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!
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."
This week provides an occasion for the U.S. government to get real about history, as April 9 is the 150th anniversary of the Union’s victory in the Civil War. The generous terms of Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House foreshadowed a multitude of real and symbolic compromises that the winners of the war would make with secessionists, slavery supporters, and each other to piece the country back together. It’s as appropriate an occasion as the Selma anniversary to reflect on the country’s struggle to improve itself. And to mark the occasion, the federal government should make two modest changes: It should make April 9 a federal holiday; and it should commit to disavowing or renaming monuments to the Confederacy, and its leaders, that receive direct federal support. [my emphasis]
He puts this in the context of reframing the popular historical narrative over slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction and discrediting the persistent effects of the Lost Cause ideology.
Donald Trump has emphasized Robert E. Lee as a hero for his white nationalist movement.
One thing about about fanaticism is that its motivational claims don't have to be based on empirical reality. It's often said, for instance, that you don't need Jews to have anti-Semitism. If people in Poland, for instance, believe the world is controlled by a sinister Jewish conspriracy, the notion came become a big influence politically even though very few people in the country have any regular contact with actual Jews at all. In some ways, not having actual contact with a stigmatized group make be helpful in making a politics targeting them as the enemy earsier. Polls in Germany, Austria, and the US repeatedly show that areas with higher proportions of immigrants are less open to xenophobic appeals that areas with a much lower immigrant presence.
Neo-Confederate ideology also doesn't have to bear any close resemblance to actual history for it to serve as pseudohistorical ideology for present-day white supremacist politics.
But facts do matter, even in historical outlooks. I haven't seen any polls on the topic. But I think there is more awareness among Americans today than, say, 20 years ago that neo-Confederate/Lost Cause pseudohistory does play a role in current political ideology, and that it's based on shameless distortions of history.
Adam Serwer did a helpful article a couple of years ago addressing the scam version of Trump's hero Robert E. Lee, The Myth of the Kindly General Lee 06/04/2017:
The myth of Lee goes something like this: He was a brilliant strategist and devoted Christian man who abhorred slavery and labored tirelessly after the war to bring the country back together.
There is little truth in this. Lee was a devout Christian, and historians regard him as an accomplished tactician. But despite his ability to win individual battles, his decision to fight a conventional war against the more densely populated and industrialized North is considered by many historians to have been a fatal strategic error.
But even if one conceded Lee’s military prowess, he would still be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans in defense of the South’s authority to own millions of human beings as property because they are black. Lee’s elevation is a key part of a 150-year-old propaganda campaign designed to erase slavery as the cause of the war and whitewash the Confederate cause as a noble one. That ideology is known as the Lost Cause, and as historian David Blight writes, it provided a “foundation on which Southerners built the Jim Crow system.”
[my emphasis]
His article debunks Lee's postwar status as an advocate for racial moderation and political reconcilation in the South. The Lost Cause narrative served to facilitate a post-Reconstrution political reconciliation between white Northerners and white Southerners, very much at the expense of African-American rights, particularly but by no means exclusively in the former Confederate states.
Apparently Trump wants to be the star of Confederate "Heritage" Month, too: Katie Galioto, Trump says he answered Charlottesville questions 'perfectly'Politico 04/26/2019. He defended his notorious praise for neo-Nazis ("very fine people") at the murderous 2017 Charlottesville rally where demonstrators nominally supporting the retention of a Robert E. Lee statue chanted "Jews will not replace us!"
“If you look at what I said you will see that that question was answered perfectly,” Trump told reporters on the White House lawn ahead of a trip to Indianapolis to speak at the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting. “I was talking about people that went because they felt very strongly about the monument to Robert E. Lee, a great general.”
The president has received repeated criticism from those arguing he offered moral equivalence between the white supremacists and neo-Nazis who incited the rally and those who protested against them. In the days following the deadly protests, Trump did not denounce the marchers, instead condemning violence on both sides and calling for Americans to “come together.”
This is an illustration of how neo-Confederate/Lost Cause pseudohistory and ideology is very much a part of the worldview projected by today's Trumpified, white nationalist Republican Party.
Here is Trump, who probably couldn't tell you in what century Lee lived, Trump Defends His 2017 Charlottesville Response, Praises Robert E. LeeTicToc by Bloomberg 04/26/2019. The Charlottesville comment comes just after 2:30.
He comically claims just after 1:10, "I'm a student of history." He also claims "I'm a young, vibrant man."
The reporter that asked the Charlottesville question didn't directly mention Joe Biden's reference to Trump's comment about Charlottesville in his video Thursday formally announcing his Presidential campaign. But Biden - who has some shaky history on civil rights himself - did raise it in that video. And good for him for doing so. This is an MSNBC report with commentary on Trump's doubling-down on neo-Nazis being "very fine people", President Donald Trump Makes His Own Argument On Charlottesville WorseDeadline 04/26/2019:
It's worth noting here that in his last Presidential run, Biden couldn't resist a touch of neo-Confederate type talk himself (Xuan Thai and Ted Barrett, Biden's description of Obama draws scrutiny CNN 02/09/2007):
In a June 2006 appearance in New Hampshire, the senator [Biden] commented on the growth of the Indian-American population in Delaware by saying, "You cannot go into a 7-11 or a Dunkin' Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. Oh, I'm not joking."
Two months later, responding to a question in an August interview on Fox News Sunday, Biden was asked how a "Northeast liberal" could compete against more conservative southern candidates.
"Better than everybody else. You don't know my state. My state was a slave state. My state is a border state. My state is the eighth largest black population in the country. My state is anything from a northeast liberal state," Biden said.
He repeated the comment during a visit to South Carolina in December 2006 at an event before the Columbia Rotary Club, according to a story published in The State newspaper. The State reported that Biden referred to Delaware as a "slave state that fought beside the North. That's only because we couldn't figure out how to get to the South. There were a couple of states in the way." [my emphasis]
When pundits talk about Biden being gaffe-prone, this is what they mean. His glad-handing, respond-to-the-crowd-in-front-of-you style is appealing and makes him come across as likable.
But when he goes with the flow in that way, he sometimes lets out some blunders. I heard Biden speak live at the Netroots Nation conference in Detroit in 2014, and that likability aspect was very evident. VP Joe Biden speaks about Marriage Equality at Netroots Nation:
But just after 13:40, he begins an impassioned portion denouncing physical abuse of women, using the somewhat old-fashioned euphemism of a man raising his hand against a woman, i.e., calling it a "cardinal sin" and declaring. "No man has a right to raise his hand to a woman for whatever reason." He continued in a peroration, "No man has a right to raise a hand to a woman under any circumstances" and completed the sentence "except self-defense. Period."
It didn't come off though he was making excuses for domestic violence. On the contrary. But it also sounded really awkward and did distract from his attempt to unequivocally condemn it.
And I think his reliance on the metaphor (or I guess it's technically a synecdoche) of a man "raising his hand against a woman" was part of the problem. It probably occurred to him or his speechwriter that he needed to make the statement a bit more generic, because domestic violence happens in same-sex couples and involves not just spouses but children, as well. And, yes, men are sometimes also victims of violence initiated by a female spouse or partner, though the inverse is obviously far more often the case. If he had framed the speech in terms of "domestic violence" and violence against "partners," he could have avoided the awkward moment. And in a speech like that, he would have buried his point if he tried to put in all the variations I mention in this paragraph.
