Confederate "Heritage" Month 2018, April 24: Slavery and white racism

I always appreciate irreverent observances of Confederate "heritage" days:

In the real world, white Unionists in the free states largely shared basic white supremacist ideas with Southern slaveholders and their supporters. Although the dominant propaganda justification for slavery in the South in 1860 was a more intense and toxic version that held black people to be permanently suited only for slavery. And the rejection of democratic principles that implied was leading the slave states farther and farther away from democracy for whites, as well.

But slavery was a distinct issue. And by the end of the Civil War, many Union soldiers had not only seen the horrors of the Civil War that the slaveowners brought on to defend their Peculiar Institution, as they called it. Many of them had their first contact or extensive involvement with slaves, and had seen black Union troops performing bravely and ably in the Union cause, while the defenders of slavery were killing US soldiers in the service of treason.

So many Northerners who had previously been indifferent to slavery or not especially concerned about seeing it ended before the war now deeply despised it and understood its destructive effects on a democratic Republic like the United States.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2018, April 23: Secession in Mississippi and the issue that prompted it

Earlier this month, I quoted from an essay by Percy Lee Rainwater (1888-1964) on the politics of secession in antebellum Mississippi. He also had a book on the topic, Mississippi: Storm Center of Secession, 1856-1861 (1938), which incorporates the previously mentioned essay.

Rainwater describes in some detail the members of the Secession Convention that declared secession in 1861 , including their professions and major factions in the secession debate. He constructed this instructive table on the 100 members of the convention relying on The Mississippi Slave Schedule for 1860:

Out of 100 members of the convention, all but 18 directly owned other human beings as property. Using the lower end of the range, members of the Secession Convention owned at the very minimum 2,599 slaves among them. At the mid-range, the number of slaves owned would be 3,364.

But Rainwater is clearly impressed with this group in this 1938 book, describing it as "having every desire for the restraints of law and embracing no cabal of disappointed factionalists striving for illegitimate power." He even enthuses, "The convention was composed of some of the purest, the ablest, and the most opulent men in the state."

All but 18 of whom owned other human beings as property.

But, the neo-Confederates tell us, secession wasn't because of slavery. No, it was about Honor, Courage, Defense of Home, States Rights and it was all the fault of the damnyankees, anyway.

Oddly, though, even in Rainwater's account, they seemed to have been singularly focused on a particular issue:

All members of the convention, of whatever party — although finding the doctrine of States Rights both a convenient plea in estoppel of Northern aggression and, in the case of almost all, a legal right of secession — were united upon the great question that the institution of slavery ought and must at all hazards be preserved. The best means to be employed for making secure the institution of slavery was the sole great question which divided the convention. Every other question was incidental to, and revolved about, this one question upon which all were agreed. [my emphasis]

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.

Trump puts Andrew Jackson back in the news

Well, I called this blog "Old Hickory's Weblog" for most of its existence 'til now. So I'm happy to see this refreshingly historically literate commentary on Andrew Jackson and the Nullification Crisis in response to our President's bizarre Civil War revisionsm from this past weekend ("People don’t ask that question, but why was there the Civil War?"). Because Josh Marshall in this piece knocks it out of the park in Trump Knows Jack about Andrew Jackson. SAD! TPM 05/01/2017:

The final months of Jackson’s first term as president saw what historians refer to as the Nullification Crisis. In critical ways, it was a dry run for the Civil War. The notional trigger of the crisis was a tariff law which was generally opposed in the Southern states. But the real issue was the authority of the national government, whether states or groups of states could block federal laws or even secede from the union, and ultimately the security of slavery.

The originator of these doctrines and driver of the crisis was one of the great political stars of the early 19th century, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina.

Who, we might add, is the real political ancestor of Trump and Steve Bannon. As Josh also concludes at the end of the piece.

... the Nullification Crisis cut to the core of one of his central beliefs: the inviolability of the federal union. Today we hear ‘nationalism’ used as a byword for xenophobia, racism and militarism. Jackson had his mix of each. But Jackson thought the crisis, what Calhoun was doing could not have been more important. He actually wanted to march an army down to South Carolina and hang Calhoun. To the extent Jackson knew about the Civil War and was 'really angry' about it, he was really angry at the Southern planter aristocrats who would later start the Civil War. He was ready to go to war in 1832-33 to vindicate the union and popular democracy – two concepts that to him were basically inseparable.

