Confederate "Heritage" Month 2022, April 30: The "Dred Scott" decision and the politics of a radicalized Supreme Court

This year's daily April posts against Confederate "Heritage" Month spilled over into May until today. Earlier in this year's series of posts, I discussed the Supreme Court catastrophic Dred Scott decision (1857).

During the first week of May, we've seen a leaked Supreme Court majority opinion draft by Justice Samuel Alito overturning Roe v. Wade that reminds us that a radicalized, crassly ideological, reactionary Supreme Court is by no means only a phenomenon of the 1850s. As of this writing, the decision described in Alito's leaded draft has not been formally announced.

Dred Scott still stands as the Supreme Court decision most destructive in its immediate effects, and I certainly wouldn't want to deprive Chief Justice Roger Taney and his judicial confederates of that malign distinction.

But it has certainly not been the only one. Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and Bush v. Gore (2000) are high on the list.

So the example of a radical Supreme Court as a significant anti-democracy actor represented by the Dred Scott Court is sadly still relevant.

Paul Finkelman in his essay "The Strange Career of Dred Scott: From Fort Armstrong to Guantánamo Bay" (in The Dred Scott Case: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Race and Law 2010) describes the decision:

In Dred Scott the Supreme Court held three things: that blacks could never be citizens of the United States and, therefore, could never sue in federal court as citizens of a state; that Congress had no power to regulate the territories beyond setting up a minimalist form of government; and that the Bill of Rights was applicable to all federal territories and thus neither Congress nor a territorial government could ban slavery in the territories, because this would be an unconstitutional taking of property in violation of the Fifth Amendment.

This decision effectively eliminated the possibility of an abolition of slavery without widespread violence. In fact, the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 had already set off five years of a mini-civil-war in the Kansas Territory ("Bleeding Kansas"). The Dred Scott decision added more fuel to the fire.

Finkelman gives further disturbing details of Chief Justice Taney's majority opinion:

Taney used some of the most racist language in American jurisprudence, arguing that at the nation’s founding blacks were “not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which the instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States. On the contrary, they were at that time [1787] considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings, who had been subjugated by the dominant race, and, whether emancipated or not, yet remained subject to their authority, and had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the Government might choose to grant them.” According to Taney, blacks were “so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” [my emphasis]

He also notes:

Taney in effect argued that the Constitution created a kind of dual citizenship—state and federal—and that, while the states might make anyone a citizen, federal citizenship was limited only to whites because it was impossible for Taney to imagine that the Southern founders of the nation would have agreed to the Constitution if blacks were to be citizens.

And he writes of the political aftermath:

In reaching this conclusion Taney held that the Missouri Compromise, in force since 1820, was unconstitutional. This was only the second time in U.S. history that the Court had held an act of Congress to be unconstitutional. The last time had been in 1803 when the Court struck down a minor provision of the Judiciary Act of 1803 in Marbury v. Madison. But here the Court struck down a major statute — one of the most important in the nation’s political history — and one that had been in force for thirty-seven years. This was truly a bombshell and, combined with the racism of Taney’s opinion, led to a huge backlash against the decision in much of the North. [my emphasis]

He also points out that Taney was plainly wrong in his reading that the denial of citizenship to Black Americans was not what Sam Alito might call "deeply rooted in this Nation's history and tradition." In fact, Finkelman writes:

In 1787 blacks voted in at least six states (Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina) and thus took part in the ratification of the Constitution. By 1800 Vermont and Tennessee had also enfranchised blacks. ...

[Taney] was of course wrong in his assumptions. Many white Northerners who were conventionally racist and did not want blacks to have significant rights still believed they had some rights. They were shocked by the boldness of Taney’s racism and his slanted, one-sided, and often wrong history of the founding. Free blacks had, after all, voted in at least six states when the Constitution was ratified. It was simply impossible for these Northerners — typified by Lincoln — to accept that free blacks had “no rights” under the Constitution. Even some white Southerners were not willing to accept the idea. [my emphasis]

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2022, April 29: Neo-Confederate organizations in the US

The good news is, explicit neo-Confederate groups seem to have declined recently. As the SPLC's Neo-Confederate page puts it as of 05/08/2022:

Neo-Confederate group numbers declined between 2019 and 2020, when the largest neo-Confederate hate group, the League of the South, lost several chapters. Long the central organization within this branch of white nationalism, the League of the South has not rebounded from fallout from its attendance at the deadly riot in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017. This has continued to impede recruiting. Neo-Confederate group Identity Dixie also faltered in 2020, still reeling from revelations about the group’s leaders that the SPLC exposed in 2019. Today, Identity Dixie is down to one chapter. In 2021, SPLC’s analysts documented a significant decrease with the Neo-Confederate category. Analysts documented 31 groups in 2020, with a steep drop to 16 groups in 2021. The decrease occurred, in part, from the financial challenges facing neo-Confederate groups in the wake of a civil lawsuit brought against group leaders by Integrity First for America. In addition, without significant protests from the Left to rally against, the neo-Confederate groups that newly appeared in 2020 have been sidelined. A dedicated and loyal following of neo-Confederate extremists continue to plot online and will use efforts to remove Confederate monuments, rename parks, schools and other public spaces as a way to rally other extremists to their ideology, recruit new members and fundraise from the larger radical right movement. [my emphasis]

The bad news is: with explicit insurrectionist ideas and practices (the storming of the Capitol on 01/06/2021) and white supremacist ideology and attitude having been so mainstreamed by the Republican Party itself, the spirit of John Calhoun is alive and well.

The Republican embrace of the crackpot moral-panic campaign over "critical race theory," whose anti-CRT rhetoric draws from what began as a hard-right, anti-Semitic theory about what they called "Cultural Marxism," is a sign of how deeply neo-Confederate-type pseudohistory has made inroads into the national Republican Party.

The SPLC page notes:

In this regard, neo-Confederacy is best viewed as a spectrum, an umbrella term with roots dating back as early as the 1890s. It applies to groups including the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) of the 1920s and those resisting racial integration in the 1950s and 1960s. In its most recent iteration, the term “neo-Confederacy” is used by both proponents and critics to describe a belief system that has emerged since the early 1980s in such publications as Southern Partisan, Chronicles and Southern Mercury, and in organizations including the League of the South (LOS), the Council of Conservative Citizens and the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

The SPLC also calls attention to the role that "Christian dominionism" plays in neo-Confederate thinking.

The soul of John Calhoun goes marching on:

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2022, April 28: More on L.Q.C. Lamar

I posted about LQC Lamar back in the 2005 edition of this Confederate "Heritage" Month series and his active role in the overthrow of the democratic Reconstruction government of Mississippi headed by Republican Gov. Adelbert Ames.

