Confederate “Heritage” Month 2024, April 30: Can we find a “usable past”?

Sorting through Lost Cause themes inevitably involves looking at the facts and various narratives about those in a past before the lifetime of anyone still living today.

Andrew Bacevich gives a good summary about how historical memory works in a body politic, a process he describes “manufactured memory”:

Whether related to family, race, ethnicity, religion, politics, or nation, the past is a human construct. lt is not fixed but malleable, not permanent but subject to perpetual reexamination and revision. The value of history correlates with purposefulness. Changing times render obsolete the past that we know and require the discovery of a "new" history better suited to the needs of the moment. (1) [my emphasis]

He's not talking here about just making up fake “facts” and claiming they are real. We do history by constructing understandable narratives that described what happened and how we understand it. That not only changes when increased factual information is discovered/released/uncovered. It also depends on the particular priority of the researchers. Facts always matter. So does understanding them a meaningful context.

It's worth recalling that the philosopher Hegel cautioned (with a heavy dose of irony) about the value of this whole learning-from-history concept:

History and experience teach us that peoples have not learned anything from history at all. Because every age lives in such an individual situation, out of which they make their decisions. This is the character of the time, which is always different. (2)

Hegel may well have been right about that. But it doesn’t stop us from trying.

And it matters how one goes about deriving “lessons” or interpretations from past events. People can do honest history that at the same time can serve as a “usable past.” But not all uses of history are honest.

Casey Nelson Blake credits the Progressives of the early 20th century in the US with the concept of a “usable past” "What is important for us?" asked cultural critic Van Wyck Brooks in his influential 1918 essay, "On Creating a Usable Past": "What, out of all the multifarious achievements and impulses and desires of the American literary mind, ought we to elect to remember?" (1993:225, emphasis in original). Brooks was concerned with his country's literary history, but his desire to approach the past "from the point of view not of the successful fact but of the creative impulse" was shared by many Progressive-era intellectuals who sought to mobilize American memory as a resource for a more democratic. To think of the American past as "usable," as opposed to a dry collection of facts or a completed tradition deserving mute reverence, was to take an essentially pragmatic approach to the study of history. "For the spiritual past has no objective reality," Brooks asserted; "it yields only what we are able to look for in it". The past would become "usable" when it allowed Americans to pry open spaces in the present for future innovation. (3) [my emphasis]

In the case of the Lost Cause narrative, from the very start its usability for those who wanted to minimize the significance of Confederate treason against the United States and the centrality of slavery and white racism in that context depended on falsifying the factual history and substituting dishonest ideological claims and maudlin sentimentality for a reality-based understanding of the events.

Notes:

(1) Bacevich, Andrew (2021): After the Apocalypse: America’s Role in a World Transformed, 9. New York: Metropolitan Books.

(2) Hegel, G.W.F. (1822/23): Philosophie der allgemeinen Weltgeschichte (Hotho transcript). In Gesammelte Werke 27:1 (2015), 11. Dusseldorf: Nordrhein-Westfälische Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Künste. My translation from the German.

(3) Blake, Casey Nelson (1999): Review: The Usable Past, the Comfortable Past, and the Civic Past: Memory in Contemporary America. Cultural Anthropology 14: 3, 423-435.

Confederate “Heritage” Month 2024, April 29: Adelbert Ames, Blanche Ames, LQC Lamar, and John Kennedy

The Atlantic Monthly had a special issue last year on Reconstruction. In one of the articles is by Jordan Virtue, about John Kennedy’s how view of Reconstruction was heavily influenced by Lost Cause dogma. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., later noted that it was the view that Kennedy learned in history classes at Harvard in the 1930s. (1) Schlesinger also noted that after his experiences as President with segregationist Governors like Alabama’s George Wallace and Mississippi’s Ross Barnett, Kennedy began to think more favorable about the advocates of Reconstruction.

Virtue focuses on JFK’s description of two 19th century Mississippi politicians in his book Profiles in Courage (1955). One of them was Adelbert Ames, the best Governor Mississippi ever had and an actual hero of democracy for defending equal rights as Reconstruction Governor there in 1874-76. He had also been a Union General. When he passed away in 1933 at age 97, he was the last surviving Civil War general.

The other Mississippian was Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar II, often referred to as LQC Lamar, who served as Mississippi Senator 1877-1885, and later as federal Secretary of the Interior and a Supreme Court Justice. Lamar was an enemy of Reconstruction and democracy, and he supported the anti-democracy “Redeemer” movement to deprive Black Americans of the rights they had won.

Lamar had worked on drafting Mississippi Secession Ordinance and served on the staff of Confederate Gen. James Longstreet, who was the cousin of Lamar’s wife. Had the anti-insurrection clause of the 14th Amendment (2) been properly enforced, he would never have been allowed to hold a federal office again. Because he was a Congressional Representative in the 1850s, which meant he had taken an oath to support the Constitution.

Virtue summarizes what was wrong with JFK’s approach this way:

Lamar and Ames were the preeminent politicians of Mississippi Reconstruction. They hated each other. (At one point, Lamar threatened to lynch Ames.) Profiles in Courage had relied heavily on the work of influential Dunning School historians — disciples of the Columbia University professor William A. Dunning, who scorned Black suffrage and promoted the mythology of the Lost Cause. Kennedy may have been genuinely misled by these historians, but he also aspired to higher office and needed to appeal to white southern voters. His book denounced Reconstruction, casting Ames as a corrupt, carpetbagging villain and Lamar as a heroic southern statesman. [my emphasis]

A good example of how views of history and contemporary political postures affect historical narratives.

Virtue tells the story of how Ames’ daughter Blanche repeatedly wrote Kennedy demanding that he revise his book, which he declined to do. “[W]hen when Kennedy refused to amend Profiles, Blanche did what any sensible Massachusetts woman would do: she sat down and wrote her own book.”

Virtue sketches out more of Adelbert Ames’ career, who she accurately describes as “a champion of racial rights [i.e., equal rights for African-Americans], embracing a personal ‘Mission with a large M’ to support Black citizens.

Ames’ daughter Blanche carried on her father’s and mother’s tradition of social justice advocacy:

Adelbert encouraged his daughters to attend college. Blanche went to Smith, where she became class president. At commencement, she delivered a forceful address promoting women’s suffrage, with President William McKinley in the audience. Blanche helped spearhead the Massachusetts women’s suffrage movement, working as a political cartoonist for Woman’s Journal. She founded the Massachusetts Birth Control League. Once, Blanche sauntered onto Boston’s Commonwealth Avenue carrying a hand-carved wooden penis to demonstrate proper condom use; she was arrested, but police released her after realizing she was the daughter of one governor and the granddaughter of another. “If she was a man,” one historian has observed, “there would be five books” about her already.

Virtue’s account also includes this observation:

Before the Civil War, Mississippi had contained some of the richest counties in the nation, but most Mississippians—some 55 percent—were enslaved. After the war, Mississippi was the poorest state in the Union.

JFK as a historian was bad on Reconstruction. And he accounts of Ames and Lamar really are embarrassingly bad. But as President, he acted on civil rights much more in the tradition of Adelbert Ames than that of the thoroughly odious LQC Lamar.

A new biography of Ames was just published, Adelbert Ames, the Civil War, and the Creation of Modern America (2024) by Michael Megelsh.

Richard Nelson Current devotes an excellent chapter to Adelbert Ames in the ironically titled Those Terrible Carpetbagger: A Reinterpretation (1988).

As Virtue reports, Blanche’s own biography of her father (Adelbert Ames: General, Senator, Governor) went to press on the day Kennedy was assassinated, November 22, 1963.

Notes:

(1) Virtue, Jordan (2023): Kennedy and the Lost Cause. Atlantic Monthly Dec. 2022, 90-94.

(2) Temme, Laura (2024): Disqualification from Public Office Under the 14th Amendment. FindLaw 01/08/2024. <https://constitution.findlaw.com/amendment14/annotation15.html> (Accessed: 2024-29-04).

Confederate “Heritage” Month 2024, April 28: Confederate icons were not popular nationally for decades after the Civil War

The Guardian reported in 2022 about history professor who had a decades-long career in the US Army, Ty Seidule.

Speaking specifically to US military facilities named for Confederate figures like Robert E. Lee, Seidule says:

“The first thing to know is that in the 19th century, most army officers saw the Confederates as traitors.

