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 8: Jefferson, Jackson, the American democratic tradition and antislavery

I've expressed my reservations about the arguments made by Forrest Gabors in From Oligarchy to Republicanism (2017). One of those reservations is that his positive presentation of the Republican Party position on what he describes as "regime change" during Reconstruction is uncomfortably consistent with present-day neoconservative demands for "regime change" in Iran and various other countries.

But his account of the Republican position on the Slave Power and Reconstruction does provide a welcome alternative to the brand of Whig history that the left and center-left in the US have largely adopted at the moment in which the monarchist and advocate of government-by-corruption Alexander Hamilton and the plutocratic John Quincy Adams are the stars with Abraham Lincoln as the superstar Great Emancipator, while leaders like Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson are considered as something like contemptible hypocrites and villainous evildoers.

Now, there's nothing wrong with writing the history of Whigs. (Lincoln was a Whig before being a Republica, BTW.) Or of warmongers. Or of crackpot rightwing political sects from the Anti-Masonic Party on.

But I've yet to see a way to understand the growth and expansion of democracy without understanding that the process was a historical movement from not-democracy to democracy. And there's no reason to think that process is completed. Or to assume that the process takes place without resistance or setbacks or reversals.

Democracy in practice has its shadow sides. And it's indispensable for honest history that those sides be recognized.

America in 1776 started a national-independence revolution that was widely and rightly understood as the most democratic movement of the time that successfully took on the world's most powerful empire of the day. The Constitution of 1789 and the system it established became the model for the new Latin American nations and was seen by European liberals as the most advanced democratic republic in the world.

The British took pleasure in pointing out that the great American democratic republic was also a slave republic. Even though the slaveholding states that rebelled in 1776 were slaveholding British colonies immediately before that. Despite the cynicism and hypocrisy with which that criticism was often made, it was true. Just because it functioned as British propaganda doesn't mean it was wrong. And, like the Northern US banks and shipping companies, British firms also profited from American slavery in the cotton trade. So much so that it touch-and-go during the first years of the Civil War whether Britain would recognize the Confederacy as an independent country, which would have made the Union cause much more difficult and even opening the possibility of a formal or de facto alliance of Britain with Confederacy.

In other words, the American Revolution was a messy and contradictory enterprise, like every other drastic political change in history. Purity in political movements hard to find. As Hegel famously observed, "history is not the soil in which happiness grows. The periods of happiness in it are the blank pages of history." (From his Lectures on World History) Substitute "pure political movements" for "history" and the statement is at least equally true.

But looking in what direction a political movement or process is heading is a different story. Those are results we can see, whether or not we like the picture they present.

In the context of the concerns in the forefront of historians' considerations today, even the post-Civil War Reconstruction regimes would qualify only as deeply flawed and very limited democracies. Although there were scattered periods of women voting prior to the Civil War, When the Territory of Wyoming recognized women's right to vote in 1869, they were unique in doing so in the United States. Women's suffrage in the US was established nationally only in 1920 in the US.

And, of course, Native Americans were the targets of discrimination, relocation, plundering, murder and a long series of what were known as Indian Wars. There's no way to tell that story without several variants of Europeans looking very bad: British, English, Spanish, French, Americans, Canadians, Mexicans. Something that Nabors highlights in his book is that Republicans before and after the Civil War advocated radical versions of democratic land reform. But not only was all that land previously occupied by Indians, although not "owned" in the European sense. And part of those radical land reform proposals had to do with distributing territorial land. Or, in other words, distributing land taken from Indians by force and violence to distribute to white men.

And yet democracy grew and expanded. And eventually the American political community expanded to include the vote and full citizenship for blacks, women, and Native Americans. Nabors recounts how the pro- and anti-slavery disputants each claimed to be the true representatives of the tradition and values of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. And in doing so, they confronted the contradictions between the ideals of democracy and equality, on the one hand, and the reality of slavery. A big part of his focus is how white citizens - essentially all of whom shared some kind of white supremacist ideas - came to see it as part of their own interest in democratic rights and freedoms for themselves required them to destroy slavery and make the slaves free people and even voting citizens.

But those ideas didn't drop down from Heaven on the day in 1860 when South Carolina declared its secession from the Union. They were deeply rooted in the ideas of of the Revolution and the Constitution and the ways in those ideas were incorporated of their understanding of their individual and group interests. Abraham Lincoln gave particular emphasis to the Declaration itself. He made this well-known observation in a letter to Joshua Speed (08/24/1854):

I am not a Know-Nothing [i.e., not an adherent of the anti-immigrant American Party]. That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor or degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that "all men are created equal." We now practically read it "all men are created equal, except negroes" When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read "all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics." When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty -- to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy [sic].

As President, Lincoln, who was an abolitionist and dead set on stopping the expansion of slavery, claimed Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson as the Presidents to whom he looked as models for his own Presidency. The two Presidents who founded the Democratic Party that now can't even be bothered to invoke the democratic traditions of which they were a part. Even allowing an anti-democratic malicious clown like Donald Trump to pose as a Jacksonian.

Nabors gives this example of how the Jacksonian reformers in the Democratic Party later found their way into the Republican Party when the Democratic Party converted itself into the party of John Calhoun. How people today can fail to distinguish the radical difference between the Jacksonian tradition and that of John Calhoun still bewilders me:

James Blaine dated Van Buren’s defeat in 1844 as the beginning of Calhoun’s total influence over the Democratic Party, but it “moved so rapidly and so far, that men in the North, who wished to remain in the ranks of the Democracy, were compelled to trample on the principles, and surrender the prejudices, of a lifetime.” In particular, Reconstruction Republicans who were former Democrats deplored the transformation of their party. John Hale had left the Democratic Party and successively joined the Liberty, Free Soil, and Republican Parties. He remembered Van Buren’s surprising demise at the 1844 convention, with the words, “I repeat but history when I say that the breath of slavery has made and unmade the public men of this country.” The old Democratic Party led by Andrew Jackson, said George Williams, had opposed “monopolies, class legislation, and the unjust and artificial distinctions of society.” But “Calhounism however found its way into the party and worked like poison. Contrary to the teachings of the Fathers that Slavery was a political, social and moral evil, it came to teach the ethics of Calhoun that Slavery was a political, social and moral blessing.” [my emphasis]

Nabors also describes an early version of what we now call "voter suppression" directed by the planters and their flunkies against ordinary white workers and farmers in the South, in which votes had to be cast by voice, about as far removed from a secret ballot as it could be.

