Confederate "Heritage" Month 2019, April 9: The long shadow of John Calhoun's white supremacist ideology

This is the second of three posts on Southern Agrarian Frank Owsley's essay, "Scottsboro, the Third Crusade: The Sequel to Abolition and Reconstruction" American Review 1:3 June 1933. I originally posted this April 20, 2011, as part of that year's Confederate "Heritage" Month posts, which gave particular attention to the group of pro-segregation writers who were known as the Southern Agrarians, aka, the Nashville Agrarians. (This is a somewhat modified version of the original post.)

In the first post of those three posts (Confederate "Heritage" Month 2001, April 19: Frank Owsley on the "Scottsboro boys" case (1) 04/19/2011), I talked about the contemporary concerns Owsley's piece with defending Southern segregation from Yankees who wished to commit "outside interference with the relationship of the whites and blacks in the South." In this post, I'm concerned with the way he uses neo-Confederate/Lost Cause history to provide an ideological frame for his contemporary (1933) application of segregationist ideology.

John C. Calhoun (1782-1850)

The first crusade in Owsley's historical trilogy of grievances inflicted on the white South by the damnyankees was abolition. Owsley's Lost Cause perspective dictated that he had to deny that slavery was in any way really the cause of the Civil War. As usual, such claims don't bear up under close scrutiny. Owsley's twist is to argue there was a basic competition between the industrialists of the North and the beautiful agrarian society of the South. The fact that one was based on free labor and the other on chattel slavery is somehow supposed to be incidental in this particular Lost Cause twist. But in Owsley's construction, the anti-slavery movement in the North was a sinister plan by the evil Yankee industrialists against the white South:

In order to subordinate the South it would be necessary to destroy [the] balance [of power between the North and South]. But the industrialists, carefully coached by their lawyers and statesmen and "intellectual" aides, realized the bad strategy of waging a frank struggle for sectional power; they must pitch the struggle upon a moral plane, else many of the intelligentzia [sic] and the good people generally might become squeamish and refuse to fight. Shibboleths and moral catchwords must be furnished. It was therefore found convenient to attack slavery as an evil and the slaveholder as a criminal, in fact to impugn the morality of the South, in order to create opinion in the East and North in favour of the industrialists' plans of Southern restriction.

The actual history of the abolition movement - including the sometimes violent rejection of it in the North - the need for fugitive slave laws to return human property that had absconded from the humane and civilizing conditions of slavery, the slave revolts and the paranoid panics over possible slave revolts that increasingly characterized conditions in the slave states: all of that has to be ignored or minimized for the Lost Cause pseudohistory to maintain a thin film of credibility even to those predisposed to accept it.

For the Lost Cause, abolition was just a nasty Yankee plot against the put-upon whites of the South. Owsley, typical of Lost Cause partisans, echoed the slaveowners' pre-Civil War accusations against the damnyankees. Given the ideology of racial superiority that became stronger and stronger over time in the slave South, the reality of slaveowners fathering their own children with their slaves was a particular embarrassment to the owners of human property. Owsley takes up their cause retrospectively by pointing to Yankee hypocrisy:

... when ... the moralist crusaders of the Northeast were painting a picture of universal prostitution and miscegenation in the South, information was available to those same moralists which showed sexual degradation in the factories of the East to have reached depths hitherto unknown in the experience of a modern civilized nation. Illegitimacy was more common in the industrialized East than in any country in the world. Yet these crusaders offered little criticism of a society which forced young girls into semi-prostitution.

He goes on to gripe about the nastiness of working conditions in Northern factories. All of this was standard slaveowner polemics prior to the Civil War. Since, as we saw in the last post, Owsley was especially worried about alleged Communist influence over civil rights agitation in 1933, it's appropriate here to quote an observation by Communist Party leader William Foster from his 1954 book The Negro People in American History (1954):

The furious debates of the 1850's over the question of slavery presented a rare spectacle of the two quarreling sectors of capitalism - the Southern planters, with their obsolete production system, and the Northern industrial capitalists, representing the interests of capitalism as a whole. They exposed and denounced each other's system of exploitation, and many true words were spoken in these mutual unveilings. Never, in any country, have the sinister workings of capitalism been so thoroughly aired from within.

Which is true enough, as far as it goes, although I can't vouch for the international comparison. John Calhoun actually incorporated such a conception of exploiting class differences into his political strategy and theory, as Richard Current explains in John C. Calhoun (1963). At the beginning of the Martin Van Buren Administration in 1837, Calhoun was becoming increasing unhappy with the Democratic Party:

There was much that he disliked about the party, including its name. He was himself no democrat, and he had little in common with the city workingmen to whom, among others, the party catered. That is, he had little in common with them except for the votes which they could cast and which he, in some future presidential election, might receive. In practice he was fond of "the people," including the workers. In principle he feared the "needy and corrupt" many, whom he expected to rise sooner or later in revolt against their betters, the rich and wellborn few. At heart he preferred the Whigs to the Democrats, the party of the rich to the party of the poor.

That appeal to urban labor was key to what "Jacksonian democracy" meant. Calhoun, to put it mildly, was no Jacksonian.

What Calhoun hoped for was an enduring alliance which would include working class Northern voters and Southern slaveholders. And in the service of that goal, Calhoun elaborated a nominally pro-labor viewpoint which, not coincidentally, also served as an indictment of the Northern system of free labor that increasingly competed directly against the slavery-based Southern agricultural economy. Current writes:

"It is useless to disguise the fact," Calhoun frankly informed his fellow senators (1837). "There is and always has been, in an advanced state of wealth and civilization, a conflict between capital and labor."

And he provides the following quotes from the Senator from South Carolina. From 1847:

Where wages command labor, as in the non-slaveholding States, there necessarily takes place between labor and capital a conflict which leads, in process of time, to disorder, anarchy, and revolution, if not counteracted by some appropriate and strong constitutional provision.

For, as the community becomes populous, wealthy, refined, and highly civilized, the difference between the rich and the poor will become more strongly marked; and the number of the ignorant and dependent greater in proportion to the rest of the community. With the increase of this difference, the tendency to conflict between them will become stronger; and, as the poor and dependent become more numerous in proportion, there will be ... no want of leaders among the wealthy and ambitious, to excite and direct them in their efforts to obtain the control.

It worth noting that in 1847 Karl Marx at this time was still an obscure Young Hegelian German scholar and polemicist with a tiny group called the Communist League (Bund der Kommunisten).

Calhoun's condemnation of the evils of industrial capitalism was entirely cynical politics and reactionary political theory. Which is not to say he wasn't correct in some of the things he had to say on the subject.

But the Lost Cause ideology expounded by Owsley in this essay is a direct descendant of Calhoun's pro-slavery positions. What may sound in isolation like perceptive criticism of the evils of the American form of capitalism circa 1933 - the failings of which were painfully evident in the early years of the Great Depression - are embedded in a defense of a Southern Agrarian ideal, which was really a dystopian vision meant to defend the existing system in the South: segregation, sharecropping, thoroughly corrupt politics that were democratic more in form than content, poverty and hopelessness for the majority of the rural population white and black. Owlsey was taking his stand on the grounds John Calhoun and other defenders of slavery had lain out years before the Civil War.