Confederate "Heritage" Month 2018, April 28: A convert's story

Or maybe it's more of a growing-up story. William Black in Confessions of a former neo-Confederate Vox 12/16/2016 about visiting the Jefferson Davis Monument in Kentucky with his wife and father-in-law. He explains how he grew up absorbing the neo-Confederate worldview:

Less than a decade ago I was one of those people my father-in-law was afraid of. I believed slavery in the antebellum South wasn't as awful as some people made it out to be. I believed the Confederacy seceded to preserve states’ rights, not slavery. I thought Reconstruction was a mistake, a prime example of federal overreach. And I insisted the Confederate flag was a symbol of Southern pride, not racism. If Dylann Roof had gone to my high school and we had talked about American history, we would have agreed on a lot.

I worry sometimes it’s too easy to dismiss neo-Confederates as a fringe group. With every victory in the campaign against Confederate iconography in the public square — a flag removed from the South Carolina statehouse grounds, a Jefferson Davis statue taken down at the University of Texas — the Lost Cause seems weaker and less relevant.

But neo-Confederate ideas are more pervasive than we like to admit. They’re not limited to the South or the far right. And they’re harder to rout out than a few flags and statues. In January [2016] we heard Hillary Clinton repeat the old Lost Cause line that Reconstruction should have been less “rancorous” and more “forgiving” of former Confederates, gliding across the fact that this would have occurred at the expense of black people’s freedom. [my emphasis]

He tells the story of how he watched the Ken Burns' documentary series on the Civil War as a 12-year-old and found elements of it that resonated with neo-Confederate sentiments that he had experienced growing up in Tennessee:

I quickly devoured all 11.5 hours of the series, and though the documentary is far from neo-Confederate propaganda, I was drawn to its Lost Cause elements. There were the magnolia-drenched words of novelist Shelby Foote, who blamed the war on the American people’s failure to compromise. There was the story of how the Northern Lights made an unusual appearance after a Confederate victory in Fredericksburg, Virginia, which Lee’s men saw as a sign of God’s favor. There were the final words of Stonewall Jackson, accidentally shot by one of his own men: “Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees.” When the narrator related how, at the 1913 Gettysburg reunion, veterans from the opposing sides embraced and shook hands over the stone wall at the Angle, I cried.

Now a history scholar, Black recounts his own experience as a history-nerd teenager coming to understand the ideological and false nature of the Lost Cause/neo-Confederate narrative.

He talks about how much of real history is obscured in the Lost Cause account:

Nor was slavery a mere wedge issue. Serious money was at stake. Slaves were worth more money in 1860 than all of America's factories, railroads, and banks combined. And it wasn't just slaveholders who had a stake in the so-called peculiar institution, because every white Southerner, even the poorest dirt farmer, drew comfort from the knowledge they would never be on the bottom rung of society so long as slavery remained in place.

The Confederates were clear: They were seceding to protect slavery. Just read Mississippi’s secession ordinance: “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world.” Or read the Confederate vice president’s proclamation that the “cornerstone” of the new nation was “the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man.”

This is a useful reflection on his part that gets to the issue of "anachronism," in the sense of applying prominent present-day perspectives to earlier periods in which those ideas were not dominant, and possibly not even recognizable in the earlier context:

I look at my own past — valorizing slaveholders and traitors, whitesplaining history to my middle school teacher and to my classmates — and I cannot be sure, as many white liberals are, that if I had lived in the 19th century I would have been an abolitionist. I cannot be sure I do not even now support systems of cruelty and injustice that future historians will view with clear-eyed contempt.

An added note on the Jefferson Davis Monument. The conservative writer Robert Penn Warren, a onetime figure in the Nashville Agrarian group, used his youthful visits to the Jefferson Davis Monument as it was under construction as a introductory narrative in his book-length essay, Jefferson Davis Gets His Citizens Back (1980).

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2018, April 22: Kenneth Stampp on Ulrich Phillips' treatment of slavery

In some earlier posts this month, I looked at an essay by historian Ulrich Phillips (1877–1934), a major historian of slavery but one with a distinctly benign view of the Peculiar Institution, i.e., a proslavery view.

Kenneth Stampp (1912–2009) was one of the major historians who pushed back against the proslavery historical view, notably with The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (1956), and against that of the neo-Confederate Dunning School of historians.

In The Historian and Southern Negro Slavery American Historical Review 57:3 (Apr 1952), he discusses Phillips' approach, noting also Phillips had done important empirical research:

No student could begin to understand the complexities of the slave system without being thoroughly familiar with the findings and varying points of view of such historians as Ulrich B. Phillips, Herbert Aptheker, Lewis C. Gray, John Hope Franklin, Avery Craven, Carter G. Woodson, Frederic Bancroft, Charles S. Sydnor, John Spencer Bassett, and many others.

Among these scholars, the late Professor Phillips has unquestionably made the largest single contribution to our present understanding of southern slavery. It may be that his most durable monument will be the vast amount of new source material which he uncovered. But Phillips was also an unusually able and prolific writer.

In that essay, Stampp criticizes historians who generalize in a proslavery mode about the supposed benign, patriarchal care that owners supposedly provided their slaves:

... the evidence hardly warrants the sweeping pictures of uniform physical comfort or uniform physical misery that are sometimes drawn. The only generalization that can be made with relative confidence is that some masters were harsh and frugal, others were mild and generous, and the rest ran the whole gamut in between. And even this generalization may need qualification, for it is altogether likely that the same master could have been harsh and frugal on some occasions and mild and generous on others. Some men become increasingly mellow and others increasingly irascible with advancing years. Some masters were more generous, or less frugal, in times of economic prosperity than they were in times of economic depression. The treatment of the slaves probably varied with the state of the master's health, with the vicissitudes of his domestic relations, and with the immediate or subsequent impact of alcoholic beverages upon his personality. It would also be logical to suspect-and there is evidence that this was the case-that masters did not treat all their slaves alike, that, being human, they developed personal animosities for some and personal affections for others. The care of slaves under the supervision of overseers might change from year to year as one overseer replaced another in the normally rapid turnover.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2018, for April 20: Unsettled issues from the Civil War?

Uwe Bott has an essay on the lasting effects of the American Civil War, The War That Never Ended The Globalist 04/07/2018.

He makes this point on Abraham Lincoln's election, "Lincoln’s election was in part the result of divisions among Democrats. Lincoln’s opposition to slavery was laudable. However, to him it was far less a humanitarian concern than a smart position in the political power struggle between the North and the South over representation and taxation."

While this is a point that involves judgment and not just factual occurrences, it's wrong. Lincoln was seriously opposed to slavery, seeing it as a moral evil and a threat to democracy in the US. He shared the white supremacist assumptions of most of his fellow white Americans and emphatically denied prior to the war that he wanted social equality for blacks. Although he did insist on civil equality before the law.

He describes the Republican Party's Southern Strategy identified with Richard Nixon and connects it to the situation prior to the Civil War that gave Southern states disproportionate power over the national government through the 3/5 clause of the Constitution, "The industrial and industrious Northeast and Western coastal states are politically underrepresented and fiscally exploited by a conservative, backwards and economically weak South."

That strikes me as more of a metaphor than substantive connection, but it's an interesting one. He makes the point by emphasizing the structure of the US Senate, in which each state has two Senators regardless of population:

... the Senate is even more dysfunctional today as it was back then because many more small states were added after 1861.

As a result, large states (and the vast majority of Americans) are effectively tyrannized by the increasingly extremist majority of Republican senators representing small states.

Two senators serve the population of 574,000 souls in the state of Wyoming, while the same number of senators serve 40 million people in California.

In fact, if you look at senatorial races in 2016, 2014, and 2012 combined – a period during which all 100 seats of the U.S. Senate were up for election – Democrats received more than 10 million more votes in all senatorial races than Republicans. In a proportionate voting system, this would lead to a current Democratic majority of 54-46, rather than the Republican majority of 51-49.

This is true. But it's not different from what it was prior to Civil War. The 3/5 Compromise in the Constitution gave the slave states a "slave bonus" in the allocation of the number of seats in the House of Representatives, because 3/5 of slaves were counted as part of the state's population for allocation purposes but none of those slaves could vote.