Josh slips up a bit when he says that Jackson "also become known for his militarism." Say what? There was wasn't even a standing army to speak of when Jackson was President. Remember all those big wars during the Jackson Administration of 1829-1837? Me neither. I believe the sum total of them amounts to: the Second Seminole War of 1835-42. I think Ken Burns did a 12-part documentary series on that one. (Or, NOT!) Unless we include that it was during Jackson's Presidency that the US snatched the Malvinas/Falkland Islands from Argentina and gave it to the British, leaving a still-unresolved problem. But Josh redeems himself on that one:

Most of the public image of Jackson today, at least in the public arena is driven by the writing of Walter Russell Meade, whose grasp of the man and the period is, I would argue, rather thin and presentist. It’s this Jackson – militarist, unilateralist, authoritarian and nationalist that Bannon is in love with and through Bannon has become Trump’s favorite President.

Andrew Jackson has become the Schroedinger's Cat of contemporary American politics. Republicans don't believe in science, so rather than looking for quantam complexity, they just make stuff up to fit their preferred narrative. Democrats worry that if they challenge the Trump/Bannon/white-supremacist image of Jackson, it might upset some hardcore Republican somewhere who would never consider voting for a Democrat ever. So they cede the image of Jackson - Revolutionary War veteran, hero of the Battle of New Orleans, a Founder of the country and of the Democratic Party - to Republican hackery.

The reason that the Steve Bannons of the world would go to the trouble of fabricating a bogus historical version of Jackson: because Jackson has an enduring reputation as a pioneering political reformer. They make use of his image. The Democrats don't bother to contest it.

I visited the Reagan Library and Museum in southern California two weekends ago for the first time. They have a replica of the Oval Office as it was during St. Reagan's Presidency. I learned from the guide's spiel that St. Reagan was 6'1" tall. And LBJ was 6'5". I also noticed that he had a portrait of Andrew Jackson in the office, although not positioned in so prominent a way as Trump has it. St. Reagan surely realized that the well-known image of Jackson the Democrat had a firmly-established reputation as a reformer. And using it fit well with his pitch to the so-called Reagan Democrats that "I didn't leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me."

And the Democrats can't use their own well-established party symbol! It reminds me of the famous quote, a attributed to poet Robert Frost, that a liberal is someone "too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel."

One fascinating thing in learning about Argentine history is that contesting 19th century history is still a thriving practice. Left-nationalists and kirchneristas, not just historians but politicians and polemicists - proudly identify themselves with the images of Mariano Moreno (1778-181) and Juan Manuel de Rosas (1793-1877). While conservatives look to Bernardino Rivadavia (1780-1845), Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1811-1888) and especially Bartholomé Mitre (1821-1906) as the secular saints of their political tradition. But here in the US, only the Republican Party draws on that symbolism of the early days of the US, which still resonates strongly for many American voters. Zach Schonfeld notes in Understanding Donald Trump's Weird Obsession With Andrew Jackson Newsweek 05/01/2017, "Despite the more despicable aspects of his legacy, he remains reasonably popular among historians. (Though his popularity is sliding, and some are blaming Trump for that.)"

Sean Wilentz' Andrew Jackson (2007), his contribution to the American Presidents Series, is a fairly recent but pre-Trump account by a liberal historian that stresses elements of Jackson's democratic achievements and legacy without ignoring the less democratic aspects of his character and career.

But I said at the time that Trump visiting Jackson's grave and ludicrously trying to identify himself with Old Hickory was an instant dose of major bad karma. He's lucky that Jackson didn't claw his way out of his grave right there and bitch-slap him. He wouldn't have challenged Trump to a duel, though, because you only did that with somebody who was considered to have some personal honor.

Trump's vague remark that Jackson could have worked out something to avoid the Civil War attracted a lot of attention.