But that's Biden. I don't know if his Delaware-was-a-slave-state gaffe in 2006 was a similar case of his trying to duck the neo-Confederate issue by being humorous, or if it was a line he's been using for years to signal that he agreed with segregationists on some things like court-ordered busing for desegregating schools. Either way, it's a reminder of how broadly Lost Cause talking points have affected the US political vocabulary.
The particular news here is probably a minor data point in Missouri politics. Blunt signed "a 1990 letter that discusses 'states’ rights' as a cause of the Civil War, but makes no mention of slavery." He was Missouri's Secretary of State at the time. In response to the Star's questions, Blunt admitted he signed it but claimed he didn't read it and that "it’s always been clear to him that slavery was the 'original sin' of the Constitution."
Several paragraphs into the article, Wise gives us more details on the letter which was in response to a student's letter. And it provides a good example of how Lost Cause pseudohistory about the Civil War is part of a larger narrative, based on white supremacist assumptions:
“Why did the States feel that their rights caused them to separate from the U.S.?” the student asked Blunt. “What does the Constitution say about states rights? How have states’ rights changed since the Civil War?”
The typewritten response was signed by Blunt and printed under Missouri Secretary of State letterhead. It says the debate over states rights was at the heart of the Civil War. ...
His response to the student, which runs slightly over one page, single-spaced, does not mention slavery.
It suggests the student read the writings of former Vice President and U.S. Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, “one of the most articulate and ardent supporters of the states’ rights position” and suggests studying the lives of Edmund Ruffin and Jefferson Davis “on the states’ rights side” and Republican President Abraham Lincoln, his Democratic rival Stephen Douglas and Nathaniel Lyon, a Union general, on the “national rights side.”
Calhoun called slavery a positive good. Davis, also a defender of slavery, was the president of the Confederacy. Ruffin was a Virginia slaveholder who claimed credit for firing one of the first shots of the war. He ended up killing himself, wrapped in the Confederate flag.
The letter signed by Blunt concludes with the observation that the states’ rights debate “continues to be waged in our own lifetimes.” It cites, as an example, the “debate whether or not the federal government has the right to require the state of Missouri to pay the costs of racial desegregation in Kansas City and St. Louis schools.” [my emphasis]
In this example as presented by the Kansas City Star, we see the emphasis on "state rights" as the central cause of the Civil War without mentioning slavery, which is a key argument of the Lost Cause/neo-Confederate narrative. And we see how the letter connects that narrative to Republicans' opposition to "racial desegregation in Kansas City and St. Louis schools" at the time.
I've done several posts this year about John Calhoun, the guiding spirit of today's American white nationalists. As he was for the secessionists of 1861.
The Nullification Crisis of 1831-2 was a conflict that was explicitly though not overtly about slavery. In this case, Calhoun defended a "states rights" position and President Andrew Jackson's position asserting federal authority won out. The Congressional lineup around that issue was broadly sectionally divided, with slave states tending to support the states-rights stance and the free states supported the national position.
The notorious Indian Removal Act of 1830 also lined up sectionally, even more clearly than on the Nullification Crisis. The Southerners favored the Act, which extended federal power in controlling territories in the area in question. The Northern opponents used the states-rights argument to oppose the Act. So even then, Southern support for "states' rights" was based on the issue immediately at stake, not on some abstract, legalistic commitment to states' rights as a basic Constitutional principle.
Between the Nullification Crisis and Lincoln's election in 1860, the controversies over slavery had the Southern slaveowners backing the use of national power in favor of slavery and against states' rights. After 1840, the Presidents were increasingly favorable to the slave states. The Fugitive Slave laws were a big point of contention during that whole period; Southern representatives demanded more use of federal power to force free states to return escaped slaves.
After the 1860 Presidential election, slave states did begin to invoke states' rights again. But as their secession ordinances and speeches of secession leaders made very clear, the purpose their secession and treason was defending slavery.
Bryant has longrunning ties with segregationist and neo-Confederate groups. In high school, he attended a segregation academy that the racist Citizens' Council, known colloquially as the "White Citizens Council," started.
He is a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, an organization known for its efforts to revise history with false claims that the Civil War was fought over "state's rights," and not slavery. The group recently gave Bryant the John J. Pettus Heritage Award, named for Mississippi's virulently racist, slave-holding governor who led the state in secession.
As the title on Pittman's article idicates, Bryant tried a twist this year by proclaiming April "Unity Month" in Mississippi instead of Confederate Heritage Month. He also reports, "Two days after the April 27 unity rally, Mississippi will celebrate Confederate Memorial Day - a holiday recognized by just a handful of southern states. Mississippi, Anderson pointed out in his statement, also celebrates Robert E. Lee Day every January on the same day as Martin Luther King, Jr. Day."
He goes on to refer to Lee as a slaveowner. There is apparently still some lack of clarity on whether Lee himself owned slaves in his own name. But his family did, and Lee had practical authority over his family's slaves. (Allen Guelzo, Robert E. Lee and SlaveryEncyclopedia Virginia 02/13/2019) The advocates of Lost Cause pseudohistory like to claim that Lee himself was personally opposed to slavery, but that's nonsense.
Roy Blount, Jr., debunks the myth of Lee as anti-slavery in Making Sense of Robert E. LeeSmithsonian Magazine (July 2003).
But as late as 1994, the US Postal Service was putting Lee's image on a postage stamp, as part of a series equally divided between Union and Confederate figures:
Caitlin Rosenthal is the author of the book Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management (2018), which looks at the accounting methods of the Southern planters, some of which turn out to have been notably innovative. She finds, for instance, that the accounting practice of depreciation was one of their innovations. That is a method of allocating the cost of capital purchases like large machinery to annual income over several years. It can get complicated. But the basic idea is that a capital investment like machinery often has benefits spread over a period of years. And as the machinery is used, it also gets wear and tear that reduces its monetary value from what it was when it was purchased.
... one of the key developments in the emergence of modern business is the idea that you should analyze your products to see exactly how much everything costs. And related to this is the analysis of depreciation – so thinking about how a large fixed cost like a railroad train might change in value over time, and how you should account for that.
In one of the most prominent accounting guides for planters, Thomas Affleck’s “Plantation Record and Account Book,” he gives advice on how to appreciate and depreciate enslaved people. For him, these are long-lived, complex, capital assets. They are human capital. He doesn’t call them that, but he gives instructions on how to account for their growth and value as they get older, as they learn new skills and how to account for their depreciation as they age or if they’re injured or even if they attempt to escape.
... depreciation is something that I’d gotten used to seeing as a sign of remarkable sophistication. It doesn’t show up in accounting textbooks until the late 19th century and here we are half a century earlier, and we have a Southern planter instructing people how to appreciate and depreciate enslaved people. So that means that he was well ahead of his time in a setting that I had gotten used to thinking about as being one that was relatively backwards, one that wasn’t sophisticated. [my emphasis]
Running a slave plantation involved lots of data carefully entered into paper spreadsheets and reports that were passed along to absentee owners in England. From the comfort of counting rooms, plantation owners could review this data without having to think too hard about the people it represented.
Some planters received standardized reports every month from their sugar plantations in Jamaica and Barbados. These careful records tracked the daily tasks of the hundreds (sometimes thousands) of people they enslaved, all with an eye to maximizing profits. The accounts monitored the output of plantations as well as the “increase” and “decrease” of laborers, slaveholders’ chilling economic shorthand for births and deaths.