This method of voting exposed the elector to the candidate’s control by means of bribery, pressure, or intimidation. In addition, it could reverse the effect of the central reform of the Jacksonian democracy movement — the elimination of property qualifications for voting. If the elector was landless or a tenant but had to express his choice by voice vote at the polls, the individual’s fear of the landlord or employer could more easily induce him to vote as the landlord wished, increasing the landlord’s control of election outcomes. Madison expressed this concern in the Federal Convention of 1787, when he predicted that if the propertyless obtained suffrage, they would become the “tools of opulence and ambition.” His intention was not to limit the republican liberty of the people; rather, he intended the opposite. In the same context, he said, “The right of suffrage is certainly one of the fundamental articles of republican government” and that a “gradual abridgment of this right has been the mode in which aristocracies have been built on the ruins of popular forms.” The apparently democratic reform of giving suffrage to the propertyless would actually augment the ruling power of oligarchy, not restrict it, and Madison wished to check that result. Viva voce voting assisted the oligarchy, under democratic guise. [my emphasis]

The 19th century USA had slave revolts and women's suffrage campaigns, utopian movements and religious revivals, public dissent and passive resistance, democratic societies and labor unions, all of which provided some ways for which those excluded from full citizenship ways to exert pressure for democratic change: women, slaves, free blacks, immigrants, non-Protestant religious groups, even Native Americans.

But they also appealed to democratic principles put into effect by war and revolution and political struggle among the dominant white male political community. That was real history. American democracy wan't born by Immaculate Conception.

Women's vote in the Early Republic period in the US

Gordon Wood in his 2009 history, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815, wrote this about voting in the early days of government under the Constitution in the United States:

Perhaps the most radical change resulting from the Jeffersonian election of 1800 was in politics. Popular voting took on a significance that it had never quite had before, and the increased numbers of contested elections for both federal and state officials sent the turnout of voters skyrocketing. In many places, especially in the North, the participation of eligible voters went from 20 percent or so in the 1790s to 80 percent or more in the first decade of the nineteenth century. At the same time, states that had not already done so began to expand the franchise by eliminating property qualifications or transforming the requirement into the mere paying of taxes. Of course, the enhanced importance of voting and the increase in electoral competition made suffrage exclusions as important as suffrage expansions. Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and New Jersey, which earlier had had no racial restrictions, now confined voting exclusively to white adult males. With the exception of a brief period in New Jersey (1790-1807) no state granted women the suffrage. By modern standards the system was far from democratic, but by the standards of the early nineteenth century America possessed the most popular electoral politics in the world.

Its always both frustrating and fascinating to see how political progress and political retrogression can happen at the same time within the same political entity. Jefferson and his supporters in the Republican Party (the party that later became today's Democratic Party) called his election in 1800 "the revolution of 1800." Jefferson's party wasn't nearly so squeamish at using the word "revolution" in a positive sense in those days, in dramatic contrast to today's corporate Democrats. Today's Republicans with the Reagan Revolution and the Gingrich Revolution and so on has not been nearly so squeamish in that regard in recent decades.

One of the things that strikes me in this passage is that Wood cites the fact that "[p]opular voting took on a significance that it had never quite had before" was "the most radical change" that manifested itself in the 1800 election at all levels. If you're someone who believes that democratic participation and popular interest in public affairs are desirable in a democratic republic, that was a good thing.

I would also note that increasing democratic participation is at the core of what Bernie Sanders refers to as the kind of revolution he wants to see.

Another striking point in that paragraph is that women had the franchise for nearly two decades around the start of the nineteenth century. But as voter participation expanded for white men, the one state that recognized women's right to vote put an end to it. A similar backward step from the standpoint of democracy was that there was also a trend to remove the franchise from free blacks in some places. This is a case where democratic progress (a huge increase in popular participation) happened simultaneously with democratic regression.

The trend toward disenfranchising women had begun earlier, with New York, Massachusetts and New Hampshire having withdrawn women's suffrage prior to 1800. (See Wikipedia's Timeline of women's suffrage in the United States.) This is evidence that some men and women even in the late 18th century in the US thought that women voting was a good thing. Not only was the idea talked about at the time. It had actually been practiced to a limited extent in the United States.

But since Wood has a realistic and evidence-based approach to history, he reminds us that "by the standards of the early nineteenth century America possessed the most popular electoral politics in the world."

The egocentric American Exceptionalism is happy to use alleged American superiority in all things as an excuse to make war against foreign governments that displease us.

But it is important to remember that the US in 1800 was at best only a partial democracy by the standards of 2017 - women in Iran also have the right to vote today - it still at that time had the most popular electoral politics in the world. And it really was an inspiration for people in Europe and Latin America that wanted to move in a democratic direction in their countries' governance.

And if we believe democracy is a desirable and necessary for a free people, that was a good thing. And understanding that is an essential part of understanding the history of the Early Republic and antebellum periods.

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.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2017, April 14: Anti-slavery as a partisan tool

In the previous post in this series, we looked at the ways in which the abolitionist cause became associated with partisan interests, including intra-party rivalries, a development that emerged in a more pronounced way with the Missouri crisis of 1819-20. Joshua Michael Zeitz provides these examples in "The Missouri Compromise Reconsidered: Antislavery Rhetoric and the Emergence of the Free Labor Synthesis" Journal of the Early Republic 20:3 (Autumn 2000):

In retrospect, the more that he pondered its dynamics, the more certain Thomas Jefferson grew that the Missouri Crisis had been orchestrated for political purposes by a group of sly Federalist operatives. "The Missouri question is a mere party trick," he wrote to Charles Pinckney, several months after Congress formulated the well known 36 °30' line. "The leaders of federalism, defeated in their schemes of obtaining power by rallying partisans to the principle of monarchism ... are taking advantage of the virtuous feelings of the people to effect a division of parties by a geographical line." Former President James Madison agreed that the proponents of slavery restriction shared "an object very different from the welfare of the slaves," while his successor and Virginia neighbor, President James Monroe, was certain that the sole intent of the antislavery forces was "undoubtedly to acquire power."

As time went on, this position looked more and more like a cynical defense of slavery. Which it surely always was to some degree, depending on the person.

But politics is a tribal affair, as we are constantly reminded. Partisan loyalties grow over time and become connected to a variety of social, cultural, class and political interests and issues. And there is also a strong temptation to regard the other side as acting in bad faith in their use of issues. Which, as we see regularly, is often actually the case.

The antislavery issue became associated with Northern Democrats, the remnants of the Federalist Party (notably the archetypical conservative Daniel Webster), the Whigs and eventually the Republicans. But the antislavery advocates were also often associated with a tendency to favor government by wealthy industrial and banking elites, support for the Bank of the United States, and opposition to the expansion of the right to vote. The sectional alignments were primarily though not exclusively based on slavery, but sectionalism also functioned as a distinct source of political alignments.

We shouldn't lose sight on the main point, that slavery was wrong and incompatible with democracy and democratic freedoms. As we've also seen, the ways in which the slave system in practice imposed more and more obvious restrictions on democracy for whites in both slave and free states. And that meant that white voters had a rational selfish reason for hating slavery. That meant that antislavery sentiment could be and often was associated with hatred of black people, as well. Or, in another way of putting it, white voters and politicians could be "sincerely" and practically opposed to slavery and/or its expansion, while not being "sincere" in expressing concern for the well-being of the black slaves themselves.