Jackson's supporters who were still around after the 1860 election were heard to wish they could have Jackson back in the White House for that moment. (Although, apparently unlike Trump, they were aware that Jackson was dead since years before.) But they were addressing a particular, immediate problem. Lincoln's famous decision-making style was to weigh decisions carefully and analytically, but then when he made the decision he followed it through in a determined way. And they were frustrated at Lincoln's seemingly restrained posture after he took office, in what they saw as a contrast to Jackson's handling of the Nullification Crisis. Lincoln himself later expressed regret that he hadn't responded more actively, like arresting Union military officers who resigned to go South to lead an armed rebellion against the US government. Trump may have heard some version of that, but what came out of his mouth in that interview was hopelessly garbled.

Tim Morris gives Trump way too much credit in understanding that situation, of which Morris himself gives a decent account, in Donald Trump is right about Andrew Jackson New Orleans Times-Picayune 05/02/2017.

Here are a few other notable reactions:

• Digby Parton expresses her gobsmacked response to Trump goofy Civil War remarks in Your Sixth Grader In Chief Hullabaloo 05/01/2017.
• Aaron Blake, Trump’s totally bizarre claim about avoiding the Civil War Washington Post 05/01/2017
• David Graham, Trump's Peculiar Understanding of the Civil War Atlantic Online 05/01/2017 Not so good.
• Tim Murphy, Historian on Donald Trump's Civil War Comments: "God Help Us" Mother Jones 05/01/2017
• Yoni Appelbaum, Why There Was a Civil War Atlantic Online 05/01/2017
• Chris Cillizza interviews Jon Meacham, What would Andrew Jackson think of Donald Trump? CNN 05/02/2017
• Jessica Estepa, Note to President Trump: Andrew Jackson wasn't alive for the Civil War Tennessean/USA Today 05/01/2017

Christopher Wilson in Historians react to Trump’s Civil War comments: ‘That’s entirely wrong in every respect’ Yahoo News! 05/01/2017 quotes historian Eric Rauchway putting Trump's comment about Jackson's "big heart" in some necessary context:

There was also pushback against Trump’s musings that Jackson could have prevented the Civil War and his suggestion that the seventh president — whose Indian Removal Act essentially legalized genocide — had a “big heart.”

“Andrew Jackson himself was a slaveholder and the Jacksonians were slaveholders and they despised the abolitionists,” said Rauchway, “so it’s hard for me to believe that they would have been able to prevent the Civil War. And actually it was Jacksonian policies – particularly those of James K. Polk, who styled himself as Young Hickory, as a direct heir to Andrew Jackson – which precipitated the Civil War. That’s entirely wrong in every respect.”

“Jackson had a big heart for white farmers,” said Hemmer, “Less so for the American Indians he slaughtered and the African-Americans he enslaved. Given Trump’s own focus on white Americans over non-white Americans, it’s not surprising that he would fail to see the limits of Jackson’s big-heartedness.”

James Loewen responds to Trump's now-infamous question in ‘Why was there the Civil War?’ Here’s your answer. Washington Post 05/02/2017:

Trump’s conclusion about Jackson places him in a camp of 1930s historians who called it a “needless war,” in the words of James G. Randall, brought about by a “blundering generation.” That view is a product of its time, and that time is now known as the Nadir of Race Relations. The Nadir began at the end of 1890 and began to ease around 1940. It was marked by lynchings, the eugenics movement and the spread of sundown towns across the North. Neo-Confederates put up triumphant Confederate monuments from Helena, Mont., to Key West, Fla., obfuscating why the Southern states seceded. They claimed it was about tariffs or states’ rights — anything but slavery.

Earlier, everyone knew better. In 1858, William Seward, a Republican senator from New York, gave a famous speech titled “The Irrepressible Conflict,” referring to the struggle between “slave labor” and “voluntary labor.” When Mississippi seceded, it emphasized the same point: “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world.”

Simply to recognize this material interest renders improbable the “needless war” notion. Mississippi was right: Slavery was the greatest material interest in the United States, if not the world. Slaves made up an investment greater than all manufacturing companies and railroads in the nation. Never has an elite given up such a stake voluntarily. The North went to war to hold the nation together, not to emancipate anyone. But the Civil War did end slavery. When might that have happened otherwise?