When you understand the context of these records - high mortality, punishing slave labor, racialized violence - the records are horrifying. But without that context, they erase as much as they reveal. They look like antiquarian versions of Excel spreadsheets. And, absent a moral perspective, the productivity enabled by data-driven analysis could be seen not as a marker of degradation but of progress.
This is also related to the historical issue of how much Southern slavery should be considered an integral part of American capitalism or viewed in some other way, e.g., an aristocratic holdover.
In To Remake the World: Slavery, Racial Capitalism, and JusticeBoston Review 02/20/2018, Rosenthal talks about how our view of slavery and the kind of economy of which it was a part can have important effects on how we view political systems and human rights:
One place to begin is to describe the abolition of slavery not as a human-rights measure but as a form of market regulation. In the abstract, this shift makes sense: abolition not only stripped slaveholders of their property, it also restricted property rights. It prevented men and women from being sold (or selling themselves) into bondage. Abolition also outlawed certain kinds of transactions and, as a regulation of “bonds,” it restricted the right to contract.
Framing abolition as market regulation inverts conventional ideas about slavery and capitalism, particularly the assumption that free markets are fundamentally connected to other human freedoms. The shared modifier “free” elides vast differences between free markets and other kinds of freedoms: freedom to move, to speak, to assemble, to love. History suggests that these freedoms can both expand together and move in opposition to one another. In the Atlantic world, “free” trade in goods (and bodies) expanded even as millions of Africans lost control over their lives and labor. The relationship between free markets and other freedoms is not inevitable. [my emphasis]
Her analysis there doesn't imply that slavery was not a human rights issue. She's just explaining how the market view is also important. As she notes in the Majority Report interview, the way that slavery was abolished during and after the Civil War was confiscation of property without compensation. This is also relevant to the discussion of reparations for slavery. Because - and here's accounting theory again! - it can also be understood as "giving" individual slaves something of value (their own bodies) rather than paying the planters the money value of the property emancipation took away from them.
I haven't seen this particular angle discussed in the reparations discussion, probably because I'm not familiar with that discussion in any great depth with the issues being discussed in connection with reparations. But I can't imagine it won't be taken up in the policy discussion and polemics. Opponents of reparations could argue that emancipation actually was a substantial form of reparations, while advocates could point to it as an important precedent for the reparations idea.
Manisha Sinha, the historian I quoted a few days ago, also recently did a summary article, The History and Legacy of Jacksonia DemocracyJournal 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]
Carl Weinberg provided an example several years ago of using Virginia Confederate History Month proclamations to debunk the Lost Cause narrative behind them: The Strange Career of Confederate History MonthOAH Magazine of History 25:2 April 2011. The "history" month was April, Confederate Heritage Month by another name.
This particular incident has to do with the 2010 proclamation. "Republican Virginia Governor Robert McDonnell issued a Confederate
History Month proclamation that omitted any mention of slavery. Less than a week later and after many protests, McDonnell reissued a new text that prominently included slavery."
A key part of the neo-Confederate/Lost Cause pseudohistorical account is to deny or minimize the role of slavery as the cause of the war. The revised version of the 2010 proclamation, included as a sidebar in the article, opened with, "WHEREAS, April is the month in which the people of Virginia joined the Confederate States of America in a four year war between the states for independence that concluded at Appomattox Courthouse." Weinberg takes off from that passage to provide this helpful dose of real history:
For one thing, there were 500,000 enslaved "people" in Virginia at the time who were legally considered property and could not have taken part in this decision. Further, the [1861] Virginia Ordinance of Secession makes it plain - by reference to "the oppression of the Southern slaveholding states" - that slavery was, once again, the key.
But even if we acknowledge that the Virginia Secession Convention voted to leave the Union on April 17, 1861, the white "people" of Virginia were hardly of one mind on this point. When voting on delegates to that convention took place two months earlier on February 4-the very day that the new Confederate government was seated in Montgomery, Alabama-a majority voted for men known to be against secession. This sentiment was especially strong west of the Blue Ridge mountains, where it prevailed by a five-to-one margin. Once assembled in Richmond February 13, pro-secession delegates failed to win a majority. Meanwhile, western delegates denounced taxation policies (partial exemptions on slaves) and political representation policies (the state version of the 3/5 clause) that favored slaveholders, who were more numerous in the eastern Tidewater and Piedmont regions. Only the attack on Fort Sumter and Lincoln's call for 75,000 volunteers broke the two-month deadlock. Despite the outbreak of war, western Virginia leaders emerged from the convention determined to stay in the Union. At a convention in June in the western city of Wheeling, they renounced secession and formed a new rival state government. Two years later, after much maneuvering, and under the condition that the gradual abolition of slavery be included in its new constitution, the state of West Virginia was admitted to the Union. They had seceded from the secessionists. [my emphasis]
Another clause of the revised proclamation states that slavery was the cause of the war:
"WHEREAS, it is important for all Virginians to understand that the institution of slavery led to this war and was an evil and inhumane practice that deprived people of their God-given inalienable rights and all Vrrginians are thankful for its permanent eradication from our borders, and the study of this time period should reflect upon and learn from this painful part of our history ..."
But another clause picks up parts of the Lost Cause narrative:
WHEREAS, all Virginians can appreciate the fact that when ultimately overwhelmed by the insurmountable numbers and resources of the Union Army, the surviving, imprisoned and injured Confederate soldiers gave their word and allegiance to the United States of America, and returned to their homes and families to rebuild their communities in peace, following the instruction of General Robert E. Lee of Virginia, who wrote that, "... all should unite in honest efforts to obliterate the effects of war and to restore the blessings of peace."
It is a stock piece of the neo-Confederate case that the South lost because they were just crushed by the sheer numbers of the Union forces. This diverts attention from mistakes and problems of the Confederate generals and state governments, as well as from factors like the undermining of the Confederate economy by mass desertions of slaves from plantations after the Emancipatio Proclamation. It also frames the Confederate loss as an inevitable tragedy, rather than a disaster created by the fanaticism, greed, and treason of the planter class and their supporters in mounting a armed revolt against the Union.
That latter clause also perpetuates the unhistorical image of Robert E. Lee as a patriotic, benevolent figure after the war. Lee did urge reconcilation, which for conservative Southern whites meant reconcilation between Northern and Southrn white people at the expense of the freedom and well-being of black citizens.
Historian Kevin Levin has a long-running blog called Civil War Memory where he regularly engages with issues related to Lost Cause ideology. He is particularly known for his systematic debunking of the neo-Confederate myth of black Confederate soldiers.
I really enjoyed the focus last night on DuBois, whose *Black Reconstruction in America* (1935) was decades ahead of its time. Here is a blog post I wrote some time ago to help place his book and textbooks today in historical context. https://t.co/miS2lJDVIo#ReconstructionPBS
In his 2017 post, he recommends teachers to use the selections from history books included by W.E.B. DuBois in his Reconstruction book:
Students will likely be surprised by many of the historical claims made in these textbooks. Start by making sure they have some understanding of Jim Crow culture in the 1930s. From there, ask your students to do the following:
List some of the most significant differences with how their own sources interpret Reconstruction.
Ask students to consider the roles that African Americans performed both during the Civil War as soldiers and activists and as politicians throughout Reconstruction.
Have students reflect on why this history had become so distorted or forgotten entirely by the 1930s.
Have students reflect on why this history had become so distorted or forgotten entirely by the 1930s. To what extent did this history serve to justify the political and racial oppression during the Jim Crow Era[?]
