the Marx of the Master Class" in his 1948 book, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It.

Richard Nelson Current looked at Calhoun's theories of class conflict in "John C. Calhoun, Philosopher of Reaction" The Antioch Review 3/2 (Summer, 1943). He explains that Calhoun consistently saw his role as a defender of the wealthiest: the bankers and industrialists of the North, the slaveowners of the South. Especially the slaveowners of the South.

One of the arguments made by neo-Confederates in pursuit of their Holy Grail pseudohistorical point that slavery was not a cause of the Civil War is that there was a rivalry between the industrialists of the North and the planters of the South.

Which is true. Except it's thin sophistry as an argument that slavery was not involved in causing the war. The conflict was between a Northern capitalism based on free labor and a Southern capitalism based on a plantation economy operating on slave labor. As Lincoln said in the 1862 quote I used in the April 20 post, "without the institution of slavery ... the war could not have an existence."

Calhoun tried to get Northern capitalists to understand that they had a stake in supporting the slavery system in the South. And the core of his argument to them was that they had to fear a workers' revolt, while the South did not. And therefore they should make common cause with the slaveowners in supporting and extending the slavery system.

Current looks at some of the ways in which Calhoun as a political and social theorist seemed to share some of the assumptions that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were developing at the same time in Europe:

Historians have completely overlooked the key to Calhoun's political philosophy. That key is a concept of the class struggle. Before Calhoun, other Southern thinkers, notably James Madison and John Taylor of Caroline, had given expression to more or less well developed ideas of the conflict of social classes, for this was a notion familiar enough to a generation of Americans brought up largely on the history of ancient Greece and Rome. But these others took a liberal view, John Taylor, for one, favoring co-operation of farmers and artisans against their mutual enemy, the moneyed power. Calhoun was strictly the reactionary. Unlike the others, moreover, he used a terminology and treatment which in many respects anticipated the later "scientific" approach of Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx. [my emphasis]

Calhoun's class-solidarity argument was based on the planters' propaganda image of slavery as being a friendly paternalistic system with happy workers in the form of human chattel. The social forces producing a potential apocalyptic class struggle in the North simply did not operate in the South, according to his line of argument:

Presenting as he did a common ground for planter-capitalist collaboration against the class enemy, Calhoun intended his theory not merely as a bogey with which to frighten the manufacturers into yielding on the sectional issues of the day. Anyhow, he was not so naive as to suppose that his words, by themselves, could induce the capitalists to see the light. "That any force of argument can change public opinion ... ," he wrote in 1831, "I do not expect; but I feel assured that the coming confusion and danger, which I have long foreseen, will." Though the revolutionary movements then under way in Europe failed to have the repercussions which he anticipated for the United States, the time of confusion and danger finally seemed at hand when the financial crisis of 1834 beset the nation. Calhoun now persuaded himself that his doctrines were rapidly growing popular among the well-to-do in the North. Thousands were beginning to look to the South for protection not only against the "usurpation" of Andrew Jackson, but also against the "needy and corrupt" among their own population. "They begin to feel," Calhoun congratulated himself, "that they have more to fear from their own people, than we from our slaves." A year later, though the financial crisis had passed without fulfilling his expectations, he still nourished a hope that the capitalists would be converted sooner or later through fear of a mass uprising. [my emphasis]

Calhoun understood Andrew Jackson's brand of politics as representing the interests of those "needy and corrupt" grumblers in the North, despite Jackson's being a slaveowner and Southerner himself. And he was correct in that assumption.

Current also found other commonalities between the theories of John Calhoun and Karl Marx:

He started, as Marx and Engels were also to do, with John Locke's so-called labor theory of value. ...

Calhoun anticipated a number of the other Marxist doctrines. Among these were the following: (1) the eventual division of society into only two classes, capitalist and proletarian; (2) the gradual expropriation of the bulk of the population by the capitalists, so that the propertied would become fewer and fewer and the property-less more and more numerous; and (3) the ultimate impoverishment of the masses to a bare subsistence level.