Richard Nelson Current described Lamar's role in 1875 in supporting the anti-democracy "Redeemer" movement in Those Terrible Carpetbaggers (1988). Ames tried to raise a state militia consisting of both black and white citizens to defend the elected democratic government against, 2which Lamar polemically called "negro regiments." Here is how Lamar, who is still credited by Britannica Online as having had a "moderating influence during Reconstruction" responded:

[Various compromise measure agreed to by Gov. Ames and the Republicans] did nothing to appease the Democrats. They were infuriated by other legislation that Ames secured - a law authorizing him to reorganize the militia and to purchase rapid-fire, multiple barrel Catling guns - which they denounced as the "Gatling Gun Bill." The anti-Republican Brandon Republican [newspaper] advised "Mr. Adelbert Ames to pack his carpet bag and take his wife and babies to Massachusetts before he issues an order to his 'melish' to turn his Gatling guns on the white people of Mississippi." Regarding Ames and his prospective "negro regiments," the Mississippi congressman Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar wrote to his own wife: "He will get them killed up, and then Grant will take possession for him." Lamar was to mastermind the strategy by which the Democrats, having learned their lesson from events in Vicksburg, would get enough blacks killed to carry the state election in the fall - and would do it in such a way as to keep Grant from taking possession for Ames." (my emphasis)

The "events in Vicksburg" to which Current refers are known as the Vicksburg Massacre of December 7, 1874.

And Lamar was remembered as a moderate!

President Grover Cleveland, the most reactionary Democratic President since before the Civil War, appointed Lamar as a Justice of the Supreme Court.

As Joseph Angelillo noted last year, "rather than a lauded leader in the advance toward national reunion, Lamar should be regarded as central in the retreat from Reconstruction." (The “Unrepentant Secessionist”: The Nomination of L.Q.C. Lamar and the Retreat from Reconstruction Journal of Supreme Court History 05/10/2021)

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2022, April 27: L.Q.C. Lamar

LQC Lamar - Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar was his full Southern pompous name - is another of the somewhat better-known villains of American history. He was a true disciple of John Calhoun, the official evil spirit of American history. But he was also an important innovator of the post-Civil War "moderate" Southern segregationist and white racist.

My favorite stodgy-but-reliable source, Britannica Online, gives some information about his background:

Lamar was admitted to the bar in Georgia in 1847 and was a member of the Georgia House of Representatives (1853). He moved to Mississippi in 1855 and was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives the following year, serving until December 1860, when he resigned to participate in the Mississippi secession convention. He was the author of the Mississippi ordinance of secession (Jan. 9, 1861) and served in the Confederate army.

After the war Lamar taught law at the University of Mississippi (1866–73). He then served in the U.S. Congress, both in the House (1873–77) and in the Senate (1877–85), where his moderating influence during Reconstruction won him the sobriquet “the Great Pacificator.” President Grover Cleveland appointed Lamar secretary of the interior (1885) and later associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1888). [my emphasis]

Okay, that was a little heavy on the stodgy part. No, Lamar was not a "moderating influence during Reconstruction." He was a hardcore white supremacist and enemy of the Reconstruction democracies in the South that recognized African-Americans as equal citizens. He specialty, though, was putting on a polite face in Congress for Northerners who were tired of supporting the democratic Reconstruction so they could pretend that what was happening in the post-Reconstruction South wasn't so bad.

Dennis Mitchell in A New History of Mississippi (2014) explains how Lamar established his moderate schtick by giving a half-decent tribute to the Abolitionist Massachusetts Sen. Charles Sumner after Sumner death in 1874:

During his first months back in Congress, Lamar kept quiet, waiting for an opportunity to establish himself as spokesman for reconciliation between the South and North that would persuade the North to abandon its protection of the freedmen in Mississippi. Charles Sumner's death provided the perfect occasion. Before his death, Sumner had called for amnesty and forgiveness for the South, and Lamar used that as a springboard to praise Sumner and make his appeal for reconciliation between northerners and southerners, concluding: "My countrymen know one another and you will love one another:' The timing and tone proved to be perfect, winning the former fire-eater the reputation of peacemaker and conciliator and gaining lavish praise from the press. In the next Congress, Democrats elected him chairman of their caucus, further enhancing his status. As the face of the Mississippi Democratic Party, Lamar practiced the big lie technique as his allies back home brutally wrestled control away from [Mississippi's Republican Gov. Adelbert] Ames and his black majority. Lamar and his fellow Democrats adopted the face of reasonableness and conciliation to the white North while their allies employed violence to eliminate blacks from the political process in Mississippi. Confronted with accounts of murder and white intimidation of voters, they simply lied and denied the evidence. [my emphasis]

Did you catch the part in the Britannica quote about how Lamar was the author of the Mississippi ordinance of secession? A leading traitor to the United States, in other words. What a shock that less than a decade later he wanted to "persuade the North to abandon its protection of the freedmen in Mississippi"! Who could have predicted it?

Adelbert Ames is one of the genuine heroes of American democracy who seriously tried as Governor to defend democratic government in Mississippi. Mississippi suffers to this day from the fact that people like Lamar were on the winning side back then instead of those like Ames and his supporters.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2022, April 26: The recalcitrant Southern establishment in 1865

Abraham Lincoln's successor as President was "Union Democrat" Andrew Johnson, who had been Lincoln's running mate in 1864. Johnson became the first President to be impeached, though not convicted and removed for office in the Senate trial. He pursued a conciliatory policy toward the Southern planter class who had caused the Civil War. Johnson's weak Reconstruction policy was the real political basis for his impeachment.

Brenda Wineapple wrote about Johnson's Reconstruction policy in The First President To be Impeached American Scholar Spring 2019. She describes the situation immediately after the end of the war this way:

Visitors from the North frequently found white southerners smoldering, aggrieved, and intransigent; white southerners had tried to protect their homes, believing they had fought for the unassailable right of each state to make its own laws and preserve its own customs.

It's actually unlikely that many white Southerners immediately believed the war was mainly about some abstract commitment to "states' rights". They knew it was about what the Confederate leaders said clearly that it was about: preserving slavery.

Having lost the war, they would not surrender such rights easily. "It is our duty," said South Carolina planter Wade Hampton, "to support the President of the United States so long as he manifests a disposition to restore all our rights as a sovereign State." Union General Philip Sheridan, renowned for his unrelenting aggression during the war, alerted his superiors that planters in Texas were secretly conspiring "against [the] rights" of the freedmen. In New Orleans, the journalist Whitelaw Reid, traveling through the South, was stunned to find a picture of Lincoln hanging next to one of John Wilkes Booth, and above them both a huge portrait of Robert E. Lee. [my emphasis]

Many of the defeated Southern planters and their political supporters were not ready to play nice, in other words.

She continues:

All through the South, ex-Confederates vilified the black population, and one legislature after another passed "black codes," ordinances designed to prevent freed men and women from owning property, traveling freely, making contracts, and enjoying any form of civil rights or due process. "People had not got over regarding negroes as something other than men," wrote Reid. Meanwhile, Andrew Johnson, the Tennessean occupying the White House, had acted quickly. While Congress was in recess, he singlehandedly reestablisl1ed southern state governments by executive proclamation. He subsequently issued pardons to former Confederates on easy terms and at an astonishing rate. Later, he nudged out of the Freedmen's Bureau those who disagreed with his position and tried to shut down the bureau by vetoing legislation that would keep it running. He vetoed civil rights legislation as unfair to whites and attempted to block passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, which guaranteed citizenship to blacks. He turned a cold eye on the violence directed toward the freedmen, and he emphatically staked out a position he sought to maintain, saying, ''Everyone would and must admit that the white race is superior to the black." [my emphasis]

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2022, April 25: Slavery and the founding principles of the US

Sean Wilentz reminds us of the key role that slavery played in the development of what we know by names such as Western culture and European values: "A fixture and force in Western culture, time out of mind, slavery, and more specifically racial slavery, had been essential to the European settlement of the New World ever since the Portuguese pioneered the plantation system with enslaved African labor in the sixteenth century." (American Slavery and ‘the Relentless Unforeseen’ New York Review blog 11/19/2019)

Wilentz gives us a brief intellectual history of the strain of European thought that developed a critique of modern slavery, an important step in the development of democracy, personal freedom, and social justice.