He goes on to describe the effects of gerrymandering that does give Republicans an unfair advantage today in the House. And he also describes a similar effect in the Electoral College in selecting a President.

Those are important points. But in his introductory paragraph, it frames it, "It is easy to date the “official” American Civil War. It occurred between 1861 and 1865. It is far more complex to answer the question whether the Battle of Appomattox truly resolved what so deeply divided the United States of America back then." And his essay looks at that problem in the context of the structural issues of how the Constitution sets up the federal government.

But the issue that produced a Civil War in the context of those structural issues was slavery. And that issue was settled by the Civil War.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2018, April 19:: Who were the Mississippi secessionists?

In the last post in this series, I discussed how Percy Rainwater in his essay An Analysis of the Secession Controversy in Mississippi, 1854-61 by Mississippi Valley Historical Review 24:1 (Jun., 1937) made clear the centrality of the slavery issue in the secession debate in the state of Mississippi.

That is heresy to the main Lost Cause narrative, which tries to minimize the role of slavery in secession, stressing instead abstract legal issues, or offenses to Southern Honor,or the difference between a Northern industrial economy and a Southern agricultural one. But Rainwater was put in the same situation as other Lost Cause advocates when they talk about the history leading up to the Civil War, they can't avoid talking about slavery. Even if they jump through hoops to argue that controversies over slavery weren't really over slavery.

One of the arguments he makes is that most slavewoners were cautious businessmen who were reluctant to embrace slavery:

From 1854 to 1861 agitation for secession in Mississippi increased with accelerated momentum. In the early stages of the renewed controversy, it was largely the active, restless, and politically ambitious element, represented by the lawyer-politician and the country editor, which incessantly rang the fire bells in order to arouse a not uneasy social order against the approaching and consuming blasts of abolitionism. Conservative men of property, desiring to be let alone that they might enjoy the fruits of their prosperity, not only held aloof but positively condemned the new agitation. But an equally loud and fanatical minority in the free states played, through the press and from the platform and the pulpit, quite unintentionally into the hands of the secession agitators in Mississippi, as elsewhere in the South.

As a historical description, this is fairly disingenuous on its face. All those named types - "the active, restless, and politically ambitious element, represented by the lawyer-politician and the country editor" - were very aware that the slaveowning planter class was the dominant social and political force in Mississippi. The notion that secession was somehow a demand of the common people against the planter class is, well, not very convincing.

This is a long-standing trope in the neo-Confederate/Lost Cause narrative in support of the post-Reconstruction Segregation 1.0 system. It was typical for white communities to blame lynchings or other racist violence against black people on the "rednecks out in the country." Certainly not the respectable white leaders of the town or city! "Redeemer" Mississippi Sen. L.Q.C. Lamar had his own version of this, giving moderate-sounding speech on North-South reconciliation in Congress, while agitating on the side of violent white supremacists back home in Mississippi. We saw an iteration of this in the 1950s and 1960s in the face of the Post-World War II civil rights movement, where business leaders tried to present themselves as the sensible moderates who disapproved of the "violent excesses" of the Klan rabble. Well, the businesspeople were at least probably less inclined to use the n-word.

Rainwater tosses out the Fanatics On Both Sides version of the run-up to the Civil War. But there were enough fanatics on one side to start a massive armed rebellion, seceding from the Union, seizing federal property, writing their own Constitution. I'm just sayin'.

Rainwater ties all this together with a version of yet another favorite segregationist revisionist view of history. If the secessionist rabble hadn't imposed treason and rebellion on their betters in the planter class, slavery would have had a better chance of surviving. Or, alternatively, it would have just faded away peacefully if those pushy, rude damnyankee fanatics hadn't been so obnoxious about the whole thing.

He does admit, though, in those speculations he is trying "to argue without the record."

Not exactly. The Republican program of halting the spread of slavery would have doomed the Peculiar Institution. And the power of federal patronage would have also given the Republicans a foothold to start building a party presence in the slave states.

The other possibility was unlikely. Because the Confederate defenders of slavery insisted on the superiority of slavery and were dead set on expanding it, not only geographically but even into industrial settings.

The latter is also a version of the eternal argument of the phony moderate, who claims to be in favor of some reform like desegregation, and praises the virtues of patience and gradualism. But their real ire is reserved for those who actively try to bring about the change. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter From Birmingham Jail" addressed just that kind of "moderate."

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2018, April 18: The secession controversy in Mississippi

Catching up again, here with the post for yesterday's date, I'm looking at another older journal article taking a version of the Lost Cause perspective, An Analysis of the Secession Controversy in Mississippi, 1854-61 by Percy Rainwater Mississippi Valley Historical Review 24:1 (Jun., 1937).

In the next post, I'll look at a couple of his points that fall into the neo-Confederate spectrum. But, despite operating in that perspective, in this piece his task is to look at the political disputes in Mississippi around secession. Empirical research is always a special challenge for a neo-Confederate perspective. And this essay makes clear that one issue was central to the secession controversy. Speaking of the militant secessionists versus those less convinced, he writes:

Both of these groups regarded the benefits of the Union as secondary to the preservation of slavery, which was the support of the state's social and economic system. In short, all classes in the state, slaveholders and non-slaveholders alike, looked upon the society in which they lived as representing the realization of a social ideal sanctioned alike by God and nature. This ideal, on its positive side, was beneficial both to the master and the slave; and, although social and economic lines between white groups were not permanently fixed, the system did provide for a wholesome regimentation of the nether herd. On its negative side, the institution of slavery, with its attendant effects upon all groups and classes, created an atmosphere in which, unlike that in the free states, undesirable and dangerous innovations in the religious life and in the general mores of the people could not live.

All groups in Mississippi in 1860 believed apparently that the social system based upon slavery was economically advantageous and socially elevating, and that only upon such a social soil could the highest type of republican government be built. All groups proceeding, it is true, upon a priori arguments, united in the belief that their social system was superior to that based upon free labor at almost every point by which civilization could be evaluated. When, therefore, the institution of slavery was endangered by the election of Lincoln, both the slaveholder and the non-slaveholder arose with religious zeal to defend their social heritage, which, like their religion, was not a subject for the detachment of the laboratory. The rich and the poor, the high and the low, the slaveholder and the non-slaveholder were "so indissolubly united in feeling and interest," said 0. R. Singleton, "that if you but touch a chord connected with either, it vibrates through our whole social system, and unites in more rapid motion the blood of every heart."

Thus united in their loyalty to a social system whose benefits, all agreed, far surpassed the benefits of the Union, the people nevertheless differed sharply concerning the degree of danger to which Lincoln's election subjected slavery and the effect disunion would have on the future of that institution.

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 2018, April 16: Avery Craven on John Brown and "Albert G. Brown of Mississippi"

I'm returning today to Avery Craven's Lost Cause/neo-Confederate historian Coming of the War Between the States: An Interpretation Journal of Southern History 2:3 (Aug 1936). He uses the figure of John Brown to give a race-based justification of the Southern secession. He argues that John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry decisively turned white opinion in the South toward secession:

But the John Brown raid was another matter. It put reality into the much discussed program of Yankee "money-changers," "peasant farmers," and the "long haired men and short haired women" of the North. The sharpest resentments and deepest fears of which a people were capable broke loose. A race war was impending. And that was a poor man's problem. Albert G. Brown of Mississippi put it this way:

The rich will flee the country. ... Then the non-slaveholder will begin to see what his real fate is. The Negro will intrude into his preserve ... insist on being treated as an equal ... that he shall go to the white man's bed, and the white man his ... that his son shall marry the white man's daughter, and the white man's daughter his son. In short that they shall live on terms of perfect social equality. The non-slaveholder will, of course, reject the terms. Then will commence a war of races such as has marked the history of San Domingo. [my emphasis]

Let's start with some basic debunking. There was no "race war" impending. Panics about slave insurrections were a common feature of the paranoid Southern environment. Such panics were far more frequent than actual attempts at anything like a slave rebellion, though of course there were some instances of those occurring, and for obvious reasons. But the panics generally featured their own kind of violence with murders of slaves and free blacks. In effect, they were episodes of sporadic white terror against blacks.

