Confederate "Heritage" Month 2020, April 30: No Confederate battle flags for the US Marine Corps

A South Carolina news source, the Charleston Post and Courier gives us a great illustration for this last Confederate "Heritage" Month on how neo-Confederate/Lost Cause ideology still plays a role in American understandings of our history and in contemporary politics: Thomas Noverlly; Top Marine responds after SC Confederate group angered about ban on battle flag 04/29/2020:

The Marine Corps’ top officer has detailed why he banned the Confederate battle flag from bases across the country, a month after a South Carolina heritage group called the policy “appalling.”

Earlier this year, Commandant of the Marine Corps Gen. David Berger asked officers to create a policy to remove Confederate-related paraphernalia from all of the branch’s bases. When news of the policy leaked last month, many heritage groups, including South Carolina’s Sons of Confederate Veterans, were outraged. ...

More than one-third of all active-duty troops and more than half of minority service members say they have personally witnessed examples of white nationalism or ideologically driven racism within the ranks, according to a February survey of active-duty personnel conducted by the Military Times.

Kevin Levin asks a sensible question:

Why is anyone concerned about what an organization that celebrates a rebellion that killed United States Marines thinks about this policy? Seriously. https://t.co/yStZ4VXrbo

— Kevin M. Levin (@KevinLevin) April 29, 2020

This is Berger's April 23 tweet providing the text of his official statement:

Read here for my views on displays of the confederate battle flag.https://t.co/MuM6ClDXV5 pic.twitter.com/uAAfa7awMf

— David H. Berger (@CMC_MarineCorps) April 23, 2020

Corey Dickstein reported earlier For Stars and Stripes (Marine commandant defends banning Confederate flag as a divisive symbol 04/23/2020):

The Confederate battle flag is a symbol still closely tied to the southern states and slavery during the Civil War. The symbol remains popular in the American South, where defenders describe it as representing southern heritage and pride. But the Confederate battle flag has also been used heavily by white supremacist groups, and is considered a symbol of racism by others. ...

The Confederacy’s legacy has had a lingering impact on the U.S. military. While Berger disallowed the display of its symbols in February, the Army has 10 installations that carry the names of Confederate generals. The Army has no intention of renaming those posts, which used Confederate names in “the spirit of reconciliation,” a service official said earlier this year.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2020, April 29: Civil War music, sentimental and funny

Some of the popular Civil War songs were sentimental and have a saccharine sound today. Here is Tennessee Ernie Ford singing one of them, Just Before The Battle, Mother

But we may suspect that such a song was more popular back on the homefront than around the campfires on the front lines. This cynical parody of that same song is also a jab at how what sounds like patriotic devotion back home may sound more like cluelessness to soldiers actually in the fight. Sung by Bobby Horton, Just Before the Battle Mother (Parody):

That version has the Yankees as the other side. This version of the same song, sung by Hermes Nye with the title, Farewell Mother, has the "Rebs" on the other side.

The latter is another selection from Songs of the Civil War (1860) from the hardcore folkie label Folkways, which today is part of the Smithsonian Institute.

The liner notes, edited by Irwin Silber, introduce the collection (in a text by Silber) this way:

The Civil War, that great fratricidal conflict which played such a decisive role in shaping our history and our national consciousness, exits no longer in the first- hand memories of living men. The aging, gray-haired veterans, whose grand reunions and garrulous recollections were, for so many decades, living reminders of the Civil War, have all crossed over into Jordan. The memories of the Civil war are now dependent on less fragile material - on histories and biographies, on the printed page and the time-worn photograph , on artists sketches and such minute memorabilia as wartime maps, fading uniforms, medals (some tarnished, some still shining}, bayonets, swords, battle flags, and other material objects, trifling and important, of an age gone by, which remain after human flesh has paid its inevitable price to mortality.

Among our less tangible but no less real keepsakes, however, are the songs of the Civil War - the stirring marching sones and patriotic hymns, the unabashedly sentimental ballads and the comic ditties, the boasting songs and drinking songs and fighting songs and loving songs of America's bloodiest and most significant struggle. And through these songs, an age which is past is brought to life, and we live with the men and women who walked this land of ours a century ago.

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

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

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

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

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2020, April 27: Ulysses Grant's funeral and white North-South reconciliation

There's an excellent blog called Civil War Memory by Kevin Levin. Kevin is a historian and author of Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War's Most Persistent Myth (2019). As the title suggests, he focuses a lot on the process of memory formation in the way Americans collectively remember the Civil War.

As he notes in Civil War Memory 101 (Week 6) 04/26/2020, he's currently conducting a Twitter discussion on a book by Caroline Janney, Remembering the Civil War: Reconciliation and the Limits of Reunion (2013), which also deals with the building of Civil War memory. He mentions in that post another book, U.S. Grant-American Hero, American Myth by Joan Waugh (2013).

Grant was the most important Union general in the Civil War. Lincoln was frustrated with a number of his generals, probably most notoriously George McClellan, who Lincoln and apparently most historians since have seen as overly conservative in his approach. Lincoln finally removed him from command in late 1862. Lincoln famously praised Grant for what he found an excellent qualification, "I can't spare this man – he fights."

After Andrew Johnson did all he could as President to block serious Reconstruction efforts in the South, Grant was elected President as a Republican and was pro-Reconstruction. But during the time he served as President (1869-1877), he also proved to be unwilling to use the Army to the extent necessary to defeat the Ku Klux Klan and similar white terrorist groups the conducted terror campaigns against blacks and worked to overthrow the elected, democratic Reconstruction state governments.

To me, it's counterintuitive that Grant's death in 1885 would be taken as a moment of national reconciliation, i.e., reconciliation between the white majorities in the North and South on the basis of suppressing the basic rights of black citizens, especially in the former Confederate states. In the chapter of her book called, "Pageantry of Woe: The Funeral of U.S. Grant," Waugh explains that exactly that happened:

“There is perhaps no parallel in the history of state funerals,” another observer stated, “where so many orations were delivered as at yesterday’s obsequies.” The thousands of eulogies and obituaries for Grant stressed his good Christian moral character, his role in saving and preserving the Union, and his magnanimity at Appomattox.

The praise for the last was especially loud, as eulogists likened the sentiment for sectional reconciliation engendered by Grant’s death to a final, and happy, ending to the tragic national drama begun by the Civil War. One minister captured a powerful and popular theme of Grant’s life: “By a single act Gen’l Grant put himself above the wisest of American statesmen.

That act was the terms he offered to Lee for the surrender of his Army. ... In a few, clear, simple lines [he] solved at once the problem of peace, and the possible unity and fraternity of the American people.” A speaker at a memorial service declared, “That grand funeral pageant ... owed its main impressiveness to the evidence it afforded ... [of] a restored National Union, a renewed brotherhood among the people, and a renewed sisterhood among the States.”

Richard Brookhiser mentions the key terms of that surrender in Victory incomplete: Lasting struggle after Civil War New York Post 04/08/2015:

In the parlor at Appomattox, Lee asked for the Union’s terms. Grant wrote out a generous paragraph. Officers would promise that neither they nor their men would take up arms against the United States; long guns and artillery were to be stacked, parked and surrendered.

But ex-rebels could keep their side arms and their mounts. Asking them to give up their pistols and swords, Grant wrote later, would have been “an unnecessary humiliation,” and Southern men, most of them farmers, needed their horses and mules for spring plowing.