But he also reminds us that simple historic narratives of democratic progress can easily obscure important aspects of how such progress as took place actually did happen, i.e., by people fighting for it. He summarizes a liberal version of this narrative that is true as far as it goes:

The historian Bernard Bailyn has offered one influential version of this view in his description of how the Revolution unleashed a “contagion of liberty.” Slavery, although a central part of American society, hardly encapsulated the ideals of the Declaration of Independence; it contradicted them, for reasons later explained by no less of an authority than Abraham Lincoln. The American Revolution may not have overthrown the institution of slavery but its egalitarian principles were at least implicitly antislavery. The anomaly became more glaring over the succeeding two generations when, in yet another unfolding of the unforeseen, American slavery did not die out as most expected but expanded, turning the American South into the most dynamic and ambitious slavery regime in the world. Still, when Emancipation arrived, it did so as a vindication and affirmation of America’s founding principles, the “new birth of freedom” that Lincoln pronounced at Gettysburg in 1863. It confounded the claims of those reactionary proslavery apologists who belittled Thomas Jefferson as a cunning dissembler and who regarded the Declaration’s assertion of self-evident equality as, in the words of one Indiana senator from 1854, “nothing more than a self-evident lie.” [my emphasis]

Part of the process of creating a nation is creating narratives that function as myths, i.e., more-or-less sacred events and principles and heroic achievements that are taken as valid and shared by a large portion of the people. And in the United States, where we still operate under a constitution that became effective in 1789, readings of historical events and previous interpretations of them over 200 years ago can even have significant implications for court rulings.

American reactionaries and "reactionary radicalized conservatives" (a term Austrian political scientists Natascha Strobl uses to describe figures like most of the Republicans currently in Congress) are very suspicious of critical thinking about history. As evidence by their ridiculous jihad against their bogeyman version of "critical race theory."

Wilentz describes the limitation of the Bailyn view this way:

One problem with this familiar view is that it obscures how new, how radical, antislavery politics were during the revolutionary era, and how, for many patriots, American slavery and American freedom were perfectly compatible. ...

These proslavery Americans and apologists for slavery and their progeny were no less products of the American founding than the early abolitionists inspired by Woolman and Benezet or the conflicted enlightened Virginians like Jefferson. Plantation slavery grew stupendously in the United States after the Revolution, generating a well-organized slave power that long dominated national politics. Slavery’s defeat was not inevitable. Nor, obviously, did white supremacy die with slavery. Over the century and a half since slavery’s abolition, the racist Americanism of Charles Pinckney and Roger Brooke Taney has survived and flourished in new forms, along with dominating social and political structures that uphold it. Far from vanquished, it has morphed and resurged in ways expected and unexpected, from the bloody overthrow of Reconstruction to the menacing rise of Donald J. Trump. [my emphasis]

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2022, April 24: Felony disenfranchisement in Mississippi

Mississippi’s Gov. Tate Reeves, who formally proclaimed April as Confederate Heritage Month in Mississippi, is a committed Republican “culture warrior” on issues like abortion and the anti-“critical race theory” hype. But he hasn’t forgotten the old-fashioned kind of methods used for decades to deprive Black citizens of their right to vote in Mississippi and other states.

One of those was felony disenfranchisement. After the Civil War, many African-Americans were arrested, often on trumped-up charges, then sentenced to prison, where they were hired out to former slave-owners as work gangs. “Involutary servitude” was allowed by the 13th Amendment as punishment for crimes. Then after they served their prison sentences, they were then denied the right to vote because they were convicted felons. This is a practice that still disporportionately affects Black voters.

A Mississippi Democratic friend of mine uses the nickname "Tater Tot" for Reeves, a reference to a popular Southern side dish. Tate is the child of a wealthy family who affects a strong rural Mississippi accent in his public statements.

As Bobby Harrison reports (Gov. Tate Reeves vetoes bill easing Jim Crow-era voting restrictions Missisippi Today 04/23/2022) He vetoed a bill that was passed by the Republican-dominated legislature that would have simply made it easier for felons who had served their sentences to have their right to vote restored. He rejected even that, citing the relevance of the alleged practices of ancient Greece and Rome to 21st century criminal law:

“Felony disenfranchisement is an animating principle of the social contract at the heart of every great republic dating back to the founding of ancient Greece and Rome," the Republican Reeves wrote in his veto message, which was filed with the Legislature on Friday.

“In America, such laws date back to the colonies and the eventual founding of our Republic," Reeves continued. "Since statehood, in one form or another, Mississippi law has recognized felony disenfranchisement.”

It's worth recalliung that slavery and the full disenfrancisement of women were also part of Mississippi’s law when it became a state in 1817. Here's a more reality-based version from Democracy Docket (What Can We Learn From the History of Felony Disenfranchisement? 11/21/2021) on the ancient roots of the practice, and the American versions of it:

Also, when Republicans start referring to ancient Greco-Roman history, it's usually an indication that they are blowing smoke.

The idea of “civil death” — losing certain civic and public rights as a punishment for a crime — can be traced back to ancient Greece and Rome and were later transformed into the English laws that were brought to the British colonies. Although some state constitutions established a version of criminal disenfranchisement in the early 1800s, most of the modern felony disenfranchisement laws that we know today originated after the Civil War. [my emphasis]

Harrison also reports:

Mississippi is one of a handful of states — less than 10 — that places a lifetime ban on voting for those convicted of certain felonies unless through the action of the Legislature or the governor. Most states restore the right to vote at some point after a person has completed his or her sentence.

NOTE: A version of this post appeared on the Facebook page of the Progressive Caucus of Democrats Abroad on 05/02/2022.

See also:

• Mississippi Governor Vetoes Bill Easing Strict Felony Disenfranchisement Law Democracy Docket 04/27/2022
• Courtney Ann Jackson, Lawmakers and advocates question Governor’s latest veto involving expungements and voting rights WTOK-TV (Meridian MS) 04/27/2022

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2022, April 22: Compromise of 1850

Historian David Blight reminds us of the decades of bad compromises that the Slave Power dragged the country though leading up to the Civil War in ‘A Doubtful Freedom’ New York Review 01/16/2020 issue):

In 1830 the Massachusetts senator Daniel Webster famously pronounced his dedication to “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable,” under the tremendous pressure of sectional division between North and South over tariffs, states’ rights, and slavery. In the midst of the 1832 nullification crisis, a confrontation over South Carolina’s resistance to federal tariffs and fear of how they would affect cotton prices, Webster warned that disunion would mean “states dissevered, discordant, belligerent; on a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched…in fraternal blood.” Twenty years later, he stood in the Senate to support the Fugitive Slave Act—a law, widely loathed in his state, requiring that all citizens and officials of free states cooperate in returning escaped slaves to their masters through special new magistrates—while trying to save the Union in the Compromise of 1850.