Brown's raid did send Southern slaveowners into new rounds of panic. Although his plan was not to provoke a slave insurrection. The plan was to establish guerrilla bases in the Appalachian mountains from which they would encourage slaves to flee their plantations and harass the slaveholders.

Lost Cause accounts like Craven's also typically downplay white Southern opposition to secession, which was significant even in 1861, though that shouldn't be equated with Unionism, much less opposition to slavery. Though both sentiments were also present.

But who is this "Albert G. Brown of Mississippi"? Is he just some random farmer speaking about the fears of the reg'lar white folks?

Actually, he was Albert Gallatin Brown: Fourteenth Governor of Mississippi: 1844-1848 (David Sansing, Mississippi History Now Dec 2003. He also was one of the Mississippi's two Senators in the runup to the Civil War, along with future Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Sansing writes:

After he was elected to the United States Senate, Brown became one of the most ardent defenders of states’ rights and was one of the South’s first advocates of secession. After Mississippi seceded and joined the Confederate States of America, Brown resigned his U.S. Senate seat and organized a military company known as Brown’s Rifles. Brown was stationed briefly in Virginia before his election as one of Mississippi’s two members in the Confederate Senate where he served until the end of the Civil War. [my emphasis]

The Wikipedia entry for him (04/16/2018) elaborates:

He was ... a Fire-Eater [militant secessionist] and a strong advocate for the expansion of slavery. In 1858, he said: "I want a foothold in Central America... because I want to plant slavery there.... I want Cuba,... Tamaulipas, Potosi, and one or two other Mexican States; and I want them all for the same reason - for the planting or spreading of slavery." (Akhil Reed Amar, America's Constitution, A Biography (2005) 267, quoting M.W. Mcklusky, ed., Speeches, Messages, and Other Writings of the Hon. Albert G. Brown (1859), 594-5) Indeed, he went on to say, "I would spread the blessings of slavery, like the religion of our Divine Master, to the uttermost ends of the earth." (internal links omitted)

I followed up Craven's source for the Brown quote: Percy Lee Rainwater, "The Presidential Canvass of 1860 in Mississippi," Mississippi Law Journal V:4 (1933). Although, oddly, his article cites the journal only by its subtitle, Journal of the Mississippi State Bar. Brown's hair-raising rhetoric about rampaging black rapist rebels was from a long 1860 letter Brown wrote for publication, later published as a pamphlet, making the case for secession in defense of slavery.

Albert Gallatin Brown (1813-1880)

The following passage from that letter/pamphlet is interesting in two ways. One is that Sen. Brown certainly seemed to think the current crisis was about fighting for preservation of slavery. And, despite claiming to speak on behalf of the ordinary white man, he certainly seemed to think that Southern non-slaveholders needing some persuading on undertaking secession to defend the Peculiar Institution:

Does the non-slaveholder own land? What will his land be worth when slavery is abolished? Is he the owner of cattle,horses, and other property? What will all these be worth in a free negro community? Does he live by cultivating the soil? Who creates markets and builds railroads, and provides other wise, by his money and his brains, for the most profitable means for selling the products of the soil? The slaveholder. Who gets the benefits of these markets, railroads, and other profitable means, and with comparatively little cost? The non-slaveholding farmer. Then, let him not say 'I own no slaves, and therefore have no interest in the question.

Is he a mechanic? Who is his best and most profitable employer? The slaveholder. Is he a merchant? Who buys most of hiss goods? The slaveholder. Is he a lawyer or doctor? Who pays him the most fees? The slaveholder. Does he, in short, rely on his muscle or his brain for bread? Who is his best customer9 The slaveholder. Then let no man of any occupation, trade or profession, say 'I own no slaves, and therefore I have no interest in the question.

All are interested all have an immediate, positive and PECUNIARY interest in the question, and all ought, as I have no doubt all will, stand up manfully in its support.

Kind of an 1860 version of trickle-down economics, we might say.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2018, April 15: Avery Craven's neo-Confederate version of the origins of the Civil War

I'm finally caught up with today's date on this year's series of posts.

Today I'm looking at another scholarly journal article by another well-known historian of the Lost Cause/neo-Confederate persuasion, Avery Craven's Coming of the War Between the States: An Interpretation Journal of Southern History 2:3 (Aug 1936).

Nobody called it "the War Between the States" at the time it was happening. It was a civil war, known in the official US records as the War of the Rebellion. But War Between the States is a polemic, neo-Confederate label for the conflict. And that is the narrative on which he relies.

Slavery, of course, didn't cause the war in this account. It was because the North rejected the "strict adherence to the Constitution" insisted upon by the slave states. This was the legalistic version that Jefferson Davis advocated in his memoirs. "[I}n its own eyes, the South was the def ender of democratic government against the onslaughts of those who would distort sacred institutions in order to promote their own material interests. All that the Revolution had won, all that 'the [Founding] Fathers' had achieved, was involved in the struggle."

But, as always, when any kind of empirical realities are developed around the various alternative causes promoted by the neo-Confederates, it still comes back to slavery:

When opposition to slavery developed, a new threat of economic loss, now joined with fear of racial conflict and social unrest, was added. When that drive became a moral attack on the whole Southern way of life, the defense broadened in proportion and emotions deepened. The Constitution was not enough against those who would not respect its provisions; the whole South must become unified for political efficiency. The section must have that security which the Constitution guaranteed and an equal right to expand with its institutions as a matter of principle. Keen minds set to work to reveal the virtues in slavery and the life it permitted in the South. When they had finished a stratified society, with Negro "mud-sills" at the bottom, alone permitted genuine republican government, escaped the ills of labor and race conflict, gave widest opportunity for ability and culture, and truly forwarded the cause of civilization. The stability and quiet under such a system were contrasted with the restless strife of the North which was developing socialism and threatening the destruction of security in person and in property. The Southern way of life was the way of order and progress. [my emphasis]

Just not progress in democracy or freedom.

Abraham Lincoln in this account was a blithering fanatic:

Abraham Lincoln, in his "House Divided" speech, prevented himself and his party from being thrust aside by a desperate appeal to old moral foundations. Though his own policy and that of "Judge" Douglas gave identical results, the latter was not born of moral conviction. And until the issue was conceived in terms of "the eternal struggle between two principles-right and wrong-throughout the world" the fight must go on. That is why a man who was willing to save the Union at the cost of a bloody civil war, even with slavery untouched, would not save it by a compromise which yielded party principle but which did not sacrifice a single material thing. The party was one with God and the world's great experiment in Democracy.

I'll leave it for others to sort out whose side God was on. Lincoln himself was restrained on the topic. Lincoln in his Second Inaugural Address in 1865, famous for his "with malice toward none" phrase:

One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. [my emphasis]

Not only Lincoln but everyone else during the Civil War itself knew that slavery was its cause.

Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding.

Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged.

The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.

"Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether." [my paragraph breaks]

But were Lincoln and the Union on the side of democracy in the Civil War? Absolutely.

Confederate "Heritage" Month, August 14: Ulrich Phillips and the white supremacist narrative

Still catching up on this month's series, and returning one more time to the essay by slavery historian Ulrich Phillips, The Central Theme of Southern History (American Historical Review 34:1; Oct 1928). Phillips, despite being a legitimate important historian on the basis of his research, nevertheless organized his material on the basis of a proslavery and white supremacist narrative. And this essay fully reflects that.

And this was not an essay in some cheap political pamphlet. The American Historical Review was and remains a major scholarly journal. He was writing with the cachet of highbrow respectability.

The essay is about what he calls Southern unity and "solidarity," meaning in his case white Southern segregationist unity around segregation, white supremacy, and Jim Crow laws in what became known as the Solid South reliably dominated by segregationist Democrats. He views the "Redemption," aka, the overthrow of democratic Reconstruction governments in the South by force, violence, intimidation, and fraud, in a favorable light.

But, he warns, the white Southerners could never truly feel secure in their dominance, "because the negro population remains as at least a symbolic potentiality." As opposed to, say, human beings with the right to full American citizenship including the vote (for black men, anyway). This "at least a symbolic potentiality" created "a certain sense of bafflement and of defensive self-containment." Which I suppose is a highbrow euphemism for white racist hatred and fear.

