Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 14: the slave system's political dynamics

Lacy Ford in Democracy, Despotism, and Disunion: A Review Essay Journal of Southern History 76:1 (Feb 2010) gives a useful summary of William Freehling's work on the varying approaches to defending slavery among the various slave states in his book The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 1776-1854:1990ol 1 (1990):

The most important of those points, in my view, are that the political radical ism of the lower South enhanced political moderation in the upper South and that the upper South's moderation drove lower South politicians toward bolder and more extreme defenses of southern interests, precisely because they feared that upper South politicians were not reliable on the subject. Upper South moderation fueled lower South extremism. The lower South's extremism strengthened upper South moderation.

This means that, in the context of Lost Cause myth-making, you can find quotes from people like Robert E. Lee of Virginia who just before the Civil War made statements to the effect that they thought slavery would fade away peacefully. While defenders of the Peculiar Institution in the lower South were trumpeting it as the greatest benefit to human civilization God every created.

A second lesson from Volume 1 is that these tensions between upper South moderation and lower South extremism grew out of underlying differences in political economy. The upper South, with little involvement in the cotton booms of the nineteenth century, depended less on slaves for economic success as the region's tobacco economy stagnated. Hence the upper South looked to reduce the proportion of slaves in its population. Lower South whites experienced cotton booms and busts during the antebellum era, but, on balance, they saw cotton and slaves as paths to both economic competence and wealth. Yet lower South whites nonetheless worried much about slavery, especially about how to make a slaveholding society safe for whites. Still, they could scarcely imagine a lower South economy that did not depend heavily on slave labor. [my emphasis]

This is a good way of stating it. There were tensions between free whites and the slaveowners, between free whites and the slave system. Because in a very basic sense, the slavery system did work against the vital interests of the big majority of Southern whites.

And those tensions including tensions over the very real threat the slavery system was to (white male) democracy:

Finally, Freehling's first volume posited a strong tension between democracy and despotism in the hearts and minds of white southerners. Democracy, both in its political forms and as genuine egalitarian sentiment, increasingly flourished in southern state constitutions and in the region's electoral politics. Yet much despotism grew from the power of slaveholders to own and govern slaves with only minimal restrictions from civil authority. At times, the spirit of this slaveholders' despotism escaped the confines of master-slave relations and influenced the entire white democracy, producing vigilance committees and lynch mobs that intimidated marginal individuals and squashed dissent in an especially ugly form of majoritarian tyranny. [my emphasis]

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 8: William Freehling on slavery debates in Viriginia

Today I'm linking to a 2010 lecture by historian William Freehling on Pre-Civil War Virginia Showdowns C-Span 09/30/2010. The full lecture available at the C-Span link is not available for embedding here.

Their YouTube channel has a brief clip, Virginia Showdowns and Secession 10/18/2010, also not available for embedding here. They also provide this descriptive comments there:

The most populous slave state in the south prior to the Civil War was Virginia. The debate to abolish slavery in 1832 and the 1861 secession debate became critical showdowns as the Old Dominion struggled to decide whether to stay with the Union or join the Confederacy. Author William Freehling explores both topics at a recent talk given at the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond.

He gives a good sense here of the complexity of the slavery question in Virginia politics between the American Revolution and the Civil War. He reminds us that the debate over slavery was prompted by Nat Turner's rebellion in 1831 was the occasion for the two-week debate in the legislature.

One of Freehling's important insights is useful for people to day who may struggle to understand that white Americans could be both antislavery and racist against black people. Racist ideas were already in the air and developing rapidly from a variety of sources. But the experience of the voluntary abolition of slavery by Northern states showed a pattern of opposition to slavery being associated with a low percentage of black in the population.