Historian Sean Wilentz, who has what I take to be a nuanced and sophisticated view of early American and antebellum history, did a review essay last year on Harvard historian Jill Lepore's These Truths: A History of the United States (2018). (The American RevolutionsNew York Review of Books 11/08/2018)
I've been referring in the last few posts in this series to the conflicting trends we see in American history, such as that between democracy and white supremacy, or between the rule of law and authoritarianism. Wilentz describes three major narratives about slavery in the early decades of the United States as a country:
One well-established line of argument holds that the Revolution unleashed what Bernard Bailyn once called a “contagion of liberty” that eventually challenged the enormity of slavery. Another line is tougher on the Revolution’s hypocrisy, echoing Samuel Johnson’s famous jibe about hearing “the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes.” A still-darker argument asserts that slavery was a cornerstone of the Revolution’s republicanism - that slaveholding aristocratic rebels like Washington, Jefferson, and Madison could, as Edmund Morgan wrote, “more safely preach equality in a slave society than in a free one,” and that they accordingly promoted a racist republicanism that kept poorer whites contented by the fact that they were not black and not enslaved. [my emphasis]
All of those positions are based on real factors. I have a sentimental attachment to the “contagion of liberty” perspective. I try to maintain a critical perspective on my own outlook by paying attention to the Samuel Johnson take, which is based on the very obvious historical reality that slavery and white racism were deeply rooted in the early Republic. As one might guess from the name of this blog, I'm enough of a Hegelian to not be surprised at big contradictions in a country's historial process.
I pay attention to the third perspective. But it still looks to me like a basically reactionary position and ignores some important changes in the institution of slavery itself during the early years of the US, such as the invention of the cotton gin. I don't see how that view is compatable with things like the (pre-Constitution) Northwest Ordnance that banned slavery in northern territories. Or with the voluntary abolition of slavery in various northern states.
Wilentz writes that Jill Lapore "advances an emerging view among historians that there were two eighteenth-century revolutions in America, not one: the familiar successful rebellion against monarchical rule and a less remembered one to abolish slavery that would not succeed until 1865." I'm not sure if he means to differentiate that approach from the "contagion of liberty" outlook, because it seems to be consistent with that view. Also, since a large portion of the left and center-left seem to have written off much of early and antebellum American history as a long, dark night of slavery and reaction, I'm not sure that in popular understanding of history that the Civil War is "less remembered" that the Revolution. I would agree that the Civil War can and should be understood as a second revolution, although in very meaningful ways it was an extension of the first one. Which would be consistent with the "conagion of liberty" perspective, much less so with the slavery-as-a-cornerstone outlook.
Wilentz also makes this important observation about the evolution of the parties on the slavery issue. Note that the party he calls Republican in 1819-20, consistent with the contempory usage, was the Democratic-Republican Party founded by Thomas Jefferson, which was commonly referred to as the Republican Party until later in the 1820s, when it became known as the Democratic Party, of which today's Democratic Party is the same organization. The present-day Republican Party was founded in 1854 as an anti-slavery party.
Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans did not ... align as, respectively, antislavery and proslavery parties prior to the momentous crisis over the admission of Missouri as a slave state in 1819 and 1820; most congressmen in what John Quincy Adams called the “free party” were in fact northern Republicans. Adams, who was by then a Republican himself, did become increasingly opposed to slavery over the following decades, as Lepore relates, but partly on that account, he never “steered the erratic course of the Whig Party,” as the book contends. If he had, something like Lincoln’s Republican Party might have arisen two decades earlier than it did.
Much of Wilentz' essay is devoted to an evaluation of Lapore's analysis of the Populist tradition in US politics. He links that back to pre-Civil War days and the Calhounian trend that on which I've been focusing in several posts in this year's "Heritage" series:
Trump may perhaps reflect the worst in the long history that Lepore relates, but in more ways than she suggests, he also represents a sharp break, matched in our history only by Southern secession and the Civil War. Reclaiming America’s truths means, first and foremost, understanding the exact historic dimensions of the unprecedented crisis—a crisis that, beyond demagogy, lies, and phony populism, goes to the legitimacy of the constitutional order. [my emphasis]
In yesterday's "Heritage" post, I mentioned the James Whitman book, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (2017). which talks about the ways that the Hitler regime looked to American examples for ways to craft racist laws.
Omer Aziz reviews Whitman's book in America Through Nazi EyesDissent Winter 2019, which provides some useful perspective on that historical phenomenon.
Before getting more into Aziz' essay, I want to emphasize that this historical influence shouldn't be seen as some particularly perverse case of American Exceptionalism, in which other countries were just following the bad example set by the United States. Europe and Germany had their own histories of white racism and anti-Semitism long before Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, long before Jonestown and the Puritans landing in Massachusetts.
The Studies in Prejudice sponsored by the American Jewish Committee in the 1940s is best known for the publication The Authoritarian Personality (1950) by Theodore Adorno and others. Another volume in that series is Rehearsal For Destruction: A Study of Political Anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany (1949). I did a series of five posts about Massing's book, starting with Political anti-Semitism in Germany, 1871-1914 (1 of 5): politics in the Kaiserreich 06/27/2011. As I noted in that series, organized anti-Semitism as it manifested itself in Imperial German politics in the second half of the 19th century up to 1895 revolve around two movements: the Berlin Movement led by Adolf Stoecker (1835-1909) and the pseudo-scientific racial agitation, led by characters like Hermann Ahlwardt (1846-1914), Otto Böckel (1859-1923), Theodor Fritsch (1852-1933), Ernst Henrici (1854-1915), Wilhelm Marr (1819-1904) and Max Liebermann von Sonnenberg (1848-1911). Eugen Dühring (1833-1921), who is mainly remembered today as the target of fierce polemics by Nietzsche and Engels, was also a significant promoter of racial anti-Semitism.
Despite the limits of specifically racial anti-Semitic politics during that period, the advocacy of racial anti-Semitism promoted a prejudice that later and more successful advocates of peusdoscientific racial anti-Semitism would effectively exploit. Nazi anti-Semitism in the 20th century was notably influenced by ideologues like the Brit Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Hitler himself was heavily influence by the toxic brand of anti-Semitism he sought out during his youthful years in Vienna, which included the political example of longtime mayor Karl Lueger (1844-1910), as well as fringy crackpots like former monk Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels (1874-1954) and Guido von List (1848-1919).
George Masse extensively documented the evolution of Nazi ideology in books like Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (1978).
The American examples of racist legislation and attitudes were processed by the Nazis through a particular European and German viewpoint heavily influenced by extreme German nationalism, pseudoscientific racism, and the rightwing cultural-political völkisch movement.