My focus in this post is on describing Calhoun's framing of the class conflicts of his time in the US, not so much on the question of similarities between Calhoun's political theories and those of Marx. Current doesn't suggest that Marx' work directly influenced Calhoun. Calhoun died in 1950; The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels was published in 1848. Calhoun and other pro-slavery intellectuals were certainly aware of the Revolutions of 1848 in Europe. But, to put it very briefly, we're mostly talking here about Calhoun drawing conclusions from ideas that were "in the air" at the time. What we now know as economics today frames issues in market terms of prices and demands, following the "neo-classical" economics of the late nineteenth century. Economics, known as political economy is Calhoun's day, focused on production relations. So concepts like what Current describes as "John Locke's so-called labor theory of value" and David Ricardo's idea of an iron law of wages that would push the pay of industrial workers to subsistence levels were part of the general intellectual property of the "political economy" of the time.

There was also some general understanding of classes in the sense that Calhoun talked about them. In the United States, the concept of industrialists and planters as classes, or of laborers and farmers as classes, was not a exotic one. Nor is it strange in itself that Calhoun predicted a negative future for Northern capitalism. The Northern and Southern brands of capitalist business organization took very different forms in North and South, and they were in conflict. Calhoun had incentive to paint the dimmest possible picture of Northern capitalism and its fate. The few socialists and utopian thinkers of Calhoun's time didn't have to dig up their own criticisms of the existing capitalist system North or South. Northerners and Southerners were eagerly pointing out the evils of the existing system - in the other section of the country.

That an essentially reactionary thinker like Calhoun would point out the liklihood of a clash between Northern industrial workers and Northern business owners also has its parallels in Europe. According to Ernst Benz, the man responsible for introducing the word "proletariat" into German from French, a term that came to be heavily associated with the socialist movement, was one of Germany's most prominent reactionary philosophers, Franz von Baader. (Ernst Benz, "Franz von Baaders Gedanken über den 'Proletair'" Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte 2/1948) Benedikt Franz Xaver von Baader (1765-1841) was a religious-minded Catholic philosopher. Lenz calls him the first social theorist from the German lands who occupied himself with the "social problem" of the new industrial working class. His political activity largely consisted of advice to monarchist regimes and to the Churches to come up with ameliorative reforms based on Christian principles before the workers came to prefer a non-religious, materialist revolutionary approach. Benz treats Baader as a conservative, but he is also commonly classified as a counterrevolutionary thinker, i.e., a reactionary opponent to the democratic and human rights ideals of the French and American Revolutions.

Based on his observations of the French Revolution of 1830 and also of conditions among the workers of England, Baader also concluded that the new working class would produce not only a political but a social revolution if trends continued as they were. But he was terrified of the prospect and wanted urgently to head it off, similarly to John Calhoun's framing of the issue. Benz in that article discusses several ways in which Von Baader's analysis of the social situation in Europe also anticipated that of Marx in coming years, a reminder of how many of these ideas were "in the air" during that period.

Calhoun was not an academic, but a politician. His ideas about class struggle were ones he used in his political goal of defending slavery:

... Calhoun was interested less in composing a well rounded statement of the theory than in using it for the practical purpose of defending the property of the planters.

On behalf of the planter class he appealed again and again to fellow conservatives among the bankers and manufacturers of the North. As each great sectional issue came to a head between 1828 and 1850, he was ready with a new instalment of his class-struggle argument.

And his position was taken up by others:

After Calhoun's death some of the apologists for a solid, proslavery South went much farther than he had gone. Jefferson Davis, horrified at the spread of strikes throughout the free world, made more explicit the parallel between abolitionism and socialism as twin attacks upon property. George Fitzhugh took a very different but even more extreme stand. In his Sociology for the South, or the Failure of Free Society, published at Richmond in 1854, he admitted the accuracy and justice of the socialist case against capitalism but asserted that the socialists overlooked the need for a master at the head of each of their ideal communities - a need which the Southern plantation system, or something like it, alone could meet. Fitzhugh praised slavery as the only workable form of socialism and urged the whole world to adopt it, at once, as the sole cure for class conflict and the other ills of competitive society!