The Compromise grew out of westward expansion following the Mexican War in the late 1840s, which raised the question of whether slavery would exist in California or any new state formed in the vast southwest territories gained from Mexico. In close sectionalized rather than partisan votes, Congress admitted California as a free state, set new borders for Texas, and opened up the entire southwest to the possible expansion of slavery, while ending slave-trading in the District of Columbia. Congress also passed the Fugitive Slave Act, which allowed Southerners to think that they had secured a federal legal system by which to retrieve their runaway “property.” The Compromise, however, was a weak and untenable settlement of the slavery question, and it backfired by stimulating a more militant antislavery movement. This time, the patriotic urge for union ultimately failed, and a decade later the nation collapsed and descended into civil war. [my emphasis]

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2022, April 21: Democracy vs. white supremacy

I have one more quote from Stetson Kennedy's Southern Exposure (1946). He stresses in his book the similarity of white-supremacist Southern racial ideology and practice to the ideologies of the defeated fascist nations in the very recently concluded Second World War. And he writes about the importance of ending white racist political and social practices everywhere in the country in order to secure democracy for the US as a whole:

Because of its afore-mentioned poverty, prejudice, poor health, poor education, poll tax, white primary, and the relative weakness of its unions, the South is American democracy's Achilles' heel - its soft spot. Not only the Southern enemies of democracy are aware of this - many of the nation's most powerful antidemocratic elements are also concentrating their big guns on the South. Already they have succeeded in blasting into office a pack of prostitute Southern congressmen and senators who for decades have virtually controlled Congress and subverted democracy throughout America. Not satisfied with this, some among them are plotting to build up a reservoir of fascism in the South with which to flood the whole nation.

There is no intent here to oversimplify the problem of the South in terms of democracy versus fascism; on the contrary, this has been an attempt to sketch something of the complexity of the problem. Nevertheless, the struggle against fascism in the South is basic, just as the War Against Fascism was basic. A total democratic victory over fascism, inside and outside the South, is prerequisite to any and all forms of permanent Southern progress. [my emphasis]

And there is an echo of today's Republican anti-public-education rhetoric in this comment of Kennedy's from 1946: "Inasmuch as a racial educational differential is essential to the socio-politico-economic system of white supremacy, the system's opposition to federal aid to education has dated from Reconstruction."

Dishonest history and science are something that white supremacists have always considered important to promote.

And Kennedy almost seems to have had a premonition of Ron DeSantis and Marjorie Taylor Greene: "As was only to be expected, a cult of witch doctors has arisen to administer the poison and conduct the rites of white supremacy. No diagnosis of the problem of the South would be complete without close scrutiny of these pathological symptoms."

To be fair, I've never come across evidence of the old Jim Crow white supremacy advocates advocating white supremacist math. So Gov. DeSantis deserves some credit for innovation.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2022, April 20: Prejudice, "natural" and manufactured

In the previous post in this series, I quoted once again from Stetson Kennedy’s 1946 book Southern Exposure a passage where he talks about how Southern elites – others might say Bourbons (a term used for decades to describe conservative Democrats who favored the wealthy), the ruling class, the wealthy, capitalists, the establishment – deliberately promoted racial prejudice to divide working people from one another.

I want to expand on this idea a bit more.

This was an explanation often used not just by the ideological left but by labor unions more generally, an argument of the “don’t-let-the-boss-man-divide-you” type. Kennedy devoted a chapter of his book to the role labor and the pro-labor Roosevelt Administration had played in recent years defending the civil rights of African-Americans.

White racism is of course a complicated phenomenon with many villains. The fact that the wealthy convinced many whites that Black people were their enemies doesn’t excuse those of all classes who have played into it. Nor does it excuse non-elite whites who joined in organizations like slave patrols prior to the civil war (which participation was often mandated by state and local governments) or to white-supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan in later times.

To use political terms from more recent decades, class conflicts and racial prejudice overlap but are not identical. Achieving a just society requires combating both. But equal representation in unions won’t automatically eliminate white racism. Nor will celebrating highly successful individuals with a minority background. And unfair wages and bad working conditions aren’t any better if whites and non-whites are equally represented among the workers being exploited.

Racial injustices and class injustices are deeply interconnected. And one can certainly argue plausibly that one cannot be fully solved without also solving the other. But the two are distinct problems, however intertwined they may be.

Kennedy also makes a distinction between what we might call prejudice arising from normal social processes, e.g., when two groups with notable cultural differences first find themselves interacting with each other, and maliciously generated prejudice. He sees the bosses-setting-workers-against-each-other kind of hatred as one that is systematically promoted by particular interests. He makes the distinction this way:

We have seen how social prejudice comes into being naturally and can be overcome naturally through co-operation and education, while institutionalized prejudice, on the other band, is deliberately fostered and nurtured to serve the ends of economic and political reaction. Social prejudice is a growing pain incident to the process of becoming civilized, but institutionalized prejudice is the cause of untold suffering, war, and depression. The task of eliminating the latter type is therefore most urgent. [my emphasis]

And he makes it clear that the white Southern elite - and not just the Southern version - worked on promoting racial prejudice against African-Americans for a long time.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2022, April 19: The social function of white racism

I've fallen behind in my April posts against Confederate "Heritage" Month. I'm intending to complete a daily series for April. But some of the posts will spill over into May.

For this post, I'm going back to Stetson Kennedy's 1946 book Southern Exposure that criticizes the Jim Crown laws and voter suppression practices directed against African-Americans at the time, particularly in the South.

In the book, Kennedy speculates on the mass psychology of white racism. He starts it with an assumption that early human tribes were suspicious and hostile to each other. That's still a widespread assumption, though I'm not sure how well current anthropological research sustains it:

Primitive men no sooner became aware of their racial and cultural divergencies than they began to band together in tribes of their own kind - and individual xenophobias merged into group xenophobias. As such, they acquired the characteristics of mass psychology. The individual's fear of strange tribesmen was re-enforced by the identical fears of all his fellow tribesmen; and the trepidation which had begun as a protective instinct now took on the infallibility of a verity imputed by socially consistent sensation.

But Kennedy also makes it clear that this is in no way a valid excuse for contemporary racist practices, i.e., that's just the way people are. He's not buying that:

Although it is entirely natural for people to first make issues of their differences, it is equally natural for them to resolve those differences and to work out ways of co-operation. This means that race hatred can be kept alive only by forces foreign to the folk themselves. The whole monstrous mass of racial and religious animosities, despite their instinctive and traditional background, are not bona fide folkways, but a deadly virus that has been artificially cultivated by the few who profit from the disunity of the many. Exploitation, imperialism, fascism, and war would all be impossible without forced feeding of these asocial instincts. [my emphasis]

He also characterizes that process this way: "Fascism represents the ultimate expression of this policy."