Zeitz continues:

By December 1820 [the year the Missouri Compromise was concluded] Jefferson could assure his old friend, Marquis de Lafayette, that the debate had not been "a moral question, but one merely of power." Eight months later he detected no more lasting harm done than that the episode had "given resurrection to the Hartford Convention men." Some three years after the crisis had passed, the sage of Monticello remained indignant that "the people of the North [had been] blindfolded into the snare [and had] followed their leaders for awhile with a zeal truly moral and laudable, until they became sensible" that the Missouri question had been "got up" under a "false front."

We don't have to take such claims as those by Jefferson just quoted at face value. He was a retired politician, but very much a politician, diplomat and polemicist nevertheless. However, understanding the role that this claim played is important to understanding the evolution of the slavery debate at that time.

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

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

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

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

I plan to discuss his analysis further in following posts.

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

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2017, April 8: Jefferson, the Missouri Compromise and the evolution of the slavery issue

Stuart Leibiger looked at Jefferson's position from retirement in Monticello on the Missouri Compromise of 1820 in "Thomas Jefferson and the Missouri Crisis: An Alternative Interpretation" Journal of the Early Republic 17:1 (1997).

Leibiger's argument about correcting traditional interpretations of Jefferson's distress over events around the Missouri Compromise doesn't strike me as particularly notable, although it strikes me as obviously correct. He argues that he calculated his statements to political effect, which seems pretty obvious to me. He writes, "Dumas Malone's statement that 'there is no reason to believe that he ... tried to have any direct influence on the course of events in the crisis' seems too naive."

But that statement by Dumas, which is from the chapter on the Missouri Compromise in The Sage of Monticello (1981) from which I quoted in the last post in this series. It stuck out to me, because it seems inconsistent with the story Dumas is telling there. So whether Leibiger's argument about the nuances of conventional interpretations is something I'll gladly leave to the professional Jefferson scholars.

But I find Leibiger's concluding judgment to be a very useful perspetive:

Historians long have taken Jefferson's shrill rhetoric on the Missouri Crisis at face value, probably because it was so prophetic; but prophecy was never his intention. Jefferson and others used threats and bullying to coerce a compromise and preserve the Union. The strategy worked in the short term, but in the long run it led to southern proslavery intransigence and finally civil war. From Jefferson's perspective, issuing frightful warnings may have seemed like a sound approach to sectional bickering. During the revolutionary years, southern ultimatums had produced compromises for the Union, most notably at the 1787 Federal Convention. But in the 1820s and 1830s, many Americans began placing other priorities-including the morality of owning slaves - above constitutional unionism. Still unaware of these shifting sentiments, Jefferson employed familiar tactics that had worked in the eighteenth century. The gradual emergence of both "fire-eaters" in the South and abolitionists in the North guaranteed that his approach would backfire as passion and single-issue fanaticism replaced moderation and forbearance. Jefferson's close friend James Madison, who seemed to recognize the decline of Americans' compromising spirit and the rise of confrontational moral imperatives, wisely avoided repeating his predecessor's dire pronouncements. [my emphasis]

The politics of the slavery issue were changing in ways that Jefferson may well have misunderstood. He interpreted the antislavery proposal that initiated the Missouri crisis as a cynical political ploy on the behalf of monarchist-inclined Federalist types.

Politics is politics, so it would be truly remarkable if the antislavery advocates in Congress didn't pay attention to the effect of such proposals on their own political fortunes. But however cynical the individual politician using the issue, the issue wouldn't lend itself to cynical usage if there weren't some support among their public for it.

The institution of slavery and the attitudes of white supremacy were also evolving rapidly. At the beginning of the 19th century, the defenders of slavery typically justified the Peculiar Institution as a civilizing force, lifting the African slaves to a higher level of civilization. This ideology obviously had more than a little cynicism in it, too. William Freehling calls that the "necessary evil" defense of slavery. (The Road to Disunion, Vol. 2: Secessionists Triumphant, 1854-1861; 2007) Over time, that justification of slavery fell out of favor in the Lower South, although it continued to be used more often in the Upper South. The latter approach grew and intensified as slavery began to come under more intense challenge.

The new, activist Abolitionist movement and hardening Southern commitment to slavery were making the gradual abolition process no longer feasible in practice. In retrospect, the Missouri crisis symbolizes that shift in practical possibilities.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2017, April 7: Jefferson and the Missouri Compromise

The Missouri Compromise of 1820, was one of the events that we now recognize as one of the major events leading up to the Civil War. It involved a conflict over the extension of slavery, and pitted the free states against the slave states.

For a quick summary version of the Missouri Compromise, we'll turn again to he 1960 edition of The Beards' New Basic History of the United States by Charles, Mary and William Beard:

Under its power to make "all needful rules and regulations" respecting territory belonging to the United States, could Congress lawfully exclude slavery from such territory? That subject was not mentioned in the document, but it was squarely raised in 1818-20 during a dispute over the admission of Missouri to the Union as a slave state. By that time Northern states bad abolished slavery within their borders, or had provided for gradual abolition, and anti-slavery sentiment was growing insistent in the country.

Opposition to the admission of another slave state was outspoken in Congress and a deadlock occurred on the issue. After many angry words had been uttered, the standstill was broken by a compromise: Missouri was to be admitted with slavery, and the balance of political power maintained by the admission of Maine as a free state. In addition, as a part of the compromise, slavery was to be prohibited in the rest of the Louisiana Territory north of the line 36° 30'.

On the one side it was claimed that Congress bad no authority to prohibit slavery in this territory. On the other, attention was called to the fact that the Northwest Ordinance, adopted in 1787 and ratified by Congress in 1789, had excluded slavery from the Northwest Territory; so it was argued that Congress could lawfully do this under the Constitution.

Jefferson was no longer holding public office in 1820. But he continued to follow public events and communicate with political leaders. And he made a statement that became perhaps the most famous comment on the Missouri Compromise, as we see in this excerpt from the Britannica Online article on it (internal links omitted):

The territory of Missouri first applied for statehood in 1817, and by early 1819 Congress was considering enabling legislation that would authorize Missouri to frame a state constitution. When Rep. James Tallmadge of New York attempted to add an antislavery amendment to that legislation on February 13, 1819, however, there ensued an ugly and rancorous debate over slavery and the government’s right to restrict slavery. ...