It actually makes sense, though it seems counter-intuitive today. If there were a lot of black people in areas like eastern Virginia, it meant in practice there were a lot of slaves. And with a lot of slaves came a class of wealthy slaveowners who defended the institution of slavery and worked hard to convince other whites to do the same. Areas where there were fewer slaves were areas with a less powerful slaveowning group had less proximate defenses of slavery. And he describes in the case of what became West Virginia when it split off to remain with the Union after Virginia's secession, the whites in those areas resented the disproportionate representation that the eastern Viriginia slaveowners had under the state Constitution. The US Constitution itself in its infamous "three-fifths" clause awarded representation to states based on their slave population, but the slaves themselves weren't allowed to vote. This created an electoral bonus for the slave states that became a major source of regional resentment in the North.

This phenomenon also meant that white Americans in the "whiter" parts of the country came to associate slavery with the presence of black people, including free black people. And vice-versa. Which meant that whites could be bitterly antislavery and also bitterly hostile to black people. That's by no means the whole story of white racism in the pre-Civil War US. But it's an important part of it.

And it speaks specifically to the claim by present-day defenders of the Confederacy that the Civil War couldn't have been about slavery because Northern whites hated black people, too.

It's worth recalling in this regard that one of the most famous prewar antislavery books was Hinton Helper's The Impending Crisis of the South (1857). I discussed Helper's book in a blog post even before I started doing these Confederate "Heritage" Month posts every year. John Brown's body lies a-mold'ring in the grave 11/02/2003:

I was glad to see the reference to Hinton Helper, an antislavery Southerner who published a book in 1857 (the year of the infamous Dred Scott decision) called The Impending Crisis of the South. His book goes into a great deal of detail comparing the Northern and Southern economies, relying heavily on contemporary economic statistics. He argues that the Northern industrial/commercial economy was far more efficient and prosperous, and refutes some of the most prominent arguments of pro-slavery propagandists.

He also emphasizes how slavery damaged the interests of non-slaveholding whites in the South. In a weird sort of way, Helper's argument is made even stronger by the fact that the guy was a white supremacist. That comes out at places in the book. After the Civil War, he published books advocating the explusion of African-Americans from the United States (which we would call "ethnic cleansing" today).

Helper was no saintly prophet of multiculturalism, in other words. But he was dead-on in his analysis of slavery. And The Impending Crisis of the South still makes fascinating reading to get an idea of the terms in which slavery was debated by contemporaries prior to the Civil War.

Freehling in the linked lecture argues that the "antislavery" debates in the Virginia Legislature in 1832 were actually about how to "whiten" Virginia. Since slavery was associated with the presence of black people, the white Virginians assumed that ending slavery would necessarily entail getting rid of most of the black people in Virginia.

This was the idea behind the notion of "returning" African-Americans to Africa, favored by white leaders of the stature of Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln. (And revived in radically different context by white supremacist Sen. Theodore Bilbo after the Second World War.) The American Colonization Society was established for that purpose, as reported in the linked article from KQED's Africans in America resources (article not dated):

The American Colonization Society, founded in 1816 to assist free black people in emigrating to Africa, was the brainchild of the Reverend Robert Finley, a Presbyterian minister from Basking Ridge, New Jersey. Finley believed that blacks would never be fully integrated into American society and that they would only be able to fulfill their potential as human beings in Africa, the "land of their fathers." He saw colonization as a charitable work, one that would benefit American blacks and Africans alike through the spreading of Christianity to Africa. He also thought that it would prompt a gradual end to slavery.

In keeping with the popular thought of the day, Finley saw the presence of blacks in America as a threat to the national well-being and the quality of life for whites. He said that free blacks were "unfavorable to our industry and morals" and that removing them would save Americans from difficulties such as interracial marriage and having to provide for poor blacks. ...

In a series of meetings [at the end of 1816], the group adopted a constitution, chose officers, and decided to call themselves the "American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Color in the United States." Bushrod Washington, the nephew of George Washington, was chosen as president of the society. Vice presidents included Finley, Henry Clay, and Richard Rush, the son of Benjamin Rush. Andrew Jackson was included on the list without his consent; in reality he was a staunch anti-colonizationist. Caldwell was the organization's secretary, and Key was on the board of managers.