And that is still the direction that contemporary versions of voter suppression and election subversion aimed at displacing African-American and Latino voters are headed.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2022, April 18: Sherman marching through Georgia - oh, hell, yeah!

Gen. William Sherman's march from Atlanta to Georgia in December 1864 was a major blow to the still-persisting resistance of the Southern Confederacy. This became a favorite incident in the Lost Cause narrative in which the pore white Southerners were victims of tyrannical Yankee fanatics.

Alan Blinder wrote about Sherman's March in 150 Years Later, Wrestling With a Revised View of Sherman’s March Atlanta Journal 11/14/2014, a story on the occasion of an historical marker being placed in Atlanta that was meant to counter the dishonest Lost Cause version of Sherman's story, which Blinder summarizes this way:

To any number of Southerners, the Civil War general remains a ransacking brute and bully whose March to the Sea, which began here 150 years ago on Saturday, was a heinous act of terror. Despite the passage of time, Sherman remains to many a symbol of the North’s excesses during the Civil War, which continues to rankle some people here.

... One of the marker’s sentences specifically targets some of the harsher imagery about him as “popular myth.”

“ ‘Gone with the Wind’ has certainly been a part of it,” W. Todd Groce, the president of the Georgia Historical Society, which sponsored the marker, said of regional perceptions of Sherman and the Union Army. “In general, we just have this image that comes from a movie.”

And he explains:

The marker near the picnic tables at the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum is the fruit of a reassessment of Sherman and his tactics that has been decades in the making. Historians have increasingly written that Sherman’s plan for the systematic obliteration in late 1864 of the South’s war machine, including its transportation network and factories, was destructive but not gratuitously destructive. Instead, those experts contend, the strategy was an effective and legal application of the general’s authority and the hard-edged masterstroke necessary to break the Confederacy.

They have described plenty of family accounts of cruelty as nothing more than fables that unfairly mar Sherman’s reputation. (my emphasis)

Honorable Southerners making up lying war propaganda to smear the Yankees? Say it ain't so, y'all!

“What is really happening is that over time, the views that are out there are being challenged by historical research,” said John F. Marszalek, a Sherman biographer and the executive director of the Mississippi-based Ulysses S. Grant Association. “The facts are coming out.”

To that end, the marker in Atlanta mentions that more than 62,000 soldiers under Sherman’s command devastated “Atlanta’s industrial and business (but not residential) districts” and talks of how, “contrary to popular myth, Sherman’s troops primarily destroyed only property used for waging war — railroads, train depots, factories, cotton gins and warehouses.” (my emphasis)

I don't know if all of Sherman's actions would be consistent with international humanitarian law in 2022. But the essential point is that Sherman's approach to warfare, including the propaganda-laden March Through Georgia, was not the terroristic military operation directed against civilians depicted in Lost Cause mythology. It was directed against the Rebel armed forces. And Sherman is credited as being something of an innovator in recognizing the importance of disabling economic infrastructure like railroad lines and industrial facilities that were important to the enemy's war effort.

I would be much more inclined to take a critical attitude toward Sherman's postwar stint as Commanding General of the Army (1869–1883), in which he was in charge of the Indian Wars in the western US of that period.

Here's Pete Seeger's version of the Union song Marching Through Georgia from the Civil War days:

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 17: Slavery and the American national narrative

Civil War historian David Blight provides a good summary of how history narratives intersect with current conceptions of national identity in 'A Doubtful Freedom' New York Review 01/16/2020:

That the United States has been a “nation” since its founding — struggling through slavery, civil conflict, labor strife, economic depressions, and deep ethnic and racial divisions but still surviving as a single polity and people — has long been an article of faith in triumphal versions of our history. “We the People” have often needed a sense of our long continuity if we wished to hold ourselves together. A story, true and false, imagined or otherwise, with remembrance and a good deal of forgetting is perhaps the only thing that can unify a nation. Before he became president, Barack Obama inspired many of us with his clarion call in 2004 that “there is not a liberal America and a conservative America—there is the United States of America.” In these recent polarized years we’ve seen bitter refutations of this premise, even as its noble impulse survives. Just now the idea of the American nation needs serious attention from historians. (my emphasis)

Assuming that homo sapiens can somehow avoid the worst in environmental damage and nuclear war, people will someday look back and marvel at the leaps of imagination required to conceive of a world of "nations." Even now, if we look back at the disputes before and after the First World War on how to go about defining and constructing nations, some of it looks pretty bizarre and unworkable.

But that will be a long time from now. Meanwhile, we have to deal with bizarre arguments over defining what's valuable and essential in the US national heritage. This is currently producing some strange manifestations, e.g.: Ana Ceballos, Florida targets school math textbooks over critical race theory objections Miami Herald 04/15/2022.

I suppose it's appropriate that it was during Confederate "Heritage" Month that I was first confronted with this new Florida idea of white supremacist mathematics. How does this work? If you count the number of people in a room, you only count the white people?

Blight focuses on a question of ongoing interest, how supporters and opponents of slavery invoked what they all considered a kind of sacred past, or at least a past that conveyed a patriotic burden, to address challenges that the Founders were unable to solve on a permanent basis.

He writes that James Madison, and by implication other Framers, were unable to resolve the contradiction in the Constitution's protection of slavery and the democratic-republican notion of human equality:

[Madison] embodied the contradiction at the same time that he may have provided later abolitionists a means to harness, rather than only condemn, the founding document. Many, especially Frederick Douglass, did just that, hoping to get the authority of the Bill of Rights and the plea for a “more perfect union” on the side of the antislavery cause. We have never stopped arguing about whether the Constitution was fundamentally proslavery—in effectively sustaining the system—or whether it contained antislavery elements that were revealed over time. What we do know is that eventually a strong segment of political abolitionists forged an antislavery interpretation of the Constitution that energized the original Republican Party and helped foment disunion. (my emphasis)

Oh, Bright also has the following observation related to the evil spirit of American history:

[Andrew Delbanco] contends that Melville based Captain Ahab directly on the figure of John C. Calhoun, the South’s and slavery’s most notorious defender and a crucial proponent of the Fugitive Slave Law. One of the most interesting aspects of the book is Delbanco’s serious engagement with and analysis of Calhoun’s place in history — the political philosopher of proslavery ideology as well as the “two nations” conception of America. Ahab has been likened to everyone from Hitler to terrorists. But by arguing for Calhoun as the model for Ahab, Delbanco suggests that the slavery crisis was woven through Melville’s philosophical masterpiece about the human condition. (my emphasis)

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2022, April 16: The Texas "1836 Project"

Texas last year passed a law as part of its effort to ban the teaching of history in public schools passed a law establishing an “1836 Project” to celebrate the revolt led by pro-slavery Americans living in the Mexican territory of Texas. American slaveowners had been moving into Mexico as part of a larger Southern effort to add new slaves states.

The reliable-if-somewhat-stodgy Britannica Online gives this brief summary of the slave Republic of Texas:

Texans formed a provisional government in 1835, and in 1836 they issued a declaration of independence at Washington-on-the-Brazos. David G. Burnet was chosen ad interim president of the new Republic of Texas; Sam Houston was appointed its military commander; and Austin became commissioner to the United States with the mission of securing strategic aid and enlisting volunteers.

