Heather Cox Richardson on "The American Paradox": slavery vs. democracy

Here the second of Heather Cox Richardson's lectures on the topic of The American Paradox: Part 2 03/30/2020:

This lecture is full of interesting observations and good stories. I may have known but had forgotten, for instance, that both Abraham Lincoln and his famous rival Stephen Douglas had both courted the woman who became Mary Todd Lincoln.

In this lecture, she tells a version of the story of how slavery came to be understood by a large part of the American public as hostile to even a democracy limited to white men. In her telling, the War of 1812 marked a new effort to define a distinctive American identity. As she observes, that war led Britain to give up ambitions of regaining control of the former colonies or establishing a dominating presence in North America west of the US and south of Canada. Prior to that, the main foreign policy concern for the US was to keep Britain out. And this new sense of permanence and the improved prospect of westward expansion produced efforts to define a special mission for America.

In the north, the image of the independent white farmer became a dominant narrative. But in the South, a different narrative grew around the expanding institution of slavery. Richardson stresses something that it seems to me has receded in historical accounts, the critical importance of the invention of the cotton gin in 1793. Cotton production on Southern plantations had been a relatively low-margin, very labor-intensive business. That contributed to a belief prior to 1793 that slavery would inevitably fade away. That may have been unrealistic or a disingenuous excuse for not tackling the problem. But in the years following 1793, the employment of the cotton gin made it far more profitable.

She describes how the Compromise of 1820 that established a line, north of which slavery would be excluded, was generally accepted by Southern leaders at the time in no small part because they assumed that the US would be seizing large amounts of territory in Latin America.

She also talks about the infamous Wade Hampton (1818-1902) of South Carolina and other slavery defenders who developed an argument that the slave system in the South was actually a much more promising model for civilization that the Northern version of democracy and a free-labor capitalist economy. Slavery was not a static institution. It was aggressively expansive, and Richardson describes some of the very concrete was dramatically restricting democracy in the non-slave states in the lead-up to the Civil War, e.g., Stephen Douglas' "popular sovereignty," Bleeding Kansas, the Dred Scott decision.

She also briefly mentions her concept that Abraham Lincoln was responsible for stablishing an entirely new kind of democracy in the US. She also mentions how it important it was that the Lincoln Administration established the first US fiat currency backed by the federal government.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2020, April 28: "Old Abe Lincoln Came Out of the Wilderness"

Here's another Civil War era song from Folkways' Songs of the Civil War (1860) celebrating Abraham Lincoln in a kind of corny campaign song, Old Abe Lincoln Came Out of the Wilderness, sung by Hermes Nye:

From the liner notes: "The most lasting of the Lincoln songs, this rollicking air was employed as a Lincoln campaign ditty in the election of 1860. The tune, which is best known today as 'The Old Grey Mare,' has been traced back to a composition (circa 1858) known as 'Down in Alabam'' composed by a J. Warner."

Here's another version, which is worth listening to just to say you've hear a performance by the Millard Fillmores Orchestra.

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 23: Calhoun and Jefferson on slavery (2)

In the previous post in this series, I discussed part of John Calhoun's "Speech on the Oregon Bill" of June 27, 1848 and how he used the words and reputation of Thomas Jefferson to bolster his own pro-slavery position. And I talked about how Jefferson's famous dismay over th Missouri Compromise of 1820 confronted Jefferson with the dilemma that his own gradual-emancipation strategy for freeing the slaves had become unrealistic in the face of increased aggressiveness on the part of slaveowners and their representatives.

But Calhoun then found himself condemning the most famous piece of Jefferson's literary production, the Declaration of Independence. While commentators today are more apt to take Jefferson's antislavery positions and even his more general positions on democracy and individual liberty as cynical covers for support of slavery, The Dark Prince of American Reaction John Calhoun, thought Jefferson was altogether serious about the sentiments in the Declaration, and Calhoun condemned one of them in harsh terms.