No doubt the former Confederate soldiers were happy their could keep arms. Unfortunately for the future of democracy in the South, many of those trained soldiers went on to use their arms on behalf of anti-Reconstruction terror groups. At times during the worst crises leading up to the overthrow of the Reconstruction governments, the fact that the terrorist groups had such a large store of arms at their disposal was a critical factor.

Waugh notes that even 20 years after the war, it seems counterintuitive that Southerners as well as Northerners would celebrate Grant as a unifying figure, because the Lost Cause ideology was still intense in the South. (And hasn't died out to this day!) She describes how the death of Grant functioned in the south in particular as a way of placing the Civil War into their longer narrative(s) of American history:

Moreover, prominent speakers - leading political figures, ministers, military officers, and veterans - universally praised Grant as one of the greatest generals in the history of the world, and the general who, along with Lincoln, preserved the Union for all time. The fact that Grant was both a general and a president prompted southerners to emphasize the connection with Virginian George Washington. The Montgomery Advertiser proclaimed “His death a National Affliction” and stated: “Looking at the life and character of General Grant from the broadest national standpoint, it is true to say that no man since Washington has better illustrated the genius of American institutions or the temper of Americans as a people.” The majority of Southern eulogies made no mention of Lincoln at all - one of the notable differences between white northern and southern commemorations of Grant. While the passage of time ensured that reconciliation between the sections was under way by 1885, it was by no means fully secured. [my emphasis]

Waugh makes very clear: "Grant himself did not abandon his deepest beliefs about what the Union Cause represented. Indeed, he never backed down either in public or private on his firmly held belief that slavery was the cause of the war and that emancipation was a glorious, if unfulfilled, consequence of the conflict."

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2020, April 26: Historical context of Southern secession

I just came across this quote from Hannah Arendt, which is relevant to understanding the prevalence of Lost Cause history:

To the extent there is a “handling” [Bewaltigen] of the past, it consists in the retelling of what has happened; but even this retelling, which shapes history, does not solve problems and does not appease suffering, it does not cope with anything in the end. Rather, so long as the meaning of the event remains alive - and this can be the case for a very long time – it stimulates repetitive storytelling. (Quoted in "Erzählen formt Geschichte" Osteuropa 59/7-8 2009; my translation tfrom the German)

Although Arendt herself notoriously criticized efforts to integrate American public schools in the 1950s. So we should probably be especially careful in applying her observation to debunking neo-Confederacy.

These days we're less likely to talk about, say, laws of history and instead talk about "narratives that describe historical processes in a form that resembles historical laws". Or something along those lines. And Arendt is doing something along those lines there.

There is no one alive today who was living during the Civil War of 1861-1865. But historical images and political themes in the US today still tap into the history of the Civil War. So we're still telling and refining stories about it. But it still is tied to current political passions. That doesn't mean that the events can't be evaluated "scientifically," i.e., in a scholarly and accurate way that takes facts seriously. But we also have aware that our understandings of the past and what others hear when we communicate it is shaped not only by the current passions around it, but by the decades of stories that have been told about it. And the passions wound up with those!

With American history, we also have a government that has a continuous history that goes back to the Constitution of 1789. It has had 27 Amendments, including the Bill of Rights, the first 10 Amendments, that were adopted immediately by the first Congress. So The Federalist Papers, polemics in support of the adoption of the Constitution by James Madison, Alelxander Hamilton, and John Jay, are still used in present-day legal research to shed light on the original context and understanding of Constitutional provisions. 1789 is no longer our present. But the Constitution of 1789 is very much part of the American present.

Another way of thinking about the passage of time is to compare the age of living people to the age of the United States, Even if we count the founding of the United States as 1776 rather than 1789, a person who is 65 year old in 2020 has been alive during 27% of the history of the US. When Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) was assassinated at age 56, he had been alive for 63% of the entire history of the United States.

Comparing time frames between events in diffferent periods can also add some helpful perspective. In my Confederate "Heritage" Month posts this year, I've discussed the Missouri Compromise of 1820. That came 44 years after the Declaration of Independence, and provided a drmatic signal about how slavery and its defense had drastically changed within that time, not least because of the invention of the cotton gin in 1793. The Nullification Controversy came in 1932, 12 years after the Missouri Compromise, and it put secession in defense of slavery on the agenda, though it was nominally about a tariff.

The Mexican War (Guerra de Estados Unidos a México) ended in 1848, setting off a bitter new round of arguments over the territorial extension of slavery. That was 15 years after the Nullification Controversy was resolved in 1833. The Compromise of 1850, another major inflection point on slavery, came only two years later. The "Bleeding Kansas" controversy broke out four years later in 1854. The Dred Scott decision came down in 1857, essentially making armed conflict over slavery inevitable.

John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, two and a half years later (Oct 1859). John Calhoun's South Carolina became the first state to secede from the Union in December 1860.

To compare, 44 years ago (1976), the Democratic primary was down to a contest between Jerry Brown and Jimmy Carter (both still alive), Ronald Reagan was challenging encumbent Prsident Jerry Ford, whose chief of staff was Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney served on Rummny's staff. At the time of Missouri Compromise, the public and major political figures still had as contemporary history the seven-year Revolutionary War, the French Revolution, the War of 1812 when Britain occupied Washington and burned the White House (Presidential Mansion then) and the Capitol building and the Louisiana Purchase. The US had expanded from the original 13 colonies to include Vermont, Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, Louisiana, Indiana, Mississippi, Illinois, Alabama, and Maine. The main secession fear came from British sympathizers who promoted the idea of Northeastern states seceding, although it never came to anything as serious as the Nullification Controversy.

Twelve years ago (Missouri Compomise-Nullification Controvery) was 2008, the year Obama was elected President, when Britain was still a member of the European Union, and Russia was supporting armed secessionists in (the nation of) Georgia. Commentators and politicians still talk about events of that year in the assumption that they will be familiar to most of their listeners. We still discuss the Revolutions of 1989 and the subsequent fall of the Soviet Union as events whose consequences are still playing out and which still heavily define the politics of Europe and the world. In 1859, when John Brown raided Harper's Ferry, the European revolutions of 1848 were only 11 years in the past. That was the year democratic revolutions swept western and central Europe: France (of course!), Germany, Italy, the Netherlands. In the Habsburg (Austro-Hungarian) Empire, with revolts breaking out in large parts of the Empire, the Emperor and his court felt obliged to flee Vienna. Not since the America and French Revolutions of the 18th century had such an event taken place, and never of this scale.

Democracy - even in the now seemingly rudimentary form of universal male suffrage, representative parliaments, and republican rule of law, was very much a revolutionary notion at that time. And John Calhoun was scarcely the only partisan of slavery who was terrified of it. Especially if it took the form of slaves insisting that they were human beings with the same rights and abilities of white people.

That was the thought-world in which Americans of that time lived.

The philosopher Walter Benjamin had a way of viewing the past which may tell us something about how we still today can understand events that are no longer contemporary history for anyone living today as somehow vital to the current moment. In his younger days, Benjamin used this image for meditation.

In his "Theses on the Philosophy of History" (1940) he expresses an idea that has fascinated me ever since I first read it:

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth hangs open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage hurling it before his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call Progress.