Tags: confederate heritage month 2012, john calhoun, slavery, white racism

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 21: John Calhoun, political theorist

John Calhoun of South Carolina was the godfather of secession and the patron saint of the post-Civil War violent overthrown of the democratic Reconstruction state government, Jim Crow laws and segregationism.

John C. Calhoun (1782-1850)
"I never saw any one who so completely gave me the idea of possession." (Harriet Martineau)

Richard Current in John C. Calhoun (1966) writes:

Wherever a White Citizens' Council meets in Mississippi, or a similar group in another of the Southern states, there is to be sought, nowadays, the true spirit of Calhoun. It is to be sought in the activities of conservative - or reactionary - Southern whites. The way they use the lobby, the bloc, the party convention, and other political devices can be considered as essentially Calhounian.

That is now the spirit that dominates today's Republican Party, from the state and local levels to the national scene.

Current quotes a passage from the travel memoirs of Harriet Martineau, Retrospect of Western Travel, Vol. 1 (1838), on her encounter with Calhoun in 1835:

Mr. Calhoun, the cast-iron man, who looks as if he had never been born and never could be extinguished, would come in sometimes to keep our understandings upon a painful stretch for a short while, and leave us to take to pieces his close, rapid, theoretical illustrated talk, and see what we could make of it. ... His mind has long lost all power of communicating with any other. I know of no man who lives in such utter intellectual solitude. He meets men, and harangues them by the fireside as in the Senate; he is wrought like a piece of machinery, set going vehemently by a weight, and stops while you answer; he either passes by what you say, or twists it into a suitability with what is in his head, and begins to lecture again. ... Mr. Calhoun is as full as ever of his nullification doctrines; and those who know the force that is in him, and his utter incapacity of modification by other minds (after having gone through as remarkable a revolution of political opinion as perhaps any man ever experienced) will no more expect repose and self-retention from him than from a volcano in full force. Relaxation is no longer in the power of his will. I never saw any one who so completely gave me the idea of possession.

Today, he would do very well as a commentator on FOX News

Tags: confederate heritage month 2012, john calhoun, slavery, white racism

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2011, April 26: Allen Tate on 19th century history

Southern Agrarian Allen Tate has a review in The American Review 2:2 (Dec 1933) of a book by Herbert Agar, The People's Choice. Tate elaborates a strange political history of the United States. In this paragraph, he seems to slip up and admit that the abolition of slavery may have had something to do with the Civil War:

No avowedly democratic state has made a serious effort to make equality of economic opportunity a social relaity; for this concession to the peole would haved jeopardized the plutocratic aims of the middles class [here he means capitalists]. In this country Jacksonian democracy stopped with the fiction of social equality. Economic inequality and the fictitious character of social equality provide the first step of American capitalism to rationalize its power. Working with the reality of economic disparity, capitalism made secure the doctrine of social equality, and fought on that basis the War Between the States, which finally consolidated its power. [my emphasis]

Tate's Southern Agrarian vision insists that the "Jacksonian" policy of social equality is a lie. Part of the Southern Agrarian schtick was to use "capitalism" as a pejorative against Yankee industrialism. There actually is a serious discussion among historians as to what extent the antebellum Southern economy had feudal as distinct from distinctly capitalist features. But the business of Southern agriculture was carried on within a capitalist economy. It takes some imagination for the Agrarians to conceive of the antebellum South or of postwar subsistence forming as somehow other than "capitalist."