And he explains approvingly the white majority's response:

... by Southern hypothesis, exalted into a creed, negroes in the mass were incompetent for any good political purpose and by reason of their inexperience and racial unwisdom were likely to prove subversive. To remove the temptation to white politicians to lead negroes to the polls again, "white primaries" were instituted to control nominations, educational requirements for the suffrage were inserted in the state constitutions, and the Bryanizing of the Democratic party was accepted as a means of healing a white rift. Even these devices did not wholly lay the spectre of "negro domination"; for the fifteenth amendment stood in the Constitution and the calendar of Congress was not yet free of "force bills".

The white primary meant allowing only whites to vote in the Democratic nominating primaries. Since the Democratic nominee was all but automatically going to be the elected candidate in the general elections statewide in and in most Congressional and legislative districts. The literacy requirements - which some Republicans are making noises about trying to revive - was another technique for disenfranchising black citizens. These allowed the local, usually white, voter registrar to wave through even the most illiterate whites as passing the test, while black college professors could be disqualified.

This is worth noting. The Segregation 1.0 system did not explicitly exclude black voters. The Southern states found it necessary to make that much of a concession to the Reconstruction Amendments to the Constitution. And not all black voters were disfranchised in the old Confederacy. And, in addition, some poor whites were disenfranchised by the voter suppression measures such as the poll tax.

Phillips' reference to "Bryanization" refers to the power of the Populist movement in some areas of the South. As Phillips explains, also with obvious approval of the white-supremacist counter-measures:

A dozen years sufficed to restore white control, whereupon they began to differ among themselves upon various issues. Many joined the People's party; and in some quarters a fusion was arranged of Populists and Republicans to carry elections. In the stress of campaigning this threatened to bring from within the South a stimulus to negroes as political auxiliaries.

Some Southern Populists actually did challenge the segregation system and build biracial coalitions.

Phillips was right in understanding that the white powers-that-be saw that development of potentially dangerous to their system. In that essay, though, he does not acknowledge that the white solidarity was one that had to be maintained with some considerable effort on the part of the ruling groups. There was more going on than unanimous white agreement on the superiority of current social arrangements in the South.

By the time of Phillips' 1928 essay, the Populist threat was in abeyance for the moment. Though defenders of the Solid (White) South knew that the threat was chronic. And the threat of the US Constitution and the American way of life confronting the segregation system, as Northern democracy had earlier confronted the threat of the slave system, was always hanging in the air:

... white Southerners when facing problems real or fancied concerning the ten million negroes in their midst can look to the federal authorities for no more at best than a tacit acquiescence in what their state governments may do. Acquiescence does not evoke enthusiasm; and until an issue shall arise predominant over the lingering one of race, political solidarity at the price of provincial status is maintained to keep assurance doubly, trebly sure that the South shall remain "a white man's country".

This was a backhanded concession on Phillips' part that Southern racial practices actually were the Other of American democracy.

It's worth stressing again. This was not a fringe crackpot position that Phillips was taking in 1928. It was considered entirely respectable even in the scholarly mainstream.

Confederate "Heritage" Month, August 13: Ulrich Phillips on white racism among nonslaveholders in the South

Still catching up on the Confederate "Heritage" Month posts

I'm continuing here with discussing the essay by slavery historian Ulrich Phillips, The Central Theme of Southern History (American Historical Review 34:1; Oct 1928). Phillips' friendly view of slavery was very much in line with the Lost Cause/neo-Confederate historical narrative supporting segregation and Jim Crow laws. In the last post, we saw how in his view of Southern history it was not slavery that caused the Civil War, but argued that slavery was rather only a means to the end of protecting "white supremacy and civilization."

He also offers a version of the favorite neo-Confederate argument that the Civil War couldn't have been about slavery because the Confederate soldiers were mostly not slaveowners. As a historical position, that doesn't rate as much more than a throwaway talking point. But people hearing it for the first time may be thrown off, because it doesn't occur to most people at most times that the goals or originating causes of a war can somehow be measured by the the personal opinions or ordinary foot soldiers or their personal economic backgrounds. And both the Union and the Confederacy relied on conscription. Both of them offered exemptions to wealthier men who could pay a personal bounty. The Confederacy's version also exempted slaveowners with 20 or more slaves. So the largest slaveowners were exempted from compulsory military service. But even though the ownership of slaves was heavily concentrated, there were whites - and sometimes Indians and even occasionally free blacks - who owned one or a few slaves. So not only was slave ownership not confined to large planters, that also meant that ordinary farmers could aspire to become successful enough to own one or a few slaves. So even ordinary Confederate soldiers could aspire to become slaveowners.

Phillips does at least allude to "militia musters," the slave patrols in which nonslaveowning white citizens were required to participate. Their role was to patrol for slaves away from their plantations without proper papers. It also gave the white men on the patrol the chance to bully both slaves and free blacks with impunity. It was a key institution in giving nonslaveowning whites a psychological stake in the slave system.

Phillips tries to argue that nonslaveowners were the main source of white racism and anger against Northern Abolitionists:

The reason for this apparent anomaly lay doubtless in the two facts, that men of wealth had more to lose in any cataclysm, and that masters had less antipathy to negroes than non-slaveholders did. In daily contact with blacks from birth, and often on a friendly basis of patron and retainer, the planters were in a sort of partnership with their slaves, reckoning upon their good-will or at least possessing a sense of security as a fruit of long habituation to fairly serene conditions. But the white toilers lived outside this partnership and suffered somewhat from its competition. [my emphasis]

The concept of a "partnership" in which one party literally and legally owns the other is an, uh, intriguing concept.

Phillips in that essay pretty much breezes by the fact that hostility against slavery generally coexisted with hostility to the presence of black people, because black people were associated with slavery. That's not said to excuse the attitude, but rather to say that without recognizing that connection the dynamics of the politics of slavery among whites is more difficult to understand.

It was also the fact that Abolitionist advocacy was suppressed in the slave states with increasing intensity in the decades before the Civil War.

But it's also the case that Southern whites were very aware of the central role of slavery in the politics leading up to the Civil War. And, of course, the advocates for secession put the defense of slavery front and center in their demands. Phillips even notes that in the 1850s, "legal sanction for the spread of slaveholding, regardless of geographical potentialities, became the touchstone of Southern rights."

Confederate "Heritage" Month, August 12: Ulrich Phillips on white supremacy and Southern unity

I've gotten a couple of days behind on the Confederate "Heritage" Month posts, but I'll do some catching up.

Ulrich Phillips (1877-1934) was a major historian of American slavery. John David Smith in the linked article in the New Georgia Encyclopedia praises Phillips' scholarly work and presents it in a relatively benign light. Although his final sentence in the piece is, "Today historians remember Phillips as a path-breaking scholar, as a pioneer in the use of plantation and other southern manuscript sources, as the inspiration for the "Phillips school" of state slavery studies, and as a conservative, proslavery interpreter of slavery and the slaves."

Phillips' relatively short scholarly essay The Central Theme of Southern History (American Historical Review 34:1; Oct 1928) was an influential one. He tries to describe the defining, unifying core of Southern American identity. He explains that the US South:

... is a land with a unity despite its diversity, with a people having common joys and common sorrows, and, above all, as to the white folk a people with a common resolve indomitably maintained - that it shall be and remain a white man's country. The consciousness of a function in these premises, whether expressed with the frenzy of a demagogue or maintained with a patrician's quietude, is the cardinal test of a Southerner and the central theme of Southern history. [my emphasis]

And he gives the following historical narrative as its context:

It [Southern unity] arose as soon as the negroes became numerous enough to create a problem of race control in the interest of orderly government and the maintenance of Caucasian civilization. Slavery was instituted not merely to provide control of labor but also as a system of racial adjustment and social order. And when in the course of time slavery was attacked, it was defended not only as a vested interest, but with vigor and vehemence as a guarantee of white supremacy and civilization. Its defenders did not always take pains to say that this was what they chiefly meant, but it may nearly always be read between their lines, and their hearers and readers understood it without overt expression. Otherwise it would be impossible to account for the fervid secessionism of many non-slaveholders and the eager service of thousands in the Confederate army. [my emphasis]

Smith mentions this essay in his biographical sketch, "In 'The Central Theme of Southern History' (1928), Phillips maintained that the desire to keep their region 'a white man's country' united southerners."