Although slavery had been a divisive issue in the United States for decades, never before had sectional antagonism been so overt and threatening as it was in the Missouri crisis. Thomas Jefferson described the fear it evoked as “like a firebell in the night.” Although the compromise measures appeared to settle the slavery-extension issue, John Quincy Adams noted in his diary, “Take it for granted that the present is a mere preamble—a title page to a great, tragic volume.” Sectional conflict would grow to the point of civil war after the Missouri Compromise was repealed by the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854) and was declared unconstitutional in the Dred Scott decision of 1857. [my emphasis]

In 1820, the Union contained 22 states, equally divided between slave and free states. Missouri territory was part of the enormous Louisiana Purchase that Jefferson made from France in 1803. The Missouri Compromise, brokered by House Speaker Henry Clay (1757-1852). As noted above, the agreement involved:

• Admission of Missouri to the Union as a slave state
• Admission of Maine to the Union as a free state, preserving the 50-50 balance among slave and free states and therefore the balance of representation between the two in the US Senate.
• Exclusion of slavery from all parts of the Lousiana Territory north of the parallel 36° 30'

It was the later that particularly disturbed Jefferson, as Jonathan Earle explains by Jonathn Earle in "The Political Origins of the Civil War" OAH Magazine of History 25:2 (2011):

The debates and threats of disunion went to the core issue of the struggle for power in Congress between representatives of the northern and southern states and, related to that, the ability of Congress itself to decide the fate of the territories added to the United States. These were difficult issues to solve, and incidentally ones put off into the future by the founders. This is why the aging Thomas Jefferson confided to a correspondent his fears that the line created by the Compromise would endanger the future of the nation: "this momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened me and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union ... a geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated."

There is nothing in that comment of Jefferson's that countenances the legitimacy of secession, for slavery or any other matter. Jefferson's seriousness about his consistent opposition to slavery has been brought into question, largely because his treatment of his own slaves. But he did oppose the institution of slavery as a matter of policy. And if his position on the Missouri Compromise represented any retreat from his antislavery policy position, he managed to keep it well concealed.

Dumas Malone devotes a chapter of the sixth and final volume of his Jefferson biography, The Sage of Monticello (1981) to Jefferson's reaction to the Missouri Compromise. He writes that the Burr conspiracy during Jefferson's Presidential Administration heavily influenced the former President's view of the context of the threat of disunion. In particular, Jefferson worried that the most likely scenario in which the Union would be split would be by secession of western states. Which is what Burr had tried to pull off.

A second important consideration is Jefferson's hostile view of the threat of states seceding was heavily influenced by his experience with the New England Federalist threats to secede in support of Britain in the War of 1812, a threat that was represented by the Hartford Convention of . A very much related consideration for him was that the Federalists still around in 1820 were supporting the effort to ban slavery in Missouri, which touched off the crisis resolved by the Missouri Compromise. In 1821, he wrote (letter to Henry Dearborn 08/17/1821):

I rejoice with you that at length a member of our Union. Whether the question it excited is dead, or only sleepeth, I do not know. I see only that it has given resurrection to the Hartford convention men. They have had the address, by playing on the honest feelings of our former friends, to seduce them from their kindred spirits, and to borrow regaining power under political distinctions, they have adroitly wriggled into its seat under the auspices of morality, and are again in the ascendency from which their sins had hurled them.
[my emphasis]

Jefferson is arguing that that Federalists and their political successors had used the Missouri crisis to recuperate their reputation and take votes from the Jefferson-Madison-Monroe Republicans by using the antislavery issue ("under the auspices of morality"). He clear assumption, emphasized by Malone, was that the concern over slavery expressed by the opponents of the Jeffersonians was political cynicism.

But a third reason was Jefferson shared with most pre-Civil War Abolitionists an unrealistic idea of what emancipation of the slaves would look like. More specifically, Jefferson - and Lincoln prior to the war - supported the program of sending freed slaves to Africa. This approach was never especially attractive to black Abolitionists like Frederick Douglass. Jefferson's assumption, as he expressed in letters around this time, was that if the free states forced emancipation onto the slave states, that it would result in something like a civil war of blacks against whites, with the latter being in deadly danger in that situation.

In this latter sense, Jefferson was taking a proslavery position, in the immediately practical context. He was likely assuming that the emancipation he hoped to see in Virginia and other Southern states would take place in a similar way to what had occurred in the free states of 1820: emancipation enacted by the states in a process which included a relative reduction in the number of black people present. But he also understood that the process he envisioned would require a mass emigration of blacks, which in reality would have had to have been a mass expulsion.

In the same letter in which his famous fireball in the night metaphor appeared, he wrote this (letter to John Holmes, 04/22/1820), "Of one thing I am certain, that as the passage of slaves from one State to another, would not make a slave of a single human being who
would not be so without it, so their diffusion over a greater surface would make them individually happier, and proportionally facilitate the accomplishment of their emancipation, by dividing the burthen [sic] on a greater number of coadjutors." Such a process of "diffusion" was what had occurred in the states which by 1820 had abolished slavery at the state level. It's worth noting here that the issue in the infamous Dred Scott decision in 1857 was whether taking a slave into a free state abolished the slave's legal state of servitude.

In that same letter, he used dignified language to express the terror whites in the slaveowning states feared from slave revolts, as well as from the abolition of slavery in a state in which "dispersion" or some other kind of mass exit of black people:

... there is not a man on earth who would sacrifice more than I would to relieve us from this heaveymore than I would to relieve us from this heavy reproach [the insitution of slavery], in any practicable way. The cession of that kind of property, for so it is misnamed, is a bagatelle which would not cost me a second thought, if, in that way, a general emancipation and expatriation could be effected; and gradually, and with due sacrifices, I think it might be. But as it is, we have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation [i.e., of the white population in the slave states] in the other. [my emphasis]

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2017, April 6: Jefferson and the Aaron Burr secession conspiracy

I've been using Brian Steele's article, "Thomas Jefferson, Coercion, and the Limits of Harmonious Union" (Journal of Southern History 4:2008), as a jumping-off point for looking the positions Jefferson took on secession and states rights at several crisis moments during his lifetime. One of those was Aaron's Burr's conspiracy.

This article from the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), The Burr Conspiracy (n/d accessed 04/06/2017, summarizes Burr's plan this way:

When Vice President Aaron Burr killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel in 1804, he also killed his chance to be president. Wanted for murder in New York, he fled the state and went to Philadelphia. Realizing that he had no future on the east coast, Burr, in a frantic effort to salvage his destroyed political power and heavily in debt, conceived a plan to seek political fortunes beyond the Alleghenies. He first contacted the British Minister, Anthony Merry, living in Philadelphia. He offered Merry his services in any efforts by Great Britain to take control over the western part of the United States. Merry, who hated the United States, wrote his Foreign Ministry that while Burr was notoriously profligate, nevertheless, his ambition and spirit of revenge would be useful to the British government. Merry became a strong supporter of Burr's schemes.

In 1805, Burr came up with a plan that involved secession:

Burr was dropped from the presidential ticket by Jefferson and in April 1805 commenced to put his plans into motion. He again approached the British via Minister Merry. He informed Merry that Louisiana was ready to break with the United States and once it did all the western country would follow suit. To be successful, Burr requested that Britain assure his protection, provide him with a half of million dollar loan, and dispatch a British naval squadron to the mouth of the Mississippi River. The British might have entertained Burr's requests but Prime Minister Pitt died and was succeeded by Charles James Fox, a life-long friend of the United States. Fox considered the Merry-Burr discussions indiscreet, dangerous and damnable and recalled Merry to England on June 1, 1806. Having failed to secure British aid in an attempt to separate western states from the United States, Burr then headed west across Pennsylvania. [my emphasis]

As the article recounts, Jefferson's Administration charged Burr with treason. Burr walked on the treason charge because the highly partisan and anti-Jefferson Supreme Court Justice John Marshall presided over the trial and found him innocent. Jefferson and his supporters had good reason to think that the Chief Justice had not handled the trial well, to put it mildly.

