Owlsley published a Calhounian account in 1941 describing his own Lost Cause version of the cause of the Civil War. (2) A hardcore segregationist view, in other words.
He opens his piece in good segregationist style by trashing Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address that expressed the American (i.e., Union) cause as based on the goal "that government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from the earth.”
Instead, this 20th-century Calhoun declares, “The Civil War was not a struggle on the part of the South to destroy free government [yes, it was] and personal liberty nor on the part of the North to preserve them [yes, it was].”
One of Owlsley’s dubious productions, first published in 1949
He assures his readers, “In the light of the present-day death struggle between freedom and the most brutal form of despotism, the Civil War, as far as the issue of free government was involved, was a sham battle.”
Arguing that the Confederates weren’t as bad as the Nazis is surely a case of damning with faint praise. On the other hand, the article was published in early 1941 and was based on a paper first presented in 1940. And since he doesn’t get more specific, it’s not necessarily the case that it was the Nazi government in Germany he had in mind.
But later in the essay, he explains that the evil Northern Abolitionists are like contemporary “totalitarians” of 1941:
One has to seek in the unrestrained and furious invective of the present totalitarians to find a near parallel to the language that the abolitionists and their political fellow travelers used in denouncing the South and its way of life. Indeed, as far as I have been able to ascertain, neither Dr. Goebbels nor [Italian fascist journalist] Virginio Gayda nor Stalin's propaganda agents have as yet been able to plumb the depths of vulgarity and obscenity reached and maintained by George Bourne, Stephen Poster, Wendell Phillips, Charles Sumner, and other abolitionists of note.
Owsley made an argument that he presumably meant to sound like some inverted Marxist case:
New England and the middle states were fast becoming in essence a plutocracy whose political ideology was still strongly democratic; but the application of this democratic ideology was being seriously hampered by the economic dependence of the middle and lower classes upon those who owned the tools of production. Tue employee unprotected by government supervision or by strong labor organizations was subject in exercising his political rights to the undue influence of the employer.
He even uses the term associated with socialist analysis, the “means of production.”
But this kind of argument wasn’t a 20th-century invention. In fact, the polemicists in the slave and free states made a habit of portraying the social system of the other as being oppressive and awful. Both sides sometimes had good points to make. But the side whose social system was based on the ownership of human beings under chattel slavery was not looking to increase freedom or democracy or greater prosperity and security for workers and farmers.
There is an enormous amount of economic research available these days, so there’s no reason to assume the statistics he cites are accurate without verification. But he makes an argument that was a kind of economic determination: most (white) Southerners (men) owned their own farms, which means that the “means of production” was more widely distributed (among white men, of course) than in the free states. So the slave South was by definition more democratic than the North! And therefore the Confederacy couldn’t have been fighting against free government!
The Southern Agrarians promoted a sentiment – calling it a philosophy or political theory would give it way too much credit – which held up a vague idea of how the hard-working rural (white) folks were the salt of the earth. Owlsley’s weird economic-determinist argument about how the slave states were by definition democracies, and more democratic democracies than the free states, is consistent with that Southern Agrarian sentiment.
Owlsley basically belabors a Lost Cause talking point that the problems that led to the Civil War were primarily based on sectionalism. And the evil Yankees were too mean and pushy and ambitious and so the war was all their fault.
Owlsley and the other Southern Agrarians were “highbrow” advocates of the segregationist pseudohistory embodied in the Lost Cause narrative. But it was and is deeply dishonest and reactionary.
And their work on themes like this needs to be seen in the context of how the Lost Cause narrative was an integral part of the ideology of segregation and the denial of the vote and other basic civil rights to Black Americans.
Notes:
(1) Miller, Bruce (2024): Confederate "Heritage" Month 2019, April 9: The long shadow of John Calhoun's white supremacist ideology. Contradicciones 04/09/2019 <https://brucemillerca.blogspot.com/2019/04/confederate-heritage-month-2019-april-9_9.html> (Accessed: 2024-05-04).
(2) Owlsley, Frank (1941): The Fundamental Cause of the Civil War: Egocentric Sectionalism. The Journal of Southern History 7: 3-18. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/2191262>
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