But there was plenty for them to find useful in the legal structures of white racism in the US. Aziz writes that in June 1934:
Nazi lawyers, jurists, and medical doctors gathered under the auspices of Justice Minister Franz Gürtner to discuss how to codify the Prussian Memorandum [of 1933 on Nazifying the German legal code]. The very first item discussed was U.S. law: “Almost all the American states have race legislation,” Gürtner averred, before detailing a myriad of examples, includingthe many states that criminalized mixed marriages. Roland Freisler, the murderous Nazi judge, stated at the meeting that U.S. jurisprudence would “suit us perfectly.” All the participants displayed either an eager interest in, or an avowed knowledge of, U.S. law. This went beyond specific legislation. The Nazis looked to an innovative legal culture that found ways to relegate Native Americans, African Americans, immigrants, Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, and others to second- and third-class status; the many devious pathways around the constitutional guarantees of equal protection; the deliberate textual ambiguity on the definition of race itself; the draconian penalties for sexually consorting with a lesser race, or even meeting publicly. The United States in the 1930s was the apogee of a racist state. [my emphasis]
This is also a sobering reminder:
From a contemporary U.S. perspective, however, the most interesting area of influence that Whitman explores is in immigration law. From the outset, the United States had a racially restricted immigration regime. The Naturalization Act of 1790, passed by the First Congress, limited immigration to “free white person[s].” In the 1800s, the United States passed more racially exclusionary immigration laws because of the perceived threat of Asians. As Whitman notes, the Nazis “almost never mentioned the American treatment of blacks without also mentioning the American treatment of other groups, in particular Asians and Native-Americans.” The Chinese were excluded from citizenship in the late 1800s, and the Asiatic Barred Zone of 1917 expressly banned immigration from a whole swath of Asia. Finally, the Immigration Act of 1924 set racial quotas for those who could enter the United States, and banned Indians, Japanese, Chinese, and other Asians outright, along with nearly all Arabs. Under the Cable Act of 1922, if a woman married an Asian man, her U.S. citizenship would be revoked. [my emphasis]
I'm cautious about casual optimism about American democracy. Because taking democracy too casually inevitably weakens democratic institutions. But I like the way Aziz frames the dynamic contradictory ideas and practices that have always been part of the American experience:
The United States is a nation with two radically different ideas at its heart: white supremacy and equality under the law. A nation that currently has more immigrants than any country in the world but is undergoing traumatic convulsions at the very mention of immigrants. A nation with a pessimistic mind and an optimistic soul, founded and codified by white men, whose geographic expansion was made possible by the violent clearing out of the original inhabitants, whose economic growth was purchased through slavery, but also a land where millions of immigrants have come in search of work and opportunity. The question of who counts in the “we” and who belongs to the “them” is being argued and fought every day, from the courtroom to the classroom to the streets. It is a conversation that has been taking place since the founding of the United States, and one that was taking place in Germany when the Nazi cabal seized the state. How this nation answers that question will determine which of the two American ideas lives on. [my emphasis]
And he also describes the broad sweep of American history in a way that is both realistic and informative when it comes to what has been called a "usuable past":
It is not white supremacy that differentiates America from Nazi Germany, but rather the constitutional architecture of this country - a democratic system tested, broken, remade, rewritten. Racism in the United States is counterbalanced by an emancipatory spirit. The Constitution enshrined slavery, but this same Constitution was transformed as a result of the bloodiest war in U.S. history, which ended the Southern slave empire. The Civil War was a second American founding, and the passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments advanced the American spirit of equality before the law. Even amid the racist terror that lasted long after the Civil War, African Americans made room in the United States to fight for their freedom, equality, and dignity. Nazi Germany, by contrast, was a totalitarian state, and its express objective was the erasure of the Jewish people. These differences cannot be minimized. [my emphasis]
Stetson Kennedy was "a folklorist and social crusader who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the 1940s and wrote a lurid exposé of its activities, 'I Rode With the Ku Klux Klan'." (William Grimes, Stetson Kennedy, Who Infiltrated and Exposed the Klan, Dies at 94New York Times 08/30/2011)
Kennedy also has an unusual distinction of Woody Guthrie having written a song praising him and his work, interpreted here by Billy Bragg (Stetson Kennedy 06/08/2015):
Grimes cites a verse not included in the Billy Bragg version here:
Mr. Kennedy pursued the Klan and racist politicians through a variety of means. In 1950 he ran a write-in campaign for senator. Woody Guthrie, who lived on Mr. Kennedy’s lakeside property near Jacksonville, writing 88 songs there, composed a campaign song for him, titled “Stetson Kennedy,” declaring:
Stetson Kennedy, he’s that man;
Walks and talks across our land;
Talkin’ out against the Ku Klux Klan.
For every fiery cross and note;
I’ll get Kennedy a hundred votes.
One of Kennedy's books was Southern Exposure (1946) about Southern politics of the era. This was published the year after the Second World War, in which official US war aims and war propaganda stressed the superiority of American democracy and equality over the kind of dictatorship and racism represented by the Nazis.
He included this table illustrated the results of a poll done by Negro Digest in 1945 on the question of "Are all men reated equal?" He notes that the respondents included a 10:1 ratio of white respondents.
He calls attention to the dramatic "extent to which presjudice obtains throughout the nation." But he also stresses the other obvious result of this poll. "The fact that 61 per cent of the Southern respondents agreed that all men are created equal, and then only 4 per cent would admit that Negroes are equal to whites, is just one indication of the insanity produced by the Myth of the Master Race."
No doubt a point well taken! But I also can never resist thinking about alternative poll interpretations. In this case, if the Southern respondents were 10:1 white, i.e., 9% non-white and mostly African-American in the South, that means that something like half of the Southern black respondents declined to say that blacks were equal to whites. Which calls attention to the questions themselves. The first question "Are all men reated equal?" uses the wording of the US Declaration of Independence, which most Americans in the last year of the Second World War would have been inclined to reflexively affirm.
On the other hand, the percentages who affirm even that phrase with its patriotic and all-American connotations was 82% in the West, 79% in the North, and 61% in the South. So a fifth or more of the respondents nationwide were unwilling to endorse even a throwaway patriotic truism like that. And in the South, over a third of them.
But the second question isn't structured in a parallel way, i.e., it doesn't ask, "Are Negroes created equal to whites?" Insted, it asks a more factual question without the patriotic aura of the Declaration, "Are Negroes equal to whites?" The 92% Southern response of "No" was factually accurate! And about a two-thirds majority in the North and West answered the same way.
But Kennedy is right in calling attention to the disparity between the professed American and democratic ideal of equality and the perceived reality as shown in the polling results.
This is significant in light of what I called attention to in yesterday's "heritage" post, Kenneth Stampp's stressing the importance of the 14th and 15th Amendments as both law and official ideals, even when their effect was widely nullified under segregation and Jim Crow.
Kennedy goes on in the same chapter to challenge the American reality with the American ideals, specifically with the professed American values of the Second World War. James Whitman has a recent book called Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (2017). But Kennedy was also writing in 1946:
It has been generally supposed that Nazi Germany sank lower than any other nation in giving official sanction to the Myth of the Master Race, but in reality the myth enjoys its greatest legal status in the United States of America. While the Nazis adopted all manner of legal restrictions against the economic, political, and civil rights of Jews (more or less rigorous than the South's restrictions on Negroes), they did not go so far as to prohibit intermarriage between Nordic Germans and Jews. On the other hand, thirty states of the United States (including all Southern states) have statutes which provide that "All marriages between white persons and persons of Negro descent are forever prohibited and shall be void always." As an added precaution, Arkansas proceeds to state that concubinage between whites and Negroes is likewise verboten. Florida, displaying a nice regard for the double standard, provides a $1,000 fine and three months' imprisonment for any white woman who has sexual intercourse with a Negro man, but makes no reference to such relations between white men and Negro women. [my emphasis]
Which reminds me, the general equality question in the poll cited above used the generic Declaration language about all men being created equal. It would be interesting to know how the respondents would have answered a question about gender equality in that poll.
He continues with the German comparisons:
In defining racial purity many American states also go further than did the Nazis. The infamous Nazi Laws of Niirnberg permitted cultural and spiritual "Nordification" of Germans with one Jewish grandparent, but the only hope for a child born of an Aryan German mother and a Jewish father was for the mother to formally swear that the child was not the issue of her Jewish husband, but of an adulterous liaison with an Aryan. The Nazi Civil Service Law of 1933 prescribed that no German could be considered a bona fide Aryan if he had more than one eighth Jewish blood (more than one Jewish great-grandparent).