And I see that the next generation of the Clinton Dynasty has a safely simplistic answer that would not disturb any donor to the Clinton Foundation:

1 word answer: Slavery. Longer: When Andrew Jackson died in 1845 (16 yrs before the Civil War began), he owned 150 men, women and children. https://t.co/Icg6puG2JZ

— Chelsea Clinton (@ChelseaClinton) May 1, 2017

Postmodernism never really took hold with me, I admit. But "Slavery. Longer." seems like a 2-word answer to me. I'm just sayin'.

I wonder how Chelsea would explain Jackson's position in the Nullification Controversy. She went to Stanford, so I'm guessing she had one or two decent American history classes. But if you take the real history seriously, slavery and antislavery were devilishly complicated. Last month, I wrote a bit here about Hinton Rowan Helper, who was one of the most famous and effective antislavery advocates. He was also a white supremacist with racist ideas against blacks so noxious I can barely read them. And that combination of attitudes was not at all unusual among antebellum white opponents of slavery.

The one famous white American prior to the Civil War I know of who had ideas on the equality of blacks and whites, and men and women that would sound respectable in 2018 was John Brown. But how many Americans today would regard the "terrorist" (and hardcore Calvinist) John Brown as someone with whom they could identify? I think most Democratic politicians today, of either the corporate or progressive variety, would do backflips to avoid identifying the guerrilla fighter and convicted traitor John Brown as some kind of hero. Even though the Union Army that put an end to slavery - and was mainly composed of white men who thought themselves to be part of a superior race - used "John Brown's Body" as a marching song. Like Josh Marshall says in his excellent post on Trump and Jackson, history is complicated.

Also, there's this from Hillary hardliner Simon Maloy:

not every day you see a GOP president shit on Lincoln in favor of a genocidal, racist, Democratic war criminal https://t.co/momFwItuOd

— Simon Maloy (@SimonMaloy) May 2, 2017

Seriously, dude?

Jamelle Bouie's heart and head seem to be in the right place in this piece from March, Donald Trump Sees Himself in Andrew Jackson Slate 03/15/2017:

This is the most familiar vision of Jackson, heavily indebted to the mythmaking of the Democratic Party, which claims him as its founder next to Thomas Jefferson. In this popular narrative of the party, Jefferson embodied equality, autonomy, and economic opportunity, whereas Jackson stood for democracy and its expansion. Under his presidency, the United States renounced its property requirements for voting, opening the franchise to all white men. Defenders of Jackson acknowledge his racial exclusivity but see it as separate from a broader embrace of the principle of democratic participation.

That’s one view of Jackson. There is another. That perspective sees Jackson in a different tradition. Not of democracy, but of white supremacy. This Jackson was a planter who built his wealth and influence with the stolen labor of more than 200 enslaved Africans. He forced Native Americans off their land in a campaign of removal that claimed thousands of lives in service of white expansion and white hegemony.

Jacksonian democracy, in other words, was a racial democracy built on a foundation of ethnic cleansing, committed to race hierarchy and enslavement. And while Jackson rejected the nullification theories of his vice president, John C. Calhoun, he all but embraced the South Carolinian’s view that slavery — and racial caste more broadly — was “the best guarantee to equality among the whites.” Along with that racial ideology, he brought ceaseless condemnation of elite corruption and a profoundly anti-government philosophy that contributed to the panic of 1837, a crushing depression that lasted more than a half-decade.

Unfortunately, it's also a little-bit-of-this-little-bit-of-that approach to history. Jackson's two most significant democratic achievements as President were his successful fight against the Money Power embodied and symbolized by the Bank of the United States headed by Nicholas Biddle and his suppression of Calhoun's nullification scheme. Bouie ignores the first and trivializes the second.

But he does manage to say that Jackson's "populism ... is too exclusive." The present tense there is a tell. This is very much a presentist view of the Age of Jackson. And while I would call the Jacksonian movement proto-populist and let William Jennings Bryan's Populist Party be the first populists, I suspect that for corporate/Hillary Democrats, what bothers them about Jackson's "populism" is not that it was too exclusive, but rather than it made the Money Power a symbol of the wealthy ruling elite and successfully opposed it.