That sentiment was the Declaration's position that "all men are created equal". People today are more conscious of the extent to which Jefferson and the leaders of the Revolution really meant men only. But that consideration wasn't what was on Calhoun's mind. He told the Senate:

Now, let me say, Senators, if our Union and system of government are doomed to perish, and we to share the fate of so many great people who have gone before us, the historian, who, in some future day, may record the events ending in so calamitous a result, will devote his first chapter to the ordinance of 1787, lauded as it and its authors have been, as the first of that series which led to it.

If he should possess a philosophical turn of mind, and be disposed to look to more remote and recondite causes, he will trace it to a proposition which originated in a hypothetical truism, but which, as now expressed and now understood, is the most false and dangerous of all political errors. The proposition to which I allude, has become an axiom in the minds of a vast majority on both sides of the Atlantic, and is repeated daily from tongue to tongue, as an established and incontrovertible truth; it is, that “all men are born free and equal.”

This is one way in which Calhoun was a straightforward reactionary. That phrase in the Declaration expressed a fundamental principle of democracy and liberal freedoms, that each individual has a basic level of rights as a human being (or at least as a man!) that must be recognized and respected. It was also an expression of a basic principle of the liberal concept of the rule of law, that the law applies equally to all.

As democrats recognized even in the late 18th century, the actual application of equal rights and the rule of law was heavily influenced by class and status considerations. But Calhoun was not at all advocating overcoming such barriers. He rejected the entire principle. He begins with an refutation of the kind we hear these days from aspiring rightwing podcasters:
Taking the proposition literally, (it is in that sense it is understood,)

Taking the proposition literally (it is in that sense it is understood), there is not a word of truth in it. It begins with “all men are born,” which is utterly untrue. [!!] Men are not born. Infants are born. They grow to be men. And concludes with asserting that they are born “free and equal,” which is not less false. They are not born free. While infants they are incapable of freedom, being destitute alike of the capacity of thinking and acting, without which there can be no freedom. Besides, they are necessarily born subject to their parents, and remain so among all people, savage and civilized, until the development of their intellect and physical capacity enables them to take care of themselves. They grow to all the freedom of which the condition in which they were born permits, by growing to be men. Nor is it less false that they are born “equal.” They are not so in any sense in which it can be regarded; and thus, as I have asserted, there is not a word of truth in the whole proposition, as expressed and generally understood. [my emphasis]

Ben Shapiro would be proud. Incidentally, the rapid-fire speech of some rightwing pundits was also something that Calhoun was known to practice in his speeches. It's an old rightwing habit, I guess.

As Calhoun insists there, the American public did take that basic principle of democracy and the rule of law very seriously, i.e., "literally ... is in that sense it is understood"; "the whole proposition, as expressed and generally understood." And Calhoun wanted to change that common opinion!

He continues with some weak theoretical nitpicking against John Locke and Algernon Sidney. But his real point is not about differences between individuals but alleged difference between races. Because the dominant slaveowners' justification for slavery had become the notion that black people were inherently inferior to whites and incapable of creating or practicing civilization on the supposedly elevated level of the slavedrivers. The slaveowners who held human beings as property and bought and sold them as such.

The Honorable Senator from South Carolina:

It follows from all this that the quantum of power on the part of the government, and of liberty on that of individuals, instead of being equal in all cases, must necessarily be very unequal among different people, according to their different conditions. For just in proportion as a people are ignorant, stupid, debased, corrupt, exposed to violence within and danger from without, the power necessary for government to possess, in order to preserve society against anarchy and destruction becomes greater and greater, and individual liberty less and less, until the lowest condition is reached, when absolute and despotic power becomes necessary on the part of the government, and individual liberty extinct. So, on the contrary, just as a people rise in the scale of intelligence, virtue, and patriotism, and the more perfectly they become acquainted with the nature of government, the ends for which it was ordered, and how it ought to be administered, and the less the tendency to violence and disorder within, and danger from abroad, the power necessary for government becomes less and less, and individual liberty greater and greater. Instead, then, of all men having the same right to liberty and equality, as is claimed by those who hold that they are all born free and equal, liberty is the noble and highest reward bestowed on mental and moral development, combined with favorable circumstances. Instead, then, of liberty and equality being born with man; instead of all men and all classes and descriptions being equally entitled to them, they are high prizes to be won, and are in their most perfect state, not only the highest reward that can be bestowed on our race, but the most difficult to be won — and when won, the most difficult to be preserved. [my emphasis]