“That’s not a presentist argument. That’s what they thought. And particularly about Lee, who renounced his oath, fought against this country, killed US army soldiers and as [Union general and 18th president Ulysses S] Grant said, did so for the worst possible reason: to create a slave republic.

“So in the 19th century, they would not have done this … the first memorialisation of a Confederate at West Point is in the 1930s. So, why is that? [It’s about] segregation in America. The last West Point black graduate was 1889. The next one was in 1936. West Point reflects America. [The first memorials] were a reaction to integration.” [my emphasis] (1)

The civilian monuments to traitors who held leadership positions in the Confederacy began decades earlier. But what Seidule says applies to the civilian and military versions, when he rejects the notion that they could be seen a symbols for reconciliation among Americans:

“The problem with that is it was reconciliation among white people, at the expense of Black people.

“There had already been reconciliation. Magnanimously, the United States of America pardoned all former Confederates in 1868 … reconciliation is sort of an agreement among whites that Black people will be treated in a Jim Crow fashion. So no, it’s not a reconciliation based, I would say, on an America we want today.” [my emphasis]

More specifically it was Andrew Johnson, the first President to ever be impeached, who Abraham Lincoln chose for his running mate in 1864 as a “Union Democrat” but who was not at all friendly to serious Reconstruction in the South nor to holding high Confederate officials legally responsible for their crimes, who issued the pardons.

John Wilkes Booth had a serious effect of US history by his assassination of Lincoln.

Seidule is the author of Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner’s Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause (2021).

He discusses his general view in this video, on which I did a double-take because it’s from the conservative PragerU. Because most conservative Republicans today would not be thrilled with his puncturing of the Lost Cause narrative. (2)



Notes:

(1) Pengelly, Martin (2022): ‘Confederates were traitors’: Ty Seidule on West Point, race and American history. The Guardian 09/05/2022. <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/sep/05/confederates-traitors-seidule-west-point-race-history-ku-klux-klan-plaque-naming-commission> (Accessed: 2024-28-04).

(2) Was the Civil War About Slavery? PragerU YouTube channel. 08/10/2015. <https://youtu.be/pcy7qV-BGF4?si=R2qGkv3U8Y1ZGw0p> (Accessed: 2024-28-04).

Confederate “Heritage” Month 2024, April 27: The “First Arkansas” Marching Song

Mississippi by state law recognizes April 27 as Confederate Memorial Day.

To mark the occasion, here’s a great Civil War song. It was the song of a regiment called the First Arkansas. But despite being named for Mississippi’s neighbor states, this was an all-black Union regiment.

This is a performance of their marching song by Tennessee Ernie Ford, a white country singer, from an album of Civil War songs. (1)

It's sung to the tune of “John Brown’s Body” and has some memorable lyrics:

We’re the bully soldiers of the first of Arkansas

We are fighting for the Union we are fighting for the law

We can hit a Rebel further than a white man ever saw

As we go marching on

We have done with hoeing cotton, we have done with hoeing corn

We are Colored Yankee soldiers just as sure as you are born

When the master hears us yelling they will think it’s Gabriel’s horn.

As we go marching on

This gives an indication of why some Southern segregationists were worried that Tennessee Ernie was less than fully devoted to the “Suthun Way of Life.”

The First Arkansas was one of 175 regiments that made up the United States Colored Troops (USCT). As the US Army website tells us:

During the Civil War, the Union established and maintained regiments of black soldiers. This became possible in 1862 through passage of the Confiscation Act (freeing the slaves of rebellious slaveholders) and Militia Act (authorizing the president to use former slaves as soldiers). President Lincoln was initially reluctant to recruit black soldiers. This changed in January 1863, with the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring freedom for all slaves in Confederate states. …

The first black regiments to serve in the Civil War were volunteer units made up of free black men. These included the 1st North Carolina Colored Volunteers, 5th Massachusetts (Cavalry), 54th Massachusetts (Infantry), 55th Massachusetts (Infantry), 29th Connecticut (Infantry), 30th Connecticut (Infantry), and 31st Infantry Regiment. In May 1863, the War Department established the Bureau of Colored Troops for the purpose of recruiting African-American soldiers. These became the United States Colored Troops (USCT) and existing volunteer units were converted into USCT regiments.

New regiments were also formed from every Union state. While mostly made up of African-American soldiers, other minorities served in these regiments as well, including Native Americans and Asians, while white Union officers served as commanders. USCT regiments participated in all aspects of the Union war effort as infantry, cavalry, artillery, and engineers, though they were often used as rear action garrison troop[s]. ...

By the end of the Civil War, there were 175 USCT regiments, containing 178,000 soldiers, approximately 10% of the Union Army. The mortality rate for these units was exceeding high. One of every five black soldiers in the conflict died, a 35% higher rate than other troops. In the process, sixteen USCT soldiers earned the Medal of Honor for their Civil War service. (2)

Notes:

(1) Marching Song (Of The First Arkansas Negro Regiment). Tennessee Earnie Ford TV YouTube channel. <https://youtu.be/jKss9jF2Yxw?si=Gun7R0kVghPyhEDl> (Accessed: 2024-27-04).

(2) Ferguson, Paul-Thomas (2021): A History of African American Regiments in the U.S. Army. U.S. Army 02/11/2021. <https://www.army.mil/article/243284/a_history_of_african_american_regiments_in_the_u_s_army> (Accessed: 2024-27-04).

Confederate “Heritage” Month 2024, April 26: An Irish look from 1862 at the causes of the American Civil War

Today I’m taking a look at another book on the “Slave Power,” this one from 1862, still early in the Civil War. It was written by classical political economist John Eliot Cairnes (1823-1875), the namesake of today’s J.E. Cairnes School of Economics at the University of Galway, Ireland, where he also taught.

As Cairnes wrote, the Confederacy had initially made some attempt to official minimize the role slavery played in secession. But that was always bogus, as he explains:

I have been at some pains to show that the question at issue between North and South is not one of tariffs—a thesis prescribed to me by the state of the discussion six months ago, when the affirmative of this view was pertinaciously put forward by writers in the interest of the South, but which, at the present time, when this explanation of the war appears to have been tacitly abandoned, cannot but appear a rather gratuitous task. (1)

Cairnes' description of the incredulity of the English public when the learned about secession had its echoes in the wake of Trump’s attempted coup of January 6, 2021:

The first announcement by South Carolina of its intention to secede from the Union was received in this country [England] with simple incredulity. There were no reasons, it was said, for secession. What the constitution and laws of the United States had been on the eve of Mr. Lincoln's election, that they were on its morrow. It was absurd to suppose that one half of a nation should separate from the other because a first magistrate [the President] had been elected in the ordinary constitutional course.

The January 6 zealots of 2021 in the US were and are also absurd. But that’s a much later story.

Cairnes explains that, initially, Englanders were inclined to think that there must be some commercial differences or some kind of fiscal policy causing it. He describes what he took to be the prevailing initial English view, which actually bears a strong resemblance to the later Lost Cause type of argument:

The North fancied she had an interest in protection; the South had an obvious interest in free trade. On this and other questions of less moment North and South came into collision, and the antagonism thus engendered had been strengthened and exacerbated by a selfish struggle for place and power-a struggle which the constitution and political usages of the Americans rendered more rancorous and violent than elsewhere. But in the interests of the two sections, considered calmly and apart from selfish ends, there was nothing, it was said, which did not admit of easy adjustment, nothing which negotiation was not far more competent to deal with than the sword.

It was polite of the English public, I guess, that they were willing to take such forgiving view of the obsessive greed for power of American slaveowners. Naïve, surely, but polite.

He proceeds to describe how Englanders viewed the idea of slavery skeptically as a cause of secession:

As for slavery, it was little more than a pretext on both sides, employed by the leaders of the South to arouse the fears and hopes of the slaveholders, and by the North in the hope of attracting the sympathies of Europe and hallowing a cause which was essentially destitute of noble aims. The civil war was thus described as having sprung from narrow and selfish views of sectional interests (in which, however, the claims of the South were coincident with justice and sound policy), and sustained by passions which itself had kindled ; and the combatants were advised to compose their differences, and either return to their political partnership, or agree to separate and learn to live in harmony as independent allies.

Yeah, they really were naïve.

But British views of the Confederacy were never unanimous or fixed in stone. The British workers movement of the time was able to create substantial political pressure on the government to not formally recognize the Confederacy, for instance.