If the Hillary hardliners could scold Bernie Sanders for supporting a mayoral candidate in Omaha that had an anti-abortion record in his past, even though he had the most pro-choice position of any of the candidates in that race, I can picture them accusing Bernie or Elizabeth Warren of being "Jacksonians" and try to make that mean "Trumpists."

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2017, April 29: Antislavery and white racism [minor edits for clarity]

In this year's "Heritage" posts, my annual counter-observance of Confederate "Heritage" Month celebrated by neo-Confederates and still officially commemorated by a few states in the form of Confederate History Month, I've talked about the diverse attitudes about race among antislavery advocates. Including that of the famous Southern antislavery figure, Hinton Rowan Helper (1829-1909).

Jeffrey Brooke Allen makes some helpful distinctions among various white racist perspectives and actions in The Racial Thought of White North Carolina Opponents of Slavery, 1789-1876 North Carolina Historical Review 59:1 (Jan 1982):

Another key term, "racism," will be used interchangeably with the expression "ideological racism." "Racism" will refer to the belief that one or more racial groups is inherently and therefore permanently inferior to another group in terms of mental capacities and moral tendencies. "Social environmentalism," "environmentalism," and "antiracism" will each be used to indicate the contrary belief that racial inferiority is only apparent and is attributable not to biological inheritance but to an unfavorable social environment characterized by racial prejudice and discrimination. "Racial prejudice" will refer to feelings of contempt or aversion, especially aversion for physical or sexual contact between the races. Finally, "racial discrimination" will be used to indicate actions that are designed to affect members of a particular racial group adversely precisely because they belong to that group.

Any delimiting categories like this on some complex and messy a subject as white racism will inevitably by a little ragged around the edges. But they are helpful in looking at early American and antebellum racial ideas and practices in the US, not least because the ideology of scientific racism really began to flourish only in the early 19th century, although it had distinct roots in Enlightenment ideas of "civilization," identified with western Europeans.

Helper is a prime exhibit for the complex relationship of antislavery advocacy and white racial attitudes.

Henry Wilson (1812-1875) rightly describes the perspective taken in Helper's most famous book, in his (Wislon's) History of the rise and fall of the slave power in America, Vol 2 (3rd edition, 1876). Here he's describing an anti-Helper resolution proposed in Congress in 1859:

This stormy debate was introduced by a singular resolution, offered by John B. Clark of Missouri, to the effect that the doctrines of a book just published, written by Hinton R. Helper of North Carolina, and styled "The Impending Crisis of the South," were insurrectionary and hostile to the domestic tranquillity [sic] of the country; and that no member who had indorsed [sic] it was fit to be Speaker. The impertinence of that intrusive measure was indicated, not simply by its conflict with freedom of speech and action, but by the fact that the book condemned was not distinctively an abolition work, but was written not so much in the interest of the black as of the white population, for prudential rather than philanthropic reasons, more in behalf of the master than the slave, and more to help the non-slaveholding whites than either. A compendium, prepared for general circulation, had received the recommendation of a paper signed by nearly seventy members of the House of Representatives, and by such men as Horace Greeley, William C. Bryant, Thurlow Weed, and John Jay. The special point of the resolution was directed to the fact that Mr. Sherman, one of the candidates for the speakership, was among these signers ; and the demand was made by the mover that his name should be withdrawn. [my emphasis]

Allen gives an example of a Southern critic of slavery who argued for some kind of basic equality among blacks and whites:

Another early white critic of slavery who believed that blacks were good "from nature" was James O'Kelly, initially a friend and colleague of James Meacbam in the Methodist Episcopal church and later a founder of the Christian church. Like Meacham, O'Kelly was born in Virginia, but his ministerial circuit included parts of North Carolina, the state in which be settled in the 1790s and in which he spent the remaining thirty years of his life. In 1789 O'Kelly published an Essay on Negro Slavery, a bitter indictment that ignored the disadvantages slavery held for white people and assailed the institution for its cruelty to black people. Citing the biblical injunction that God made all men of 'one blood, O'Kelly repeatedly attacked racist denunciations of black people and explained their apparent shortcomings in patently environmentalistic terms. Confronting charges that blacks were by nature lazy, ignorant, and criminal, O'Kelly proclaimed that blacks labored indifferently only because slavery gave them no inducement to industry or hard work. "As for their ignorance," he reminded his readers, "it is surely your shame and sin, that they have received so shocking an education." "Your children," he continued, "would have been as foolish, bad they been raised after the same manner. Disgrace and want have brought them to be thieves." Turning to the argument that black women were inherently lascivious, O'Kelly observed that when African females were first crowded on the slave ships, they heroically resisted the blandishments of white males, only to fail and be "exposed to the brutish, filthy sailors." By no means natural slaves, many Africans had escaped the "brutish" sailors and "leaped into the friendly sea ... choosing strangling and death rather than the dreadful life of slavery!"

