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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Heather Cox Richardson on "The American Paradox": equal rights in theory with actual inequality

The historian Heather Cox Richardson has been indulging in some prolific public-intellectual activism over the last year with regular columns on her Facebook page and with a series of YouTube lectures on history. This is the first one in a nine-part series called The American Paradox 05/30/2020 (it appeared on Facebook in late March):

She takes a liberal-left approach to history which takes an approving, enthusastic attitude to democracy while paying realistic and engaged attention to its dark side, which she defines braodly as the notion that political equality in the sense of the Declaration of Independence has from the first existed with major inequality. (Given the name of this blog, it probably won't surprise anyone that I would be more inclined to use the more Hegelian "contradiction" rather than "paradox.")

She covers other useful reminders of what was shaping the world while Europeans were settling the Americas, such as sail technology.

The focus of this lecture is to frame the development of the English political tradition. She stresses the diversity of the population in what is now the US, but focuses on the English tradition because the governmental system of the Declaration and the US Constitution comes primarily out of that tradition. She discusses Shakespeare's play The Tempest (circa 1610) as a European look at the "New World" of the settler colonialism in the Americas. She uses that to describe the emerging European ambiitions and imaginations of what they consider the "New World".

She reminds us of the religious wars going on in Europe in the 1500s and 1600s and how large they loomed in European politics of the day, which shaped the classical liberal notions of freedom of religion and opinion.

This is a good example of how it's possible to take an engaged view of history that it's even partisan toward democracy and equality but also pays close attention to facts and indentifiable historical trends.

One point I want to mention is that, while I can't argue with her estimates of 90% death rates among the native population from illness in the early 17th century on the Atlantic coast being colonized by the English. But I do want to mention that the broader question of the effect on native populations of European diseases in the Americas is heavily dependent on the assumption of the "pre-Columbian" indigenous population. My understanding is that there is no solid general consensus at this point among the relevant experts.