Confronted with this treasonous attempt at secession, Jefferson charged the perpetrator with treason. That was strong statement of his position, even though the active collusion with Britain rather than just the secession plans themselves were also involved.

During the crisis that unfolded during Aaron Burr's conspiracy (which Jefferson ultimately understood as a plan to separate the western states from the Union), Jefferson consulted [Secretary of State James] Madison about whether the executive had the authority to use regular troops in cases of domestic insurrection. When Madison told Jefferson that he did not, Jefferson drafted a bill "authorizing the emploiment [sic] of the land and naval forces of the US. in cases of insurrection" in all situations where the president is authorized to use militia "to suppress such insurrection, or to cause the laws to be duly executed." [my emphasis]

But Jefferson celebrated the fact that the crisis was resolved without a resort to force on the part of the federal government:

At all times, though, Jefferson hoped that local authorities would suppress the plot and counted on the loyalty and republicanism of the inhabitants of the western states. After the plot failed, the lesson Jefferson took from it was that government was strongest when "every man feels himself a part" of it - the message of the first inaugural. It proved, too, "the importance of preserving to the State authorities all that vigor which the Constitution foresaw would be necessary, not only for their own safety, but for that of the whole." The "hand of the people" had "given the mortal blow to a conspiracy which, in other countries, would have called for an appeal to armies." Federal force thus seemed unnecessary in a union of such harmony and affection.

Steele stresses how emphatically Jefferson insisted on the necessity and justice of the national government preserving itself in the face of a state in open rebellion and attempting to secede from the Union:

But if the people of Ohio and Kentucky and Louisiana had not come through [in foiling the secession plot], Jefferson was prepared for Burr. In his sixth annual message Jefferson reminded Congress that a benign government directed by the will of the people made "insurrection or enterprise on the public peace or authority" nearly unimaginable. Nevertheless, Jefferson remained unwilling to trust such "moral restraints only" and praised the wisdom of laws that "provided punishments for these crimes when committed." But even this seemed insufficient to deal with such a conspiracy against the Union. Accordingly, Jefferson encouraged Congress to pass laws giving him the power to prevent even the "commission" of such crimes. As much as Jefferson trusted the magnetism of affection and interest to hold the Union together, he nonetheless considered a kind of preemptive suppression of "insurrection" a legitimate function of the national government. [my emphasis]

Jefferson's record on secession and the need to preserve the Union with the appropriate means to do so, including military coercion, stand out clearly in the Burr conspiracy incident.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2017, April 5: Jefferson and the need for national authority

In the April 4 installment, we looked at Thomas Jefferson's position in the Kentucky Resolutions, which became the prime display in the arguments of later secessionists and segregationist in trying to associate the author of the Declaration of Independence with their causes.

But as Brian Steele explains in "Thomas Jefferson, Coercion, and the Limits of Harmonious Union" (Journal of Southern History 4:2008) that Jefferson's support for the legitimate right of the national government to compel states to meet their obligations as part of a unified country even before the Constitution went into effect.

The Articles of Confederation were the constitution of the US 1781 to 1789. The difficulty of coordinating federal action and providing sufficient revenues for the central government were prime considerations in leading people like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison to see the need for an improved national constitution. You sometimes hear that debate over the Constitution of 1787 pitted the democratic common people in the Anti-Federalist cause against the wealthy Federalist supporters of the new federal compact. This is a deeply misleading impression, which the famous Progressive historian Charles Beard had a lot to do with establishing in the public mind.

Steele describes Jefferson's insistence on the implied, inherent right of the national government to maintain the union of states even under the Articles:

The inability of the Confederation government to compel states to provide revenue was one of the problems that would Iead to the writing of the Constitution. But Jefferson argued that the Confederation simply needed to act on its natural right to collect taxes. "lt has been so often said, as tobe generally believed," he complained to Edward Carrington in 1787, "that Congress have no power by the confederation to enforce any thing, e.g. contributions of money." But, Jefferson argued, "[i]t was not necessary to give them that power expressly; they have it by the law of nature." Jefferson explained his reasoning: "When two nations make a compact, there results to each a power of compelling the other to execute it." Jefferson had made this point more explicit earlier in his commentary on Jean Nicolas Demeunier's article on the United States in the Encyclopedie Methodique. Congress was far from "impotent," Jefferson wrote. Whenever "two or more nations enter into a compact, it is not usual for them to say what shall be done to the party who infringes it. Decency forbids this. And it is as unnecessary as indecent, because the right of compulsion naturally results to the party injured by the breach." Accordingly, "When any one state in the American Union refuses obedience to the Confederation by which they have bound themselves," he told Demeunier, "the rest have a natural right to compel them to obedience."

This was the broader perspective that Jefferson brought to the nature of the Union even prior to the controversy over the Alien and Sedition Acts that led to the protests embodied in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions.

Questions over possible secession and the relationship of the states to the federal Union also arose in the crisis over the Presidential election of 1800. In those days, the victor in the Electoral College became President and the second-place candidate became Vice President. It's easy to understand now how this could prove to be awkward. Which is why the Constitution was amended to change it.

But the 1800 election results resulted in an Electoral College tie between Jefferson and Aaron Burr. Which threw the election to the House of Representatives. The High Federalists were scheming to avoid the House vote by putting some sort of special administrative officer in charge of the federal government to prevent Jefferson's Republican Party from taking the Presidency. Both Jefferson and Burr were from the Democratic-Republican Party, then usually called the Republican Party; it's the party that evolved into what we now know as the Democratic Party.

The tension was great enough that Republican leaders feared that in the event of Jefferson's election, Federalist states in New England might try to secede from the Union. Dumas Malone in Jefferson the President: First Term, 1801-1805 (1970) recounts:

As might have been expected, Jefferson kept aloof from this controversy insofar as he could, but he afterwards said that he conversed with John Adams about the state of affairs when he chanced to meet the President walking on Pennsylvania Avenue.

It's worth pausing here to think what a different time that was!

Even if we suspect that the encounter Jefferson describes wasn't quite as casual as he describes, what we have there is the President and the President-elect, at a time when the opposition party might well have attempted to overthrow the Constitutional government to stop Jefferson from taking office, walking on a public street discussing matters of the utmost importance for the state. Malone doesn't mention whether or not there were bodyguards of some kind present. But the Secret Service as a constant protection for the President didn't start until Lincoln's Administration.