The article also notes:

The Texas Revolution was not simply a fight between the Anglo settlers and Mexican troops; it was a revolution of the people who were living in Texas against what many of them regarded as tyrannical rule from a distant source. Many of the leaders in the revolution and many of the armed settlers who took part were Mexicans.

But the politics around the annexation of Texas and the subsequent Mexican War had slavery and its geographical expansion at its center. Mexico had abolished slavery. The Slave Power in the US was committed to defending and extending it.

Ten years later Texas would be admitted to the Union as a slave state.

The purpose of the Texas 1836 Project is to promote a view of Texas and US history that is essentially a variant on the Lost Cause/white supremacist narrative. Heidi Pérez reported in Texas’ 1836 Project aims to promote “patriotic education,” but critics worry it will gloss over state’s history of racism Texas Tribune 06/09/2021:

One controversial aspect of the 1836 Project is its name. Some critics have pointed out that Texas’ independence didn’t apply to all of those living in the state at the time, such as slaves and indigenous groups. The Constitution of the Republic of Texas, passed in 1836, legalized slavery and excluded indigenous groups from gaining independence.

“1836 marked independence for some, but for others marks a period of slavery and pain and exploitation for many, many people who live there,” said Maggie Stern, a youth civic education and engagement coordinator at the Children’s Defense Fund in Texas. [my emphasis]

Brian Franklin analyzes and debunks the approach of this particular piece of historical revisionism in The 1836 Project Is an Opportunity Slate 06/11/2021. The title goes directly a problem of glorifying an idealized or imagined past, which is that people who actually take an interest in that past may actually learn something about actual history. Franklin refers to some of it:

Let’s read the 1836 Texas Declaration of Independence. It not only exposes the tyranny of Mexican leader Gen. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, but also describes how Anglo Texans consistently bent and broke Mexican laws. In class, we can talk about how one of the laws that Texans violated was Mexico’s decade-old abolition of slavery. The declaration also describes Stephen F. Austin’s incarceration. In discussing what happened there, we can discover that Mexican officials rightly suspected Texans of fomenting illegal revolutions for years.

Let’s read Texas’ single most foundational document, the 1836 Constitution of the Republic of Texas. We will find several values familiar to present-day Texans: divided government, religious freedom, and the right to bear arms. But we will also find some “values” that don’t track very well in 2021. That it was illegal for either Congress or an individual to simply emancipate a slave. That even free Black people could not live in Texas without specific permission from the state. That “Africans, the descendants of Africans, and Indians” had no rights as citizens.

Let’s read Republic of Texas President Mirabeau Lamar’s message to the Texas Congress in December of 1838, where he calls for the “total extinction or total expulsion” of all Indigenous peoples in Texas. This included the Texas Cherokee, who had long-standing land rights recognized by Mexico and by Texas’ previous president, Sam Houston. In class, we can talk about how Lamar would make good on his proposal by sending a Texan army to massacre and drive out the remaining Cherokee in July 1839. [my emphasis]

Real history can be enlightening.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2022, April 15: John Calhoun as a twisted prophet

In yesterday's post, I quoted from the German historian Herman Von Holst's 1882, biography of John Calhoun, fanatical defender of slavery and patron saint of secession and Confederate treason.

His account is notable in the context of Lost Cause ideology for a couple of reasons. And Holst isn't operating from a Lost Cause perspective.

He gives a lot of attention to the ideological context in which Calhoun argued. He describes Calhoun as a defender of slavery who understood that the deep contradictory between chattel slavery and democracy, even the white-men's democracy will lingering property requirements for voting of the US in the early 19th century. He shows how Calhoun took the lead in insisting that slavery defenders had to defend it as a positive good. This was in contrast to the more common justification for slavery in the late 18th century that described it as a necessary evil that benefitted Africans by raising them to a "civilized" life.

As the profits from the cotton business and the slavery that supported it in the Southern slave states grew and the "Peculiar Institution" became more entrenched, defending slavery as a positive good and a more explicitly racist view of Africans as an inherently inferior race that must be kept in permanent subjugation became far more popular as ideological defenses of slavery. And Calhoun was a leader of that trend.

Holst's biography also is a reminder of how dominant a role the slavery issue became in national politics by the 1840s and how clear it was to many partisans that slavery was incompatible with the continued existence of the Union as a democratic, constitutional government. Holst writes at some length about the push to add Texas to the Union as a slave state and the Mexican War, including Calhoun's intense polemics on those issues and the intense argument over slavery in the wake of the latter.

To make the Lost Cause narrative's fable that the Civil War was over the North's disregard for "states' rights" and not at all about slavery, you have to basically ignore those key elements in the politics leading up to the Civil War. In fact, one can hardly understand US politics up until from 1776 to 1860 without taking the importance of the controversies over slavery seriously.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2022, April 14: John Calhoun as one of his first biographers saw him

It doesn't seem quite right to do a Confederate "Heritage" Month series without mentioning the evil spirit of American history, John C. Calhoun:

Herman Eduard Von Holst (1841-1904) was one of Calhoun's early biographers.

Von Holst was born in a German town in what is now Estonia, then a part of the Russian Empire. He became a German historian of the United States, and the English translation. His series of book on US Constitutional history won him wide recognition in the United States as an important historian.

Holst served several years in the legislature of the Grand Duchy of Baden (Germany) and campaigned unsuccessfully in 1890 for the Imperial Diet on the National Liberal party ticket.

Holst did a biography of Calhoun that first appeared in 1882, John C. Calhoun. Richard Current in his own 1966 biography of that same title mentioned Holst's book as one of the three early biographies he considered "worth noting," also commenting that it "was lacking in objectivity."

A contemporary sketch of Holst by Albert Bushnell Hart wrote of Horst's Calhoun biography that in it, "the slavery question is here grouped about the political life of the champion of slavery in Congress, whose singular and contradictory character has aroused the sympathetic interest of the author."

Without trying to evaluate the general worth of Horst's Calhoun biography, I'll quote a few excerpts from it, relying here in the 1899 edition. This is a comment from the editor's introduction, not from Holst himself.

Calhoun was in fact an embodied idea; his individuality and that idea were welded into a single entity; his life expressed that idea, and expressed nothing else. Correct and even austere in his character, interested in nothing outside of slavery, he owed such picturesqueness as he had to the singleness of his purpose and the intensity of his faith in the great social and political institution of the South. ...

... apart from slavery, there were few other matters which he cared about at all, and there were absolutely none others which he cared about much. [my emphasis]

Someone whose entire being was committed to defending the idea and institution of slavery. Yeah, that's not a bad brief description of Calhoun.

Holst himself wrote, "From about 1830 to the day of his death, Calhoun may be called the very impersonation [embodiment] of the slavery question."

Holst does seem to admire some of Calhoun's personal qualities, perhaps in the sense of a biographer learning to love his monster. For instance:

The champion of slavery, who, with head erect, flashing eye, and the deep-toned voice of solemn conviction and apostolic infallibility, dares the whole civilized world, is every inch a man, though a sadly mistaken one[.] (emphasis in original)

But Holst doesn't buy into the Lost Cause narrative of slavery that became the acceptable history of the Civil War and what caused of unreconciled Southern whites immediately after Appomattox:

Slavery, in consequence of the enormous development of the cotton culture, had become the determining principle of the whole political, economical, and social life of the Southern States, and a protective tariff was absolutely incompatible with the interests of the slave-holders. ...