Tate gets all Calhounian here, using arguments that could be cut and pasted to sound like a leftwing, labor-oriented criticism of the capitalist system. But it isn't. It's an indictment of the Yankee political and economic system in Lost Cause terms. In a particular twist, though, that I don't recall encountering elsewhere, he makes the historical argument this way:

Our capitalism [Yankee industrialism] has contrived to make, first, a special myth of its own origin: the myth that it rose with the salvation of democracy and the Union. It has constructed, secondly a pseudo-moral sanction fo itself: its origin being heroic, its mission to the American people is necessarily to give them the benefits of "democracy". ...

American capitalism has thus followed the pattern typical of all ruling classes: it has disgusied its origins and it has issued a "moral" sanction. It is becoming increasingly evident to the historians that the transitional period of early American politics, known as democracy, was not perpetuated, but was crushed out of existence by the Confederate War; and that the Union, instead of being preserved as a real union of interests, survived as a fiction by which capitalism enormously extended its power, at the expense of local, agricultural interests.

For those of us not blessed with the conservative passion, this kind of convoluted argument is less a wonder to be admired than a headache-inducing mind-twister. My own translation of this would be: The Yankees are big ole hypocrites, because they like to talk about democracy and national unity but really they destroyed both! We had real democracy when chattel slavery was legal, when the slaveowners shut down freedom of speech and the press even for whites who wanted to criticized slavery in the South and worked hard to impose the same regime on the North, and when slave states thought they could just overthrow the Constitutional government in a bloody civil war whenever they decided the Yankees were offending their Sacred Honor too much. And so now, everyone - even inferior sorts like blacks and women - theoretically have the right to vote and to fair trials and the like, and that's un-democracy. And the nation is united but that's just a big fake and the Civil War actually destroyed the Union.

Well, I guess something that is gobbledygook in the original is a bit hard to translate into something reasonably intelligible. But as far as I can tell, that's the general idea.

I don't want to tag Herbert Agar with Tate's dubious analysis. But in the world of up-is-down history writing that Tate reads from Agar, it wasn't Andrew Jackson who routed what the Democrats of that time called the Money Power in the form of the Bank of the United States. Instead, it was his predecessor and bitter opponent, John Quincy Adams! Tate writes that Agar's "portrait of J.Q. Adams as the last president who made a serious attempt to rescue the country from the explotiation of money power will doubtless influence future writers, and correct a prevailing error in American history." Well, maybe in some future Southern Agrarian dystopia of subsistence farming when most people won't have access to all that thar useless book-l'arnin'.

But Tate gives the following quote from Agar, which gives another headache-causing historical interpretation of a weird Lost Cause variant, which makes Abraham Lincoln into a Confederate at heart! Agar, with Tate's brackets:

[L]incoln had no knowledge of the economic revolution that was taking place, no prevision of its effects on politics. It is this ignorance that accounts for Lincoln's belief that the Southerners were seceding because of what they thought was a threat to slavery. When they disregarded his honest and explicit promsies that their slave property would not be touched, Lincoln thought they were bemused by disloyal leaders. ... There is no telling whether he would have made [war] if he had realized that the South was fighting for an agrarian society against the threat of a business man's oligarchy. Lincoln would have hated that oligarchy almost as much as did Jefferson Davis, and if he had grasped the main issue, Lincoln might have felt that his real fight lay elsewhere.

We can safely count this as proof that crackpot history did not begin with Glenn Beck!

Tate concludes his dose of Southern Agrarian history-writing with the following that directly follows the Lincoln quote. It explains that because Honest Abe didn't recognize that he really in his heart of hearts supported Jefferson Davis, now the Commies may git us!

Because the real fight lay outside the false issue of freedom or slavery, capitalism was able to step in, in the Reconstruction, and seize the power. After we have bemused ourselves with the equally false issue of "capitalism v. the work", what monster will rise upon our delusion to enslave us again? It is likely that its name will be Communism - a new rationalization of industrial power copleting the reduction of free citizens to the ignominy of servitude.

Tate's review is another grounds to suspect that Southern Agrarianism had less to do with imagining an agrarian ideal than with defending Southern "folkways" with all the Lost Cause pseudohistory baggage that came with it.

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