And, not unlike many banks and businesses in the American North, many British companies were making considerable amounts of money on the cotton business fed by the South’s slave economy. So the British business elite was far more receptive to normalizing its relations with the slave South, even though that would have meant helping the slaveowners to win the Civil War. (2)

Cairnes didn’t mince words. He was writing before Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was issued. But he didn’t have trouble seeing what led to civil war. And this is a very good brief summary:

But what has been the career of the Slave Power since [the Missouri Compromise of 1820]? lt is to be traced through every questionable transaction in foreign and domestic politics in which the United States has since taken part - through the Seminole war, through the annexation of Texas, through the Mexican war, through filibustering expeditions under Walker, through attempts upon Cuba, through the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 through Mr. Clay's compromises, through the repudiation of the Missouri Compromise so soon as the full results of that bargain had been reaped, through the passing of the Nebraska Bill and the legislative establishment of the principle of " Squatter Sovereignty," through the invasion of Kansas, through the repudiation of "Squatter Sovereignty" [the doctrine advocated by Northern appeasers of slavery like Stephen Douglas in the 1850s] when that principle had been found unequal to its purposes, and lastly, through the Dred-Scott decision and the demand for protection of slavery in the Territories - pretensions which, if admitted, would have converted the whole Union, the Free States no less than the Territories, into one great domain for slavery. This has been the point at which the Slave Power, after a series of successful aggressions, carried on during forty years, has at length arrived. lt was on this last demand that the Democrats of the North broke off from their Southern allies-a defection which gave their victory to the Republicans, and directly produced the civil war. And now we are asked to believe that slavery has no vital connexion with this quarrel, but that the catastrophe is due to quite other causes-to incompatibility of commercial interests, to uncongeniality of social tastes, to a desire for independence, to anything but slavery.

But we are told that in this long career of aggression the extension of slavery has only been employed by the South as a means to an end, and that it is in this end we are to look for the key to the present movement. " Slavery,'' it seems, "is but a surface question in American politics." The seeming aggressions were in reality defensive movements forced upon the South by the growing preponderance of the Free States; and its real object, as well in its former career of annexation and conquest, as in its present efforts to achieve independence, has been constantly the same-to avoid being made the victim of Yankee rapacity, to secure for itself the development of its own resources unhindered by protective laws. [my emphasis]

Notes:

(1) Cairnes, J[ohn] C[airnes] (1862): The Slave Power: Its Character, Career, & Probable Designs. London: Parker, Son, & Bourn. In: Reprint Edition (2010). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

(2) See: British Support During the U.S. Civil War (n/d). Lowcountry Digital History Initiative (LDHI). <https://ldhi.library.cofc.edu/exhibits/show/liverpools-abercromby-square/britain-and-us-civil-war> Accessed: 2024-25-04).

Confederate “Heritage” Month 2024, April 25: Charles Sumner takes the lead in the Senate against the Fugitive Slave Act

In Congress in late 1851, the recently enacted Fugitive Slave Act became a point of hot contention.

In a history published in 1876, Henry Wilson gave an account of the intensity of the controversy in Congress that began after Congress convened in December, 1851, over the Fugitive Slave Act:

The debate at once elicited and exhibited the party tactics that controlled the nation, showing not only the disposition of the slave-masters to dictate terms to the rival parties, but the anxiety of leaders to conciliate and control the political strength of the slave-masters. ...

On the 26th of May, [first-term Massachusetts Senator Charles] Sumner presented a petition from the Society of Friends in New England, asking that the Fugitive Slave Act should be repealed; but there were only ten votes for its consideration. On the 27th of July, he submitted a resolution requesting the Committee on the Judiciary to consider the expediency of reporting a bill for the immediate repeal of that Act. (1)

At the demand of pro-slavery Democrats, the Senate on that occasion refused to allow him to speak on the Senate floor in defense of that petition. But he later used a parliamentary maneuver to defend his position on the floor:

In the Senate, on the 26th of August, he moved to amend the civil and diplomatic bill, so as to provide that no allowance should be made for expenses incurred in the execution of the Fugitive Slave Act, and that such act be repealed. In his speech on their introduction he alluded to the immeasurable importance of the slavery issue, dwarfing all others, and constantly casting its shadow across those halls. Referring to the impotent and inconsistent attempts of the [pro-slavery] propagandists to enforce silence, while always provoking discussion, he denounced the attempt to repress the liberty of speech, protested against the wrong, and claimed the right to be heard on slavery, as on every other subject. "The convictions of the heart," he said, " cannot be repressed. The utterances of conscience must be heard. They break forth with irrepressible might. As well attempt to check the tides of the ocean, the currents of the Mississippi, or the rushing waters of Niagara. The discussion of slavery will proceed wherever two or three are gathered together, — by the fireside, on the public highway, at the public meeting, in the church. The movement against slavery is from the Everlasting Arm. Even now it is gathering its forces, soon to be confessed everywhere. It may not yet be felt in the high places of office and power, but all who can put their ears humbly to the ground will hear and comprehend its incessant and advancing tread."

He arraigned the enactment in the name of the Constitution it violated, of the country it dishonored, of the humanity it degraded, of the Christianity it offended, and affirmed that every attribute of God united against it. Referring to the requirements of the Act that every citizen, when summoned, should aid and assist in its prompt and efficient execution, he boldly affirmed that "by the supreme law which commands me to do no injustice, by the comprehensive Christian law of brotherhood, by the Constitution which I am sworn to support, I am bound to disobey this Act." He closed his speech with an earnest demand for the repeal of an act so incompatible with every dictate of truth and every requirement of justice. In the words of Oriental adjuration, he said: " Beware of the wounds of the wounded souls. Oppress not to the utmost a single heart, for a solitary sigh has power to overset a whole world." This speech — learned, logical, exhaustive, and eloquent, worthy of the cause it advocated — placed the new Senator at once among the foremost of the forensic debaters of America. [my emphasis]

Sumner’s biographer David Donald argues that Sumner actually understood his position on slavery as being in the tradition of conservative reform represented by John Quincy Adams, who also opposed slavery. But he also notes that Sumner took inspiration as well from English democratic history:

He liked to fancy himself the [political] descendant of the Separatists of the English revolution, who uncompromisingly contended ‘for religious, intellectual, and political emancipation.” As their heir, he boldly announced that slavery was wrong. (2)

Sumner found in the Separatists his own “usable history.” And since the Puritans who founded the Colony of Massachusetts (and who were rescued from starving to death by the native inhabitants) were Separatists, invoking them as a precedent presumably had some political marketing value in his home state.

Charles Sumner became one of the most important anti-slavery leaders before the war and on the most committed advocates of democratic Reconstruction in the South after the Confederacy’s defeat.

Notes:

(1) Wilson, Henry (1876): History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, Vol. 2, 353- Boston: J. R. Osgood. <http://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015028747783>

(2) Donald, David (1960); Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War, 226. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Confederate “Heritage” Month 2024, April 24: Frederick Douglass and the Compromise of 1850

The controversial core of the famous Compromise of 1850 was the strengthened Fugitive Slave Law, which infuriated many free-state citizens who were being required to be complicit in returning escaped slaves to their owners and masters in the slave states.

The escaped slave and major abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass was not at all happy about it either. He had contempt for the Great Compromiser and Kentucky Senator Henry Clay who had played a major role in negotiating the package of agreements:

[W]hatever the contemporary [1950] admiration for Clay's parliamentary abilities and personal incorruptibility, Douglass could have no good word for a man who owned fifty slaves. Singling out Clay's first proposal, that of admitting California as a free state, Douglass unloosed his choicest irony. "This liberal and generous concession to be fully appreciated," he wrote, "must be viewed in the light of the fact that California has already, with singular unanimity, adopted a constitution which excludes forever the foul system of bondage from her borders. . . . Mr. Clay's proffered liberality is about as noble as that of a highwayman, who, when in the power of a traveller, and on his way to prison, proposes a consultation, and offers to settle the unhappy difficulty which has occurred between himself and the latter, by accepting half the contents of his purse, assuring him, at the same time, that if his pistol had not missed fire, he might have possessed himself of the whole." (1)

Benjamin Quarles also provides Douglass’ analysis of the goals of the Slave Power (slave states) at that juncture:

To Douglass and his fellow abolitionists there existed in 1850 a slave power conspiracy. Douglass believed that this plot of the "slavocracy" embraced "five cardinal objects. '' He listed them. ''They are these: first, the complete suppression of all anti-slavery discussion; second, the extirpation of the entire free people of color from the United States; third, the unending perpetuation of slavery in this Republic; fourth, the nationalization of slavery to the extent of making slavery respected in every State of the Union; fifth, the extension of slavery over Mexico and the entire South American States.”