The motives of the ACS members varied considerably. Some were genuine allies of free blacks, and were concerned for their welfare. Some hoped that colonization would eradicate slavery. Others wanted to maintain the institution of slavery but to rid the country of free blacks, who they believed posed a serious threat as potential fomenters of slave rebellion. [my emphasis]

In reality, whatever the motives, it was an impractical idea that was fundamentally cruel. The idea never found more than a small number of supporters among African-Americans, including those like Frederick Douglass who became important Abolitionist leaders.

Although there was enough practicality in the idea that the American Colonization Society was able to establish settlement areas in what became the nation of Liberia in 1947 and a small number of blacks from America were settled there under the auspices of the Society.

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 27: More on John Brown

Black and white Union sailors serving together

Last year, I devoted a number of posts to the career of the still-controversial John Brown. And I'm still interested to read various views of his actions and impact.

I'm about half-way through William Freehling's new The Road to Disunion, Vol 2: Secessionists Triumphant, 1854-1861 (2007). While Freehling is one of my favorite sources on the antebellum era, he didn't get Brown quite right. Like the reviewer I discussed in yesterday's post, he gives a distorted and misleading version of the Pottawatomie killings of 1854. I looked at those in several posts last year, beginning with this one of 04/14/06, so I won't belabor it here.

Freehling admits to having changed his view over time on the plausibility of Brown's Harpers Ferry mission, specifically in relation to the possibility of attracting local slaves to his fight in Harpers Ferry itself. Freehling's current judgment of the outcome seems reasonable to me:

There transpired one of the most stupendous scenes in American history. In the dark night, Brown's freedom fighters easily captured Harpers Ferry's federal armory, arsenal, and engine house. They sliced the telegraph wires. They halted a train. They dispatched messengers to a nearby plantation, Lewis Washington's (a great-grandnephew of George Washington's), there to alert slaves to spread the invasion. No other first strike has ever been better planned or carried out (which is only to say that John Brown here perfected his lifelong specialty).

No other following tactics have ever been botched so badly (which is only to say that John Brown here succumbed to his lifelong flaw). ...

Where Brown and his men needed to transport Harpers Ferry's potentially highly consequential firearms to the nooks and crannies of the mountains in a great big hurry, the raider stayed in Harpers Ferry's death trap. While whites gathered to hurl themselves at the furious old man, their prey jailed himself inside the most innocuous corner of his caputred fortress, the engine house. There, the self-imprisoned raider found no food.

The night after Brown struck, U.S. Marines arrived, led by Robert E. Lee. The next day, Lee's assaulters fed Brown's hungry raiders stell for breakfast.

Freehling also gives a good account of the subsequent slave-insurrection panic that spread through the South.

I also want to mention an essay by Bertram Wyatt-Brown that makes the best case I've seen for John Brown having suffered from depression, "'A Volcano Beneath a Mountain of Snow': John Brown and the Problem of Interpretation" in His Soul Goes Marching On: Responses to John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid, Paul Finkelman, ed., (1995).

"Psychohistory" is always tricky, and a lot of it isn't worth the paper it's printed on. It's especially tricky in the case of someone like John Brown whose enemies often tried to portray him as a fanatical lunatic. Wyatt-Brown manages to talk about Brown's personal psychology without getting too far out ahead of the available evidence and also without reducing his politics or his religion to a personal quirk. Or, worse, to a personal pathology. He writes:

If Brown's composure under fire at the engine house and his later serenity as he faced the prospect of the gallows testified to his religious strength of character, it also bespeaks his melancholy satisfaction in ending a life of inner rage and darkest mood. He had contemplated his own death for many years, and the issue was now settled. Without having to encounter the moral dilemma of self-destruction, long considered an offense against God's will, Brown could face the terminus of his life with devout tranquility. Thus he entered the most creative period of his antislavery career, fulfilling the role of martyr with almost artistic perfection. ... When asked by by his captors who had sent him, he replied, "It was my own prompting and that of my Maker, or that of the devil, whichever you please to ascribe to it." The sentiment was almost jocular, but one wonders if Brown himself did not feel that he was inspired by both supernatural elements — an amalgamation of the Manichean division that seemed to have empowered him to create the tumult he wished for. ...