Malone continues:

At the moment [Jefferson] was disturbed by reports that "a very dangerous experiment was then in contemplation, to defeat the Presidential election by an act of Congress," devolving the government in any interregnum on a president of the Senate, who would be elected by that Federalist body. This alleged plan was the more dangerous because it contemplated provision for a contingency in advance of the voting and thus would have encouraged the Federalists to prevent a constitutional election. He asserted to Adams that "such a measure would probably produce resistance by force and incalculable consequences," which the President could prevent by negativing [opposing] it. He got no satisfaction out of Adams, whom he reported as having suggested the simplest and quickest way out - that is, that he insure his election by giving assurances that he would honor the public debt, maintain the navy, and not displace the federal officers [all causes given by the High Federalist to impede Jefferson's assuming office] [my emphasis]

Malone also quotes Jefferson from a letter of 02/15/1801 to James Monroe, then Governor of Virginia, after the Federalist conspirators had backed off:

If they [the High Federalists] could have been permitted to pass a law puning the government into the hands of an officer, they would certainly have prevented an election. But we thought it best to declare openly and firmly, one & all, that the day such an act passed, the middle States would arm, & that no such usurpation, even for a single day, should be submitted to. This first shook them; and they were completely alarmed at the resource for which we declared, to wit, a convention to re-organize the government, & to amend it. The very word convention gives them the horrors, as in the present democratical spirit of America, they fear they should lose some of the favorite morsels of the constitution. [my emphasis]

In other words, Jefferson and Monroe were ready to mobilize the militias of the states like Virginia govenrned by Republicans. (The national army hardly existed at this time.) Part of the decision was based on the Federalists counting the troops likely to line up on either side of the conflict.

Malone provides some excellent context for this Jeffersonian approach to resolving the crisis:

When reporting his election to Madison soon thereafter, he said that the Federalists were confronted not only with the impossibility of electing Burr, but also ·with "the certainty that a legislative usurpation would be resisted b:~ arms, and a recourse to a convention to reorganize and amend the government." A few weeks later, after his inauguration and at a time of calm, he wrote differently to his learned friend Joseph Priestley. "There was no idea of force, nor of any occasion for it," he then said. A more correct Statement, nearer the full truth, would have been that there was no idea of force among the responsible leaders, except in the case of attempted usurpation by the Federalists, and that the occasion for employing it did not arise. At the moment Jefferson, who was congratulating the country on the peaceful Settlement of this dispute, presented a half-truth to a lover of peace. Also, he described the probable course of events in the case of the non-election of a President, when the federal government would have been like a clock that had run down. [my emphasis in bold]

Jefferson and Monroe were not thinking of mobilizing Republican state militias in order to secede from the Union. They were planning to defend the central government and the Constitutional order against the plotters' plan for what today we might call a "soft coup" to overthrown it. Jefferson's stance was to defend the central government and the Constitution, fully aware that an attempted secession by Federalist-led states could require an military response by the central government.

Another key difference to the Confederate secessionists was that in 1801 election crisis, slavery as such was not the cause of it. Although it's important to remember that the Constitution the Jeffersonians were defending was one that protected slavery. Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison would later call it "the pro-slavery, war sanctioning Constitution of the United States." Also characterizing it as "an agreement with Hell."

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2017, April 4: Thomas Jefferson vs. secession

Thomas Jefferson was alive and engaged with public issues during several of the most important disputes involving secession of states from the Union in some way. In "Thomas Jefferson, Coercion, and the Limits of Harmonious Union" (Journal of Southern History 4:2008), Brian Steele looks at Jefferson's position on those issue throughout his career, concluding that Jefferson was consistent in recognizing that the Union can and should resort to coercion, including military coercion, in the case of a state trying to succeed or blatantly defying federal authority.

Jefferson, Steele argues, "was willing to enforce federal law in the face of opposition by state and local authorities, that he believed the Union was empowered to coerce a seceding state, and that he claimed executive prerogative in cases of national self-preservation or even of national interest."

Southern secessionists and later segregationist advocates of "states rights" and interposition (nullification) pointed to the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 and 1799. James Madison was heavily involved in drafting the former, Jefferson the latter.

The text of Resolutions Adopted by the Kentucky General Assembly can be found at Princeton's Papers of Thomas Jefferson website, The Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, which also has a discussion of the somewhat uncertain nature of Jefferson's contribution to their drafting. Monticello.org (Thomas Jefferson Foundation) also has a discussion of the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions. The causes to which the Kentucky Resolutions, largely written by Jefferson and excerpted below, were the Alien and Sedition Acts passed and being enforced by the John Adams Administration. They were directed against immigrants, described in the excerpt as "the friendly strangers ... to whom the mild spirit of our Country and its laws had pledged hospitality and protection." They also authorized broad powers of repression to the federal government against the free press and free speech.

VIII. Resolved, that the preceding Resolutions be transmitted to the Senators and Representatives in Congress from this Commonwealth, who are hereby enjoined to present the same to their respective Houses, and to use their best endeavours to procure at the next session of Congress, a repeal of the aforesaid unconstitutional and obnoxious acts. ...

IX. Resolved lastly, that the Governor of this Commonwealth be, and is hereby authorised and requested to communicate the preceding Resolutions to the Legislatures of the several States, to assure them that this Commonwealth considers Union for specified National purposes, and particularly for those specified in their late Federal Compact, to be friendly to the peace, happiness, and prosperity of all the states: that faithful to that compact, according to the plain intent and meaning in which it was understood and acceded to by the several parties, it is sincerely anxious for its preservation: that it does also believe, that to take from the states all the powers of self government, and transfer them to a general and consolidated Government, without regard to the special delegations and reservations solemnly agreed to in that compact, is not for the peace, happiness, or prosperity of these states ...

Let him say what the Government is if it be not a tyranny, which the men of our choice have conferred on the President, and the President of our choice has assented to and accepted over the friendly strangers, to whom the mild spirit of our Country and its laws had pledged hospitality and protection: that the men of our choice have more respected the bare suspicions of the President than the solid rights of innocence, the claims of justification, the sacred force of truth, and the forms & substance of law and justice. In questions of power then let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution. That this Commonwealth does therefore call on its Co-states for an expression of their sentiments on the acts concerning Aliens, and for the punishment of certain crimes herein before specified, plainly declaring whether these acts are or are not authorised by the Federal Compact? And it doubts not that their sense will be so announced as to prove their attachment unaltered to limited Government, whether general or particular, and that the rights and liberties of their Co-states will be exposed to no dangers by remaining embarked on a common bottom with their own: That they will concur with this Commonwealth in considering the said acts as so palpably against the Constitution as to amount to an undisguised declaration, that the Compact is not meant to be the measure of the powers of the General Government, but that it will proceed in the exercise over these states of all powers whatsoever: That they will view this as seizing the rights of the states and consolidating them in the hands of the General Government with a power assumed to bind the states (not merely in cases made federal) but in all cases whatsoever, by laws made, not with their consent, but by others against their consent: That this would be to surrender the form of Government we have chosen, and to live under one deriving its powers from its own will, and not from our authority; and that the Co-states recurring to their natural right in cases not made federal, will concur in declaring these acts void and of no force, and will each unite with this Commonwealth in requesting their repeal at the next session of Congress [my emphasis]

In hindsight, it's easy to see how secessionists and segregationists could have used such language as "declaring these acts void and of no force" to be precedent for the claims of secession, Calhoun-style nullifiction or George Wallace-style "interposition."