The only one of that list that may have been a bit overblown is the last one. Maybe.

This conspiracy was not a “conspiracy theory” in today’s meaning. It was pretty obvious from what the slave states were actually doing in Congress.

Quarles notes that the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law provoked a number of escaped former slaves living in the North to flee to “cold Canaan” (Canada). And he notes that “[t]he unpopularity of the Fugitive Slave Law thus dated from the hour of its passage.” And for good reason!

The abolitionists focused on showing the citizens of the free states the danger the Fugitive Slave Law was to their own freedom:

Douglass and the abolitionists … began to stir the collective conscience of the nation by stressing the fact that more than the slave was at stake; freedom itself was at stake. Highlighted by the Fugitive Slave Law, the abolitionist crusade perceptibly broadened from a sympathetic effort on behalf of the slave to a deep concern for the preservation of civil liberties in America.

It's worth noting that many abolitionists were ready to use force to resist the efforts of fugitive-slave hunters to send their fellow citizens back to slavery. A month after the passage of the new law, Douglass addressed an antislavery meeting in Boston:

Charles Francis Adams [son of President John Quincy Adams and grandson of President John Adams], after stating the object of the meeting, called first upon Douglass, asking him especially "to state the condition of the colored people under this new act for their oppression." Arising amid an ovation, Douglass did not mince words. The colored people of Boston, said he, had resolved to suffer death rather than return to bondage. "We must be prepared should this law be put into operation to see the streets of Boston running with blood.”

That didn’t occur in Boston. But the conflict that came to be called Bleeding Kansas – which was not simply a metaphor - broke out in 1854 and was a “small civil war in the United States, fought between proslavery and antislavery advocates for control of the new territory of Kansas under the doctrine of popular sovereignty.” (2)

Notes:

(1) Quarles, Benjamin (1950): Douglass and the Compromise of 1850. Negro History Bulletin 14:1. 24, 19-21. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/44212401>

(2) Editors (2024): Bleeding Kansas. Britannica Online 03/14/2024. <https://www.britannica.com/event/Bleeding-Kansas-United-States-history> (Accessed: 2024-24-04).

Confederate “Heritage” Month 2024, April 23: More on how the Compromise of 1850 was terrible

The major provisions of the Compromise of 1850 included a resolution of issues involving the territories seized from Mexico in the war of 1846-48 (la Guerra de los Estados Unidos contra México). Three of the five major provisions of the compromise involved admitting California to the Union as a free state, setting the boundaries of Texas to exclude what became New Mexico, and organizing/establishing the territories of Utah and New Mexico with the question of slavery to be left to “popular sovereignty” in the territories.

This is a map showing the boundaries of Mexico as of 1824 (1):

A fourth element was abolishing the slave trade in the District of Columbia but allowing slavery itself to remain legal there. This was a cosmetic concession to remove the embarrassing presence of the buying and selling of human beings as property in the national Capital.

The fifth element was the explosive establishment of a new and much tougher Fugitive Slave Law. Its provisions were drastic enough that even former slaves who had been established as free persons in free states for decades became subject to new legal proceedings to return them to bondage.

As unstable and unjust as the Compromise of 1850 was, it can be and has been argued in retrospect that it bought time for the Northern states to strengthen their economy and infrastructure enough to defeat the South in the war set off by the latter in 1861 in defense of slavery.

Frank Heywood Hodder in an article published posthumously in 1936 offered that defense of the compromise:

The defense for the Compromise lies in the f act that, had not some settlement of the outstanding questions been reached in 1850, the secession movement would certainly have been started in the South and could not have been stopped. The building of the railroa.ds in the succeeding decade changed the situation completely. Ten railroads linked the Ohio with the Great Lakes in 1860 where there had been but one in 1850. Five roads joined the Mississippi and Ohio valleys in 1860 where there was none in 1850. The result was the new alignment of the East and the West that saved the Union in the Civil War. (2)

That counterfactual judgment is speculative, of course. But it’s hard to imagine that the advantages the North had in population and industrial development would not have been at least as superior to that of the South in the early 1850s as they would become a decade later. And the North would have had American patriotism and the moral cause of fighting against slavery and the Slave Power then just as they did later.

To tease out that what-if scenario, we would also need to speculate about whether the same Southern coalition of states could have been persuaded to join a Confederacy in 1850. The polarizing experiences of the 1850s like the guerilla war in Kansas and the Dred Scott decision certainly played a polarizing role in hardening Southern resistance to freeing the slaves. The recent shared experience if the Mexican War could have made senior officers more reluctant to enter into a treasonous uprising in 1850.

We would also have to speculate whether President Millard Fillmore (he held the office 1850-1853) would have been more effective and careful in reacting to Southern attempts to secede as Abraham Lincoln was in 1860-61. That’s also speculation. But the answer there is almost certainly: No, he would not have.

But understanding potential and feasible alternative decisions and speculating on their impacts is also part of understanding the situation in which the actual decisions were made.

Notes:

(1) File:Mexico 1824. Wikimedia Commons 06/29/2015. <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mexico_1824_(equirectangular_projection).png#filehistory> (Accessed: 2024-23-04).

(2) Hodder, Frank Haywood (1936): The Authorship of the Compromise of 1850. The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 22:4, 525-536. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/1897319>

Confederate “Heritage” Month 2024, April 22: The Compromise of 1850

I want to give some attention to the Compromise of 1850 in this year’s “heritage” posts.

That compromise provided a stopgap solution to the problems raised by the theft of one-third of Mexico’s land, including Texas and California, in the Mexican-American War of 1846-48. In those days, seizure of the territories of neighboring countries was standard operating practice for the US. Lots of slaveowners were hot for the annexation of Cuba back then, too.

The evil spirit of American history, John C. Calhoun, was still in the Senate then. He wanted all of the newly-seized territory to be open for slavery. Kentucky Sen. Henry Clay came up with a package of compromises, which Sen. Stephen Douglas of Illinois (of the Lincoln-Douglas debates fame) steered through Congress. Michael Woods summarizes its provisions this way:

The compromise admitted the free state of California; organized the territories of New Mexico and Utah under the slippery principle of popular sovereignty; reduced Texas’s size but promised to pay its massive debt; restricted the sale, though not the ownership, of enslaved people in Washington, D.C.; and established a draconian Fugitive Slave Act, which made recovery of alleged runaways a federal priority. (1) [my emphasis]

This situation was a major advance for the Slave Power in the South. More slave states had been added to the list. The slave state/free state balance in the Senate was still intact. But the writing was on the wall. The slave states intended to increase their power until they became dominant in the national government.

The Fugitive Slave Act was seen by many in the free states as making them even more complicit in what they viewed as the evil institution of slavery. It also trampled on the “states rights” of the free states. In fact, this was part of a series of efforts by the slave states to override the rights of free states. It was only after Lincoln was democratically elected to the Presidency in 1860 that the slave states suddenly became obsessed again with state sovereignty over federal. The Nullification Controversy of 1832 had been a trial run by the South for this approach.

The phrase “popular sovereignty” was a euphemism for allowing territories to decide themselves by popular vote (among white men, of course) whether they should enter the Union as a slave or free states, and Congress should defer to that choice. The practical outcome of this was displayed in the mini-civil-war in Kansas Territory later that decade, when pro- and anti-slavery forces attempted to achieve a majority in the territory to decide on the slavery issue.

Woods identifies three basic strands of thought on the Compromise of 1850: the triumph of statesmanship and moderation (at the expense of the slaves, of course); viewing the agreement as “a cowardly act of appeasement” (which it was): and, a “skeptical interpretation” that emphasizes “ironic outcomes and the limits of federal influence.”