This is important in showing that there were whites who explicitly advocated for the equality of blacks and whites.

Although here's where Allen's distinctions among types of white racism quoted above are also important. Abstract expressions of equality could be sharply stated and even sincerely so, without those expressions leading to advocacy or practice of full equality toward black men and women. We see classic examples of that from the Declaration of Independence to the Lincoln-Douglas debates to Republicans today declaring their pristine lack of white racism while making minority voter suppression a key element of their electoral strategy.

But that doesn't mean their were any the less serious about their antislavery ideas and convictions. This is why it's so important to avoid projecting the predominant narratives on race in the present onto antebellum debates over slavery. Slavery and antislavery were complicated.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2017, April 28: Hinton Helper and the North Carolina piedmont

I've mentioned earlier this month Hinton Helper, the famous Southern antislavery writer and activist.

David Brown in Attacking Slavery from Within: The Making of "The Impending Crisis of the South" Journal of Southern History 70:3 (Aug 2004) explains that Helper had seen some of the baleful effects of the slave economy on his native piedmont section in North Carolina:

Moreover, economic trends within the central piedmont gradually worsened the position of nonslaveholders during the 1850s. Charles C. Bolton calculates that landless poor whites, who were mainly tenant farmers and laborers, composed somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of all free white households in the central piedmont in 1860, and he suggests that slavery restricted their economic opportunities. Most significantly, the chance of owning land and joining the ranks of the yeoman farmer diminished in the 1850s as the presence of slaves both lessened the need for and drove down the price of casual wage labor. Such work, routinely required by the agricultural economy, was one way that poor whites might eventually accumulate enough savings to become upwardly mobile. Other potential avenues of employment, such as working in the mining or turpentine industries, were also subject to competition from slave labor. The move toward more commercial farming, as railroads made the piedmont accessible to distant markets, also harmed the position of poor whites because the net effect was to raise land prices. Bolton concludes that there was a permanent and growing class of landless whites in the central piedmont whose only option was to leave the area, as they did in increasing numbers during the 1850s. Notably, Helper included in The Impending Crisis Benjamin Hedrick' s lament about the plight of families forced to leave the region. This was the economic situation of the piedmont in the mid- l 850s, with which Helper would have been personally familiar. We know that he placed great faith in the importance of statistics and quoted extensively from the 1850 census. However, he was also surely influenced by his own observations of greater numbers of landless whites, more frequent departures of friends and family, and a general sense of restricted economic opportunity in the piedmont. This situation stood in stark contrast to his impressions of the bustling urban North. Helper would have encountered a different economic scenario had he been resident elsewhere in the South and, accordingly, would have written a different book. [my emphasis]

Brown points out Helper expressed moral objections to slavery. But he goes so far as to argue that Hinton Rowan Helper was not motivated [in his antislavery] by racial hatred or by personal envy and most importantly was not an outsider, but instead he genuinely believed that he held the best interests of the South at heart. He attacked slavery from within."

As we've seen, hostility to slavery among whites often went hand-in-hand with hostility to blacks. Helper is usually taken to have been an example of that. Brown in this article questions the contemporary evidence for anti-black racism in Helper in the 1850s. He notes that Helper was specifically dubious about the (pseudo-) "scientific racism" that was so popular among slaveholders. Brown doesn't argue that Helper was free of antiblack racism in the 1850s. His point is that among the motivations for writing his Impending Crisis, "antiblack prejudice was not a prime, or even a minor, motivation."

As Brown notes, Helper's postwar books were distinctly racist. As the trusty Britannica Online's article on Hinton Rowan Helper, "After the war, he wrote three bitter racist tracts advocating deportation of blacks to Africa or Latin America."