Expressed with that one-sentence summary, we could imagine that Phillips expressing a harsh critical judgments against attitude on the part of Southern whites. But in the paragraphs I've quoted, it's already clear that was not the case. One thing is striking is that Phillips takes "the South" to be white men. Southern women had the vote by 1928, and "man" was often used in a generic sense, but we wouldn't be far wrong in assuming that he explicitly mean white man in speaking of the "white man's country." Texas did have a female governor 1925-27, Miriam "Ma" Ferguson, who is probably most remembered for an apocryphal comment attributed to her: "If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it ought to be good enough for the children of Texas."

It's also notable in the latter paragraph quoted, Phillips describes slavery as having been formed for "control of labor" but also to insure "racial adjustment and social order," i.e., the subordination of blacks to whites. This reads very much like projecting the dominant white supremacist ideas of the notoriously anti-immigrant US in the 1920s back onto the 18th and 19th century development of American slavery. We've seen in earlier posts that the Revolutionary generation viewed blacks as generally inferior to whites. But they also justified slavery as a system that was necessary to the raise the African race to white American levels of civilization.

Pseudoscientific theories of inherent racial inferiority came to be the leading ideological justification for slavery by the Deep South slaveowners particularly after the Missouri Compromise of 1820. But establishing slavery for the purpose of "racial adjustment and social order" makes no sense, since there was no problem of "race control" involving blacks in the British colonies until the British had imported large numbers of African slaves. And Phillips even simplicity recognizes that in the immediately preceding sentence!

If anything, it would be much more accurate to say that slavery was restricted to blacks in the British colonies in North America for the purpose of controlling slaves, so the slavery system could be administered as a system of racial control.

How those arguments of Phillips' fit into the larger Lost Cause/neo-Confederate historical ideology is an interesting question. The Lost Cause narrative from immediately after the war insisted that slavery was not the cause of the Civil War nor the primary thing that the Confederacy was defending. Phillips' account quoted above implicitly recognizes the centrality of slavery to the conflict. But he emphasizes that defending slavery was only a means to the end of protecting "white supremacy and civilization." Though he does feel compelled to concede that slavery's "defenders did not always take pains to say that this was what they chiefly meant," he hastens to clarify that "it may nearly always be read between their lines, and their hearers and readers understood it without overt expression." (my empnasis)

This may seem like quite a lot of hairsplitting to say that the Lost Cause wasn't about slavery, it was about defending white supremacy and slavery was only a means to that end. But this kind of headache-inducing argument is very common in neo-Confederate ideology. Phillips goes on to say, "Otherwise it would be impossible to account for the fervid secessionism of many non-slaveholders and the eager service of thousands in the Confederate army." This is also a variant of a common neo-Confederate claim, which says that the fact that so many nonslaveowners fought for the Confederacy is proof that the war wan't "about slavery."

That's a flimsy claim. But Phillips does have some things to say in elaborating that point that are worth considering in the next post in this series.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2018, April 11: Charles Ramsdell, Lost Cause ideologist

The neo-Confederate/Lost Cause version of history was elaborated at a scholarly, "highbrow" level by the Dunning School of Southern history associated with historian William Dunning. This interpretation was the dominant or "hegemonic" interpretation of the Civil War and the antebellum and Reconstruction period during the first half of the 20th century. It was challenged by African-American historians like W.E.B DuBois and some white historians. But it took the post-World War II civil rights movement to unseat it as the predominent understanding of that period among American historians generally.

Fred Arthur Bailey recounts the career of one of the most important and influential of the Dunning School historians, Charles Ramsdell, in The Dunning School (2013), John David Smith et al, eds. He gives a good sketch of how the neo-Confederate narrative was elaborated in professional history and how it was shaped by organized political pressures and funding from conservative Southerners.

The period of 1865-1875, the decade after the war, saw a democratizing movement in the South led by white and black Republicans North and South, enforced with varying levels of enthusiasm by the federal government. Black men had their right to vote recognized, education in basic literacy and more was provided by former slaves, former slaves became free laborers and farmers, and both black citizens and white Republicans became active in Southern politics, all of which had been impossible under the slave system. The first African-American Senator was Hiram Revels of Mississippi, who took the Senate seat once held by Jefferson Davis.

Beginning in 1875, the anti-Reconstruction, anti-democracy "Redeemer" movement successfully pushed back many of the democratic gains of Reconstruction, depriving many black citizens of the vote and making the former Confederacy politically a "Solid South" supporting the Democratic Party, with the Republican Party largely eliminated in the South. "The Klan's successes" in domestic terrorism and intimidation "lead to the restoration of white rule," a laudable goal in the Redeemers' view. The Redeemers' new order promoted an ideological outlook and narrative based on the Lost Cause pseudohistory in which slavery had been benign, slavery had nothing to do with the Civil War, and blacks were naturally inferior to whites.

Bailey's account of Charles Ramsdell's scholarship describes some of the major claims of the Dunning School of Lost Cause scholarship. For instance:

[Ramsdell in 1914:] "How shall we take these ten millions of shiftless, improvident, unmoral, inefficient child-men of an alien race [African-Americans] and convert them into desirable citizens? With individual exceptions, the negro population rests like a great black blight upon the industrial and social life of the South.”

And:

{Ramsdell's] paper, “The Natural Limits of Slavery,” emphasized that though the “peculiar institution” was economically viable in the 1850s, rational men of thought should have realized that it was on the verge of destruction, that within a generation, perhaps sooner, it would have come to its inevitable end. Absent the Civil War and absent the nation-damaging Reconstruction era, inevitable emancipation would have led to reasonable “codes for the control of free negroes” that would have limited the negative effect of black citizenship and enfranchisement.

The Lost Cause narrative, even in its scholarly version, was highly ideological and deeply biased against black Americans and against whites who supported equal rights for them.

But Ransdell adopted a positivist outlook and claimed that he was doing only scientific historical research:

Throughout Reconstruction in Texas Ramsdell portrayed the postbellum decade as a violent epoch in which Texas whites, subjugated by adversaries of their own race — northern-sponsored reformers and politicians — thwarted a scheme to put the defeated slaveholders under permanent subjection to their former slaves. Though by definition the Texas scholar’s commitment to scientific history meant that he forsook the development of a discernable [sic] thesis and considered the personal interpretation of facts a violation of professional ethics, he nonetheless developed powerful themes that he assumed were no more than incontrovertible facts. With the destruction of Confederate authority, traditional southern social relationships stood near collapse, he argued. “The immediate and pressing problem was to preserve the normal balance of society, and to provide for the freedman an industrial position in that society such that agricultural interests would suffer the least possible additional shock.” Southern whites assumed that “free negro labor would be a failure and that a labor famine was imminent.” Subsequent events validated that fear, for to “the childlike negro, concerned only with the immediate present, there was no difference” between working under a labor contract “and his old condition as a slave.” The Texas scholar emphasized that, emancipated from restraint, these newly freed people abandoned their former masters, replacing obedience with “vagrancy, theft, vice and insolence”; and where “negroes had made contracts they broke them without cause, often leaving their families for their employers to feed.” [my emphasis]

This Lost Cause version of history was enforced as the official, allegedly truthful and objective, version of history by Southern legislators and what we now call Confederate "heritage" groups.

Bailey also describes Ranmdell's passion for Southern history and his extensive original research. It's important to keep in mind that even very ideological histories can sometimes present important factual material.

But the larger Lost Cause/neo-Confederate historical narrative is really pseudohistory with a heavy ideological agenda.

Tea Party whites, Trumpism and neo-Confederate pseudohistory

In yesterday's post on Arlie Russell Hochschild and her study on Louisiana Tea Party supporters, I mentioned an article of hers that appears in the current (10:1917) Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik, Weiß und stolz und abgehängt.Donald Trump und der Südstaaten-Rassismus (behind subscription at this writing).

Part of her point in this article is that Southern Tea Party adherents - it would be redundant to say "white" adherents - focus on the government as the image and main instrument of the groups they see as the enemy: Yankees, coastal elites, Hollywood, black people, professional women, the mainstream media. In part, this is because of the eternal complaint against alleged freeloaders: "Und zudem gab der Staat Leuten Geld, die nicht arbeiteten, und untergrub damit die mit der Arbeit verknüpfte Anerkennung und Ehre." ("On top of it all, the government gave money to people who don't work and thereby undermined the recognition and honor tied up with work.")