The praise of the statesmanship of the compromise involves some colorful figures as major actors. But Woods politely but accurately describes Calhoun’s villainy even in the 1850 compromise this way:

Given his efforts to forge a southern political bloc and the secessionist threat embedded in his March 4 address, he fits less easily into the role of patriotic patrician. In the final volume of a massive biography, Charles W. Wiltse insisted that Calhoun remained committed to the Union. More recent interpreters view the glass as half empty: increasingly convinced that northerners would not concede to proslavery demands, Calhoun went to his grave striving to maintain the Union on southern terms while reserving secession as a last resort. From this perspective, Calhoun’s final appeal was less a plea for national unity than a sectional ultimatum. [my emphasis]

Calhoun was a defender of slavery. The only “patriotism” involved was that he would have preferred to make the entirety of the United States a safe haven for human slavery.

As Woods notes, “some historians condemn the Compromise of 1850 as a shameful capitulation to slaveholders.” It certainly was, and it only served to encourage the Slave Power to expand its pressure against democracy.

What Woods refers to as interpretations that emphasize “ironic outcomes and the limits of federal influence” mainly have to do with some of the larger implications it had for the American West. For instance, “the [popular sovereignty] doctrine raised a host of other questions in Utah, where Mormon leaders strove to maintain local control over issues ranging from Indian policy to polygamy.”

Notes:

(1) Woods, Michael E. (2019): The Compromise of 1850 and the Search for a Usable Past. Journal of the Civil War Era 9:3, 438-456. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/26755582>

Confederate “Heritage” Month 2024, April 21: Former Mississippi Democratic Gov. Ray Mabus on why celebrating Confederate “heritage” is disgusting

Ray Mabus, one of the few really good Governors Mississippi has had over the last century, explains why Republican Gov. Tate Reeves (Mississippi Dems also know him as “Tater Tot”) proclaiming an official Confederate Heritage Month again this year is a bad idea. (1)

Former Mississippi Gov. Ray Mabus on Saturday condemned Gov. Tate Reeves' decision to declare April as "Confederate Heritage Month" —- calling it "incredibly hurtful" and "dead solid wrong."

It celebrates "something that was truly awful: people trying to own other people," he added.

"First, I didn't do it when I was governor," Mabus told CNN in a video clip posted on Instagram by anchor Victor Blackwell. "And second, Confederate heritage? Really? The heritage that I think of with the Confederacy is slavery, is treason, and is losing. Which of those heritages are we really honoring here?"

Mabus, a Democrat who was Navy secretary under then-President Barack Obama, said the move was "part of the 'lost cause' narrative ... that came about a few years after the Civil War in an attempt to reassert white supremacy." (2)

Well said! It’s a real shame that something so obvious still needs to be said in 2024.

A more expansive quotation of what Mabus said about “Confederate heritage? Really?” here:

But it’s all part of that lost cause narrative, the ‘Moonlight and Magnolias’ that came about few years after the Civil War in an attempt to reassert white supremacy. It came hand-in-hand with Jim Crow. And, it worked for a long, long time. Statues were put up, this heritage notion. But what it does is incredibly hurtful, it is incredibly harmful, and it honors something that we should learn about, know about, but definitely, definitely not honor. (3) [my emphasis]

Mississippians are understandably concerned about the state so often winding up last among the 50 states in various measures of quality of life and economic prosperity. At the moment, the state also has the dubious distinction of being the “last” state in the past three years that official celebrates Confederate “Heritage” Month:

Mississippi is the only state that has dedicated a month to honoring the Confederacy in the last three years, although six other Southern states have done so historically. Mississippi will also recognize Confederate Memorial Day on April 27, as state law requires. But those seeking to protest against these policies will have a tough time: The Supreme Court just effectively abolished protests in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. (4) [my emphasis]

Notes:

(1) Blackwell, Victor (2024): X (formally Twitter) 04/20/2024. https://x.com/VictorBlackwell/status/1781711591106297859 (Accessed: 04/21/2024).

(2) Golding, Bruce (2024): Former Mississippi Governor Blasts Proclamation of 'Confederate Heritage Month'. HNGN [Headlines and Global News] 04/20/2024. <https://www.hngn.com/articles/259838/20240420/mississippi-proclamation-confederate-heritage-month-governor-tate-reeves-ray-mabus-republican-democrat.htm> (Accessed: 04/21/2024).

(3) Bahney, Jennifer Bowers (2024): ‘Confederate Heritage? Really?’ Former Mississippi Gov Slams State’s Plan to ‘Celebrate’ Confederacy. Mediaite 04/20/2024. https://www.mediaite.com/politics/confederate-heritage-really-former-mississippi-gov-slams-states-plan-to-celebrate-confederate-heritage-month/> (Accessed: 04/21/2024).

(4) Rashid, Hafiz (2024): The Shocking April Holiday That Mississippi Is Still Celebrating. The New Republic 04/16/2024. https://newrepublic.com/post/180736/mississippi-confederate-heritage-month-still-thing> (Accessed: 04/21/2024).

Confederate “Heritage” Month 2024, April 20: Yes, the Civil War was about slavery

A key feature of the Lost Cause narrative basically started the day the war ended, which is that the war wasn’t about slavery, but about States Rights and "Suthern Honuh" and so on. If many Americans in Union states had been indifferent to the fate of slaves before the war, by 1865, most of them had come to hate the institution of slavery. That was partly became it had led the Confederates to start a massive civil war. And also because Union troops in the South got to see slavery and slaves up close and now understood what a vicious institution it was.
Paul Finkelman describes the view of the South Carolina secession convention, the first to declare secession in December, 1860:

On December 20, 1860, the delegates to the South Carolina secession convention voted to leave the Union. In the declaration explaining the causes of their momentous decision, they charged that "an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution." "Thus," they concluded, "the constituted compact has been deliberately broken and disregarded by the non-slaveholding states, and the consequence follows that South Carolina is released from her obligation." As almost all historians have increasingly recognized, the institution of slavery was the primary cause of secession and, consequently, of the Civil War. At the same time, as the South Carolina declaration suggests, the debate over slavery and secession was framed in constitutional terms. (2)

Caroline Janney gives the following six items as basic tenets of the Lost Cause narrative:

1. Secession, not slavery, caused the Civil War.
2. African Americans were "faithful slaves," loyal to their masters and the Confederate cause and unprepared for the responsibilities of freedom.
3. The Confederacy was defeated militarily only because of the Union's overwhelming advantages in men and resources.
4. Confederate soldiers were heroic and saintly.
5. The most heroic and saintly of all Confederates, perhaps of all Americans, was Robert E. Lee.
6. Southern women were loyal to the Confederate cause and sanctified by the sacrifice of their loved ones.

Paul Finkelman summarized the view of the South Carolina secession convention, the first to declare secession in December, 1860:

On December 20, 1860, the delegates to the South Carolina secession convention voted to leave the Union. In the declaration explaining the causes of their momentous decision, they charged that "an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution." "Thus," they concluded, "the constituted compact has been deliberately broken and disregarded by the non-slaveholding states, and the consequence follows that South Carolina is released from her obligation." As almost all historians have increasingly recognized, the institution of slavery was the primary cause of secession and, consequently, of the Civil War. At the same time, as the South Carolina declaration suggests, the debate over slavery and secession was framed in constitutional terms. (2)

He also recalls that the institution of slavery was increasingly suppressing the freedom of free white citizens even in non-slave states:

Most Americans believe that secession was about "states' rights," but the South Carolina delegates' complaints about the "increasing hostility" to slavery suggests quite the opposite. In the four decades before the outbreak of Civil War, Southern leaders had called for Northern states to support and enforce the federal fugitive slave law, change their own state laws to allow Southerners to travel with slaves in the North, and suppress abolitionist speech. In the constitutional debate over slavery, that is, Southerners wanted states' rights for their states, but not for the Northern states.

The politicians in the slave states wanted “states rights” for their states to preserve slavery. But they were willing to ignore any “states rights” claimed by the free states that might inconvenience the slaveowners’ control of their human property. For instance, in the decades before 1860, “most Northern states had passed personal liberty laws, which were designed to prevent the kidnapping or removal of free blacks who were wrongly seized as fugitive slaves.” The slaveowners had no respect for that kind of exercise of states rights.

That consideration is also important in understanding how bogus the Lost Cause claim is that the Confederate states just wanted to secede peacefully and would leave the remaining states of the Union alone. With the Confederate states separated from the Union and no longer subject to fugitive slave laws, the remaining Union states would have become even more attractive as destinations for fugitive slaves.