We can't actually repair the past. Then again, as William Faulkner had one of his characters observe, ""The past is never dead. It's not even past." (Requiem for a Nun, 1951)

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2020, April 25: Calhoun and slavery

John Grove has a very recent essay on arch-reactionary John Calhoun in the libertarian journal Law and Liberty, of which he is an associate editor, Calhoun and Constitutionalism 04/08/2020.

Grove argumes that Calhoun's political theory can be meaningfully parsed to distinguish between its philosphical and constitutional theories from his positions on race and slavery:

Calhoun was an unrepentant slaveholder, and he is often described as a figure who fundamentally changed public attitudes by developing a new theory of slavery. The first of these descriptions is undoubtedly true. The second is mostly false. ...

Calhoun’s rhetoric reflected ideas that, by the 1830s, had become commonplace in the South: He claimed that slavery was humane and improved the condition of the slave; he contrasted it favorably with the excess of Northern and European free labor; he claimed the plantation was a community which constructively blended the interests of the slave and master alike; but he never expanded much on these ideas. Such arguments rarely came up unprompted and there is little evidence of his having exerted significant intellectual effort in developing anything resembling a theory of slavery—economic or pseudo-scientific. It is not mentioned at all in the Disquisition, and only comes up briefly in the Discourse and there only as an explanation for the cause of recent tensions between the states. The infamous “positive good” phrase - which ... Calhoun immediately insisted was misinterpreted as an abstract label - was nestled in his remarks amongst all the common, paternalistic bromides which pervaded the South.

Calhoun’s views on race and slavery were unquestionably odious. But they were not terribly new or innovative. And as I explore in detail in my book, not only are they severable from his political and constitutional theory, several of them actually stand in stark contrast to the more developed, intellectually-rigorous arguments about constitutional liberty found in his theory. The most obvious of these is the contradiction between chattel slavery and the presumption that unchecked power over others can never be reliably benevolent.

The book to which Grove refers there is John C. Calhoun’s Theory of Republicanism (2016), where he argues the case at greater length.

Calhoun was a major political figure, a pivotal one in Amrican history, actually. And unfortunately. His theories have also been influential on generations of American conservatives. So I wouldn't want to just dismiss them as frivolous.

But this argument of Grove's, for instance, really strikes me as untenable: "It is essential to treat Calhoun’s rejection of abolitionism separately from his moral defense of Southern slavery." This has a close kinship to the Lost Cause argument that the Civil War occurred over the abstract issues of States Rights, and not because of slavery. Even though the only State Rights issue the seceeding states were so concerned about that the mounted a treasonous rebellion, Grove argues that Calhoun's rejection of the movement to abolish slavery had nothing to do with defending the slavery they wanted to abolish.

Let's just say it's a strained argument.

Confederate „Heritage“ Month 2020, April 24: the history Zombie of the happy slaves

A new popular history by Peter Charles Hoffer takes a debunking look at some common assumptions among Americans about our own history, Zombie History: Lies About Our Past that Refuse to Die (2020).

One such “Zombie” he discusses is the “Sambo” image, “the happy darky, the slave who loved his master.” This particular historical Zombie “sang and danced through the pages of antebellum southern writers and intellectuals.” It was a propaganda narrative, of course. In the real world:

When slaves gave testimony from firsthand knowledge, they revealed that slavery was inherently a brutal and brutalizing institution. In law, it reduced human beings to chattel - pieces of property that could be bought and sold, inherited and gifted away, at the will of the owner (or his creditors). In practice, it allowed all manner of physical and psychological abuse so long as the owner, his agent, or any free white person called it “correction.” In law the slave could offer no resistance to such punishment, as in law the slave was not a person with any rights.

Defenders of slavery then and later offered the following response—in practice, slavery was far gentler than it was in law. [my emphasis]

That “later” includes today, when advocates of a Lost Cause view of American history do invoke a version of the “sambo Zombie,” often as part of a common arguments from Republicans that African-Americans today are lazy and look for the government to take care of them, because they got used to be so well cared for under slavery. Whites opposing Reconstruction took up that argument as soon as the Civil War ended. So Zombie really is a good name for it. It’s undead self has been staggering ever since.

Hoffer writes further:

In response, abolitionists then and observers now demonstrate that free persons never wanted to change places with slaves, denouncing more onerous callings as slavery. For example, female household help in the antebellum North rejected the term “servant” and wanted to be called “maid” because servant was a code word for slave. Slaves wanted to be free. The constraints on acting on this desire were familial - slaves did not want to be parted from their children, parents, or other relatives. In fact, while few slave families were intentionally severed, at auction and in wills mothers were separated from children. Every slave family would have known or seen such separations, and the threat of them, perhaps more terrifying than physical correction [i.e., beating and other forms of abuse including murder], hung over every slave family. In particular, the expansion of slavery from coastal regions farther to the south and west broke up families. When slaves could run away from bondage safely, for example during the Civil War, they did so in the hundreds of thousands. [my emphasis]

It's very remarkable from the point of view of the slavery apologists' Zombie claim, that there was no clamor from Southern whites to be allowed to become slaves so they could enjoy that allegedly cushy lifestyle!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Honorable Senator from South Carolina:

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

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

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

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

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

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

As a nation, we began by declaring that "all men are created equal." We now practically read it "all men are created equal, except negroes" When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read "all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics." When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty - to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy [sic].

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

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 22: Calhoun and Jefferson on slavery (1)

The Great Nullifier and arch-reactionary John Calhoun gave a speech in the Senate on June 27, 1848, weighing in on the controversy over slavery in territories that might be captured during the Mexican War then underway that had been concluded in February of that year. The immediate topic which he was addressing was actually on the question of slavery in Oregon, which became a US Territory and was not part of Mexico. But the territories that might be captured in the war were very much on Calhoun's mind. The Mexican War was generally enthusiastically supported by the slave states, but Calhoun had reservations about the war, because he thought that significant parts of Mexico were not suitable for slavery.

The speech is known as his "Speech on the Oregon Bill," and he elaborated some important parts of his worldview in it. The text was published in an Appendix for that date to the Congressional Globe: an abridged version is available from the Teaching American History website.

Calhoun's worldview was primarily centered around the view that chattel slavery in the American South was a great institution which much be preserved even at the cost of the destruction of the United States in the Constitutional form in which it then existed. While he makes some grand theoretical and Constitutional arguments in the speech, they are all transparently centered on his fight to preserve and extend slavery.

The secessionist threat is there in this speech:

I have believed, from the beginning, that this [slavery] was the only question sufficiently potent to dissolve the Union, and subvert our system of government; and that the sooner it was met and settled, the safer and better for all. I have never doubted but that, if permitted to progress beyond a certain point, its settlement would become impossible, and am under deep conviction that it is now rapidly approaching it — and that if it is ever to be averted, it must be done speedily. In uttering these opinions I look to the whole. If I speak earnestly, it is to save and protect all. [my emphasis]

In other words: Nice Union you've got there, Yankees. It'd be a shame if something happened to it.

Twenty-first century neo-Confederates can relate to that Calhounian attitude. It's another way his dark soul goes marching on.

This speech is also an interesting example of contention over historical symbols in the politics of a particular day. In this speech, he centers the figure of Thomas Jefferson in a way that emphasizes Jefferson's ambiguous legacy on slavery.