The full text of Impending Crisis is available at the University of North Carolina's Documenting the American South website.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2017, April 26: Jefferson as icon and synecdoche

JSTOR Daily recently looked at what it describes as the enigma of Thomas Jefferson: What Are We to Make of Jefferson? 04/13/2017 in an article by Peter Feuerherd:

His views on black people can only be considered racist, and, while a champion of liberty, Jefferson owned slaves and fathered slave children with his mistress Sally Hemmings. His views on race could only be described as retrograde. And, while expressing doubts about slavery, he lived with its benefits, both economically and personally via his relationship with Hemmings, something long denied by historians but now widely recognized via DNA testing of his mixed-race descendants.

I'm not sure the DNA evidence is quite so generally accepted as that article indicates. But it's a strong statement of the argument that Jefferson was more a defender of slavery than an opponent.

And Feuerherd also argues:

The hagiographic view of Jefferson has definitely faded. Yet there is a call among historians not to go too far in the other direction, viewing a complex eighteenth- and nineteenth- century figure through a twenty-first century lens. But even in the context of his own time, when fellow Founding Fathers such as Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton opposed slavery, much of what Jefferson preached seemed lacking in his own life. The man who preached freedom and extolled the virtues of the simple yeoman farmer lived well above his means and owned humans.

JSTOR Daily also provides links to American Synecdoche: Thomas Jefferson as Image, Icon, Character, and Self by Jan Lewis and Peter Onuf American Historical Review 103:1 (Feb 1988).

They describe the way Jefferson looms over American history this way:

As historian James Parton put it in 1874, and Jefferson biographers have repeated ever since, "If Jefferson was wrong, America is wrong. If America is right, Jefferson was right." More recently, filmmaker Ken Burns has said that "one approaches Thomas Jefferson with the sense that he is, in a biographical sense, the Holy Grail of American history.

Of course, those are catchy sayings rather than historical evaluations. But Lewis and Onuf are looking at Jefferson's role as an icon, and those of illustrative examples of iconography.

Their article about several works on Jefferson, including Ken Burns' Thomas Jefferson: A Film (1997). Here is part of their critique of Burns' treatment of Jefferson and slavery:

Bums's image of Jefferson stands in contrast to the most recent scholarship on Jefferson, which is skeptical and, indeed, often critical. By failing to engage these debates, Bums misses an opportunity to engage his audience as well. The only exceptions are the opening and closing sections with the cacophony of voices talking about Jefferson's complexities and the twenty minutes or so devoted to race, slavery, and the Sally Hemings issue. Here, the viewer's gaze is deflected from transparent objects and images to the conflicting testimonies of talking heads. But in Bums's film, all authorities are created equal, and they tend to cancel each other out in a way that inert images and objects are never allowed to do.

... Although Bums repeatedly raises the issue of race in his films-co-producer Camilla Rockwell says, "Any film by Ken is going to have race as a central focus" - he treats it as an incoherence, an insoluble
problem in an otherwise explicable past.

They also evaluate books on Jefferson by Conor Cruise O'Brien, Joseph Ellis, and Pauline Maier observing that "for all their differences, these books are variations-or interrogations - of Parton's theme. They ask us to consider the civic consequences of the Jeffersonian synecdoche." By "synecdoche," they are referring to the way Parton and Burns use Thomas Jefferson to represent the United States.

I suppose I've done that to a certain extent in this year's Confederate "Heritage" Month posts, using Jefferson as a way to understand the evolution of the pro- and anti-slavery narratives.

But in real history, Jefferson really was a key player in those debates.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2017, April 25: A skewed view of Thomas Jefferson's democratic republicanism

Looking at the past is a social act in that engaging with history is simultaneously engaging with the way others view and have viewed the same history.

In several of this year's Confederate "Heritage" Month posts, we've looked at the shift in the pro- and antislavery narratives that took place around the Missouri Compromise of 1820.