The article notes that it is a translation into German from English, so I'm reverse-translating here without having the English original available.

But Tea Partiers do not view the government as a whole as their enemy. On the contrary, they worship the military and the police, worship in the Christian theological sense of idolatry even. The FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, ICE agents terrorizing Latino parents picking up their children and school - those actual coercive agents of the state, they ones that are charged with using physical violence on behalf of law-and-order, they are big fans of those!

No, it's the civilian government that raises their hatred. And particularly those aspects of civilian government that they imagine to benefit people less fortunate and/or less white than they are.

Hochschild describes a related aspect of Tea Partiers' admiration for Donald Trump's demagoguery and his rejection of "political correctness":

Daher hörten viele mit freudiger Erleichterung einen Donald Trump reden, der offenbar hemmungslos, omnipotent und wunderbar frei von jeglichen Einschränkungen durch politische Korrektheit war. Er äußerte sich verallgemeinernd über alle Muslime, alle Mexikaner, alle Frauen – unter anderem auch darüber, dass Frauen menstruierten, was er „ekelhaft” fand. (So sagte er über Megyn Kelly, die Nachrichtenmoderatorin von „Fox News“, sie „blute aus was auch immer”). Munter imitierte er einen behinderten Journalisten, indem er seine Arme schüttelte und so eine Zerebralparese nachahmte – in den Augen seiner Gegner alles zutiefst abfällige Äußerungen, die jedoch befreiend auf all jene wirkten, die sich durch die Mitleidsverpflichtung geknebelt fühlten. Trump ermöglichte es ihnen, sich als gute, moralische Amerikaner zu empfinden und zugleich überlegen gegenüber Menschen zu fühlen, die sie für „anders” oder unter ihnen stehend hielten.

[From that viewpoint, many listen to Donald Trump speak with happy relief, he being clearly unrestrained, omnipotent and miraculously free from any limitations from political correctness. He made sweeping declarations sweepingly about all Muslims, all Mexicans, all women - including even about women menstruating, which he finds "disgusting." (So he said about Megyn Kelly, the news moderator for Fox News, that she "had blood coming out of her wherever.") He jauntily imitated a disabled journalist by shaking his arms in order mimic cerebral palsy - in the eyes of his opponents, all the most deeply derogatory expressions, which nevertheless had a liberating effect on all those who felt themselves gagged by the obligation to feel pity. Trump made it possible for them to experience themselves as good, moral Americans and at the same time to feel superior to people that they regarded as "other" or beneath them.]

Or, to put it more succinctly, they got a thrill by identifying with Trump's meanness. This is a typical characteristic of authoritarian followers. Trying to understand this in terms of their "deep story," a Hochschild term that is otherwise useful, complicatres rather than clarifies understanding of how this attitude translates into the politics of Trumpism.

We could say that a normative issue imposes itself here. At what point does explaining this kind of collective joy in meanness cross over from understanding it to justifying it?

And this is not jsut a matter of show business. We see in Trump's callous and irresponsible response to Puerto Rico's hurricane disaster right now that this kind of meanness has ugly, real-world consequences. No matter how "liberating" Trump-adoring white people in Louisiana might feel it is to see Puerto Ricans suffer and die due to the kind of meanness Trump practices as President or how much "happy relief" it may give the Louisiana Tea Partiers.

Not to defend Donald Trump, but I couldn't find a report in which Trump used the word "disgusting" specifically in relation to his own genuinely disgusting comment about Kelly; he did use it about Hillary Clinton going to the bathroom during a break in one of the debates. (See: Kayla Epstein, Trump responds to Megyn Kelly's questions on misogyny – with more misogyny The Guardian 08/06/2015; Jacob Sugarman, Donald Trump’s disgusting new attack on Megyn Kelly: She had “blood coming out of her wherever” Salon 08/08/2015

If the reference above to white conservatives' complaints about welfare loafers seems like a throwback to the 1960s, Hochschild is also aware that the throwback goes even further.

In explaining the historical and sociological background of Southern whites, Hochschild relies heavily on the classic by W.J. Cash, The Mind of the South (1941). Cash's book is a standard work and often quoted. But it was published in 1941. It has historical value. But it doesn't directly address the political of white Republicans in the Deep South in 2017. And even her historical accounts rely on confusingly wide descriptions. It likely wouldn't be clear to readers who weren't history with the history of sharecropping, for example, that this system was a post-Civil war institution, not an antebellum one.

But her historical account in this article recounts the neo-Confederate pseudohistory:

Dann brach der Bürgerkrieg aus, und der Norden schlug den Süden vernichtend. Städte wurden niedergebrannt, Felder verwüstet – teils von konföderierten Truppen auf dem Rückzug. Nach dem Bürgerkrieg ersetzte der Norden die Regierungen der Südstaaten durch eigene, handverlesene Gouverneure. Profitgierige Glücksritter kamen als Agenten des dominierenden Nordens. Ausbeuter aus dem Norden, eine wütende, traumatisierte schwarze Bevölkerung zu Hause und von allen Seiten moralische Verurteilung – das war das Bild, das mir die wütenden Südstaatler zeichneten.

[Then the Civil War broke out, and the North pulverized the South. Cities were burned down, fields wasted - partially by retreating Confederate troops. After the war, the North replaced the governments of the Southern state with its own hand-picked Governors. Profit-seeking adventurers came as agents of the domineering North. Exploiters from the North, an angry, traumatized black population at home and moral judgments from all sides - that was the picture that the furious Southerners drew.]

That's my translation from the German. And this is my supplemental translation out of Neo-Confederate-Speak:

Then the Civil War broke out when Southern slaveowners insisted on seceeding to defend slavery when they rejected the democratic results of the Presidential election of 1860. The North pulverized the South in four years of bloody warfare initiated by the white southern planters to defend their "right" to own other human beings as property. Cities were burned down, fields wasted - partially by retreating Confederate troops. And when the Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves in the Confederate states, mass abandonment of the plantations by black ex-slaves, most of them native Southerners by birth, played a massive part in the "pulverizing" of the traitor Rebel government. After the war, the North replaced the governments of the Southern state with its own hand-picked Governors. (That one is too much of a fiction to even qualify.) Profit-hungry adventurers came as agents of the domineering North, according to the WATB grumbling of many former Confederates, even though massive capital investment from the hated North was desperately needed. Many Northern whites also came to act in such roles as schoolteachers, motivated by a patriotic and Christian desire to create a better future for the South that had been wrecked due to the treason of the slaveholding planter class. Exploiters from the North, as Southern white supremacists were wont to call any of their fellow Americans from the North, an angry, traumatized black population eager to become responsible free citizens, voters and full participants in civil life, and moral judgments from all sides - except from that of white supremacists who still hated democracy and Constitutional government, judgments that came because even Northerners who had previously been indifferent to slavery had been confronted with the true horror and destructiveness of the slave system - that was the picture that the furious white Southerners who rejected the American form of government and the American way of life drew, even though a significant number of Southern whites also supported the new democratic governments established during Reconstruction.

A very similar passage appears in her book Strangers in Their Own Land (2016), although she includes a couple of phrases there to slightly distance herself from the narrative, indicating that she's describing the version her Tea Party subjects gave her.

As a native-born white Mississippian, I'm tempted to say that only a Yankee would swallow that white Southerners actually believe that Lost Cause, neo-Confederate version of history. Yankees in my experience tend to be generous-minded in that way.

But for the most part, for any adult white Southerners that present the view of the Civil War and its aftermath that she describes there, one of three things is going on: (1) they are shooting off their mouths without putting their brains in gear; or, (2) they've made no effort to fact-check even the most superficial aspects of that story, even though the information is readily available; or, (3) they know it's hogwash and they are just repeating it because they see it as the White Man's tribal narrative and they identify with it and doing give a flying flip if it's actually true.