No white man [in the slave South] could ever lose "caste." No matter how lazy, poor, ignorant, and depraved he might be, yet, by virtue of the color of his skin, he was a born member of the aristocracy, and absolutely nothing could deprive him of his place in it; for the gulf which separated the whites from the negroes could no more be bridged over than that between heaven and hell. As the human mind is constituted, no more powerful incentive could be offered to the mass of the population to sink deeper into nerveless shiftlessness. The middle classes are the backbone of every civilized community, and slavery prevented the formation of a well-to-do, intellectual, and progressive middle class more effectually than any express law could have done.

The greater the difference between this real aristocracy [the planter class] and the bulk of the white population actually was in every respect, the more the former was forced to affect absolute equality with the lowliest of their fellow citizens. These had to be persuaded that their interests were identical with' those of the rich planters; and, as they had in fact more to suffer from the effects of slavery than the slaves themselves, this could only be accomplished by systematically instilling into them a dull self-conceit and suicidal arrogance, which mistook shreds and tatters for purple and ermine. They looked down upon every other form of civilization with an air of contemptuous superiority, which would have been exceedingly ludicrous if it had not been infinitely sad. (my emphasis)

No, this wasn't compatible with the Lost Cause narrative, in which slavery had been a tragic but necessary and mostly benevolent institution, which would have faded away politely if the evil Abolitionists and damnyankees hadn't made such an issue of it.

Yet it was as certain as a proposition of Euclid that the conflict was irreconcilable, and therefore "irrepressible," because freedom and slavery are antagonistic ideas, acting with equal energy upon the intellectual, political, economical, social, and moral life of a people. It has been truly said that "compromise is the essence of politics;" genuine compromises, however, can only be concluded with regard to measures, never between principles, that is, between intellectual and moral conceptions which, in their very essence, are the opposite poles of an idea. (my emphasis)

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 12: Understand current politics in their historical context

Dale Kretz in an article for the social-democratic website Jacobin writes about different ways that the same history can be evaluated and valued (The Abolitionist Legacy of the Civil War Belongs to the Left 04/06/2022):

How should we remember the Civil War? For many liberals today, the story is one of the North winning the war but losing the peace, acquiescing to a sectional reconciliation that left white supremacy intact. Racism won out, plain and simple.

But this is only part of the story. The precipitous decline in union membership, labor militancy in the workplace, and Marxist scholars in academia have conspired to obscure what historian Matthew Stanley brings to light in his recent book: that the Civil War, for black and white workers alike, was an enduring touchstone for popular struggles from Reconstruction to the New Deal, shaping class consciousness in the process.

I would argue that Kretz draws too sharp a difference there. I'm sure there are a lot of liberals who haven't spent a lot of time reading up on Reconstruction. But during the Jim Crow years basically until the 1960s, liberals did accept a Lost Cause view of Reconstruction as a terrible time of corruption by Republicans and Black officeholders in the South in a process imposed by fanatical Radical Republicans.

And for decades it really was more left-leaning historians writing in publications like the Journal of Negro History (now Journal of African American History) who validated Reconstruction as an important time of democratic reform that could have succeeded if the federal government had been willing to enforce civil rights in the South more vigorously and suppress violent, anti-democratic terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan more diligently.

But mainstream historiography - which the Republican moral panic over "critical race theory" aims to ban from public schools - has recognized a more realistic and positive view of Reconstruction. Most liberals - and conservatives, too, if they were paying attention - have had at least some decent exposure to those views the last several decades.

I do think that one reason that today's Democratic Party has such a hard time coming to grips with the asymmetric polarization that has made today's Republican Party an authoritarian, radical-right party is that mainstream liberals do tend to operate from a reflexive attitude that progress in democracy and a social state are essentially part of a process in which setbacks are minor and temporary.

But Reconstruction and its overthrow - as well as the Civil War itself - are major reminders that progress in democracy and basic government services can be and have been drastically set back for long periods of time.

And the Republican Party's current push to use voter suppression and election subversion to undermine democracy in real time is very much based on the unfortunately successful efforts of the opponents of Reconstruction used to disenfranchise generations of African-Americans in the former Confederacy.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2022, April 11: The Crittenden Compromise ploy by the Slave Power

Kevin Levin, who I've already quoted in two posts this month, makes doing these annual sets of posts a lot easier. Because for a lot of them, I could just link to posts he's already done!

In Should Lincoln Have Let the South Go? Civil War Memory (Substack) 04/10/2022, he touches on the pre-Civil War dilemma that American politicians faced: how should the free states free themselves from the slave system, with which they were in a symbiotic relationship in the Union.

As he notes of the question in his title, "Most people who speculate about what Lincoln should have done have no real understanding of why he did what he did. More to the point, few people have any sense of what the Union meant to the loyal citizenry of the United States in 1860-61."

I can't improve on Kevin's description of why the question itself is a symptom of the lack of adequate historical understanding of early and antebellum American history. So go read his piece.

It's worth mentioning here that there was a significant proposal for a Constitutional Amendment that wouldn't have "let the slave states go," but would have protected slavery within them. It was known as the Crittenden Compromise after its main sponsor, Kentucky's Democratic Sen. John J. Crittenden. It would have "denied Congress the right to ever abolish slavery in states where it existed." (Farrell Evans, The 1860 Compromise That Would Have Preserved Slavery in the US Constitution History.com 12/06/2021)

Evans relates how President Lincoln used a political maneuver to kill the Crittenden proposal. Crittenden himself supported the Union in the Civil War. But he continued to defend slavery, as well:

After the failure of his plan and the start of the Civil War, Crittenden left the Senate and returned to Kentucky in an effort to save Kentucky for the Union. In May 1861, he became the chairman of the Border State Convention, a group of delegates from Kentucky and Missouri who met in Frankfort to ask the Southern states to reconsider their position on secession. After first pushing Kentucky to stay neutral in the war, Crittenden became a supporter of the Union. His own family was split over the war. Two of his sons became generals in opposing armies.

Two years into the Civil War, Crittenden died in 1863 of failing health at the age of 77 as he was preparing for reelection to Congress. He was not a supporter of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation nor the use of Black men as Union troops. In July 1861, he introduced resolutions that the purpose of the war was not for “overthrowing or interfering with the rights or established institutions of those states,” but rather to “defend and maintain the supremacy of the Constitution and to preserve the Union.” [my emphasis]

James McPherson elaborates on Lincoln's position (Who Freed the Slaves? Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 139:1, Mar 1995):

When [William] Seward flirted with the idea of supporting the Crittenden Compromise, Lincoln stiffened the backbones of Seward and other key Republicans. "Entertain no proposition for a compromise in regard to the extension of slavery;" he wrote to them. "The tug has to come, & better now, than any time hereafter." Crittenden's compromise "would lose us everything we gained by the [1860] election. Filibustering for all South of us [this refers to military operations to seize more territory in Latin America], and making slave states would follow ... to put us again on the high-road to a slave empire." The proposal for concessions, Lincoln pointed out, "acknowledges that slavery has equal rights with liberty, and surrenders all we have contended for. ... We have just carried an election on principles fairly stated to the people. Now we are told in advance, the government shall be broken up, unless we surrender to those we have beaten. ... If we surrender, it is the end of us. They will repeat the experiment upon us ad libitum. A year will not pass, till we shall have to take Cuba as a condition upon which they will stay in the Union."