But these resolutions, including those of Virginia primarily written by Madison, did not call for or threaten secession. Nor did they declare that the states would offer forceful resistance to federal officials enforcing federal law. As seen above, the action the Kentucky legislature was requesting from other states was to join them in protesting the unconstitutionality of the Alien and Sedition Acts and "in requesting their repeal at the next session of Congress." Steele observes:

To be sure, Jefferson's Kentucky Resolutions have been understood as giving sanction to later secession movements, and it is not always a simple matter to reconcile Jefferson's views on coercion with his stance in the 1790s. Nevertheless, the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions did not advocate - or even broach - secession, and there were substantial qualitative differences between them and the later claims made by some New England Federalists and South Carolina nullifiers, despite the claims to Jefferson's legacy made by the latter group in particular. Much of the way we have thought about and understood the 1790s has been distorted by our viewing that period through the lens of later events, particularly those of the 1830s and, especially, 1860-1861.

It requires some imagination to picture it now, but in the 1790s, the principle of judicial review on Constitutional issues had not yet been established. It was really after the Civil War that it was firmly. When the Constitution was being written, Jefferson had preferred to see it include judicial review explicitly, but it wasn't included. Ironically, the famous case in which the Supreme Court first asserted its power of judicial review of Constitutional questions, Marbury v. Madison (1803) was a decision against Jefferson's Presidential Administration. So the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions were protests stating that, in the opinion of those state legislature, the Alien and Sedition Acts were unconstitutional.

The discussion of "states rights" has been greatly complicated by the history of secession and nullification/interposition. But disputes between the states and the federal government over laws and policies continues today, notably on the enforcement of federal immigration laws. States no longer attempt to secede or nullify laws in these disputes. That ship has long since sailed. But they do go to court over them. And they also lobby for changing federal laws they don't like - which is what the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions were demanding.

Rachel Maddow the other night did report there was some kind of Russian plot to promote California secession. If that is so, it has managed to keep itself remarkably concealed from actual Californians.

There are several reference in the above excerpt from the Kentucky Resolutions to what is know as the contract theory of the Union, to which Jefferson adhered. At the time of the Civil War, secessionists were fond of citing this compact theory, while leaders like Lincoln rejected it. Here, it's important to note that the compact theory was not just secession propaganda. It was a serious political theory. But, as Steele reminds us, the compact theory did not inherently involve the right of a state to secede from the Union: "The compact theory of the Union governed by the law of nations could lead to different kinds of conclusions about the nature of that union."

As we'll see in tomorrow's post, Jefferson understood the compact theory to mean that the federal government indeed had the legitimate right to compel individual states to comply with the "compact," including the use of military force. Steele describes Jefferson's application of the contract theory in the Kentucky Resolutions this way:

In the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, Jefferson called the national government a "creature of the compact" - not an original party to it. There is a tendency on the part of historians to associate this compact theory of the Constitution, which Jefferson articulated, with a kind of "take it or leave it" view of the Union. Partly because Lincoln rejected the compact theory and many self-identified advocates of states' rights seemed to hold such a view, thereby tainting commitment to "states' rights" with the stain of disunion, the tendency is not altogether misplaced. But, as Jefferson told William Eustis in 1809, the Union - "the spirit of concord with her sister States" - had "placed us under that national government, which constitutes the safety of every part, by uniting for its protection the powers of the whole." The national government, in other words, might have been the "creature of the compact," but it was an umbrella of protection for that very compact, emerging out of the Union and remaining an indispensable part of it, rather than a separate entity to be ignored or discarded at pleasure. Jefferson noted, in fact, that the national government is the instrument through which the states act in their relations with each other. [my emphasis]

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2017, April 3: Jefferson's record on secession

A continued challenge for understanding history is "anachronism," or viewing previous events through contemporary standards in a way that interferes with understanding the meaning of the past events and the motives of key players. It's always a struggle, because we always start from some point of view. How we work from a subjective viewpoint to understanding the reality outside our heads was a key issue on which Kant and Hegel staked distinctly different positions. And the Kant-Hegel argument continues to this day. And those two thinkers were certainly not the first to grapple with the problem.

One very helpful perspective is the one taken by this issue of the German publication Zeit Geschichte 3/2016, titled, Wir Sind das Volk. Die Deutschen und die Demokratie - 1789 bis heute:

It's a collection of essays about the development of democracy in Germany from 1789 until the present day. And it focuses on major political milestones, such as the spread of Democratic Clubs in the wake of the French Revolution, the Hambacher Fest of 1832, and the proclamation of the German Republic in 1918.

An historical exhibit in the Reichstag building in Berlin at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall took a similar approach:

Like any approach, this has its limits because it focuses on one historical process rather than others. The first section of the Zeit Geschichte issue prominently features a photo of Philipp Scheidemann proclaiming the German Republic in 1918 from a window of the Reichstag. Karl Liebknecht's proclamation shortly afterwards of the "Free Socialist Republic" is mentioned in the caption, but not given the dramatic photographic prominence of Scheidemann's. This doesn't mean that it's somehow "fake history." If the topic were the history of the German social democracy, Liebknecht's proclamation would likely have been given greater prominence.

And a series of blog posts debunking Confederate pseudohistory focuses on issues and events with particular relevance to the topic. It's also a reminder that events prior to the Civil War are often seen through the perspective of how the issues were framed at the time of war and its immediately preceding time.

Secessionists claimed precedents using arguments in the manner in which politicians today still do, i.e., in a polemical and selective manner. Both sides were particularly keen to connect their cause with the traditions of the American Revolution. (I'm starting to think that only the political right in the US today still try to do so. But that's another story.) Thomas Jefferson - author of the Declaration of Independence, Governor of Virginia during the Revolution, third President, prominent Southern intellectual and slaveowner - was an important symbol for both sides.

And he was alive and politically involved at the time of various incidents that raised the issues of states' rights and secession in,different ways, including:

The protests of Virginia and Kentucky against the Alien and Sedition Acts during the John Adams Administration, known as the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, the first primarily authored by James Madison, the second by Jefferson

Election crisis of 1801; yes, those are as American as apple pie
Burr conspiracy of 1805-6
War of 1812 and the Hartford Convention of 1814
Missouri Compromise of 1820
Nullification Crisis of 1832
Nashville Convention of 1850, yet another treasonous plot by John Calhoun
Compromise of 1850
Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 and its violent repercussions in "Bleeding Kansas"
Dred Scott decision of 1857
And, of course, Lincoln's election of 1860 and immediately subsequent events

In the next post in this series, I'll take a look at the positions Jefferson took on the first three, which took place during his lifetime.