All of this points to a basic problem in trying to understand and explain a political phenomenon like the Tea Party or Trumpism in terms of a "deep story" that is heavily based on long-established ideological constructs. And deeply dishonest ones, at that.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2016, April 30:

To close this year's Confederate "Heritage" Month cycle, I'm using a quote from the Tropics of Meta blog, Jeff Davis’s Ghost: The Long Battle over the Memory of the Civil War by Steve Bare 05/18/2015 summarizing the framework historian David Blight uses to understand the major streams of public memory formation that initially emerged from the Civil War:

Blight probes the interrelationship between the two broad themes of race and reunion in American culture and society from 1863 to 1915. Blight is primarily concerned with the ways that contending memories clashed or intermingled in public memory. Blight’s Race and Reunion is considered the opening salvo in memory studies related to the Civil War.

Blight posits three overall visions of Civil War memory that collided and combined over time. One, the reconciliationist vision, which took root in the process of dealing with the dead from so many battlefields, prisons, and hospitals and developed in many ways earlier than Reconstruction. The second vision, the white supremacist articulation embodied in the Lost Cause, took many forms early, including terror and violence, locked arms with reconciliationists of many kinds, and by the turn-of-the-century delivered the country a segregated memory of the Civil War on Southern terms. The third vision Blight articulates, the emancipationist vision, was embodied in African American’s complex remembrance of their own freedom, in the politics of radical Reconstruction, and in conceptions of the war as the reinvention of the republic and the liberation of blacks to citizenship and Constitutional equality. For many Americans, the Civil War is a defining event upon which we have often imposed unity and continuity; as a culture, we have often preferred its music and pathos to its enduring challenges, the theme of reconciled conflict to resurgent, unresolved legacies.

Bare summarizes several other books that have contributed to understanding the processes by which what we could call hegemonic memories of the Civil War and its aftermath formed. And he writes:

Scholarship regarding southern memory of the Civil War saw the greatest paradigm shift in its historiography. Recent scholarship from the late 1980s on focuses on the Lost Cause as a catalyst for the acceptance of southern nostalgia and mythology regarding the war. Uniquely, gender appears more frequently in this scholarship than it does with the historiography of the North. Women in the South played a leading role in fostering the Lost Cause at an ideological level and in popularizing the pathos through print media. We also see how spatial arrangements of landscapes of the dead added weight to the enunciation of the Lost Cause. Finally, scholarship regarding the civil religion aspect of the Lost Cause foregrounded the South’s racist hierarchy. Memory in the South closely aligns with Benedict Anderson’s theory of imagined communities. In the South, the mythos of the Lost Cause bound southerners to a shared heritage with rituals that only those from the South could understand.

I assume in that last sentence, he means that it bound white Southerners together. But it could also mean that the dominant Lost Cause narrative among white Southerners - a narrative that also dominated the national historical conventional wisdom during much of the 20th century - provided the basis for dissenting counter-narratives by African-American and other dissenters.

David Brion Davis writes of Blight's 2001 book Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (The Terrible Cost of Reconciliation New York Review of Books 07/18/2002):

More convincingly than any other historian I know of, Blight explains one of the most troubling questions for the understanding of American history: why it became accepted wisdom from the 1870s to the 1960s, among American historians as well as white students from grade school through college, that states’ rights, not slavery, was the cause of the Civil War or, as many Southerners have long insisted on our calling it, “the War Between the States.” As late as 1947, as I can clearly remember when I was a GI Bill veteran in an Ivy League college, an aging professor of history could teach us that slavery in the American South was a benign and civilizing institution, but uneconomical and thus of minor importance in American history; that the Civil War was a preventable but heroic tragedy, fomented by a few extremists in both North and South; that the war led to the “emancipation” of a people wholly unprepared for such sudden freedom and thus easily manipulated and corrupted by opportunistic “carpetbaggers” and “scalawags”; and that only such groups as the Ku Klux Klan, who played upon the superstitious fears of the “half-savage, half-childish Darkies,” could begin to restore order.

Extra anti-Lost Cause posts?

People following my Twitter or Google+ feeds may be wondering why blog posts from 2004 on Confederate "Heritage" Month keep popping up.

It's because I'm moving those posts from my original blog, which is still public on Blogger as AOL Journals 1st Old Hickory's Weblog to this one.

As the original title suggests, I started this blog in 2003 as an AOL blog. AOL later discontinued their blog function and we could select to move the old posts to Blogger. But since I had already created the Blogger version of Old Hickory's Weblog and started using it instead of the AOL version by then, I had to have the AOL conversion go to a different blog name.

I do have good memories of the AOL blog function. Blogging then was still a bit "techie," in that it required some more HTML and software skills than a lot of people like me were ready to take on to have a blog. AOL's service hired science-fiction author John Scalzi as their blog coach, who provided daily tips on how to blog, how to popularize your blog, blog etiquette, etc.

Scalzi has continued to build his impressive reputation as a science fiction writer. He also continues to blog at Whatever, his blog that he was already writing in the AOL days.

Back in those days, Scalzi also indulged in the occasional tirade against neo-Confederate nonsense, e.g., Another Confederate Smackdown 01/31/2005.

The US Civil War and European politics

The Habsburg archduke Ferdinand Maximilian Joseph took the throne of Mexico as Emperor Maximiliano I in 1863. He was installed by French forces acting with the encouragement of Great Britain. His reign ended in 1867. It did not end well for him, as this painting by Édouard Manet illustrates:

This particular multinational European intrusion into the Western Hemisphere was a matter of seizing the opportunity of the American Civil War, when the government in Washington was temporarily distracted from enforcing its own imperial Monroe Doctrine by more pressing dangers. The US government would have resorted to another war in Mexico to remove what they rightly regarded as a French puppet regime that endangered American national interest. But the Mexican people beat them to it.

But the adventure of Maximiliano I was only one way in which the US Civil War affected European politics. Antislavery sentiment was strong in England, and whether Britain should recognize the Confederacy as an independent government was a major political issue. That controversy also involved whether the British government would move to break the Union naval blockade of the Confederacy, which would have improved the Confederacy's chances of military success. The European politics of the Civil War received considerable attention from a couple of German political exiles living in London who were later to achieve considerable international fame, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, who published contemporary articles during the first couple of years of the war in Vienna's Die Presse and the New York Daily Tribune.

I don't recall it being emphasized in any of the Lost Cause writing that I've sifted through if it is much emphasized that the creators of Marxism were supporters of the Union and the man neo-Confederates deride as a dictator and "King Lincoln." I'm sure it pops up now and then. In that, of course, the two men shared in the broad democratic opinion in Europe in sympathizing with the Union and against the slave republic in the South.

But their description of the war in Die Presse of March 26, 1862, could be taken as compatible with the continuing American conceit that our Civil War must have been the biggest, most Exceptional civil war ever:

From whatever standpoint one regards it, the American Civil War presents a spectacle without parallel in the annals of military history. The vast extent of the disputed territory; the far-flung front of the lines of operation; the numerical strength of the hostile armies, the creation of which drew barely any support from a prior organizational basis; the fabulous costs of these armies; the manner of leading them and the general tactical and strategical principles in accordance with which the war is waged, are all new in the eyes of the European onlooker. (English translation from The Civil War in the U.S. by Marx and Engels, 1961 edition)

This is all presumably true in military terms. But in the scope of destruction and its political ramifications, the Thirty Years War of 1608-10648 was surely more consequential in Europe. And, sadly, the world has seen many civil wars since 1865.

But there were significant implications for the future of Europe, especially for the future of democracy, in the outcome of the Civil War. David Brion Davis, a major historian of US slavery, The Terrible Cost of Reconciliation New York Review of Books 07/18/2002:

... a Confederate victory would have created an enormous impediment to the growth of democracy in Britain. This conclusion, underscored by the political and class alignments in Britain, conforms with the grim speculations of the economic historian and Nobel Laureate Robert William Fogel. After briefly surveying the plight of most workers in Europe and even England in the 1850s and 1860s, Fogel suggests that a Confederate victory would have delivered a devastating blow to antislavery and progressive politics, replacing democracy and liberal reform with “a drive for aristocratic privilege under the flags of paternalism and the preservation of order.”