The slaveowners' narrative, of course, held black people to be an "ignorant, stupid, debased, corrupt" people who could only be ruled by tyranny. While representation in a republic should be a matter for whites, who are "a people" who have managed to "rise in the scale of intelligence, virtue, and patriotism." But he wasn't advocating Jeffersonian equality even among white men. Liberty in his view "is the noble and highest reward bestowed on mental and moral development, combined with favorable circumstances." And he explicitly states that "liberty and equality" are definitively not for "all men and all classes and descriptions." (my emphasis) Calhoun is making a racial argument here. But he's making a class argument as well, both on the behalf of the slaveowning planters, aka, the Slave Power.

And he saw the sinister Jeffersonian influence at work in Europe, then experiencing what we now remembers as the revolutions of 1848:

[Maintaining the power and liberties of the white race has] been made vastly more so by the dangerous error I have attempted to expose, that all men are born free and equal, as if those high qualities belonged to man without effort to acquire them, and to all equally alike, regardless of their intellectual and moral condition. The attempt to carry into practice this, the most dangerous of all political error, and to bestow on all, without regard to their fitness either to acquire or maintain liberty, that unbounded and individual liberty supposed to belong to man in the hypothetical and misnamed state of nature, has done more to retard the cause of liberty and civilization, and is doing more at present, than all other causes combined. While it is powerful to pull down governments, it is still more powerful to prevent their construction on proper principles. It is the leading cause among those which have placed Europe in its present anarchical condition, and which mainly stands in the way of reconstructing good governments in the place of those which have been overthrown, threatening thereby the quarter of the globe most advanced in progress and civilization with hopeless anarchy, to be followed by military despotism. Nor are we exempt from its disorganizing effects. We now begin to experience the danger of admitting so great an error to have a place in the declaration of our independence. For a long time it lay dormant; but in the process of time it began to germinate, and produce its poisonous fruits. It had strong hold on the mind of Mr. Jefferson, the author of that document, which caused him to take an utterly false view of the subordinate relation of the black to the white race in the South; and to hold, in consequence, that the former, though utterly unqualified to possess liberty, were as fully entitled to both liberty and equality as the latter; and that to deprive them of it was unjust and immoral. To this error, his proposition to exclude slavery from the territory northwest of the Ohio may be traced, and to that the ordinance of ’87 [that excluded slavery from the Northwest Territory], and through it the deep and dangerous agitation which now threatens to ingulf, and will certainly ingulf, if not speedily settled, our political institutions, and involve the country in countless woes. [my emphasis]

Because for Calhoun, democratic republics and the equal rule of law could only produce "hopeless anarchy". But let's give the old reactionary credit. He was right to see the democratic revolutionary elements of the American Revolution in the European revolutions of 1848.

Calhoun here was frankly stating that the basic concepts of the American democracy were incompatible with the slave system and the racist ideology by which the planters justified it ideologically. Abraham Lincoln agreed with him about that incompatibility. But he took a different side. In his Letter to Joshua Speed of August 24, 1855, Lincoln wrote, with particular reference to the xenophobic Know-Nothing party (formally the American Party:

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 it turned out, in 1856 Czar Alexander II liberated the Russian serbs from their feudal status, declaring, "It is better to abolish serfdom from above than to wait until the serfs begin to liberate themselves from below." Because of that, historians sometimes draw parallels between Lincoln and Alexander II as similar "liberators". Alexander's government maintained good relations with Lincoln's Union government during the Civil War.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2020, April 9: Was God anti-slavery and pro-Union?