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 2: Nullification and secession, the War of 1812 experience

John Dos Passos had among his later works two popular histories, Mr. Wilson's War (1962), about the First World War, and The Shackles of Power: Three Jeffersonian Decades (1966). Written in an attractively accessible style, both forgo the burden of footnotes. Which can be frustrating if you like to read the footnotes. Or want to follow up on the source for a quote or claim.

While it makes for smooth reading, important nuance can suffer.

In Shackles of Power, Dos Passos writes about one of the important milestones in the development of states' rights and federal power. It has to do with the Federalists who sympathized with Britain in the War of 1812. They promoted their own version of secessionism in the process. Here is the description given by the 1960 edition of The Beards' New Basic History of the United States by Charles, Mary and William Beard:

To make matters worse for [President James] Madison, the war was decidedly unpopular in the Northeast where, presumably, a war proclaimed in behalf of free commerce would have been welcomed. In the House of Representatives, Daniel Webster, of Massachusetts, denounced the draft of men as unconstitutional. Federalists decried the conflict as merely "Mr. Madison's war." The govemor of Connecticut refused to obey the President's call for troops and the Connecticut assembly declared the state to be "free, sovereign and independent." A convention of delegates from various parts of New England, assembled in Hartford in October 1814, adopted resolutions akin in spirit, if not in letter, to those put forth by Kentucky and Virginia in 1798.

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

Dos Passos echoes the comparison to the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions:

Jefferson never forgave the Essex Junto [of pro-British secessionist advocates], any more than he forgave Aaron Burr, for their efforts to break up the Union. He wrote of the mortification of the New England clergy, whom both he and Madison blamed for the Federalist excesses, exulting bitterly in "the disgrace with which they have loaded themselves in their political ravings, and of their mortification at the ridiculous issue of their Hartford convention. no event more than this has shown the placid nature of our constitution. under any other their treasons would have been punished by the halter. we let them live as laughing stocks for the world, and punish them by the torment of eternal contempt."

In the course of the war the Republicans had switched politics with the Federalists. The Federalists were now defending nullification and states' rights as Jefferson and Madison had defended them at the time of the Kentucky Resolutions. The Republicans were now the party of central government, a standing army, and a navy capable of meeting force with force in relations with foreign nations. To that they were about to add a tariff for the protection of manufactures. (p. 286}

Given how the Confederates and their later apologists use historical precedents to justify the secession of 1860-61.

The neo-Confederate version is pseudohistory. Or Fake History, in more topical phrasing.

So part of what I try to do in these Confederate "Heritage" Month posts is to promote real history. In the case of the positions Jefferson and Madison took at the time of the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, the Britannica Online article on them rightly notes, "The Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions were primarily protests against the limitations on civil liberties contained in the Alien and Sedition Acts rather than expressions of full-blown constitutional theory. Later references to the resolutions as authority for the theories of nullification and secession were inconsistent with the limited goals sought by Jefferson and Madison in drafting their protests." (internal links omitted)

The US Constitution, like all constitutions and legal systems, evolves as new problems arise. The Constitution of 1789 didn't explicitly address the question of whether or not a state in the Union could secede by its own choice. Of course, a Constitutional Amendment could always allow for a state to leave the Union. But that would require much more than the single state's own choice.

It's worth noting that the present-day Brexit may wind up raising some similar issues. The 2004 EU Constitution does provide for an exit process. But as the two-year period of negotiation that Britain just initiated proceed, we could see the remaining EU nations contesting the terms and the timing of the actual Brexit event. Here is the BBC News summary of that aspect of the EU Constitution (What the EU constitution says 06/18/2004):

In fact, the EU under Angela Merkel's leadership is already making such threats. Nikos Chrysoloras and Patrick Donahue report in EU Puts the Squeeze on U.K. as Brexit Negotiation Clock Ticks Bloomberg 03/31/2017:

The European Union told U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May she will have to wait almost two months for Brexit negotiations to begin and that talks on a trade deal can come in the fall, but only if she first agrees to pay an exit bill.

The EU moved quickly to exercise its control over the Brexit countdown clock now that May has triggered the two-year negotiation period. Substantive talks can’t begin until May 22, when EU governments are set to approve the final negotiating directives for the bloc’s Brexit point person, Michel Barnier.

In the United States, the question of whether a state can leave the Union on its own accord was settled decisively at Appomattox.

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 1: What's it about?

I've been doing Confederate "Heritage" Month posts on the blog since 2004. And I'm doing it this year, too. It's a counter-observation of the event, which also know as Confederate History Month. It's ably explained (in its variation) in a new article by Ashton Pittman in the Jackson [MS] Free Press, What ‘Confederate History Month’ Really Is 03/29/2017:

In April, five states will officially celebrate Confederate History Month (or Confederate Heritage Month): Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas. In Georgia, which stopped the celebrations after a neo-Confederate killed nine black churchgoers in neighboring South Carolina in 2015, a lawmaker is pushing to bring it back, citing Trump's election and the end of the era of "political correctness."

#To be clear, Confederate History Month isn't about remembering our past and taking lessons from it. Key proponents of the month's continued existence are the Sons of Confederate Veterans, whose revisionist history of the Confederacy and the Civil War minimizes and even denies the role of slavery in southern secession. On April 9, 1865, Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered in Virginia. Yet 152 years later, many in our region are still fighting the lost war. Some of us do it by flying Confederate flags, complete with lofty slogans like, "The South Will Rise Again!" and "Heritage, Not Hate!" Some of us do it in more insidious ways. For no good reason, we work overtime to make sure those "Yankees" don't come in and wreck our perfectly dead-last economies. We definitely don't want those federal Yanks telling us how to run our education system. And despite the fact that we are the region that most needs health-care options that the Affordable Care Act offers, we did everything we could to thwart any effort from the Obama administration to help improve our miserable condition.

In the 03/28/2017 version at the Deep South Daily Pittman edits, the headline is Call ‘Confederate History Month’ What It Really IS: 'White Supremacy Month'.

Last year, civil rights activists in Mississippi had the following reaction to Republican Gov. Phil Bryant's official proclamation of Confederate Heritage Month (Critics assail Mississippi governor for declaring April ‘Confederate Heritage Month’ Raw Story/Guardian 04/03/2016):

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) leaders in Mississippi reacted by proposing a civil war remembrance of their own: Union Army Heritage Month.

“These white and black Mississippi patriots fought for the continuation of the United States of America as one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all,” Derrick Johnson, president of Mississippi’s NAACP, wrote to the Clarion-Ledger.

“Should not these soldiers be honored, too?”

Scores rallied on the steps of the capitol, in Jackson. They were diverse. Kathleen Chambers personified a shift in the state’s mentality: she is young and white, and instead of a southern drawl she spoke with the universal up-talk of young people.

“Any white people I know? They’re not OK with this,” she said to the local television station WAPT.

Of Bryant, she said: “He’s trying to turn a Confederate heritage into a good thing, when it’s not. It shouldn’t be celebrated. Especially we shouldn’t celebrate owning people in the past.”

While we are marching through Georgia - Tennessee Ernie Ford: