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.

Surprising look at how John Brown showed that agitation is another name for citizenship

This is something thing you don't see every day, even in 2020 so far: a full-throated defense of John Brown's attack on Harper's Ferry and the slave-liberation project it was meant to kick off. It comes at the end of a piece by Richard Kreitner and Rick Perlstein about the long trope of the "outside agitator", A Brief History of Dangerous Others NYBooks 07/27/2020:

Consider American history’s most notorious outside agitator: John Brown. Although his 1859 raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, failed to spark a larger revolt of the enslaved, Brown succeeded in accelerating the conflict over slavery and hastening abolition. A Connecticut-born radical and a veteran of “Bleeding Kansas,” that yearslong agitator-palooza, Brown didn’t care about the hackneyed antebellum nostrum — the core of American political culture — that Northerners should leave white Southerners alone, even if that meant allowing the slaver power to survive and expand indefinitely. His Harpers Ferry attack exploded in an instant the nearly century-long, elite-enforced consensus that condemned any criticism of slavery from outside the South as ipso facto illegitimate. Still today sometimes depicted as a treacherous terrorist, Brown was instead arguably America’s quintessential unionist and patriot: he thought Americans in one part of the country were responsible for what went on in every other part, and he acted on that belief without hesitation.

This is how American identity is supposed to work. It rarely does. But in the country we need and deserve—and must today build — the concept of the outside agitator will be nonsensical. The work of agitation, from wherever it comes, is simply another name for citizenship.

Magpie performing Old John Brown by Si Kahn 04/08/2015:

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2020, April 2: Old John Brown

Another song today, this one about anti-slavery fighter John Brown sung by the folk duo Magpie.

Magpie performing Old John Brown by Si Kahn 04/08/2015:

The song does include one mythological embellishment, the image of John Brown on his way to the gallows stopped to kiss a black child. That imaginary scene was depicted by Thomas Hovenden in a painting called "The Last Moments of John Brown (1882–84)":

Fergus Bordewich describes the immediate political effect Brown's famous raid on Harper's Ferry had (John Brown’s Day of Reckoning Smithsonian Magazine Oct 2009):

The raid that Sunday night would be the most daring instance on record of white men entering a Southern state to incite a slave rebellion. In military terms, it was barely a skirmish, but the incident electrified the nation. It also created, in John Brown, a figure who after a century and a half remains one of the most emotive touchstones of our racial history, lionized by some Americans and loathed by others: few are indifferent. Brown's mantle has been claimed by figures as diverse as Malcolm X, Timothy McVeigh, Socialist leader Eugene Debs and abortion protesters espousing violence. "Americans do not deliberate about John Brown - they feel him," says Dennis Frye, the National Park Service's chief historian at Harpers Ferry. "He is still alive today in the American soul. He represents something for each of us, but none of us is in agreement about what he means." [my emphasis]

The persistence of John Brown as an important symbol understood in varying ways is a reminder that narratives of history existent on a continuum. On one end is the scholarly discipline which attempts to discover, describe, understand, and interpret the past. And it extends to individuals who use historical narratives for learning, interest, fiction, inspiration, caution, marketing, and political symbolism. That's why Confederate monuments are still a hot topic in American politics 155 years after the Civil War ended.