Lincoln knew when it came to secession, it was now all or nothing. The rebellion had to be defeated and the further spread of slavery blocked. And both the Slave Power and the Abolitionists were very aware that the Southern brand of slavery was an institution that had to expand or die out.

He goes on to point out that there were those who questioned Lincoln's caution in issuing the Emancipation Proclamation. But on the Crittenden Compromise, he knew that accepting it would have been doom for democracy and the American Republic.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2022, April 10: Were alternatives to civil war possible by 1860?

“Lincoln allegedly teaches lessons about ‘the politics of the possible’,” writes Mark Graber, “but the precise nature of those lessons and possibilities are obscured by scholarly failures to acknowledge the proslavery compromises necessary in 1861 to preserve the Union peacefully or the justification of the violence actually responsible for the abolition of slavery.” (“John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, Dred Scott, and the Problem of Constitutional Evil” in The Dred Scott Case: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Race and Law, 2010)

What did he mean by that? In retrospect, the US Civil War – like almost any other historical event – can look inevitable. But the politicians looked for ways to avoid that outcome. And in a general sense, that’s very understandable. Solving a problem without civil war is obviously better in the abstract that solving it with one.

On the other hand, what if civil war is inevitable? That was a big part of the context of the debate over slavery prior to 1860. Many slaves certainly thought slavery was intolerable enough to undertake the very risky flight to free states, where they could legally be hunted down by slavecatchers as runaway slaves.

There was also the example of Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804, which showed that there was a way to end slavery with rebellion and war. It certainly scared the bejeesus out of American slaveowners. Independence for Haiti also came with a huge downside: France coerced them into paying France compensation for the emancipated slaves. It took Haiti 122 years to pay that debt down, acting as a huge drag on their economic development. (See: Greg Rosalsky, 'The Greatest Heist In History': How Haiti Was Forced To Pay Reparations For Freedom NPR/Planet Money 10/05/2021) Ending slavery by compensated emancipation – state governments buying the slaves from their owners, in effect – was used by Northeastern states to end slavery there. So emancipated compensation was considered a realistic option prior to the Civil War. Though even by the early 19th century with the growing investment in slavery and cotton production in the South, it wasn’t actually a realistic solution.

It would have been a horribly unjust way to end slavery, as well – unjust to the slaves themselves and to non-slaveowning whites - but a bonanza to the owners that had been ruthlessly exploiting their labor for their whole lifetimes. We could argue in the abstract whether it would have been a lesser evil than the Civil War was. But it was simply not a realistic option.

There was also the fact that “the people” who made up those able to vote was made up of white men. And as I’ve discussed in these posts in earlier years (particularly with reference to the work of historian William Freehling), it was a fact that whites could be both intensely opposed to slavery and intensely racist against Black people. The popularity even among serious white Abolitionists of the thoroughly impractical “colonization” movement which looked to relocate all African-Americans literally to Africa is one manifestation of that. Virtually no Black Abolitionists embraced the colonization scheme.

Graber writess:

The central question Americans faced during the late 1850s was how much slavery they were willing to accept to maintain national union. Taney and Douglas insisted that the price for Northerners was high, that a good deal of accommodation was necessary to preserve the Constitution of 1789. [The antislavery guerilla fighter] John Brown forthrightly insisted that all mainstream politicians proposed too dear a bargain for national union, that violence was the only means by which substantial numbers of slaves would be freed in the foreseeable future. By pretending that Lincoln’s proposal to place slavery “in the course of ultimate extinction” over the course of a century or more might have both preserved union and justified the constitutional order, contemporary Americans fail to acknowledge just how much constitutional evil must be tolerated to maintain constitutions in divided societies and the necessity of violence as the only alternative for possibly advancing the good.

John Brown participated on the proslavery in the guerilla war between pro- and antislavery fighters in what became known as “Bleeding Kansas,” which in itself was a mini-civil war. The proslavery forces were determined to establish slavery in Kansas Territory by force and violence as well as by legal political means. The Presidency was controlled by pro-slavery Democrats who were not going to oppose the pro-slavery guerrillas.

It's sometimes said that Brown intended to incite a civil war by the action he unsuccessfully undertook at Harper’s Ferry. But that was not the case. His plan was to establish groups of antislavery guerillas in the Appalachians to encourage and assist slaves to escape to increase the crisis of the slave system.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2022, April 9: the white racist historical narrative behind the infamous Dred Scott decision

One notable aspect of Chief Justice Roger Taney is that he incorporated broad, ideological historical arguments about slavery and race.

David Thomas Konig discusses that outlook in an essay called "Constitutional Law and the Legitimation of History" in The Dred Scott Case: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Race and Law (2010):

Taney’s opinion, however, did more than call on history to solidify slavery by showing it to be embedded in the American past, essential to its origins, justified by its religion, and inseparable from its present commitment to liberty. Those arguments had been made for decades, and by the 1850s there existed a widespread and deeply entrenched Southern tradition of using history to show the universality of slavery as a system and the suitability of Africans for it. Proslavery apologists, that is, already had constructed an “inescapable past” for American slavery and had used “history as moral and political instruction” to describe slavery as normal and racism natural.

Such a proslavery historical narrative brought the institution to the center of the national narrative and justified it against the rising din of antislavery argument, but it did not fully answer a new challenge emerging as Dred and Harriet Scott’s petition for freedom, commenced in the 1840s, moved slowly through the next decade. If history was to continue to provide the narrative basis for a jurisprudence of slavery and racial control, it had to address more than slavery and slaves: it had to respond to the historical reality of free African Americans whose past belied the conventional narrative, and whose vocal assertion of that fact contradicted the very foundations of proslavery jurisprudence. Taney had ample support for his version of the history of slavery; he had to create it for his version of free African Americans. [my emphasis]

In other words, the racial argument - which we could call Social Darwinism in hindsight (Darwin's On the Origin of Species wouldn't be published until 1859, and we can't blame Darwin himself for "Social Darwinism") - used to justify slavery also had the effect of excluding all Black people from equal humanity and basic rights. Taney and his Court raised this odious argument to the status of binding Constitutional law in the Dred Scott decision.

Konig goes on to remind his readers that the proslavery narrative was not only one that developed and hardened over time. It was also a contested narrative, although pitifully few leading American political figures were willing to challenge the notion of Black inferiority:

Taney’s opinion, to be sure, expressed the widespread and prevailing historical understanding among whites of the debased and excluded position of African Americans in the nation’s history. But it is vital for subsequent generations to be aware that such a view, however widely held in the nineteenth century, was nonetheless only one interpretation of that past available at the time, one that by the 1850s was coming under repeated attack as orthodoxy.