So the slave states would have had to use various means to coerce the remaining United States to return escaped human property to the foreign country of the Confederate States of America. And the latter would have had ways of exerting such pressure aside from directly military ones. With the Confederacy controlling the entry of the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico, that would have given it enormous economic clout over the most important commercial river on which Midwestern states in particular were directly dependent.

Finkelman also notes that slave states were not exactly fastidious in their respect for the “states rights” of free states:

Ironically, these same Southern states denied any rights to free blacks who lived in the North. When Northern ships docked in Charleston or New Orleans, any free black sailors on them were arrested and held in the local jail. They were allowed to leave only if the ship captain paid the jailer for their upkeep.

Notes:

(1) Caroline Janney, Caroline (2020): The Lost Cause. Encyclopedia Virginia. <https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/lost-cause-the/> (Accessed: 2024-20-04).

(2) Finkelman, Paul (2011): Slavery, the Constitution, and the Origins of the Civil War. OAH Magazine of History 25: 2, 14-18. [Civil War at 150: Origins issue] <https://www.jstor.org/stable/23210240>

Confederate “Heritage” Month 2024, April 19: Jacksonian democracy and the slavery issue

Joshua Lynn took a shot a few years ago of describing the pre-Civil War evolution of “Jacksonian democracy” and the changing view of "Jacksonian democracy" during the last couple of decades.

Early decades of the Democratic Party

Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson were traditionally considered the founders of the Democratic Party, and rightly so. Jefferson actually did found the party, which was (ironically in retrospect) originally called the Republican Party. Their Federalist opponents in the 1790s called the "democratic" Party as a polemic by which they meant to associate them with the upheavals of the French Revolution. Jefferson's party was adroit enough to recognized that the "democratic" label was a helpful one, so they formally changed the party's name to the Democratic-Republican Party.

They continued to mainly use "Republican Party" as their main label. After the War of 1812, the Federalist Party became so discredited by its perceived sympathies for Britain, its title toward the wealthiest, and their authoritarian tendencies that it essentially became irrelevant. "By 1817 the party was practically dead." (1) After 1924, the party developed a “National Republican” faction, led by John Quincy Adams, and the Jackson Democrats who also called themselves simply Democrats. And that latter label stuck until today.

The disputed Jacksonian legacy

The Democratic Party was always dominated by slaveholders. But until 1820 or so, there was a widespread belief that slavery could and would be gradually abolished, which is what had happened in Northern states. But the “Peculiar Institution” became more and more controversial and divisive among American voters.

And American voters at that time were white men with some minimal amount of property. A key element of the Jacksonian movement was to expand (white male) suffrage, and it did. The big economic battle that defined the Jackson Administration was the successful push to abolish the Bank of the United States, which Jacksonians described in class terms as representing the “Money Power.” The Jacksonian reform movement has been rightly described as “proto-populist” because it used a political framework of the People against the elite, i.e., the Money Power. (Lynn at one point calls the original Jacksonian alignment “a national populist coalition of white men.”)

But the reformist movement migrated to other parties and new factions, so that by 1860, the Republican Party was anti-slavery and otherwise supportive of economic policies to benefit workers and farmers. As Lincoln said in his first annual address as President, “Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.” (2)

Lincoln himself said that his two models for his Presidency were Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. But the Democratic Party also looked for ways to use those party icons to serve as symbols for their side as well. Times change, and different people draw different lessons from the past, especially when it comes to familiar symbols.

A ”usable past” for the modern Democratic Party

Part of what Lynn does in his article is to try to disentangle the strains for “Jacksonian” legacy. Referring to historians like Sean Wilentz, Lynn writes:

These scholars would rather the Jacksonian inheritance belong to Abraham Lincoln’s Republicans than to Stephen A. Douglas’s Democrats.

The Democrats like Douglas who stayed in the Democracy were nonetheless Jacksonians, and their thought and politics also comprise Jacksonian Democracy. 1850s Democrats directed their Jacksonian hatred of aristocracy and monopoly not against the Slave Power, but against the Antislavery Power. Instead of protesting against scheming slaveholders, they raged against a dangerous cabal of abolitionists, antislavery Republicans, and other “fanatical” reformers. Democrats believed these fanatics craved state power to undemocratically foist their reforms on white men. For these Jacksonians, race and gender were crucial, as the Antislavery Power did not violate equal rights in the abstract, but the rights of white men specifically in its effort to elevate women and Americans of color. This strain of the Jacksonian persuasion cannot be divorced from racially based notions of democracy in the late antebellum era. Majoritarian democracy, egalitarianism, and white supremacy worked together in the Jacksonian mind. [my emphasis in bold]

But it’s hard not to see a bit of “presentism” in Lynn’s analysis:

Racism, moreover, was not incidental but intrinsic to Jacksonian thought. Whether in the guise of the Slave Power or the Antislavery Power, monopolies were anathema to Jacksonians because they questioned white men’s equality and their monopoly of political power. Jackson pioneered a populist style that echoes in our politics today. That 1850s Democrats also perpetuated Jackson’s principles muddies the legacy of Jacksonian Democracy and suggests the inseparability of democratic populism from white supremacy in our republic. [my emphasis]

What Lynn calls “racially based notions of democracy in the late antebellum era” were very much part of the Republicans’ view at the time, including Abraham Lincoln himself. And part of just about every other white person’s, as well. The Republicans in 1860 were not campaigning for full racial equality, immediate emancipation, and certainly not for women’s suffrage.

The best-known white antislavery figure who actually did defend the ideas of immediate emancipation, racial equality, and even women’s rights, as well, was John Brown. The guy who fought guerrilla warfare against pro-slavery forces in Kansas Territory, and later tried to form armed guerrilla groups to help slaves escape. But how many people today feel comfortable identifying with the “terrorist” John Brown?

I think he is rightly regarded as a hero and a legitimate symbol of patriotism and democracy. Yet in the twisted world of far-right Trumpistas, Brown is also celebrated as a hero by anti-abortionists who take him – very cynically - as a Christian model for violent antiabortionists.

Lynn also falls into the trap of taking “populism” to be equivalent to rightwing populism. But there are also left and genuinely democratic forms of populism, which sees antiracism and the fight for women’s equality as essential parts of their “populist” redistributionist programs, too.

But the proslavery side also adapted some of the concepts and rhetoric. The latter was a definite precursor of today’s rightwing populism: “for them, the Money Power’s modern manifestation was the very antislavery movement many of their brethren were joining.” In present-day Trumpista concepts, we could say they portrayed Abolitionists as the Woke Elite who wanted to deny Southern planters to keep their human property and expand the institutions of slavery.

Unfortunately, Lynn treats the new ideological alliance as almost a neutral narrative choice. Although he briefly quotes Walt Whitman railing against the elite of Southern slaveowners, he doesn’t really call attention to the fact the anti-elite rhetoric used to defend the slaveocracy was 99% hogwash.

Notes:

(1) Editors (2024): Federalist Party. Britannica Online 04/01/2024. <https://www.britannica.com/topic/Federalist-Party> (Accessed: 2024-19-04).

(2) Lincoln, Abraham (2024): First Annual Message 12/03/1861. The American Presidency Project. <https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/first-annual-message-9> (Accessed: 2024-19-04).

Confederate “Heritage” Month 2024, April 18: Black Abolitionists in the 1830s

George Levesque in 1970 wrote about the neglect of the roles of Black Abolitionists even in mainstream, non-Lost-Cause histories. He focuses particular on the active movement in the 1830s. He cites an example from historian David Donald in a 1956 essay:

Donald does not give us his definition of leadership, but since his leadership category is presumably not limited to those who held office in antislavery organizations, it is remarkable that he could find but three Negroes in the ranks of the leaders in the decade of the thirties. When the American Anti-Slavery Society was organized in 1833, three of the sixty-three delegates were blacks; the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, successor in 1834 to the New England Anti-Slavery Society, elected James G. Barbadoes and Joshua Easton, both Negroes, to its board of counselors. Not only is Donald silent on the participation of colored men and women in the formation of new national societies, but he ignores the fact that Negroes were abolition-minded, having formed Negro antislavery societies in the 1820s and early 1830s in many Northern states. More perplexing yet is Donald's seeming belief that workers on the underground railroad (whites as well as blacks) were not abolitionists. (1)

Fortunately, mainstream historians for decades have been much more willing to recognize the importance of African-American Abolitionists like David Walker, Harriet Tubman (2), and Frederick Douglass.