But the Laws of Nürnberg had nothing on the laws of some
American states. Long before the Nazis adopted the same formula in defiance of all the laws of biology, South Carolina and Maryland defined colored persons as "Any person possessing one eighth or more Negro blood." However, South Carolina went on to provide that children of mixed parentage having less than one eighth Negro blood are entitled to the rights of whites; but if full-blooded whites object to their attending white schools, the state is obligated to provide them separate schools, neither white nor colored.
Florida imposes the Jim Crow line against all persons having as much as one sixteenth Negro blood. Arkansas and Virginia have preferred to vest discretionary power in the duly delegated (white ) officials via the definition: "Any person having any ascertainable Negro blood." In Texas and Tennessee, Negro blood does not have to be either ascertainable or in any specific proportion, as the laws read: "Any person of mixed blood descended from a Negro." Georgia - all-out for white supremacy - includes among "colored persons": "Any person having Negro, West Indian, Asiatic, or Indian blood, and all descendants." [my emphasis]
Those citations are also reminders of how race in America - and everywhere else - is very much a social construction.
Reconstruction, the period in American history that followed the Civil War, was an era filled with great hope and expectations, but it proved far too short to ensure a successful transition from bondage to free labor for the almost 4 million black human beings who’d been born into slavery in the U.S. During Reconstruction, the U.S. government maintained an active presence in the former Confederate states to protect the rights of the newly freed slaves and to help them, however incompletely, on the path to becoming full citizens. A little more than a decade later, the era came to an end when the contested presidential election of 1876 was resolved by trading the electoral votes of South Carolina, Louisiana and Florida for the removal of federal troops from the last Southern statehouses. ...
By 1877, in a climate of economic crisis, the “cost” of protecting the freedoms of African Americans became a price the American government was no longer willing to pay. The long rollback began in earnest: the period of retrenchment, voter suppression, Jim Crow segregation and quasi re-enslavement that was called by white Southerners, ironically, “Redemption.”...
What confounds me is how much longer the rollback of Reconstruction was than Reconstruction itself, how dogged was the determination of the “Redeemed South” to obliterate any trace of the gains made by freed people. [my emphasis]
He goes on to briefl describe the African-American resistance to the long aftermath of Reconstruction and the developing ideas, attitudes, and practices of white racism and white supremacy that evolved at the same time.
At the end of his book The Era of Reconstruction 18685-1877 (1966), Kenneth Stampp explains that the denial of rights to African-Americans took place without formally changing the basic Constitutional law enshrined in the 14th and 15th Amendments. This required massive deceit and elaborate pretenses. It could now only be done "by extralegal coercion or by some devious subterfuge." In imposing racial segregation, the majority whites relied on "the spurious argument that this did not in fact deprive them of the equal protection of the law."
This kind of massive pretence on the part of white society in itself had long-lasting consequences. Today, it's common for American conservatives to claim that whites are massively discriminated against in the US today on the basis of race. It's ridiculous, of course. But cynical white nationalists that actively promote the idea are building on a long history of white self-deception on matters of race. But noting that it is self-deception does not excuse it or make it sympathetic.
But Stampp makes an important point that changing Constitutional law with the 14th and 15th Amendments created both a legal structure and officially reconized standards of democracy and values that had a real effect. In some ways, his closing words on that subject sound perhaps a bit cavalierly optimistic. But the book was published in 1966, a period in which the civil rights movement was bringing very dramatic changes in the US:
For a time, of course the denial of equality was as effective one way as the other [i.e., de jure or de facto, officially or unofficially]; but when it was sanctioned by the laws of the [Andrew] Johnson governments [during the early years of Reconstruction] and approved by the federal government, there was no hope. When, however, state-imposed discrimination was, in effect, an evasion of the supreme law of the land, the odds, in the long run, were on the side of the Negro.
The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments ... make the blunders of that era, tragic though they were, dwindle into insignificance. For if it was worth four years of civil war to save the Union, it was worth a few years of radical resconstruction to give the American Negro the ultimate promise of equal civil and political rights. [my emphasis]
It includes a reminder that Confederate "Heritage" Month is unfortunately still officially celebrated:
Multiple Southern states proudly devote public time, energy and resources to celebrate the Confederacy each year. North Carolina and South Carolina celebrate “Confederate Memorial Day” on May 10. Kentucky, Louisiana and Tennessee celebrate it on June 3. Texas celebrates on Jan. 19, while Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi and – recently – Livingston, Tennessee, dedicate all of April to “Confederate History Month.” Alabama, Georgia, Florida and Mississippi also celebrate “Confederate Memorial Day” on various dates in April. [my emphasis]
The report recalls how a racist mass murder provided new intensity to the debate over Lost Cause public monuments, which actively continues four years later, "The 2015 massacre of nine African Americans at the historic 'Mother Emanuel' church in Charleston, South Carolina, sparked a nationwide movement to remove Confederate monuments, flags and other symbols from the public square, and to rename schools, parks, roads and other public works that pay homage to the Confederacy."
The defenders of monuments promoting a Lost Cause version of history that celebrates treason in in defense of slavery include a number of very fine people dubious characters:
White supremacists have also taken up the cause, staging hundreds of rallies across the country to protest monument removals. We saw a dramatic display of their anger in August 2017 when hundreds of racists marched with torches and shouted Nazi slogans in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a young, anti-racist counterprotester was killed.
President Donald Trump has sided with those who want to continue honoring the Confederacy, calling the removal of “beautiful” monuments “foolish” and tweeting that it is “[s]ad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart.”
The Lost Cause monuments provide a continuing example of the way that current political priorities and historical understandings and historical symbolism can be intricately connected:
There is no doubt among reputable historians that the Confederacy was established upon the premise of white supremacy and that the South fought the Civil War to preserve its slave labor. Its founding documents and its leaders were clear. “Our new government is founded upon … the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition,” declared Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens in his 1861 “Cornerstone speech.”
It’s also beyond question that the Confederate flag was used extensively by the Ku Klux Klan as it waged a campaign of terror against African Americans during the civil rights movement and that segregationists in positions of power raised it in defense of Jim Crow. George Wallace, Alabama’s governor, unfurled the flag above the state Capitol in 1963 shortly after vowing “segregation forever.” In many other cases, schools, parks and streets were named for Confederate icons during the era of white resistance to equality. [my emphasis]
Adam Gopnik just this month produced an overview of Reconstruction in How the South Won the Civil WarNew Yorker 04/01/2019, a review of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s new book, Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow (2019), the companion volume to Gates! currently-running PBS documentary, Reconstruction: America After the Civil War.
The PBS website for it has a Timeline, which with a little fumbling around with your mouse you can make talk.
Gopnik stresses the key role that violence played in the anti-Reconstruction, anti-democracy "Redemption" movement that by the mid-1970s, had sucessfully overthrown the Reconstruction governments. "The historian David Blight estimates that, between 1867 and 1868, something like ten per cent of the blacks who attended constitutional conventions in the South were attacked by the Klan."
The period of Reconstruction was tragically short, extending basically from 1865-1877. In other words, basically the length of time between the 2008 Presidential election campaign and now. But "tragically" doesn't adequately describe it. Because the classic Greek notion of tragedy was about a hero done in by fate. It wasn't Fate that destroyed Reconstruction democracy. It was the deliberate policitical and violent actions by the white supremacist Redeemers and the lack of commitment to democracy on the part of Republicans and Northern Democrats, as well.