Given the high productivity of slave labor, an independent Confederacy could have exploited its monopoly on cotton by passing on a small sales tax to consumers, a tax that would have financed a huge standing army, along with expansionist, proslavery policies that might well have led to Confederate domination of Latin America and a reversal of Britain’s antislavery pressures on Cuba and Brazil. While Fogel is fully aware that the abolition of American slavery brought “no heaven on earth,” there is much to be said for his argument that Confederate independence would have greatly increased the power of the most conservative movements in much of the world. [my emphasis]

Fogel co-authored one of the more embarrassing episodes in Civil War historiography, one which exaggerated the productivity of slavery via a poor analysis of econometric data. The question of the productivity of slave labor is an empirical one. But it also has figure heavily in polemical historical arguments over the years.

In an earlier article, Davis wrote (The Benefit of Slavery New York Review of Books 03/31/1988):

Historians have only begun to free themselves from the antislavery assumptions that permeated conceptions of political economy from the time of Benjamin Franklin and Adam Smith. We still find it difficult to believe that a flagrantly unjust system of labor could be compatible with long-term economic and material progress. But despite the many valid criticisms directed against Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman’s Time on the Cross (1974), more recent research has confirmed their contention that slave labor could be efficient, productive, and adaptable to a variety of trades and occupations ranging from mining and factory work to the technologically modernized Cuban sugar mills. Indeed, in Cuba and Brazil as well as in the southern United States slavery continued to flourish until governments moved after 1860 to abolish it.

But in that same article, Davis also cautions about the need to be careful into falling into traps set by polemical arguments over slave productivity from even before the Civil War.

In the 2002 article, he points to an historical interpretation that greatly influenced British controversies over the US Civil War:

The initial caution and passivity of British abolitionists may well have been related to a subject that has been neglected or underestimated by historians: the drastic “failure” of West Indian slave emancipation. I use quotation marks to suggest that the disappointment and embarrassment did not concern the happiness and well-being of blacks but rather the expectations of whites, including many abolitionists, who often assumed that freed slaves would work harder and more efficiently on colonial plantations. However, wherever freedpeople could find plots of land for subsistence agriculture, they fled the plantations or worked as little as possible. After the end of so-called apprenticeship in 1838, both Britain and the Southern states absorbed a stream of evidence showing that freed blacks did everything they could to escape slave-like gang labor, and that plantation production and land values had plummeted. The evidence showed moreover that Britain had desperately turned to India and other poverty-stricken regions to find thousands of indentured laborers who could be transported to the West Indies, and that Cuba and Brazil, which still imported large numbers of slaves from Africa, had greatly prospered, especially in producing sugar and coffee for the world’s expanding markets.

As Thomas Carlyle summed up the matter in his essay “Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question,” published in 1849, the freed slaves had simply refused to work and the economies of the West Indies had collapsed. Lord Wolseley, Blackett tells us, “was convinced that West Indian emancipation had been ‘a failure in every respect.'” Anthony Trollope and numerous others conveyed the same message of Negroes “squatting” in idleness, an image confirmed by even a former Chartist, Joseph Barker, who became “one of the Confederacy’s most active proponents” after returning from a residence in the United States.

And he describes the state of British public opinion as the war proceeded, mentioning the role played by another Andrew Jackson:

During the first part of the war, most Britons thought that the North had no chance of victory; even the able American ambassador Charles Francis Adams concluded that it was only a matter of time before Britain recognized the Confederacy. Yet defenders of the Union took it as their task to convince the British government to continue on its course of neutrality, and to persuade most of the working and middle classes that a united, democratic America was a symbol of hope for all people favoring political reform as well as a place of refuge for the world’s oppressed. These were the arguments of John Bright, the liberal manufacturer and MP from Birmingham, who helped to overcome the appeal of Confederate agents like the Swiss-born Henry Hotze, who published many articles in the press. Bright’s campaign gained much ground when working-class leaders organized and financed a huge meeting of the Union and Emancipation Society in Manchester’s Free Trade Hall a day before Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation took effect.

While Lincoln’s actions undermined those abolitionists who contended that slaves would have a better chance of freedom in an independent Confederacy, a large cadre of African-American speakers, including J. Sella Martin, William and Ellen Craft, and Henry “Box” Brown, challenged racist stereotypes and kept reminding Britons that slavery stood at the center of the American war. Nothing could embody this point more forcefully than the speeches of William Andrew Jackson, the escaped slave and former coachman of the Confederacy’s President Jefferson Davis.

Blackett observes that the British public was surprisingly well informed about America; the frequent meetings and rallies concerning the Civil War were not spontaneous but carefully planned and organized. Even so, there was much heckling and disruption, as when pro-Union groups would join in singing “John Brown’s Body” to drown out pro-Confederate speeches. Though pro-Confederate agents succeeded in organizing many unemployed workers in Lancashire, this was not the case in the cotton towns of Scotland and Ireland. A larger than expected number of millowners supported the Union cause, as did an increasingly wider cross section of businessmen and manufacturers. Thus despite the large number of pro-Confederate newspapers, [R.J.M.] Blackett documents an overwhelming public enthusiasm for the Union during the last years of the war, culminating in widespread acclaim, grief, and huge funeral processions following the assassination of Lincoln, whose portrait would long be a common fixture in British artisan homes. [my emphasis]

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2015, April 29: A veteran of Reconstruction defends it from Lost Cause dogma (3)

John Roy Lynch did a follow-up to the article from which I quoted yesterday. The second piece is called, More About the Historical Errors of James Ford Rhodes The Journal of Negro History (3:2 Apr 1918). It's mostly devoted to defending his previous piece on several specific factual points on which he certainly looks to have the better of the particular critic to whom he's responding.

There are two points that I'll emphasize here. One is his discussion of the antidemocratic turn in the Supreme Court, embodied in particular by their overturning of anti-discrimination and voting rights protections in the federal Civil Rights Act approved during Reconstruction that effectively gutted those laws (not unlike the Roberts Court's gutting of the Voting Rights Act in more recent years!):

I think would have been, different. The unfortunate thing about those decisions is the wide scope of authority thus conceded to the States. In other words, they amount to a judicial re-cognition of the dangerous doctrine of States Rights - a doctrine which has been the source and the cause of most of our domestic troubles and misfortunes since those decisions were rendered. But for those unfortunate decisions our country would not be cursed and disgraced today by lynch law and other forms of lawlessness and racial proscription and discrimination. But for those unfortunate decisions lynchings could have been and I am sure would have been held to be an offense against the peace and dignity of the United States as well as the State in which the crime is committed. Consequently, the criminals could be, and in most cases would be, prose cuted in the United States courts, as was done in the case of many of the leaders of that secret criminal organization called the Ku Klux Klan. [my emphasis]

He also mentions the obvious absurdity of the Court's decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, which he does not name specifically:

The court has also decided that a State law providing separate accommodations for white and colored people on railroad trains, at least for a passenger whose journey begins and ends in the same state, is not an abridgment in violation of the constitution, provided the accommodations for the two races are exactly equal. This means that the validity even of those laws will not be affirmed whenever it can be shown that the accommodations are not equal, which can be very easily done. Equal separate accommodations are both a physical and a financial impossibility. It is simply impossible for a railroad company to provide the same accommodations for one colored passenger that it provides for one hundred whites. If, then, a colored passenger cannot occupy a seat or a sleeping berth in a car in which white persons may be passengers, this will not only be an abridgment, but in some cases, an absolute denial of such accommodations. The ultimate nullification of such unfair, unjust and unreasonable laws must necessarily follow. [my emphasis in bold]

The other point is Lynch's further defense of the quality of the Reconstruction government's in Mississippi. The critic to whom he is responding, to whom he refers as "the expert," had claimed that the alleged mismanagement in Reconstruction was more prominent in local governments than the state:

In other words [as Lynch reads the claims of "the expert"], there was nothing wrong with the State administration; it was the local county and municipal governments that were bad. And yet, a fair and impartial investigation will reveal the fact that there is no more foundation for this allegation than for those about the State government. It is admitted that during the early part of Reconstruction the local tax rate was high, the reasons for which are fully explained in [Lynch's 1913 book] The Facts of Reconstruction. Such an investigation would show that the charges of extravagance, recklessness and maladministration so generally made about the administration of county and municipal affairs were grossly exaggerated and nearly, if not all of them wholly untrue. In fact, the expert flatly contradicts himself on this point, because he admits that the evidence does not support the charge of dishonesty in the case of the Negro sheriffs, and yet the sheriff is the principal officer in the administration of the county government. [my emphasis in bold]