Calhoun introduces Jefferson as the main sponsor of the idea of excluding slavery from the Northwest Territory, which eventually became part of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. This set the stage for a north-south political split over slavery. And that is probably the most significant contribution of Jefferson to the antislavery cause. It's common these days for American progressives to dismiss Jefferson's antislavery position as complete cynicism on his part. He was, of course, a slaveowner himself.

But his position was much more complicated than that. And Calhoun's speech reflected that. Jefferson was astute enough as a politician and student of history and philosophy to know that slavery was incompatible with liberal democracy and the rule of law, as the classical liberal theory of politics and governance understood them.

Calhoun next brings Jefferson forward as a witness against restriction of slavery, based on Jefferson's dismay over the Missouri Compromise, which established a new territorial limit on slavery. In a famous letter that Calhoun quotes, Jefferson says of the Missouri Compromise:

I had for a long time ceased to read the newspapers or pay any attention to public affairs, confident they were in good hands, and content to be a passenger in our bark to the shore from which I am not distant. but this momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. it is hushed indeed for the moment. but this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence. a geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper. [my emphasis]

Jefferson sounds a bit "burned out" in that passage. But it shows how events were presenting him in dramatic fashion with the limitations of his own position. Jefferson was never a Calhounist nullifier. But he was inclined to see states as a defender of basic liberal principles. But he also did have some personal and political commitment to the institution of slavery.

Jefferson, like virtually all white antislavery Americans back then, viewed the abolition of slavery as something that would be done by states and it would accompany a decrease in the number of black people as a proportion of the population. Because that's how emancipation happened in the Northern states like New York. Jefferson letter on the Missouri Compromise reflected this outlook:

I can say with conscious truth that there is not a man on earth who would sacrifice more than I would, to relieve us from this heavy reproach, in any practicable way. the cession of that kind of property, for so it is misnamed, is a bagatelle which would not cost me in a second thought, if, in that way, a general emancipation and expatriation could be effected: and, gradually, and with due sacrifices, I think it might be.

This was an unrealistic expectation at that time. In fact, the proposal by New York Congressman James Tallmadge, Jr. for excluding slavery from Missouri that set off the immediate controversy was based on the gradual-emancipation model other states had used. The representatives of the Slave Power in Congress weren't willing to tolerate it. But Jefferson was clear-headed enough to realize that he had no practical idea of that such a result could be achieved without a serious national convulsion, which Jefferson also hoped to avoid. He continues directly, "I think it might be. but, as it is, we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other." (my emphasis)

But for John Calhoun in 1848 threatening the Yankees with secession and civil war, Jefferson position that "justice is in one scale," i.e., the abolitionist side and "self-preservation (of the planter class as it then existed] in the other", was pretty weak tea. That was the best he could do to try to position the image and historical aura of Thomas Jefferson on the side of treason and secession. But Calhoun didn't care about justice.

Or, more generously, for John Calhoun, "justice" was indistinguishable from the interest of slaveowning planters as they themselves conceived it in 1848.

In tomorrow's post, we'll look at Calhoun's further thoughts on Jefferson and liberal republican government.

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 21: the later heritage of John Calhoun

In his biography John C. Calhoun (1966), Richard Current talked about the later 20th century manifestation of "the genuine ghost of the Great Nullifier." He talks about attempts to rehabilitate Calhoun's theory of government as some kind of deep insight into the American political system. But Calhoun's theory of government was basically an elaborate justification for preserving slavery, framed as a way to protect minority interests within the American system. But the only minority interest he really cared about was that of slaveowners.

Some conservatives tried to spin Calhoun's theory as being relevant to various other minority interests in the compromises that various factions and interests group make in American politics. But, Current explains, "the new interpreters of Calhoun have been careless in their reading of his philosophy and superficial in their description of current politics."

On the whole, he seems to have taken a dualist, not a pluralist, view of politics. Though he mentioned the existence of various interests in society, he made no attempt to list and describe them, and certainly he never specified racial or religious minorities, or the working class, as deserving of the veto power. Generally he ignored the variety of possible groupings. When he got down to theorizing, he really thought about only two groups at a time, not several. On occasion he dealt with the duality of capital and labor. Most often he had in mind the twofold grouping of North against South, free states against slave states. These were, to him, the majority and the minority, and this was the minority he sought to protect-the minority of slaveholders. [my emphasis]

The real successors of Calhoun were the segregationist groups involved in their "massive resistance" campaigns against legal and political pressure for racial integration:

Wherever a White Citizens' 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 convention, and other political devices can be considered as essentially Calhounian.

These white Southerners now face a 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, institutions based upon a belief in human inequality. [my emphasis]

In 2020, Calhoun's heritage can be seen especially in the voter-suppression campaign against blacks, Latinos, and poor whites that have been a key part of the national Republican Party's electoral strategy for the last two decades. The Democratic Party hasn't given up all its own Calhounian legacy, as illustrated by the Yellow Peril campaign ads the Joe Biden campaign released over the last week.

But the party of Lincoln the Great Emancipator has become the devoted party of Calhoun the Great Nullifier.

Confederate “Heritage” Month 2020, April 20: Charles Sumner on the “Barbarism of Slavery”

Sen. Charles Sumner, Republican of Massachusetts, gave a famous speech in 1860 to the Senate that became known as the "Barbarism of Slavery" speech. In an introduction to a published edition of it (quoted here from The Barbarism of Slavery, 1863), he described the stakes in the Civil War then under way:

... there are two apparent rudiments to this war. One is Slavery and the other is State Rights. But the latter is only a cover for the former. If Slavery were out of the way there would be no trouble from State Rights.

The war, then, is for Slavery, and nothing else. lt is an insane attempt to vindicate by arms the lordship which had been already asserted in debate. With mad-cap audacity it seeks to install this Barbarism as the truest Civilization. Slavery is declared to be the "corner-stone" of the new edifice. This is enough.

The question is thus presented between Barbarism and Civilization; not merely between two different forms of Civilization, but between Barbarism on the one side and Civilization on the other side. If you are for Barbarism, join the Rebellion, or, if you can not join it, give it your sympathies. If you are for Civilization, stand by the Government of your country with mind, soul, heart and might!

Such is the issue simply stated. On the one side are women and children on the auction-block; families rudely separated; human flesh lacerated and seamed by the bloody scourge; labor extorted without wages; and all this frightful, many-sided wrong is the declared foundation of a mock commonwealth. On the other side is the Union of our Fathers, with the image of "Liberty" on its coin and the sentiment of Liberty in its Constitution, now arrayed under a patriotic Government, which insists that no such mock Commonwealth, having such a declared foundation, shall be permitted on our territory, purchased with money and blood, to impair the unity of our jurisdiction and to insult the moral sense of mankind. [my emphasis]

The rhetoric of barbarism and civilization was a key element of Western colonial thought at that time used as a justification for Europeans subjugating non-white people, including the settler colonialism in the Western Hemisphere directed against indigenous peoples. In the prof-slavery polemics, the South Peculiar Institution was defended as necessary to the maintenance of Civilization. Sumner here is making a polemical inversion of that argument, pointing out the cruelty and comparAtive economic backwardness as well as the deficiency of republican institutions in the Confederacy.