Another Civil War song today, Battle Hymn of the Republic, in a folky version from Elizabeth Knight:

Here are the lyrics from the liner notes from the Songs of the Civil War album (1960) depicted on the YouTube clip above:

BATLE HYMN OF THE REPUBLIC sung by Elizabeth Knight with Jerry Silverman and The Harvesters:

Words: Julia Ward Howe
Music "John Brown's Body"

This is the great inspirational hymn which came out of the darkest hours of our nation's history. Mrs. Howe, in later years an ardent leader of the woman's suffrage movement ... [c]omposed the song in November, 1861. lt first appeared in print in the pages of The Atlantic Monthly in February, 1862. Mrs. Howe was paid five dollars by the magazine for the right to print the sang. Of all the songs produced by the Civil war, this one undoubtedly has become a more permanent part of our national idiom than any other.

The song is a God-is-on-our-side anthem used by the Union side. There is always some ambiguity in that kind of song. In this case, it represents a continuation of the theological side of the slavery debate of the prewar years. Defenders of the Peculiar Institution argued that slavery was an institution endorsed by the Bible. Opponents argued that it was against God's will and violation of the Christian view of the worth of the human being founded on the Bible.

Hermeneutic questions aside, the God of Moses and the Exodus was an inspiration to American slaves themselves, as well as popular movements for centuries, in what we would today broadly call Christian liberation theology. The militant antislavery leader John Brown was a devout Calvinist who understood it to be his Christian duty to fight against slavery. Of all the commonly known white American leaders prior to the Civil War, John Brown, who also supported the vote and legal equality for women, is the one who most clearly reflected the left-liberal views of race and gender of 2020.

There is a famous part of Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address that addressed the religious considerations at stake in the conflict, which he introduced this way (text from OurDocuments.gov):

One eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the Southern half part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union, even by war; while the government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war, the magnitude, or the duration, which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding.

Slavery was the cause of the war, as Lincoln here emphasized. As in all wars, there were contributing factors of various kinds. But neither side pretended at the time that slavery was not the central cause of the war, much less the ludicrous neo-Confederate claim that slavery had nothing at all to do with precipitating the war.

He continued with the God part (may paragraph break):

Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully.

The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!" If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offences which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him?

Fondly do we hope -- fervently do we pray -- that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said f[our] three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether." [my emphasis]

I have no reason to doubt that Lincoln believed in the Christian religion. But he was speaking here as a national leader who had the task of finishing the Civil War and then taking on the task of reconstructing a new Union and a free-labor economy instead of slavery for the whole country.

At some point, I want to take a closer look at what Lincoln actually had in mind for Reconstruction. But here, he was invoking the widely shared religious tradition of the North and the South, and doing so in a way that, to my reading, leaves no doubt that Lincoln himself assumed that God was very much on the anti-slavery side. And that "if God wills that it continue" part is great rhetorical construction that defined slavery as a national sin, not simply one by the Confederate side.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2020, April 7: Civil War songs, Army band and chorus 1963 vrsions

Here is another take on Civil War songs. This is from 1963, and it "[f]eatures the US Army Band, US Army Chorus (dressed as Yankees & Rebels) + civilians Gloria Lambert and Bill Hayes," according to the clip Internet Archives site.

Yes, that's soldiers serving in the US Army, dressing up in the uniforms of the traitors who directly betrayed the country and whose service was all focused on killing soldiers of the US Army.

Yes, this is a cultural/theatrical event, not a white power group demonstration. But there is a political element to this. After the overthrow of the democratic Reconstruction governments in the South by force, violence, and fraud, the Republican and Democratic parties adopted a narrative of North-South reconciliation. Or, put another way, a narrative of North-South reconciliation among white people

But it's also the case that Robert E. Lee and the other military leaders of the Confederacy were almost all former officers in the US Army who were sworn to support the country. Instead, they signed up with a rebellion to defend and expand slavery by overthrowing the legitimate government of the US. The symbolism of the US Army retroactively honoring those traitors is ugly.