Gopnik describes how powerful the Lost Cause narrative that justified the violent overthrow of Reconstruction was, and for how long it persisted as the dominanbt narrative. It's one of the most important narrative of American history illustrating how a view of the past frames current political disputes in important ways.
The historical literature that arose to defend white supremacy was soon accepted as a chronicle of truths, especially in the countless sober-seeming memoirs of the former leaders of the slave states, including Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederacy, who insisted that slavery was a side issue in a states’-rights war. The “Lost Cause” took on popular literary form in Thomas Dixon’s novel “The Clansman,” which became the basis for D. W. Griffith’s 1915 “The Birth of a Nation,” the first great American feature film. In Griffith’s Reconstruction, blacks, many played by white actors in blackface, are either menaces or morons (black legislators of the kind depicted in that lithograph spend their time in the statehouse drinking and eating), and are, thankfully, routed by the Klan - shown dressing in sheets because they have grasped the primitive African fear of ghosts.
It is still difficult to credit how long the Lost Cause lie lasted. Writing in the left-wing The Nation, James Agee, the brilliant film critic and the author of the text for “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” could announce, in 1948, that “Griffith’s absolute desire to be fair, and understandable, is written all over the picture; so are degrees of understanding, honesty, and compassion far beyond the capacity of his accusers. So, of course, are the salient facts of the so-called Reconstruction years.” Even as late as the nineteen-sixties, the Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison, in what was then a standard “Oxford History of the American People,” called for “ten thousand curses on the memory of that foulest of assassins, J. Wilkes Booth” - but for a surprising reason. “Not only did he kill a great and good President; he gave fresh life to the very forces of hate and vengeance which Lincoln himself was trying to kill,” Morison wrote. “Had Lincoln lived, there is every likelihood that his magnanimous policy towards the South would have prevailed; for, even after his death, it almost went through despite the Radicals.” The thought that the failure of Reconstruction had been its insufficient attention to the feelings and the interests of the white majority - like the thought that “The Birth of a Nation” should be considered to hold the “salient facts” of Reconstruction - strikes us now as astounding, but it was orthodox textbook history and criticism for an unimaginably long time, and among people who believed themselves to be progressive. [my emphasis]
It's always good to see a decent article about Reconstruction. , As Gopnik indicates, it wasn't until the 1960s or so that a realistic, democratic history of Reconstruction became more widely respectable.
But for people who sought it out, there was always a strand of pro-democracy histories of Reconstruction. They were not the dominant narrative in the historical profession, but they were there.
In addition to W.E B. Du Bois, the Journal of Negro History (Journal of African American History since 2002) and historians associated with it, for example, kept the realistic narrative alive. The New Yorker piece mentions Mississippi's black Senator Hiram Revels, who seemed to echo a Redemptionist (anti-Reconstruction) position. But John Roy Lynch, the first African-America Mississippi Congressman, elected to Congress in 1873, was a consistent defender of Reconstruction. He published a book called The Facts of Reconstruction in 1913 and lived well into the second FDR Administration and was writing defences of Reconstruction and criticisms of the dominant but false and reactionary accounts by mainstream historians.
Historians like Kenneth Stampp (who taught at UC-Berkeley) and John Hope Franklin were influential in making an honest evaluation of Reconstruction more mainstream respectable in the profession. Richard Current's 1988 book Those Terrible Carpetbaggers: A Reinterpretation (1988) is one of my favorite accounts of the period, and very pro-Reconstruction. It has a great account of Mississippi Gov. Adelbert Ames' desperate attempt to prevent a Redeemer takeover in Mississiippi. Eric Foner, who Gopnik describes as a "great revisionist [pro-Reconstruction] historian," was dismissive of Ames in his book Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (2005), something that has always struck me as bizarre.
[04/13/2019: Updated to clarify that Hiram Revels was the first African-American Mississippi Senator and John Roy Lynch was Mississippi's first African-American Member of the House of Representatives. Revels became Senator in 1870, elected to that office by the state legislature, which was the method of electing Senators in the 19th century.]
Today we have another quote from Richard Nelson Current's "John C. Calhoun, Philosopher of Reaction" The Antioch Review 3/2 (Summer, 1943), in tis slightly modified version of a post from a previous year's Confederate "Heritage" Month series.
This one connects the thinking of the godfather of secession to rightwing groups of more contemporary status in 1943. After noting that some defenders of slavery like Jefferson Davis and George Fitzhugh were more crass in their view that the master himself, Current writes:
But it is the spirit of Calhoun, not that of his more forthright followers, which lives on. It is a spirit that may be about to materialize in new and startling forms. Now, if ever, is the time for right-wing Republicans to join with Bourbon Democrats in the sort of reactionary alliance that Calhoun envisaged. The shibboleths of these allies will be not Nullification, indeed, but certainly State Rights; not the Four Freedoms exactly, but Liberty with the connotations it had for Calhoun and for the American Liberty League. The real objects of their attack will be the social controls which liberals will seek to maintain in the interests of world peace, and the democratic aspirations which have been let slip with the cry of havoc but which cannot be chained up again with the dogs of war. The leaders of the new movement will no doubt point with pride to Thomas Jefferson. But the Sage of Monticello is not their man. Let them look, instead, to the political metaphysician of South Carolina, John C. Calhoun. [my emphasis]
Today, we see that alliance between what in 1943 were Southern Democrats and conservative Republicans fully realized in the Republican Party. It took a long time. It took McCarthyism, the Goldwater movement, the Reagan Revolution, the Gingrich Revolution, and their successors in the Cheney-Bush Administration and the Trumpist desublimation of of the underlying impulses of its predecessors. But they have finally achieved it. And in spectacular fashion.
And, yes, when the white nationalists talk about the Founders, it's John Calhoun, "the political metaphysician of South Carolina," on whose thinking they draw, far more than that of actual Founders like Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Andrew Jackson. (Yes, Andrew Jackson actually fought in the Revolutionary War, so he counts as a Founder!)
Richard Sale has some thoughtful observations about the Fort Sumter Republicans in Concurrent MajoritySic Semper Tyrannis 10/09/2013. (This is a slightly modified version on a post from a previous year's Confederate "Heritage" Month series.)
John Calhoun (1782-1850) was the political and intellectual godfather of secession and the Civil War, one of the true villains of American history. And I'm talking Dick Cheney levels of villainy. He has the reputation of being a significant political theorist, largely on the dubious virtues of his snooze-inducing books, A Disquisition on Government and A Discourse on the Constitution and Government of the United States.
John Caldwell Calhoun (1782-1850), by some reports later reincarnated as Dick Cheney
Gerald Capers in his article on Calhoun in the Encyclopædia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite (2012) calls him, not without ambiguity, "a genius unto himself." (The Britannica is my baseline for stolid respectable opinion.) "Calhoun's two books on government, published posthumously, and his many cogent speeches in Congress have gained him a reputation as one of the country's foremost original political theorists. He has been credited with preceding Karl Marx in advancing an economic interpretation of history." (Richard Current in the Calhoun biography cited below notes that Capers' own 1960 John C. Calhoun, Opportunist: A Reappraisal "is refreshingly critical and realistic," rejecting "eulogistic" views of Calhoun's historian admirers like Charles Wiltse and Margaret Coit.)
Richard Hofstadter famously portrayed Calhoun as "the Marx of the Master Class."