That use of "barbarism" is archaic now, though people in the wealthiest countries still find ways to make invidious comparison between themselves and other countries that are held to be "underdeveloped" or "less advanced". "Barbaric" and "barbarism" now are typically used in the kind of polemical sense Sumner was employing in the 1860s, to refer to cruelty and viciousness.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2020, April 19: John Calhoun calls for national class solidarity among the wealthy in support of slavery

John C. Calhoun is a very significant historical figure, who I like to describe in sober and careful terms as the patron saint of everything vile and evil in American politics since 1832.

And, yes, he did look like Satan on a bad hair day.

But he was a smart reactionary, unfortunately. And he was a real reactionary. Quasi-monarchist Alexander Hamilton looks like Maximilien Robespierre compared to Calhoun.

Calhoun kept up with developments in Europe. And his view of the class conflict there was sharp enough that Richard Hofstadter famously called him the "Marx of the master class".

I think that may be giving the old traitor a bit too much credit. But he did have a class analysis in which he could make a pitch for class solidarity among Southern planters and Northern industrial and financial capitalists in the face of revolutionary threat from the unwashed masses. Richard Current gives close attention to this aspect of Calhoun's political theory and propaganda in his John C. Calhoun (1966):

.[Calhoun argued that] if the quarrel over [slavery in] the territories should end in disunion, the Northerners and not the Southerners ought to reckon the cost of that event. If left to itself, the North would run the risk of disruption from within, but slavery would save the South.

[Calhoun:] From the conservative character of the institution [slavery], it would prevent that conflict between labor and capital, which must ever exist in populous and crowded communities, where wages are the regulator between them - and thereby secure and preserve with us a settled and quiet condition of things within, which can never be experienced in such communities. The North, on the contrary, would have no central point of union to bind its various and conflicting interests together; and would, with the increase of its population and wealth, be subject to all the agitation and conflicts growing out of the divisions of wealth and poverty and their concomitants, capital and labor, of which already there are so many and so serious. [my emphasis]

Calhoun even flirted at one point with a kind of quasi-populist appeal to Northern workers. But his goal was, first and foremost, to preserve and extend the institution of chattel slavery.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2020, April 18: President Trump calls for revolt

Sometimes the ways history echoes in current events is eerie. This one fits well in a Confederate "Heritage" Month post, unfortunately.

Washington's Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee issued this statement on Friday:

The president’s statements this morning encourage illegal and dangerous acts. He is putting millions of people in danger of contracting COVID-19. His unhinged rantings and calls for people to “liberate” states could also lead to violence. We’ve seen it before.

The president is fomenting domestic rebellion and spreading lies even while his own administration says the virus is real and is deadly, and that we have a long way to go before restrictions can be lifted. (Inslee statement on Trump encouraging illegal and dangerous acts 04/17/2020)

The President of the United States, whose party includes many white nationalists who use Confederate symbols and Lost Cause narratives, is "fomenting domestic rebellion" in states governed by Democratic Governors. He published these three tweets yesterday were a big part of that:

Charlie Pierce picked up on the historical resonance of these developments (The 25th Amendment Exists for a Reason Esquire Politics Blog 04/17/2020):

He looked at those idiots in Michigan, whom he noted “like” him, which is all that matters, and saw a movement with which he could power a re-election campaign.

Now, he’s signaling that he’s on their side, which is not only stupid from a public health standpoint, it's absolutely dangerous from a political standpoint. There are certain viewpoints that history tells us are perilous when they begin circulating in our politics, and this president* has managed to mix up two of them. He created an extreme devolution of federal authority to the states, and now he’s using the power of the presidency to incite resistance to the very situation his nonfeasance created in the first place. In theory, it’s like there were four sides to the Civil War. It’s a recipe for a domestic version of the dissolution of Yugoslavia.

And is there anything from the other leaders of The Party of Lincoln? [my emphasis]

Jen Hayden provides some backgound in With a series of 'LIBERATE' tweets, Trump shows support for coups in states with Democratic governor Daily Kos 04/17/2020:

In truth, Donald Trump has courted the gun-toting former Tea Party people you see above from the start of his campaign back in 2015. He even dispatched a campaign representative to meet with the Bundy clan when they were in the midst of an armed takeover of a government wildlife refuge. That representative, Jerry DeLemus, ended up in prison for his role in another armed standoff with the Bundys in Nevada.

There is something else that’s troublesome about these “grassroots” protests. They may have started three days ago in North Carolina, but suddenly there were similar coordinated protests in Michigan and Ohio, with other planned protests in numerous other cities over the coming days. These protests have a very familiar feel about them, eerily reminiscent of the Tea Party protests that ended up being coordinated by a conservative network funded by the Koch brothers. In fact, they were small groups of people being propped up by big-time funding from the Koch brothers, the DeVos family, and other billionaire donors.

Dave Neiwert describes the incidents in Michigan (Fringe right closes down Michigan capital with 'gridlock' protest against coronavirus measures Daily Kos 04/16/2020):

Called “Operation Gridlock,” the protest—organized primarily by the Michigan Conservative Coalition, a group with connections both to far-right extremists and to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos—successfully shut down all traffic in and around Lansing. That included traffic to and from Sparrow Hospital, the city’s main coronavirus treatment center, as well as in and out of the Capitol building, whose entrance at one point was blocked by a truck bearing a large sign for the Michigan Proud Boys.

Most of the vehicles were pickup trucks, many of them adorned with signs and flags. Ordinary American flags, yellow “Don’t Tread On Me” Gadsden flags, and deep blue Trump flags dominated the scene. A couple of Confederate flags—including one modified to feature an AR-15 silhouette—were also in the crowd. The Michigan Militia also was present. [my emphasis]

He also tweeted:

Today's series of tweets from Trump targeting states where anti-COVID-19-restriction protests have occurred -- accompanied by red-capped crowds bearing Trump banners -- are wink-and-nudge signals to the #Boogaloo crowd. This one especially. https://t.co/YrNoXvySLi

— David Neiwert (@DavidNeiwert) April 17, 2020

What is #Boogaloo? The Boogaloo: Extremists’ New Slang Term for A Coming Civil War ADL 11/26/2019

Confederate “Heritage” Month 2020, April 17: Marching Song of the First Arkansas

One of the best Union songs from the Civil War, Marching Song of the First Arkansas, sung to the tune of "John Brown's Body", sung here by Pete Seeger and Bill MacAdoo. The First Arkansas was a U.S. Army regiment composed of African-American soldiers:

Oh, 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 the Rebel further than the white man ever law,
As we go marching on

From African-Americans Encyclopedia of Arkansas 12/03/2018:

Throughout the American Civil War, thousands of slaves escaped from bondage in Arkansas and made their way to the Union army encampments. The exact number has never been determined, but anecdotal reports indicate that hundreds, perhaps thousands, died from malnutrition and disease in fetid, unsanitary, hastily constructed “shanty towns” and settlements.

The escaped slaves in their midst created a dilemma and a headache for the Union commanders. One obvious and at least partial solution was to enlist able-bodied adult males into the military itself. In April 1863, Brigadier General Lorenzo Thomas, adjutant general of the U.S. Army, issued an appeal to the freedmen to volunteer for service, and many quickly flocked to the colors. The army immediately recruited three black companies in Helena (Phillips County), and they became the nucleus for the First Arkansas Volunteer Infantry Regiment (African Descent) Its new commander was Captain Lindley Miller, an abolitionist from a New York regiment. Eventually, over 5,000 former slaves in Arkansas joined the Union army. [my emphasis]

Miller was a white officer. All the African-American regiments were headed by white Union officers.

