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 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 2021, April 6: Bulwark article on 1776 Project

The Bulwark, a neoconservative site headed by NeverTrumper Charlie Sykes, offers an unsympathetic analysis of the ideological perspective of The 1776 Project: Joshua Tait, The Origins of Trump’s Slapdash, Last-Second ‘1776 Report’ 01/22/2021.

Tait calls the viewpoint of the report's brand of white supremacist ideological pseudohistory "Straussian Trumpism." The reference is to a branch of conservative thought identifying with the tradition of philosopher Leo Strauss (1899-1973). There was quite a bit of discussion and analysis of the Straussian perspective during the Bush-Cheney Administratio, when the neoconservative perspective was so influential in driving the disastrous foreign policy and warmongeing of that government. Strauss was a big influence among those who identified with the neoconservative viewpoint.

Tait writes:

The driving force behind this authorized history [The 1776 Report] is a group of conservative scholars colloquially called West Coast Straussians. Typically right-leaning, Straussians are the students—or, more likely, the students of students—of the German-American scholar Leo Strauss. During the 1970s and 1980s, Straussians divided more or less regionally over how best to understand the United States. Was it a decent regime, built on low but solid foundations, as the East Coasters had it? Or was it “broadly continuous with the classical and Biblical traditions” and in some respects “perfecting those traditions,” as the West Coasters, led by Strauss’s first student, Harry Jaffa, believed?

Jaffa not only celebrated the founding, but treated it as something sacrosanct. He believed the founding’s dedication to the Declaration of Independence, and its completion in the Civil War, made the United States a good regime dedicated to the universally valid principle of equality. [my emphasis]

This kind of "highbrow" pseudohistory typically includes quirky claims that are seemingly inconsistent with the broader vision, as with "the universally valid principle of equality" here. Because the Lost Cause narrative incorporated into The 1776 Report is definitely not concerned with equality: not equality of opportunity, not legal equality, not equality of votes, not equality of rights, not even equality among white men who are at the center of their narrative.

Jaffa's outlook may provide a clue to one of the strangest reversals of historical symbolism we saw in the Trump Administration, the adoption of Andrew Jackson as a symbol for Trumpism. Because Jackson's key stands against John Calhoun's secessionist position in the Nullification Controversy and against the concentrated economic power represented by the Bank of the United States are not remotely comparable to Donald Trump's political perspective, to the extent that he has one beyond demagoguery and grifting. The Lost Cause narrative and that of the 1776 Project are Calhounian to the core.

But conservatives are inordinately fond of such symbolic reversals, e.g., the people who criticize racism are the real racists. A perspectiv  e we see in the 1776 Project, as well.

Because they are ideological determinists, the West Coast Straussians struggle to see their opponents on their own terms. They reduce them and their ideas to “nihilistic” successors of John C. Calhoun, one of Jaffa’s punching bags. This is why the 1776 Report goes to such great lengths to connect modern identity politics to that “Marx of the master class,” [Calhoun] noting that “there are uncanny similarities between 21st century activists of identity politics and 19th century apologists for slavery.”

In other words, John Calhoun who put slavery above patriotism and above the interests of even Southern whites, the arch-reactionary who could rightly be considered the guiding spirit and political theorist of secession and civil war on behalf of slavery - that guy was like people today who want to combat racism against African-Americans, Latinos, and Asian-Americans.

This is basically smarmy small-town Bircherism. "West Coast Straussians" seems like far too pretentious a name for it.

But this West Coast Straussianism appars to be A Thing, as we say these days:

The 1776 Commission is dominated by these Straussians. Larry Arnn is its chair. The editor of the Claremont Review of Books, Charles Kesler, is a member. Matthew Spalding, the commission’s executive director, heads and teaches at Hillsdale’s D.C. center. The report lifts whole pages from Spalding’s previously published work. In short, the 1776 Report is simplified West Coast Straussianism with the presidential seal slapped on it. [my emphasis]

Unfortunately, these kinds of ideological constructions are very much a part of the present-day Republican Party that is operating in the reactionary insurrectionist spirit of January 6.

A copy of The 1776 Report as issued by the Trump White House is available from The 1776 Project.

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, 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 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 10: John Calhoun and ... Gavin Newsom?

Bloomberg Opinion seems to be up to a bit of journalistic mischief in this piece by Francis Wilkinson, Gavin Newsom Declares California a ‘Nation-State’ 04/09/2020.

My initial impression is that Wilkinson took what was probably a careless formulation by Newsom and treated it as the declaration of a new Confederacy.

But, no California hasn't adopted "Bonnie Blue Flag" as it's state song. This is another song from Elizabeth Knight and The Harvesters, this one being a popular Confederate song. From the liner notes to Songs of the Civil War (1960):

The two most important Rebel music-makers were an itinerant vaudevillian, Harry Macarthy, and a transplanted New Englander, John Hill Hewitt. Macarthy s best known work is "Bonnie Blue Flag" ...

This "parade of secession" song was the Confederacy's second most popular air, following close on the heels of "Dixie" in Southern affections. Macarthy was an English-born vaudevillian who is supposed to have written this stirring lyric early in 1861 while attending the Mississippi State Secession Convention.

The Bonnie Blue flag was an informal but popular banner celebrating secession, the Confederacy, and treason against the United States.

Getting back to Newsom's comment, California's Jerry Brown was the most militant of the governors in confronting Trump during the Orange Clown's first two years in office, and he was open about using California's full legitimate federalist power to resist bad and abusive Trump policies.