Lincoln wrote in an 1863 letter to Erastus Corning addressing his controversial arrests of active Northern Coppperheads (Confederate sympathizers):

Gen. John C. Breckienridge, Gen. Robert E. Lee, Gen. Joseph E. Johnston, Gen. John B. Magruder, Gen. William B. Preston, Gen. Simon B. Buckner, and Comodore [Franklin] Buchanan, now occupying the very highest places in the rebel war service, were all within the power of the government since the rebellion began, and were nearly as well known to be traitors then as now. Unquestionably if we had seized and held them, the insurgent cause would be much weaker. But no one of them had then committed any crime defined in the law. Every one of them if arrested would have been discharged on Habeas Corpus, were the writ allowed to operate. In view of these and similar cases, I think the time not unlikely to come when I shall be blamed for having made too few arrests rather than too many.

Whether one agrees with the denial of habeus corpus to some of the arrested Copperheads, Lincoln was stating the factual reality that many of the commanders who in 1863 were killing large numbers of US Army soldiers were former officers who betrayed their country and the US Army in which they had served in defense of the ownership of property in human beings.

The film is also an illustration of how historical memories are shaped and how various kinds of contemporary symbolism become attached to them. 1963 was in the middle of the centennial of the Civil War, which was very visibly commemorated by governments, civil society groups, and the popular press. This was also a year in which civil rights struggles were in an intense phase. And defenders of segregation and the suppression of black votes on which it rested celebrated of the Confederate cause symbolism for their very contemporary hostility to African-Americans and to democracy.

All of that said, the video is interesting as a snapshot of one official representation of Civil War history in a centennial event.

The website provides this list of the songs performed:

Episode opens with "Down By The Riverside"
"When Johnny Comes Marching Home"
"We are Coming Father Abra'am"
"Lorena"
"Tenting On The Old Camp Ground"
"The Battle" (new music & spoken word piece)
"In the Sweet By-and-By / The Army Bean"
"Yellow Rose of Texas"
"Bonnie Blue Flag"
"Home! Sweet Home!"
"Dixie"
"The Battle Hymn of the Republic"

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2020, April 5: the African colonization idea, anti-slavery and anti-black

Hinton Rowan Helper (1829-1909) was the author of The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It (1857). In my Confederate “Heritage” Month posts in 2017, I discussed Helper and his Impending Crisis book, starting with this April 27 post and continuing with two others on April 28 and April 29.

Helper’s book was an influential anti-slavery tract which made a systematic argument that slavery was actually damaging to the slaveowning states, refuting the planters’ claim that it was superior to the free-labor capitalism of the rest of the country. Helper himself was a Southerner, which gave his book a kind of contrarian, counter-intuitive appeal. But Helper is also interesting as an illustration of a common phenomenon that neo-Confederate ideologists use polemically and is awkward to address from the kind of superficial “woke” position on race that corporate Democrats have been commonly using for the last few years in contemporary politics. And that is the historical reality that whites could be and very often were both antislavery and racist against black people.

So we can find plenty of quotations from antislavery politicians from Thomas Jefferson (who was, yes, a slaveowner) to Abraham Lincoln expressing racist views against blacks of various levels of intensity and hostility. One illustration of that phenomenon was the popularity of the African colonization movement among white opponents of slavery which advocating freeing black slaves and sending them back to Africa. The creation of the colony (later nation) of Liberia was one product of this effort. This was a view of opposing slavery while also opposing the presence of black people in the US, or, at a minimum, thinking it was impractical to expect that an integrated black and white society could function in the US. (On the colonization movement, see: Becky Little, How a Movement to Send Freed Slaves to Africa Created Liberia History.com 04/05/2019)

But by the 1830s, white antislavery activists became much more critical of the colonization scheme. Very few black activists had ever found it appealing or convincing. As Becky Little writes:

In 1854, future president Abraham Lincoln agreed with this sentiment when he gave a speech that mentioned colonization as an appealing solution to the moral evils of slavery—but noted its logistical and ethical challenges:

“If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do, as to the existing insti­tution. My first impulse would be to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia,–to their own native land. But a moment’s reflection would convince me, that whatever of high hope, (as I think there is) there may be in this, in the long run, its sudden execution is impossible. If they were all landed there in a day, they would all perish in the next ten days; and there are not surplus shipping and surplus money enough in the world to carry them there in many times ten days." [italics in original; my emphasis in bold]

However, Lincoln still spoke positively about the possibilities of colonization when he was President, mentioning it in the Emancipation Proclamation itself and in an 1862 message speech known as the "Address on Colonization to a Delegation of Black Americans".