Confederate „Heritage“ Month 2020, April 16: Sherman Marching Through Georgia

Today, another Union song, this one celebrating Sherman's famous march "march to the sea", which the Lost Cause devotees made a prime grievance against the North in their neo-Confederate narrative. It's from the country start Tennessee Ernie Ford (1919–1991), Marching Through Georgia:

Here's a nice bit of debunking from the National Park Service against a piece of neo-Confederate pseudohistory having to do with Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's march through Georgia, Myth: General William Sherman’s “March to the Sea” destroyed supplies that would have gone to the prisoners at Andersonville 04/14/2015.

The atrocious conditions to which the Confederacy subjected Union prisoners-of-war at Andersonville was a legitimate grievance against the secessionists:

From February 1864 until the end of the American Civil War (1861-65) in April 1865, Andersonville, Georgia, served as the site of a notorious Confederate military prison. The prison at Andersonville, officially called Camp Sumter, was the South’s largest prison for captured Union soldiers and known for its unhealthy conditions and high death rate. In all, approximately 13,000 Union prisoners perished at Andersonville, and following the war its commander, Captain Henry Wirz (1823-65), was tried, convicted and executed for war crimes. (Andersonville History.com 06/10/2019)

Confederate "Heritage" months 2020, April 15: Why do we call it the Civil War?

We refer today to the American civil war of 1961-5 as, well, the Civil War. Defenders of the Lost Cause narrative have often preferred to use the term "the War Between the States".

But as Gaines Foster recounts in What's Not in a Name: The Naming of the American Civil War (Journal of the Civil War Era 8:3 Sept 2018), the general consensus around calling it the Civil War was effectively established around the start of the 20th century.

On three occasions, in 1905, 1907, and 1911, Congress took a stand on what to call the war. In March of 1905, with the Senate rushing to pass appropriation bills during the session’s final days, Louis E. McComas of Maryland entered an amendment giving preference in the Railway Mail Service to those who had served honorably “in the war of the rebellion.” Augustus O. Bacon of Georgia quickly proposed that he “strike out the words ‘war of the rebellion’ and insert ‘civil war.’” McComas readily agreed, although he defended his original choice by saying “war of the rebellion” was used “in the civil-service regulations.” Bacon reiterated his request, McComas again agreed to the change, at which point Edward W. Carmack of Tennessee recommended that “war of secession’” be inserted instead of “civil war.” “No,” Bacon replied, “The term ‘civil war’ is all right. That is now recognized as the courteous nomenclature.” ...

In January of 1907, the Senate began a discussion of a pension bill for soldiers in the “war of the rebellion.” Both Bacon and Carmack objected to its use in the title, and Carmack moved that “civil war” be substituted. The bill’s sponsor, Porter J. McCumber, a Republican from North Dakota, observed that “war of the rebellion” was the usual term, but he had no objection to the substitution. It appeared the Senate would make the change quickly and easily, as it had in 1905. Then Hernando D. Money of Mississippi jumped to “his feet, clamoring to be heard.” More conservative than either Carmack or Bacon, Money insisted that the proper name for the war should be the “war between the States” because “it was a war between sovereign States.” Carmack quickly backtracked, saying he did not offer “civil war” as “embodying what I considered a correct definition or description of that war” but simply to conform “to what I believe has been the best practice and the usual descriptive words as employed in legislation and in official documents.” [my emphasis]

After further discussion, the Senate agreed to use the "civil war" term in that instance. “'The best of feeling seemed to prevail after the sectional debate,' a reporter for the Washington Post wrote. One of his colleagues added that it looked as 'if the Senate would have a good, old-fashioned cry'." Foster writes about a third Congressional discussion:

A similar, but briefer discussion occurred in 1911, this time in the House and not regarding the title of an act but a reference to the “war for the suppression of the rebellion” buried in a section of a bill to codify the laws. Charles L. Bartlett, from Georgia and the son of a Confederate veteran, moved to substitute “during the Civil War from 1861 to 1865.” When someone worried that the dates might complicate determining service, he changed it to just “Civil War.” Joseph W. Keifer, former Speaker of the House and a Republican from Ohio, asked “What is to be accomplished by that?” James R. Mann, an Illinois Republican, explained, “Good feeling, that is all; but that is worth something.” Bartlett then added, “We have got far enough away from that era in our history not to use the word ‘rebellion.’” [my emphasis]

These Congressional discussions did not, of course, somehow required everyone to use a common name. Foster relates them as part of a longer story of how the general practice of refering to the conflict developed, a process which was quickly becoming a consensus early in the 20th century.

He stresses that the use of "Civil War" was part of the larger North-South reconciliation among whites at the expense of black citizens who continued to be seriously disadvantaged and even terrorized:

The postwar debate over the name reveals a white South less united and intransigent than many assume and suggests that Americans deemphasized slavery’s importance in the memory of the war. It also illustrates how the North willingly made concessions to the white South in hopes of fostering reunion and national reconciliation, even as it reveals the limit of those concessions. [my emphasis]

Foster sums up the longer development as follows:

Both during and after the Civil War, northerners and southerners displayed an appreciation for the importance of naming the conflict. As the war started, Abraham Lincoln, Congress, and most northerners at first referred to a civil war or an insurrection, but quickly came to call it the “Rebellion,” a name they hoped would reinforce the goal of preserving the Union even as it stigmatized secession and the South. Frederick Douglass and others proposed alternatives that made slavery central to the war, such as “Abolition war” or the “Slaveholders’ Rebellion,” but few northerners adopted them. In the first decades after Appomattox, northerners continued to refer to the “Rebellion.” White southerners objected to that name and used others, including “Civil War” and the “War between the States.” By the end of the century, “Civil War” had become the most common public name, and between 1905 and 1911, Congress made it virtually the official name of the war. The United Daughters of the Confederacy then campaigned, but failed, to replace it with “War between the States.”

Foster also comments about the United Daughters of the Confederacy that "many historians consider [the UDC to be] the real power in shaping southern memory.”

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 14: "Oh, I'm A Good Old Rebel"

Here's Hoyt Axton singing a song whose narrator is an unrepentent Rebel, Oh I'm A Good Old Rebel:

The Folkways album Songs of the Civil War (1960) included a version of this song. Their liner notes explain, "Here is the classic song of bitterness and hate. Written shortly after the war by Major Randolph who, in later years, achieved a minor reputation as a Southern poet, the song in time entered into the oral tradition and has been collected, in substantially the same form, in many sections of the South."

Because the neo-Confederate/Lost Cause rhetoric evolved over time, the song now sounds like a satire ridiculing an unreconstructed former Rebel. But it doesn't seem it was intended as a satire or understood as such back in the day.

Just to be clear, I know of no reason to think that Hoyt Axton was any kind of Lost Cause nostalgic. He performed his "Bony Fingers" hit at the leftie Bread and Roses Festival in Berkeley on at least one occasion.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2020, April 13: More on Benjamin Butler and the women of occupied New Orleans

I've discussed Billy Coleman's essay, Confederate Music and the Politics of Treason and Disloyalty in the American Civil War Journal of Southern History 86:1 Feb 2020 in the last two posts.

While its focus is Confederate music as political culture and propaganda, He discusses it in the context of New Orleans, St. Louis, and Baltimore. While New Orleans was under occupation, St. Louis and Baltimore were Union states but subject to particular scrutiny by Washington because of the dangers of active Confederate collaboration and subversion there. Coleman describes St. Louis, for instance, as being "inhabited by a combustive constituency of Confederate sympathizers, conservative Unionists, Radical Republicans, and representatives of a spectrum of opinion in between."

Federal measures of suppression against civilian activity in support of the Confederacy in such locations became a major theme of propaganda by the Confederacy against the Union. It was aimed at shoring up loyalty in the Confederate states, encouraging pro-Confederate sympathies and actions in Union states, and in foreign diplomacy. By far the most important target foreign diplomacy for the Confederacy was Great Britain. Britain had a very important textile industry that was dependent of Southern supplies. Southern confidence in the power of "King Cotton" was largely based on the commercial connection. But not only was the British government constrained by other great-power considerations. The British working class including the textile workers themselves mounted an active campaign against recognizing the Confederate slave republic.

Coleman's essay gives a good sense of the political and diplomatic complications involved in suppressing non-violent pro-Confederate agitation in those three cities. No one imagined at the time, however, that those measures had permanently converted Southern sympathizers and partisans in proud American Unionists. It was a serious civil war, after all. And its effects echo in some real way even today in contemporary American politics.

Jacqueline Campbell also looks at Benjamin Butler's Women’s Order that I discussed in the previous post in this series in “The Unmeaning Twaddle about Order 28”: Benjamin F. Butler and Confederate Women in Occupied New Orleans, 1862 Journal of the Civil War Era 2:1 Mar 2012. Order 28 is the Woman Order, as Campbell calls it.

She provides some useful insights into how gender issues were used in war propaganda. She quotes a piece called "The Daughter of New Orleans" appealing to Southern men, "For the sake of your sisters, do not leave your women to the mercy of this merciless foe." A formulation which, then as now, aimed at invoking the threat of wanton rape by the supposedly ruthless Unionists.

But Butler had not done anything remotely like declaring open season on the women of New Orleans. On the contrary, Campbell's research found relatively little contemporary documentation that women in New Orleans were especially troubled be the "Woman Order." They were much more concerned about a different directive, Order No. 76, which required women in New Orleans to take an oath of loyalty to the United States or be subject to having their property confiscated. "It stipulated that all people, men and women, who had failed to take the Oath of Allegiance to the United States must now declare themselves enemies of the government and be liable to confiscation of all their property and expulsion from the city."

Confiscation of Rebel property was an entirely legitimate wartime measure. And when we're talking about Rebel property, that also included their human property in the form of slaves. The Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery was also therefore one of the largest confiscations of property without compensation in history, certainly the biggest in American history. Order No. 76 was also a shrewd move on Butler's part, to prevent the paper transfer of Rebel property to wives or daughters to avoid confiscation. (To be clear,, slavery was not formally abolished in Union occupied areas, though slaves were widely permitted to flee behind Union lines.)

Campbell gives us an example of the kind of sputtering rhetorical pathos that was so common in pro-slavery agitation:

Confederate women without [the option of claiming British citizenship, which some did] reacted vehemently to General Order No. 76. Marion Southwood claimed it was the “most detestable” of Butler’s acts. While she dismissed Order 28 as “unmeaning twaddle,” she described Butler as “Satan himself . . . [when he] issued his prying, crushing Order No. 76.” Being compelled to take the oath of allegiance made one’s “brain burn with indignation,” yet she acknowledged that Butler had read the situation correctly. She conceded that, to avoid the “pains and penalties” of confiscation, “many of the more cunning sort sought to cover up their personal and floating property under the broad fold of female crinoline.” Southwood had little doubt that Butler would “shrink from nothing he esteems it his duty to do for the vindication of the violated majesty of the law.” [my emphasis]

I'm sure she didn't mean it as a compliment. But declaring that Butler would “shrink from nothing he esteems it his duty to do for the vindication of the violated majesty of the law” sounds like an admission that Butler was doing exactly what a conscientious Union officer should have been doing in that situation.

Campbell credits Butler with considerable sophistication in handling the issues presented by his Woman Order and Order No. 76:

As Butler and the women of occupied Louisiana entered into a dialogue of contempt, class and gender were central issues; but Butler never underestimated female power, he respected it. It was not that he objected to women being in the public sphere, rather, he insisted that such appearances should be on his terms. He was not motivated by a lack of respect for female strength. Butler recognized the deeply rooted class and gender identities at play. As a master of manipulation, he beat these irascible Confederate women at their own game by coercing them into controlling their own behavior. ...

General Order No. 28 plunged elite white women of New Orleans into the center of a “prodigious hue and cry” that emanated from men who portrayed them as helpless victims suffering at the hands of a vile oppressor. But Benjamin Butler never viewed Confederate women as powerless. On the contrary, he held them accountable for their actions, not only for their outward behavior on public streets, but for their economic and political standing as citizens of an occupied city. The Woman Order engendered a heated debate among men at the highest levels of the administration, the military, and the diplomatic world and thus obscured the more complex intricacies of what was indeed, in Butler’s words, a “unique but dangerous entanglement.” [my emphasis]

And Butler showed some real political talent in defending against the accusation that the Woman Order (General Order No. 28) was offending against the sacredness of Southern womanhood:

Butler’s own interpretation was that this order would actually protect women’s honor. He believed his own men were well-bred and respectful toward woman however, he pointed out that many scenes of resistance took place on private balconies. Imagine the scenario of soldiers breaking into homes to arrest female rebels in their bedrooms. Think about the scenario had they dragged “screeching women through the streets” and placed them in the Guard House inhabited by “thieves, assassins and drunken soldiers.” Would their honor have been protected in such places? How many riots would this have caused as any so called “gentleman” of the city would have felt himself called upon to protect a southern lady? General Order No. 28, in his view, shamed women into propriety and thus prevented the very thing with which he was now being charged “a war upon women.” [my emphasis]

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2020, April 12: "Beast" Butler in New Orleans

In yesterday's post in this series, I talked about Billy Coleman's essay, Confederate Music and the Politics of Treason and Disloyalty in the American Civil War Journal of Southern History 86:1 Feb 2020 and the politics of Confederate music, especially in Union-occupied New Orleans.

Coleman also discusses the situation in two Union states, specifically in St. Louis, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland. Those were both cities that were under tighter control than most cities in the Union because both were slave states with considerable secessionist sentiment.

Coleman relates this sequence of events in occupied New Orleans. Gen. Benjamin Butler was head of the occupation authority there:

Confederate women in New Orleans, not caring for the Union’s military intrusion into their private lives, met the occupation of their city i open protest of their occupiers. Women emptied chamber pots [i.e., urine and feces] on the heads of Union soldiers, pointedly lifted their dresses, obviously displayed Confederate iconography and flags, threw jeers and taunts as soldiers passed, and blatantly sang rebel songs. Benjamin F. Butler, who was in charge of the Union army’s occupying forces, initially responded to these provocations by issuing his infamous Women’s Order, which stated that Union soldiers were to treat any woman who “insult[ed] or show[ed] contempt for any officer or soldier of the United States” as a “woman of the town plying her avocation.” Whereas women might have previously assumed they could rely on their gender to exempt them from punishment, Butler’s Women’s Order raised the stakes by taking their defiance seriously and instructing Union officers to engage with Confederate women not as women, exactly, but as hostile adversaries. [my emphasis]

Coleman describes this as an instance of women's agency in opposing the Union occupation. And that's important to understand. Southern women could be just as sincere traitors against the United States in defense of slavery as their husbands, fathers, brothers, and other male fellow traitors. Southern white women weren't allowed to vote any more than other American women, and they were generally severely disadvantaged in family law and inheritance.