Levesque was concerned that the focus of white Abolitionists not only presented a distorted picture by ignoring their work and significance but also buying into a conservative stereotype of them as starry-eyed, impractical idealists and/or fanatics. That stereotype, of course, was one slaveowners in the 1930s preferred and one that became part of Lost Cause lore.

Not only had white Abolitionists used religious language and arguments against slavery. Levesque also noted that slaves tended to be Baptists or Methodists:

lt seems more than warrantable, then, to hypothesize that the influence of revivalism in radicalizing the antislavery crusade was more pervasive among black abolitionists than among their white counterparts in the movement.

He also notes that Northern Abolitionists were more likely to take a conservative approach of gradual emancipation, while slaves and free blacks wanted their freedom sooner rather than later. And by the 1830s, freedom “later” in the minds of slaveowners meant freedom never.

In this connection he makes a point having to do with a contradiction in the liberal values that framed American understanding of society and government.

A more persuasive factor [than a belief in gradual progress] explaining the overwhelming conservatism of Americans on the question of immediatism is that the doctrine "challenged the northern hierarchy of values. To many, · a direct assault on slavery meant a direct assault on private property and the Union as well." [Quote from Martin Duberman]

As heirs of the Lockean tradition [John Locke justified slavery (3)], Americans believed almost without reservation-that the sanctity of private property constituted the essential cornerstone for all other liberties. And the fear that this belief - held tenaciously by [white] southerners as well as [white] northerners - might very well eventuate in the breakup of the union was "no less real for being in part irrational" [Duberman].

Levesque concludes with the observation, “lt is indeed high time that we repossess the important historical truth that black abolitionists in the Age of Jackson were the catalysts behind the radicalization of American abolitionism.”

And that was a good thing in that context! Because the slaveowners were prepared to destroy the United States rather than allow for a peaceful end to the institution of slavery.

Notes:

(1) George A. Levesque (1970): Black Abolitionists in the Age of Jackson: Catalysts in the Radicalization of American Abolitionism. Journal of Black Studies 1:2, 187-201.

(2) Harriet Tubman's Ballad-Woody Guthrie-HBO Harriet Tubman Movie. Official Veronika Jackson YouTube channel 04/22/2016. <https://youtu.be/02xq6J4yJXY?si=THhASGH7-P6HrHFA> (Accessed: 2024-18-04).

(3) Farr, James (2008): Locke, Natural Law, and New World Slavery. Political Theory 36:4, 495-522. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/20452649> “There is glaring contradiction between mandate of absolute power [in his writing on colonial slavery] and Locke's principles regarding just-war and natural law. All this makes Locke if not a mystery at least a very difficult figure to understand. How could Locke - a philosopher of such judgment and criticism and reflection - live with such contradiction and be so guilty of ‘immoral evasion’ [John Dunn] of the consequences of his labors taken as a whole? But he did. A kink in his head, he partook of the madness of American slavery."

Confederate “Heritage” Month 2024, April 17: Mississippi’s 2024 version, courtesy of Republican Gov. Tate Reeves

I think it’s a good sign that even Mississippi’s rightwing and shamelessly authoritarian (but dorky) Governor Tate Reeves seems to think that when he proclaims April as Confederate Heritage Month in the state, he needs to do it on the “down-low.”

I think it’s a good sign that even Mississippi’s rightwing and shamelessly authoritarian (but dorky) Governor Tate Reeves seems to think that when he proclaims April as Confederate Heritage Month in the state, he needs to do it on the “down-low.”

Apparently, he didn’t issue it until April 12. And it seems to have been publicized by the Beauvoir museum run by the far-right Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV). Aston Pittman reports:

Beauvoir is owned and operated by the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a neo-Confederate organization that promotes “Lost Cause” ideology, a revisionist history that whitewashes the Confederacy’s racist past and downplays the role of slavery in the Civil War. Beauvoir annually receives $100,000 from the State of Mississippi for development and maintenance.

Starting in 2016, Donna Ladd, then the editor of the Jackson Free Press and now the executive editor of the Mississippi Free Press, first reported on then-Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant’s Confederate Heritage Month proclamations. The Mississippi Free Press has reported on Reeves’ annual proclamations as well in 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023.

The Confederate Heritage Month proclamations annually appear on SCV Facebook pages, but neither the governor nor any other state official publicizes the proclamations or posts them on any public-facing state websites or social-media pages. (1) [my emphasis]

The SPLC on April 1 of this year published a bullet-point debunking Lost Cause dogma (SPLC points in quotation marks) (2):

• “Claim: It’s heritage, not hate.”

No, it’s about hate. Racial hate against Black people, in particular.

• “The Civil War was about states’ rights – not slavery.”

It was about slavery.

• “The Confederate battle flag isn’t racist. Hate groups hijacked it, so now it’s called racist.”

It’s one of the best-known symbols of white racism and white nationalism. It may be fair to say that originally it was “only” a symbol of the treasonous Confederate States of America flown in battle when Confederate soldiers were killing soldiers of the US Army. As the SPLC notes, “The Confederacy, from its start, was founded on white supremacy.”

• “Symbols that offend some people shouldn’t be removed. The First Amendment says we have freedom of expression.”

US law allows people to display Confederate battle flags. Drive for an hour through rural roads in Mississippi even today and you’re likely to see an example or two. Displaying the Confederate battle flag is also legal in Germany, even though it is understood to be a substitute for a swastika flag, which is illegal to display under Germany’s anti-Nazi laws.

• “Removing Confederate symbols erases history in the name of being ‘woke.’”

Being aware, aka, “woke,” of the presence of symbols of treason against the United States and its Constitution allows people to understand the message being sent by people who use them. Or, as the SPLC puts it in the context of removing such symbols from government property: “Removal doesn’t erase history. It ends the government’s endorsement of symbols that have always represented the oppression of an entire race.”

Or, as the SPLC puts it in the context of removing such symbols from government property: “Removal doesn’t erase history. It ends the government’s endorsement of symbols that have always represented the oppression of an entire race.”

Notes:

(1) Pittman, Ashton (2024): Gov. Reeves Proclaims Confederate Heritage Month in Mississippi. Mississippi Free Press 04/15/2024. <https://www.mississippifreepress.org/41270/governor-reeves-proclaims-confederate-heritage-month-in-mississippi> (Accessed: 2024-169-04).

(2) Debunking Defenses of ‘Lost Cause’ Mythology During Confederate Heritage Month. SPLC 04/01/2024. <https://www.splcenter.org/hopewatch/2024/04/01/confederate-heritage-month-myths> (Accessed: 2024-169-04).

Confederate “Heritage” Month 2024, April 16: The slavery issue in the 1820s

In yesterday’s post I referred a 1969 article by Gerald Henig concerning the reserved-at-best attitude of Jacksonian Democrats in the 1830s and 1840 toward Abolitionism. Most of them regarded it as a threat to the unity of the Democratic Party, which counted on the support of Southern slaveowners.

Henig gives a helpful summary of development in the fight over slavery after the Missouri Compromise of 1820:

In the period of Andrew Jackson's first administration [1829-1833] the slavery problem led to numerous incidents throughout the country. After nine years of relative calm provided by the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the "peculiar institution" once again emerged as a serious and potentially explosive issue. In 1829 the abolition of slavery in Mexico roused concern among the American settlers of Texas for their slave property. In that same year David Walker, a free Negro residing in Boston, attempted to circulate in the South a pamphlet in which he described American Negroes as "the most wretched, degraded and abject set of beings that ever lived since the world began," and urged the slaves to fight for their freedom. Heated congressional debate on the slave trade in the District of Columbia added to the uneasiness during Jackson' s first year as Chief Executive. (1) [my emphasis in bold]

In my April 5 installment, I referred to Nat Turner’s slave rebellion of 1831, which caught the attention of slaveowners and whites generally. Henig writes:

The slavery issue became further inflamed when William Lloyd Garrison, on January 1, 1831, launched the first issue of the Liberator.

His uncompromising attitude toward Negro slavery and his irreverent attacks on the Constitution not only provoked extreme alarm in parts of the South but created a good deal of apprehension in the North. Within eight months of the founding of the Liberator a major crisis was precipitated when a slave, Nat Turner, led a revolt of some seventy Negroes in Southampton County in southeast Virginia. The uprising was ruthlessly put down, but not before sixty whites had been massacred. The Turner rebellion, as one historian has noted, produced a trauma that swept the entire South. For the next three decades the slightest rumor of slave unrest was often sufficient to instill a wave of panic and repression.