In the next post, I'll discuss a mystery about the antislavery but also anti-black Hinton Rowan Helper.

Henry Steele Commager and immanent critique of American actions

Need I add that every great American leader, from Washington and Jefferson to Lincoln to Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, acknowledged a responsibility of our membership in the great community of civilization? That responsibility can best be fulfilled by drawing on our own experience and invoking our own authority to solve national problems and applying the lessons of that experience to the challenges of the future.

That quote is from the historian Henry Steele Commager (1902–1998) from his 1993 book, Commager on Tocqueville.

Commager was one of the best known Amerian historians during his career. And his writing on current issues was a big influence on my political thinking when I was an undergraduate. I've had a lot of other influences since then, too.

But I've been reading some of Commager's work recently in the process of trying to inform myself better about the history of US dealings with native peoples in North America. And it has reminded me of what impressed me about his approach.

Commager was a liberal Democratic thinker and activist with an anti-imperialist inclination and a focus on intellectual history. In the early years of the Cold War, he was a more convential "Cold War liberal," a term which once carried a similar polemic edge to what "corporate Democrat" has today. But by the 1960s, he became a sharp critic of the Vietnam War.

In December 1965, the year that President Lyndon Johnson put American troops in a much ore expansive and direct role for US troops in Vietnam on the side of South Vietnam against North Vietnam, Commager opened his presentation in a debate over the war with:

Speaking of one of the greatest of crises Abraham Lincoln said, just over a century ago:

"If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do, and how to do it. We are now far into the fifth year since a policy was initiated with the avowed object in confidence of putting an end to the slavery agitation"- let us substitute: to the Vietnamese crisis. "Under the operation of that policy the agitation has not only not ceased but has constantly augmented." (Speech, Springfield, 1858) [text from "Debate on Vietnam Policy, Alvin Friedman & Henry Steele Commager" Massachusetts Review 7:2 {Spring, 1966}]

This is something that Commager did well that I still appreciate. He invoked iconic American historical figures to make policy and political points about the preseent, while still taking the original context seriously.

And that's a big reason that I'm still reluctant to embrace the sort of casual revisionism that we see quite a bit now on the left and center-left that writes off a large part of the American democratic tradition as hopelessly tainted by the shortcomings of democracy in earlier times. In 2019, Abraham Lincoln still mostly gets a pass because of his status as the Great Liberator in the Civil War. (Just to be clear, I'm a big Lincoln fan myself.)

I'm very much in favor of a critical approach to history. And obviously our collective view of historical events and actors changes over time as the ways we see the world develop and become more informed. I think it's safe to say that in 100 years or so, people will look back at all of us who are of voting age in 2019 and criticize us for our collective irresponsibility on the climate crisis. Because it is appalling. And at least a lot of people right now also recognize it's appalling.

If we have a nuclear war, we can only hope there will still be surviving members of humanity around to trash us for our mind-boggling irresponsibility on nuclear arms proliferation.

But as long as there are still people around to think about history, it's important to be cautious about "anachronism," which is applying current standards to past events without taking adequate recognition of what standards people in those previous times were applying to themselves and each other and the actual conditions in which they were acting. The Britain of 1215-1225 when the Magna Carta was established was seriously backwards compared to the American colonies of 1776. But the Magna Carta played a large role in how the American revolutionaries understood their own rights in real time and served as an effective part of the revolutionary ideology of 1776 and the following years. (We're talking about a tradition that in 1776 was 550 years old!)