But Southern society was also an "honor society," as the historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown has described at length in his work. And that meant the men postured as the heroic gentlemen in Sir Walter Scott's romantic novels, which were very popular in the South. Mark Twain mockingly blamed Scott for causing the Civil War.

So there is an element here of the tawdry phoniness of the self-portrayal of gallant Southern gentlemen. At least some of the New Orleans cavaliers must have thought it was much safer to hide behind the women's skirts and let them expose themselves in such public displays of resistance, thinking that the Yankee occupiers would go easier on them. And that occupation authority actions against female protesters would elicit more outrage at the damnyankees.

Butler's Women’s Order turned the symbolism back on the honorable Southern gentlemen hiding behind "their" women by taking the women's agency in the matter seriously. By threatening to charge them with prostitution, Butler showed he wouldn't recognize the "Southern honor" pretense in that situation.

Just to keep things in perspective: No occupation force or even a small-town police force would tolerate people of any age or gender dumping pots of s**t on their heads! In the US in 2020, people doing that would likely be charged with assaulting a police officer. The Women's Order was letting them off easy.

Confederate sympathizers in New Orleans called the general in charge "Beast Butler." He expected the honorable Southern ladies and gentlemen of New Orleans to act like human beings, and they thought he was being the beast.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2020, April 11: Suppressing Confederate music under Union occupation (and a Storm Trooper march on the side)

Billy Coleman has a recently published article on Confederate Music and the Politics of Treason and Disloyalty in the American Civil War Journal of Southern History 86:1 Feb 2020, based on 60 "cases of Confederates being arrested, punished, or getting away with singing, selling, or publishing rebel songs in Union-controlled border towns or occupied cities." Two thirds of the cases were in Union-occupied New Orleans.

Coleman notes that Confederate authorities also suppressed songs suspected of being pro-Union in their territory. That was a continuation of a much larger, decades long of suppression of abolitionist sentiments in the slave states before Southern secession. And attempted so far as possible to suppress them even in non-slve states. This was a real and highly visible way that slavery was a threat to the democratic rights of white citizens in the United States. It wasn't just a rhetorical flourish when opponents of slavery complained about slavery endangering the democracy that did exist for the white population - or at least for white men, if we consider that democracy actually existed only citizens with the right to vote.

Coleman's essay recounts some of the early nineteenth popular discussions of the teaching and persuasive power of music. If we take artistic/aesthetic considerations seriously, it would be difficult to determine specific ideological or political content of music itself. Johann Strauss, Sr.'s famous "Radetsky March" is named in honor of an Austrian field marshal who, among other things, crushed the pro-democracy, pro-independence revolutionary forces in Italy in 1848-49. "Radetzky served as governor of Austria’s kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia from 1850 to 1857, ruling those territories with an iron hand." (Joseph, Graf Radetzky Britannica Online 2020)

But listeners hearing the march are not normally thinking, ah, this music makes me want to go smash democracy in Italy. But Britannica notes, Strauss "wrote the popular Radetzky March in his honour but was reproached by liberal critics for having done so." So it wasn't regarded from the start as apolitical.

Oh, then there's this Faulknerian development, i.e., "The past is never dead," etc. (Kevin Clarke, De-Nazifying The “Radetzky March” At The 2020 Vienna New Year’s Concert Operetta Research Center 12/31/2019):

The old version that has been performed for decades – in the name of “tradition” – is a version created by composer and glowing Nazi supporter Leopold Weninger (1879-1940). This was confirmed by the Vienna Philharmonic press office earlier this month and reported on by various German newspapers.

As a consequence the board of directors of the Vienna Philharmonic, represented by Daniel Froschauer, commissioned the music archivist of the orchestra to produce a new version. “This version will be used from now on,” Froschauer said. “On January 1st the audience in the golden hall may clap along to a version of the Radetzky March that was created as a joint venture with the Vienna Philharmonic and that is not contaminated by a ‘brown’ past.”

The arrangement by Leopold Weninger, that millions listened to via TV every year, was first introduced to the concert series in 1946 by legendary conductor Joseph Krips. Though Mr. Krips was certainly not a Nazi, Weninger was. He famously arranged marches for the “Sturmabteilung” (SA). He also turned the 1848 march by Johann Strauss senior into a very militant affair, which helped make the number popular in Nazi times. He added a special snare drum to make it all sound even more pointed, removed ornaments, and “fixed” the tune in the middle section. He also made the sound more “massive” and overwhelming, more in sync with the times. At least this is how various newspapers described the matter.

Yes, we've been hearing the Storm Trooper arrangement all these years!

But how does all this relate to Confederate music in Union-occupied places like New Orleans? Coleman writes:

In important ways, the existence of musical protest, particularly from women and children, and the idea that it required suppression exposed the limits of Union military power, challenged the social order, and confounded expectations that Union success on the battlefield would translate into Confederate defeat on the home front. At another level, however, evidence of Union attempts to regulate Confederate musical expression also underlines the extent to which these outcomes were a product of the Union’s basic inability to separate the acceptability of Confederate patriotism from its treasonous implications. Music showcased just how difficult it was for the Union to counter the appeal of Confederate cultural symbols without simultaneously giving ammunition to charges of Union tyranny. This history, then, speaks to the deeply emotional terrain on which legal contests over Civil War loyalty played out and attests to the power of those emotions to frame the substance and significance of treason.

No, preventing people from singing songs, even treasonous ones, is not something that the US government today would do. Even in countries like Germany and Austria where there are explicit anti-Nazi laws, radical right bands promoting neo-nazi propaganda themes in their music can still legally perform. Although if the start flying swastika flags and marching around doing the Hitler salute, that could get dicey for them.

But before we take this as an incidence of Union tyranny, a reality-check is due. New Orleans under Union Army control was under a military occupation in the middle of a civil war! Of course, the occupation authorities were going to frown on anti-American propaganda and gatherings with possible subversive intent. Because, you know, it was a military occupation!

I'm struck by Coleman's framing in the phrase about "the Union’s basic inability to separate the acceptability of Confederate patriotism from its treasonous implications." The Confederacy was an act of treason! The Confederate states seceded from the Union. They completely rejected the application of American law and the American Constitution in their territory. None of the Confederate governments or their subsidiary branches like municipalities were legitimate governments at all from the Union view.

In my previous post in this series, I posted a YouTube video of a Confederate song from a 1960 album from Folkways Music, a left-leaning record publisher, an album which had versions of both popular Union and Rebel songs from the Civil War period. I'm confident that no one reading it will mistake that post for pro-Confederate. And nobody is going to get arrested in 2020 for singing it.

But understanding what those songs meant in the context of civil war and occupation in 1861-5 is a whole different thing.