Robert E. Shalhope in "Thomas Jefferson's Republicanism and Antebellum Southern Thought" Journal of Southern History 42:4 (Nov 1976) discusses the historical image of the third President. He describes the older image of Jefferson this way:

The idea that the American South underwent a conservative reaction in the second quarter of the nineteenth century has enjoyed great popularity among historians for quite some time. Scholars adhering to this perspective delineate "Jeffersonian" and "post-Jeffersonian" phases of antebellum southern history. Assuming liberal thought to be the primary characteristic of the first period, they believe that age was epitomized by Thomas Jefferson. Like his northern counterparts and fellow southern intellectuals, Jefferson is portrayed embracing the ideas of the Enlightenment. The classic view sees late-eighteenth-century and early-nineteenth-century American intellectuals placing their faith in reason and holding liberal views regarding society, religion, and politics. Most important, they are characterized as espousing the doctrine of natural rights and as holding strong antislavery beliefs. Consequently, Jefferson and his southern colleagues emerge as men who considered slavery a morally dubious institution burdensome to both the slaveholder and the community alike. Unfortunately, according to this view of southern history, reactionary forces which appeared in the 1820s caused the South to repudiate Jeffersonian liberalism in favor of a militant, conservative orthodoxy. These forces succeeded, however, only with the death of Jefferson - the ardent champion of freedom and equality.

But, of course, by the mid-1970s, Jefferson's image was undergoing a new round of examination with a less sympathetic view of his attitudes toward slavery.

Shalhope notes that the ascendant view in 1976 was to give more emphasis to Jefferson's "status as a southern aristocrat and his ambivalence regarding the place of the black man in American society." In that narrative, Jefferson's antislavery rhetoric was more superficial, "while his actions as a planter and politician actually served to strengthen the "peculiar institution" and to protect the interests of the planter class." Meanwhile, "slavery thrived and grew stronger within a society espousing the principles of liberty and equality."

His article puts Jefferson's antislavery position in the context of the concept of republicanism as it developed during Jefferson's lifetime.

What is republicanism? It can be a surprisingly tricky concept. Frank Lovett authored an article about the concept for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Republicanism (2014):

In political theory and philosophy, the term ‘republicanism’ is generally used in two different, but closely related, senses. In the first sense, republicanism refers to a loose tradition or family of writers in the history of western political thought, including especially: Machiavelli and his fifteenth-century Italian predecessors; the English republicans Milton, Harrington, Sidney, and others; Montesquieu and Blackstone; the eighteenth-century English commonwealthmen [sic]; and many Americans of the founding era such as Jefferson and Madison. The writers in this tradition emphasize many common ideas and concerns, such as the importance of civic virtue and political participation, the dangers of corruption, the benefits of a mixed constitution and the rule of law, etc. ... [my emphasis]

Shalhope describes Jefferson's republicanism in similar terms.

Unfortunately, Shalhope concentrates so heavily on the psychological aspects of Jefferson's positions that his article offers only limited insight offer much insight into the ways in which the slavery debate developed in response to political developments. And he comes to the overly simplistic assumption, "Jefferson became more and more inflexible: southern society epitomized American republicanism; northern values were subversive."

He also winds up dancing around the slavery issue, and seems to view Jefferson's position simplistically as an advocate of states' rights against those who advocated greater central authority. And he offers this very misleading picture of Jefferson's position on the Missouri Compromise:

Jefferson remained convinced that the true issue was the power of the central government to regulate the internal affairs of the states. If Congress could impose restrictions upon Missouri' s entrance into the Union, it could logically abolish slavery in the other states. While this would lead to insurrections in the short run, the long-term effects would be even more disastrous for American society. A sectional majority in Congress could impose its values upon the rest of the nation. Great numbers of Americans would fall under the control of men who did not share their interests; consequently, those in the minority would lose their liberty and freedom.

In the end, he winds up supporting the Confederate's ideological narrative of Jefferson, "Thomas Jefferson clearly helped to transform the Virginia republicanism of the Revolution into the southern intransigence of the late antebellum period."

Shelhope's accounts winds up obscuring rather than illuminating the development of the real contradiction between democracy and slavery and how Jefferson's reactions to it developed.

Which makes me also wonder if his emphasis on Jefferson's republicanism is also meant to obscure that Jefferson's brand was very much a democratic republicanism, even with the limits that American society imposed upon it at the time.