Brown's self-possession as he faced death was perhaps the most significant manifestation of the melancholy state of mind with which he had so long contended.

In conclusion, Wyatt-Brown describes John Brown as "a singular, complex, and nigenious agitator" who "profoundly touched the life of a nation". And he observes how "the very depth of Brown's dispondency helped to shape his own creative vocation as a martyr who aspired to free a nation from a moral yoke and a race from its hideous bondage."

I think Brown would be proud to be remembered that way.

Tags: bertram wyatt-brown, john brown, william freehling

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 18: Differentiating the slaveowners and the slave states

Historian Eric Foner has done a review of William Freehling's new book, The Road to Disunion, Vol. 2, Secessionists Triumphant: 1854-1861, The Three Souths New York Times Book Review 04/08/07. (Hat tip to Kevin Levin at his Civil War Memory blog, Eric Foner Reviews Freehlings Road To Disunion 04/17/07.)

Kevin's post deals with some issues that Foner raises in criticism to Freehling's book. Here I'll mention a couple of the things Foner did better on. I confess to a bit of a bias here: Foner dissed Mississippi's Reconstruction era Governor Adelbert Ames in his book on Reconstruction. Ames was a democrat in the best Jacksonian sense and one of the most serious white leaders of that time about equal rights for black citizens. He was the best governor the State of Mississippi even had, will the possible exception of William Winter. Ames is one of the few Republicans I would admit to holding as a hero. Trust me, he would not be part of today's Republican Party.

But Foner gets this right:

Since the publication four decades ago of "Prelude to Civil War," a study of the nullification crisis of the early 1830s, Freehling has been among the foremost students of 19th-century Southern history. If one theme unites his scholarship it is that the Old South cannot be viewed as a monolith. It contained distinct regions with divergent economic structures and degrees of commitment to slavery. In the seven states of the Lower South, cotton was king and slaves comprised nearly half the population. The Middle South (Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Arkansas) contained large regions of nonslaveholding whites. In the Border South (Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri) slavery seemed to be in decline. By 1860, 90 percent of Delaware’s black population and half of Maryland’s were already free.

Time and again, Freehling writes, the three Souths collided. In the three months following Lincoln’s election, the entire Lower South seceded. The Middle South waited, hoping for compromise; it joined the Confederacy only after the firing on Fort Sumter. The four border states not only remained in the Union but furnished thousands of troops to help defeat their Southern brethren.

That differentiation between the three sections of the South helps explain some of the seemingly contradictory attitudes toward slavery that we see cited, whenever someone bothers to actually find the prewar statements about slavery - something Lost Cause advocates are loathe to do, for good reason.

Freehling also describes how the slaveocracy saw three major groups threatening or potentially threatening their sacred institution: Northern abolitionists, the slaves themselves and white nonslaveowning Southerners.

Foner also writes:

Freehling examines how, in the 1850s, the Lower South became more and more committed to defending slavery as a positive good. At the same time, he tells us, the Middle and Border Souths persisted in the dream of eventually removing all slaves (and free blacks) from the region and reorienting its economy toward the North. Secessionists were not wrong, he writes, to see these states as slavery’s Achilles’ heel.

The movements in the 1850s to acquire new slave territories for the United States, reopen the African slave trade and re-enslave free blacks also revealed Southern disunity. Freehling offers fascinating accounts of each. But his main point is that because of opposition within the South, all failed. Even South Carolina, he shows, was divided. In his account of the aftermath of Lincoln’s election, Freehling overturns the conventional picture of a state rushing headlong into disunion. South Carolina secessionists emerge instead as a beleaguered minority, fearful that their state would stand alone (as it had during the nullification crisis).

