He himself thinks that the early Federalist Party provides some relevant perspective for understanding current authoritarian political tendencies. That is certainly a helpful dose of realism in light of the idolization of Alexander Hamilton in recent years. (1) His main concern seems to be that focusing too much on historical parallels can blind us to more recent determinants of events and political ideologies.
But in one of her very recent essays, Richardson makes an important point about understanding the history of the Civil War in its own particular context. Referring to the attitude of the seceding slaveholders in 1860-61, she writes:
Their move had come because the elite enslavers who controlled those southern states believed that Lincoln’s election to the presidency in 1860 itself marked the end of their way of life. (2)
In one sense, that belief was true. Lincoln and the Republicans were determined to contain the spread of the Peculiar Institution (slavery) into wider areas of the US. And they were pushing back against the infamous Supreme Court Dred Scott decision in 1857, which attempted to block all attempts to abolish slavery through legislation. Melvin Urofsky explains:
“The Southern opinion upon the subject of Southern slavery,” trumpeted one Georgia newspaper, “is now the supreme law of the land,” and opposition to it is “morally treason against the Government.” The view that Southern ideologues such as John C. Calhoun had promoted for more than a decade—that the federal government had a positive, indeed a constitutional, obligation to defend slavery—had apparently triumphed.
Not surprisingly, the North exploded in denunciations of Taney’s opinion. Several sober appraisals in the Northern press decimated the chief justice’s tortured legal reasoning. The Republican editor Horace Greeley published Justice Curtis’s dissent as a pamphlet to be used in the elections of 1858 and 1860. The press and pulpit echoed with attacks on the decision that were as heated as Southern defenses of it. Taney’s hopes of settling the issue lay smashed. If anything, Scott v. Sandford inflamed passions and brought the Union even closer to dissolving. (3)
(A great-great-great-great niece of the infamous Chief Justice Roger Taney has recently written a play dealing with the legacy of that decision.) (4)
Badly outnumbered by the northerners who insisted that the West must be reserved for free men, southern elites were afraid that northerners would bottle up enslavement in the South and gradually whittle away at it. Those boundaries would mean that white southerners would soon be outnumbered by the Black Americans they enslaved, putting not only their economy but also their very lives at risk.
To defend their system, elite southern enslavers rewrote American democracy. They insisted that the government of the United States of America envisioned by the Founders who wrote the Declaration of Independence had a fatal flaw: it declared that all men were created equal. In contrast, the southern enslavers were openly embracing the reality that some people were better than others and had the right to rule.
They looked around at their great wealth—the European masters hanging in their parlors, the fine dresses in which they clothed their wives and daughters, and the imported olive oil on their tables—and concluded they were the ones who had figured out the true plan for human society. As South Carolina senator James Henry Hammond explained to his colleagues in March 1858, the “harmonious…and prosperous” system of the South worked precisely because a few wealthy men ruled over a larger class with “a low order of intellect and but little skill.” Hammond dismissed “as ridiculously absurd” the idea that “all men are born equal.” [my emphasis]
That is the real legacy of the “Lost Cause.”
Notes:
Hoagland, William (2024): American Fascism in the Federal Period. Hoagland’s Bad History 03/27/2024. <https://williamhogeland.substack.com/p/american-fascism-in-the-federal-period> (Accessed: 2024-14-04). Using “fascism” to describe the Federalists of that period seems to me to be an “anachronistic” usage, i.e., projecting conditions or concepts of a later period into the past. Not every authoritarian or anti-democracy movement in history needs to be labelled fascist.
(2) Richardson, Heather Cox (2024): April 12, 2024. Letters from an American 04/13/2024. <https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/april-12-2024> (Accessed: 04/14/2024).
(3) Urofsky, Melvin I. (2024): Dred Scott decision. Britannica Online 02/28/2024. <https://www.britannica.com/event/Dred-Scott-decision> (Accessed: 04/14/2024).
(4) Kennedy, Mark (2024): Descendant of judge who wrote infamous Dred Scott decision pens a play about where we are now. AP News 17 03/18/2024. <https://apnews.com/article/american-rot-dred-scott-8741cb92fbd68a2af68e5e64e771ff46> (Accessed: 04/14/2024).
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