And that was despite the fact that King John, his sucessor Henry III, and the British nobles in the early 13th century would have regarded it as absurd to even consider something like the US Bill of Rights. But the historical path to the Bill of Rights nevertheless passed through the Magna Carta and events that led to its establishment. Anyone who regards liberal democratic freedoms as important can't condemn the Magna Carta as hopelessly backwards and reactionary because it didn't comport with cutting-edge democratic standards of 2019. Or of 1776.

Commager's respect for the Jeffersonian tradition and Enlightenment reason didn't prevent him from passing highly critical judgments on bad decisions and mistaken assumptions of the present and much more recent past. His criticism would become even sharper as the war wet on. But he was pretty sweeping in his criticisms of the Vietnam War in 1965:

The consequences of our Vietnamese involvement to our moral standards are already painfully familiar. It means deception; it means putting out arguments and claims which we do not ourselves believe; it means lying to the American people; it means that we are losing our friends throughout the globe; it means we are coarsening our own moral fiber, getting hardened to bombing innocent people and destroying the country on pretexts that will not stand examination. It means ever sharper divisions in our own society, and the upsurge of the forces of intolerance and militarism. It means a pervasive indulgence in that sin which may well be the unpardonable sin of the New Testament, the sin of supposing that we are a special people, exempt from those rules of morality which apply to all others. [my emphasis]

Commager was not indulging in Biblical hermeneutics here. But he was making a forceful point against American Exceptionalism. And there was probably some Niebuhrian theological influence there, too.

And he was adapt at judging American assumptions about other countries by the standards Americans applied to their own actions:

Does Russia have a vital interest in Cuba because Castro is an outpost of Communism? When Russia attempted to display that [in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962], we prepared for war .... Surely if we have a vital interest in distant Vietnam we must concede Russia a vital interest in Iran, Irak, and Hungary •••. And even more obviously, if we have a vital interest in Vietnam what are we to say to China's interest: is it something less than vital? ...

More, to assume that a request for military aid even from an independent South Vietnam would somehow justify our intervention there requires us to concede that a request for military aid from an independent Cuba justifies the intervention of the Soviet in that island. That was not what we thought in 1962. [my emphasis]

Commager was very good at making an immanent critque of American actions within the context of American history and democratic ideals.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2019, April 30: A short but useful take on the politics of slavery, the real version and the Lost Cause version

One of the more interesting developments in US political journalism in recent years is the fact that some of the most interesting pieces on politics and popular history are to found in ... Teen Vogue!

Adam Sanchez wrote in 2017 about how the Trump Administration was then glorifying Robert E. Lee, Abraham Lincoln and Civil War Myths, Explained 11/03/2017:

Earlier this week, Trump’s chief of staff, John Kelly, stated on Fox News that Confederate General Robert E. Lee was an “honorable man” who fought “for his state” and that “the lack of an ability to compromise . . . on both sides" led to the Civil War.

In these comments, Kelly parroted one of the many Civil War myths: that the war was a dispute over states’s rights. This fable was widely promoted by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which rewrote textbooks across the South to deemphasize the “right” that Southern leaders were most concerned with: profiting from the ownership of other human beings. This “Lost Cause” myth is particularly useful for Kelly and the Trump administration because it hides the essential reason the South seceded — to preserve slavery and white supremacy — allowing Trump’s white supporters to claim that they are preserving their “heritage” rather than racial privilege. Today, the idea of Confederate “heritage” as a unifying call for the white South pits white people against people of color. [my emphasis]

This is a short article that nevertheless gives a good glimpse at the complicated politics of slavery and race through in which Abraham Lincoln operated. Sanchez also mention the exodus of slaves from their plantations after the Emancipation Proclamation, a critical event which seems to be often under-appreciated.

He summarizes the challenge of reaching a nuanced understanding of that period, "The reason this history is so often hidden or distorted is because truly understanding the causes of the Civil War, and how that war was transformed, requires a view of history that sees beyond presidents, generals, and the elites."

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2019, April 23: Again on the Nulification Crisis

Manisha Sinha, the historian I quoted a few days ago, also recently did a summary article, The History and Legacy of Jacksonia Democracy Journal of the Early Republic 39:1 (Spring 2019), for an issue of that journal with several article devoted to Andrew Jackson and the broad democratic movement that became identified with his name.