And Calhoun certainly was influential. But however sophisticated or creative his political ideas were in some kind of larger picture, their focus was preserving the institution of slavery in the American South. Sale explains his theory and how it broadly relates to current events - oddly without the word "slavery" appearing in his post, though race does - as follows:
It was John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, who in 1833, invented the idea of the "concurrent majority," the strategy being used by the Tea Party today. As a person, Calhoun was a dour, humorless intractable man. He was entirely addicted to complex abstractions. His thought had a white-hot and relentless intensity. He would wander about and mutter, "This indeed is a real crisis." As he was dying, a friend asked him to sum up his life, and he replied, "I see nothing to repeat and little to correct," practically the same words President George W. Bush used in describing his presidency. But make no mistake and don’t be distracted. Intellectually, Bush wasn't within shouting distance of Calhoun.
As a thinker, Calhoun was concerned about the power of section versus section, obsessed by the waning power of the South which he felt was being increasingly overwhelmed by the growth of the North. As a result, Calhoun pronounced the South "a fixed and hopeless minority." In other words, the white people of the South were being denied the means to make their power nationally felt, thanks to the majorities of the North. If you think of the shrinking numbers of white people that will live in America in ten years, the growing number of Asians, Hispanics, gays, etc. the "white" Right Wing Republicans and Tea Party people would probably say the same thing about America today that whites in America "are a fixed and hopeless minority." Think of the eve of last year’s election when Bill O'Reilly cried out in anguish that America wasn't "white" any more. That observation encapsulates the major Tea Party fear.
The concept of the concurrent majority was a device to boost certain interests at the expense of others. We have all read items that have highlighted the role of Right Wing billionaires who are funding and supporting certain candidates who are working to restrict weaken and hamper the rights of minorities to prevent them from becoming majority voices. To the Tea Party, any minority that enjoys any degree of majority support is an enemy. We usually think of minorities as a group laboring to become part of the majority. A Virginia politician, William H. Roane, in the 1850s said that he thought that chief right of minorities was that of "freely, peaceably and legally converting themselves into a majority whenever they can." To prevent certain rising minorities becoming part of the national majority is the aim of the Tea Party program.
The brilliant American historian, Richard Hofstadter, said that the concurrent majority was designed specifically "to protect a vested interest of considerable power.["] [my emphasis]
Capers describes the Calhounian theory in its original historical context this way:
In the summer of 1831 he openly avowed his belief in nullification, a position that he had anonymously advanced three years earlier in the essay South Carolina Exposition and Protest. Each state was sovereign, Calhoun contended, and the Constitution was a compact among the sovereign states. Therefore, any one state (but not the United States Supreme Court) could declare an act of Congress unconstitutional. The proponents of the nullified measure, according to the theory, would then have to obtain an amendment to the Constitution — which required a two-thirds vote of each house of Congress and ratification by three-fourths of the states — confirming the power of Congress to take such action.
Although the tariff was the specific issue in the nullification crisis of 1832–33, what Calhoun was actually fighting for was protection of the South's "peculiar institution," slavery, which he feared someday might be abolished by a Northern majority in Congress. The tariff, Calhoun put forth in one of his public letters, is "of vastly inferior importance to the great question to which it has given rise…the right of a state to interpose, in the last resort, in order to arrest an unconstitutional act of the General Government." [my emphasis]
Hofstadter in From Calhoun to the DixiecratsSocial Research 16/2 (June 1949) noted an important and revealing feature of Calhoun's eventual conception:
Actually, the South had little recourse except to the threat of leaving the Union in order to gain a formal constitutional guarantee of the concurrent majority. Calhoun's final version of this device was a dual executive; each section was to elect one member, each member was to have veto power. This concession could be won, he reminded southerners, only if they abandoned internal party division and manifested complete solidarity and militancy.
This would presumably guarantee the ultimate in the bipartisanship that our star political commentators in the US today cherish so much.
Richard Current in his wonderful 1963 biography, John C. Calhoun, reported that the defender of slavery had a high opinion of his own significance: "Obviously Calhoun ... thought of himself as the Newton, the Galileo, of political science." (p. 110)
But he also writes of Calhoun's political theory:
Probably he was the most systematic thinker among the active American politicians of his time. His argument was, and remains, persuasive. Once his assumptions are granted, his reasoning proceeds pretty well from one step to another, and his conclusions follow almost, but not quite irresistibly. Thus his basic postulates regarding sovereignty lad to his conception of the constitutional compact, and this in turn to his position on nullification, secession, and slavery in the territories.
Even if his assumption be accepted, however, his argument reveals gaps, inconsistencies, contradictions, and downright errors once it is closely examined. If his assumptions are challenged, the whole structure begins to shake. And if they are rejected, it falls in a heap. (P. 112)
This lack of coherence and cynical flexibility in argument is something his spiritual heirs share.
Calhoun's theory revolved around the defense of slavery. Period. As Current puts it, "He was taking a concept that had been invented to defend the divine right of kings and he was using it to defend the divine right of slaveowners." (p. 113) And his theory that ostensibly was meant to protect the rights of minorities, the only minority he was focused on protecting was that composed of white slaveowners. The minority of black Americans, slaves and free, was not one Calhoun had the least interest in protecting. Just the opposite. As Capers puts it, "Although Calhoun is remembered as the defender of minorities, he had no use for any minority — certainly not labourers or abolitionists — except the Southern one. His solution to the problem of the preservation of the Union was to give the South everything it demanded." Hofstadter in 1949 observed:
... although Calhoun has been frequently hailed as a pluralist, his political analysis was essentially dualistic~ So long as he could talk in terms of the protection of "the minority," against the tyranny of "the majority," his ex parte pleading for the southern cause could masquerade plausibly as a universal concern for political restraint, balance, and the general good.
It's pretty obvious how that kind of thinking would be attractive to today's Fort Sumter Republican Party. The whole point of his political theory was to give the white slaveholding minority of the South a veto power over anything and everything the national government might want to do. Which is what today's Republican Party is trying to do in the current government shutdown/debt ceiling fight. Hofstadter wrote of the Dixiecrats in 1949:
Their essential strategy hinges upon the effective marshaling of a minority [pro-segregation Southern whites] in a solid bloc, but they must condemn the same strategy when it is adopted by enfranchised and politically self-conscious Negroes. Thus Governor [Fielding] Wright [of Mississippi], in his speech accepting the vice-presidential nomination of the Dixiecratic party declared: "Government by bloc, by vociferous minorities, is a cowardly thing. It is a disgrace to America. It paves the way for ultimate dictatorship or socialism."
As Current explained in 1963, Calhoun's race-based strategies of resistance found their true heirs in segregation and its strategy of massive resistance to integration, i.e., to adopting the American form of government:
Wherever a White Citizen's Council meets in Mississippi, or a similar group in another of the Southern states, there is to be sought, nowadays, the true spirit of Calhoun. It is to be sought in the activities of conservative - or reactionary - Southern whites. The way they use the lobby, the bloc, the party constitution, and other political devices can be considered as essentially Calhounian.
These white Southerners now face problem quite similar to the one that Calhoun faced more than a hundred years ago. They talk of maintaining white supremacy and he talked of protecting slavery. The problem remains that of defending, against external attack, institution based upon a belief in human inequality. (p. 148; italics in original)
Hofstadter in 1949 emphasized the reactionary nature of Calhoun's basic political theory: "Although Calhoun was notable for his realism as a social thinker, there was little place in his philosophy for social change."