As I mentioned in a comment at Kevin's post, one of the challenges that Freehling's history presents is that he's focusing on the conflicts within the South over slavery and disunion. After all, it was the South that seceeded and therefore the dynamics of Southern politics that eventually produced that result.

His discussions of the differing perspectives in slave states like Missouri and Kentucky with lower percentages of slaves compared to those like South Carolina and Mississippi with high concentrations is very helpful; this is part of his "three Souths" analysis, as Foner calls it. But it's a "Southern viewpoint" though definitely not a pro-Confederate or Lost Cause viewpoint, which sometimes makes me do double-takes. In analyzing the viewpoints of proslavery advocates, many of whom where nasty characters, he has to "learn to love his monster", which he mostly succeeds in doing without losing his perspective.

One of Freehling's goals in the second volume is to recount something that has much bearing on one of the favorite arguments of Lost Cause advocates: how the slaveowners undertook to gain the support of nonslaveowning whites in the South for the Peculiar Institution.

Tags: adelbert ames, civil war, us civil war, william freehling, william winter

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 15: why the slaveowner had to "disbelieve the world out there"

The second volume of William Freehling's The Road to Disunion was published this year, this one called Secessionists Triumphant, 1854-1861. As in the first volume, Freehling focuses heavily on the social and political dynamics in the South. And there are several things he does well.

I particularly like the ways he shows in concrete examples how the contradiction between the dictatorial rule of the slaveowners over their slaves and the democratic ideals and practice of American democracy. The theoretical contradiction was obvious from the start. And if it weren't, British polemicists in particular were eager to call it to the Americans' attention.

One of the things he discusses at length in the first volume is the way in which the daily dynamics of plantantion life affected the general consciousness of the slaveowners in a way to make them suspicious and distrustful of white political opponents. In the second volume, he recaps some of that discussion.

He places this in the context of the concept of "Cuffee". In the followeing quotation, he summarizes that notion and how it affected slaveowners' consciousness. It strikes me that a reader not familiar with Freehling's work might be jolted a bit by the language, so let me emphasize that Freehling is in no way writing any kind of proslavery or pro-Confederate pitches. In this section, he's describing the way masters saw the world and how it led them to what in the 1960s might have been called a "false consciousness", a useful (though easily abused) concept:

The ideal master's most revealing word for the ideal servile was not "boy," not even "Sambo," but "Cuffee." Just cuff a childish black, declared the condescending word, and he will become that alleged impossibility, the consenting slave.

But most often, Cuffee's and Massa's role slipped, belied by duplicity on both sides of the color line. Dubious paternalists regularly faced exasperating slaves' lies, misunderstood orders, slovenly work, and dark glances. Occasionally pretenses altogether disappeared. In the nineteenth century, massive slave revolts almost never ripped apart the Massa-Cuffee charade. The last slave revolt, Nat Turner's in 1831, came to seem ages ago. But individual slaves who ambushed masters were not as rare. Individual slave runaways were not rare at all, especially in the South closest to the North.

Thus Massa faced the impossible, indispensable task of discovering whether Cuffee's act of consent was true blue. The underling here taught the superior that life was a charade, that professions of loyalty must be scrutinized, and that affectations of friendship must be doubted. Cuffee's lessons bore painfully on loyalty politics among whites. Southern politicians' extravagant professions of love for slavery might be a charade. As for northern declarations of true-blue friendship, who could trust a Yankee con man after experiencing Cuffee, the ultimate pretender? To live with Cuffee was to disbelieve the world out there. Thus did the master form the slave and the slave form the master, and the two together generate a hothouse culture, too dictatorial to be comfortably democratic. (my emphasis)

Tags: civil war, slavery, us civil war, william freehling