As she observes, "the history and legacy of Jacksonian Democracy are far more contradictory than recent populist invocations of him would have us believe." As an example of the latter, she cites a book by Bradley Birzer’s In Defense of Andrew Jackson (2018) published by the rightwing publishing House Regnery. Regnery is known for publishing hackwork. I read part of a favorable review of this book on a John Birch Society website. So I'm not linking any of this stuff because, ick!

Sinha makes the following observations about the Nullification Crisis of 1832–33 that are critical to the politics of slavery and secession that led to the Civil War:

Jackson’s staunch nationalism at times trumped his provincial identity as a southern slaveholder. He is a crucial figure in the development of the antebellum American state, a government of courts and parties as the political scientist Stephen Skowronek has called it in Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (1982). His persona and policies defined the antebellum party system. One can also trace the origins of the imperial presidency to Jackson, much earlier than the twentieth century as most historians have argued. His Whig critics called him King Andrew, and J. M. Opal in Avenging the People: Andrew Jackson, the Rule of Law, and the American Nation (2017) draws attention to his vengeful personality against perceived enemies of the nation–state. As president, Jackson had no use for abolitionists, approving of the exclusion of their literature from the mails. But Jacksonian Democracy also included labor abolitionists like William Leggett and antislavery free-labor advocates such as William Cullen Bryant. Jackson also famously held no truck with South Carolinian nullifiers and the extreme states’-rights constitutional views of their avatar, John C. Calhoun. Jackson’s forceful proclamation repudiating nullification or the alleged right of a state to nullify a federal law and secede from the Union, which he linked to disunion and the tyranny of minority rule, laid down a precedent for Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in the midst of the Civil War. [my emphasis]

This is not only a key element in the development and defense of democracy and the development of the American nation. It's also one of the key things that make Jackson himself interesting as a biographical figure. His personal outlook and his own immediate class and financial interest as a slaveowner put him on the side of slavery. But when forced to choose between the American nation and democracy, on the one hand, and the defense of slavery in the manner of John Calhoun and the later Confede4rates, he came down solidly on the side of the Constitution, democracy, and the Union.

As Sinha argues, the US at that time was a "white man’s democracy," and the Jacksonian movement pushed to expand white male suffrage, which was still significantly restricted by property requirements. By 2019 standards, it wouldn't even qualify as a democracy. Today's EU entrance requirements included universal suffrage (for citizens), including all races and women, too. The United States was very far from that in 1928, the year Jackson was first elected President. But as she states:

Careful historians of the age of Jackson have shown that the institution of white manhood suffrage preceded the election of Andrew Jackson, even though the process continued to unfold during his presidency, and that white man’s democracy in the United States was accompanied by the disfranchisement and severe curtailing of black men’s suffrage in many northern states. Jackson represented the rise to prominence of the “common man” or what I would call the common white man.

But it is also the case that in 1928, the US was a radical democracy by world standards of that time. And it was recognized as such as a model to be emulated or a menace to be avoided in Europe and Latin America.

What the Nuliification Crisis brought to public attention like nothing before was that there was a severe contradiction in American democracy between the slave system and democracy, or white men's democracy which in America then was the same thing. And this wasn't an abstraction, or merely hypocrisy in principle. (Though it certainly was the latter!) As time went on, it became more and more concrete that maintaining the slave system meant a continual restriction and retrogression of democracy for white men, North and South.

This is central to understanding the historical process by which slavery produced secession and civil war in America.

One of Abraham Lincoln's best-known quotes is from a 1955 letter to Joshua Speed, referring to the program of the xenophobic, Protestant extremist American Party, which has gone down in history by the name Lincoln and others applied to it at the time, the Know-Nothings, i.e., the Bannonites of the 1850s. And it addresses this very issue of how slavery and the Slave Power (large slaveowners) threatened democracy for everyone else:

I am not a Know-Nothing. 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]. [my emphasis]