In retrospect, the polarization over slavery and the increasing militancy of slaves and the opponents of slavery seem like an inevitable development. But no one then knew for sure where the historical trend was going or how fast. As Henig’s account illustrates, the politicians of the 1820s were still heavily influenced by the example of the Missouri Compromise, which tried to avoid national divisions (among whites) around the issue of slavery by incremental compromises. But by 1932, Nat Turner and John C. Calhoun (the main schemer behind the Nullification Controversy) had made the old way of viewing the conflict obsolete.

The Missouri Compromise, signed into law by James Monroe in 1920, was the resolution over a controversy about the admission of Missouri territory as a slave state into the Union. Because Southern agriculture made slavery much more important and profitable in the Southern states, and the Northern states phased the institution out, the slavery issue became deeply intertwined with sectional divisions, which made the cohesion of the Unites States as a nation a major concern:

[James] Madison remarked to [James] Monroe [US President 1817-1825] that the prime concern of the promoters of the anti-Missouri movement was obviously not the welfare of the slaves. He inclined to the opinion that "an uncontrolled dispersion" of the slaves in the United States would be most favorable both to their emancipation and their condition in the meantime. The argument for "mitigation by diffusion" was being heard in Congress, but the northern determination was to keep the vast reaches of the Northwest for free men, not slaves, and, as some put it, for white men, not black. Southerners were believed by many to have too large a part in the government anyway. According to the Constitution their representation in Congress was based on their white population and three-fifths of their slaves. (2)

The "mitigation by diffusion" concept was held by gradual emancipationist as being the optimal way to abolish slavery. In the Northern states, as whites became an increasing part of the population, the states began adopted gradual emancipation programs.

One strange effect of that experience was that whites came to associate slavery with the absence of Black people. This is a big reason for the seeming paradox – which Lost Cause advocates use to argue that Yankee anti-slavery was somehow fake – that white citizens could be both very much opposed to slavery and also distinctly racist against blacks.

Notes:

(1) Henig, Gerald S. (1969): The Jacksonian Attitude Toward Abolitionism in the 1830's. Tennessee Historical Quarterly 28:1, pp. 42-56. <http://www.jstor.com/stable/42623057>

(2) Malone, Dumas (1981): Jefferson and His Time: The Sage of Monticello, 334. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company.

Confederate “Heritage” Month 2024, April 15: Jacksonian reform and the Abolitionists

One of the challenges in understanding the politics of the period between the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and the Mexican-American War is the reform movement represented by Andrew Jackson and his partisans. Like all major period of reform, it had complicated and contradictory currents. And like all of American history prior to 1865, the issue of slavery and relations with the native peoples are particularly problematic from today’s democratic perspectives.

One of the challenges in understanding the politics of the period between the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and the Mexican-American War is the reform movement represented by Andrew Jackson and his partisans. Like all major period of reform, it had complicated and contradictory currents. And like all of American history prior to 1865, the issue of slavery and relations with the native peoples are particularly problematic from today’s democratic perspectives.

Following on Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s influential book, The Age of Jackson (1945), which focused on the Jacksonian period’s anti-oligarchy economic policies, the growth of labor unions, and the expansion of the franchise, presented Andrew Jackson as a kind of proto-FDR and the older reform period as an early New Deal.

And he was right about that, as far as it went. But the book basically ignored Jackson’s Indian policies altogether, for which late in his life he expressed regret. And he didn’t stress the politics of slavery.

What Schlesinger had to say about Roger Taney, Jackson’s Attorney General who he would also appoint to the Supreme Court and is now remembered as the Chief Justice who wrote the infamous Dred Scott decision of 1857, illustrates the complications of sorting through the politics of that period:

Roger B. Taney, Attorney General, was the spearhead of radicalism in the new cabinet. A Maryland lawyer, fifty-four years old in 1831, he had once, like McLane, been a Federalist; but he left the party during the War of 1812 and by 1824 was a Jackson leader in Maryland. ... He would speak in low tones, sincerely and without gestures, relying on the lucidity of the argument and his own quiet conviction. His performances before the Supreme Court impressed both [John] Marshall and [Joseph] Story, and his appointment as Attorney General was widely applauded.

While not a dominating personality, … Taney was a man of unshakable determination. His experience as a lawyer had deepened his feeling against the unnecessary concentration of power in the hands of the business community; and from the first, the radicals, somewhat to their surprise, found him their spokesman in the inner council. [Churchill] Cambreleng wrote to [Martin] Van Buren early in 1832 that Taney was "the only efficient man of sound principles in the Cabinet." (1)

Schlesinger didn’t mention there one of the ironies in ‘Taney’s life, which as a young attorney in Baltimore he had done pro bono legal work defending escaped slaves from being sent back to their masters.

But he also points out a situation that had definite affinities to the situation of the Democratic Party in 1945:

The Jacksonians in the thirties were bitterly critical of abolitionists. The outcry against slavery, they felt, distracted attention from the vital economic questions of Bank and currency, while at the same time it menaced the Southern alliance so necessary for the success of the reform program. A good deal of Jacksonian energy, indeed, was expended in showing how the abolition movement was a conservative plot. (2)

A lot had happened between Jackson’s election as President in 1828 and the disastrous Dred Scott decision three decades later. The Democratic Party was divided over slavery and the anti-slavery Republican Party had emerged as a strong party movement in the North. Schlesinger writes of Taney’s most significant and disastrous contribution to history:

This decision was profoundly disturbing to most old Jacksonians, as it was to neo-Jacksonians like Sumner. Few of Taney's supporters in his indictment of the overweening ambitions of the Marshall bench were prepared to accompany him in his own exercises in judicial imperialism - even under Taney's own hope that he was thereby removing a critical issue from politics. Montgomery Blair, as Dred Scott's chief counsel, argued the case in the tense, silent courtroom, while his father sat proudly in the audience. … Other men through the North raised in the Jeffersonian school had similar misgivings; and the two who, along with Blair, had been perhaps the closest politically to Jackson, and who, unlike Blair, had refused to break with Jackson's party in 1856, could no longer suppress their contempt for the new doctrines of the so-called Democracy. (3) [my emphasis]

It's hard to imagine that an experienced politician like Roger Taney really believed that decision would remove the “critical issue” of slavery from politics. But it was the Slave Power’s (Southern planters’) position, which Taney’s decision endorsed, that the Constitution sanctified slavery and therefore should be removed – specifically abolitionist sentiment should be removed – from the political agenda.

As I noted in my April 6 installment this year, during the most significant slavery-related controversy of Jackson’s Presidency, the Nullification Controversy of 1832, Jackson came down hard on the side of preserving the Union and against South Carolina’s Calhounian trial run for secession in defense of slavery. When Abraham Lincoln resisted the treasonous attempt at secession by the Confederacy, he was acting in a distinctly Jacksonian manner. Lincoln also referred to Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson as his most important models for his Presidency.

Gerald Henig noted in 1969 of the anti-abolitionist sentiment in the Democratic Party during Jackson’s Presidency:

[Where the Whig editorials, resolutions, and addresses of the 1830' s tended to display apathy and in some cases friendliness toward the abolitionists, the Democrat writings on the other hand showed a general hostility toward any movement designed to emancipate the slave and, indeed, generally sided with the slaveholders. (4)

And in the actual sequence of events that caused the Civil War and resulted in the end of the institution of slavery, it was the Slave Power’s push in 1860-61 for secession that trigged that conflict.

History is complicated.

Notes:

(1) Schlesinger, Jr., Arthur M. (1945): The Age of Jackson, 65. New York: J.J. Little & Ives.

(2) Op.cit., 424-425.

(3) Op.cit., 486.

(4) Henig, Gerald S. (1969): The Jacksonian Attitude Toward Abolitionism in the 1830's. Tennessee Historical Quarterly 28:1, pp. 42-56. <http://www.jstor.com/stable/42623057> (Footnote corrected.)

Confederate “Heritage” Month 2024, April 14: Treacherous slaveowners

Heather Cox Richardson is well-known for using historical events to help understand current US politics. The historian William Hoagland grumps quite a bit about the temptation to draw obvious parallels to the past, including Richardson’s approach.

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)

Richardson comments on the attitude taken by the defenders of slavery:

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).