But Newsom is more of a showboat than Brown. No one can detract from his bold move on same-sex marriage as San Francisco mayor in 2004. And he has done a genuinely good job on the COVID-19 crisis.

Jerry, despite his occasional techie-utopian talk, was grounded in the old pro-labor, social-democratic (although the Dems didn't call it that) New Deal tradition, and in leftie-Jesuit liberation theology. He was consistently a defenders of immigrant rights and very prominently supported the farmworkers union, for instance. Yes, his fracking policy, wasn't ideal. But he was grounded.

Newsom isn't. At least not to the degree Jerry Brown is.

When Newsom became Lieutenant Governor, Jerry appointed him to head a state economic development commission. When Newsom announced that he wanted to look to Texas (!?!) as a model for state economic development, Jerry took him off the commission. And, so far as I saw, kept Newsom at a distance politically. And although in this universe, spouses differ on some political issues, when Newsom was SF mayor and doing the same-sex marriages, he was married to Kimberly Guilfoyle, who went on after their divorce to become a FOX News propagandist and, now, of course, Don Trump, Jr.'s., girlfriend. I’m just sayin’.

The Bloomberg Opinion piece obviously makes a big deal about Newsom’s "nation-state" comment and at the end even invokes John Calhoun, the patron saint of everything vile and evil in American politics since 1832, to make it sound like Newsom is going full neo-Confederate. I'm inclined to think that the "nation-state" comment was a careless formulation, one that Jerry Brown would not have made.

But Gavin Newsom as John Calhoun and Donald Trump as his arch-enemy Andrew Jackson? No, that's insane. For all his faults, on his deathbed Jackson said that his one regret in life was that he hadn't hanged Calhoun as a traitor over his secessionist stand in the Nullification Controversy.

Confederate Heritage Month 2019, April 26: That whole "states rights" thing in neo-Confederacy

The Kansas City Star brings us another story about a leading politician and neo-Confederate pseudohistory (Lindsay Wise, Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt signed 1990 letter about how ‘states rights’ led to Civil War 04/25/2019).

The particular news here is probably a minor data point in Missouri politics. Blunt signed "a 1990 letter that discusses 'states’ rights' as a cause of the Civil War, but makes no mention of slavery." He was Missouri's Secretary of State at the time. In response to the Star's questions, Blunt admitted he signed it but claimed he didn't read it and that "it’s always been clear to him that slavery was the 'original sin' of the Constitution."

Several paragraphs into the article, Wise gives us more details on the letter which was in response to a student's letter. And it provides a good example of how Lost Cause pseudohistory about the Civil War is part of a larger narrative, based on white supremacist assumptions:

“Why did the States feel that their rights caused them to separate from the U.S.?” the student asked Blunt. “What does the Constitution say about states rights? How have states’ rights changed since the Civil War?”

The typewritten response was signed by Blunt and printed under Missouri Secretary of State letterhead. It says the debate over states rights was at the heart of the Civil War. ...

His response to the student, which runs slightly over one page, single-spaced, does not mention slavery.

It suggests the student read the writings of former Vice President and U.S. Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, “one of the most articulate and ardent supporters of the states’ rights position” and suggests studying the lives of Edmund Ruffin and Jefferson Davis “on the states’ rights side” and Republican President Abraham Lincoln, his Democratic rival Stephen Douglas and Nathaniel Lyon, a Union general, on the “national rights side.”

Calhoun called slavery a positive good. Davis, also a defender of slavery, was the president of the Confederacy. Ruffin was a Virginia slaveholder who claimed credit for firing one of the first shots of the war. He ended up killing himself, wrapped in the Confederate flag.

The letter signed by Blunt concludes with the observation that the states’ rights debate “continues to be waged in our own lifetimes.” It cites, as an example, the “debate whether or not the federal government has the right to require the state of Missouri to pay the costs of racial desegregation in Kansas City and St. Louis schools.” [my emphasis]

In this example as presented by the Kansas City Star, we see the emphasis on "state rights" as the central cause of the Civil War without mentioning slavery, which is a key argument of the Lost Cause/neo-Confederate narrative. And we see how the letter connects that narrative to Republicans' opposition to "racial desegregation in Kansas City and St. Louis schools" at the time.

I've done several posts this year about John Calhoun, the guiding spirit of today's American white nationalists. As he was for the secessionists of 1861.

The Nullification Crisis of 1831-2 was a conflict that was explicitly though not overtly about slavery. In this case, Calhoun defended a "states rights" position and President Andrew Jackson's position asserting federal authority won out. The Congressional lineup around that issue was broadly sectionally divided, with slave states tending to support the states-rights stance and the free states supported the national position.

The notorious Indian Removal Act of 1830 also lined up sectionally, even more clearly than on the Nullification Crisis. The Southerners favored the Act, which extended federal power in controlling territories in the area in question. The Northern opponents used the states-rights argument to oppose the Act. So even then, Southern support for "states' rights" was based on the issue immediately at stake, not on some abstract, legalistic commitment to states' rights as a basic Constitutional principle.

Between the Nullification Crisis and Lincoln's election in 1860, the controversies over slavery had the Southern slaveowners backing the use of national power in favor of slavery and against states' rights. After 1840, the Presidents were increasingly favorable to the slave states. The Fugitive Slave laws were a big point of contention during that whole period; Southern representatives demanded more use of federal power to force free states to return escaped slaves.

After the 1860 Presidential election, slave states did begin to invoke states' rights again. But as their secession ordinances and speeches of secession leaders made very clear, the purpose their secession and treason was defending slavery.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2019, April 10: John Calhoun, "the political metaphysician of South Carolina" (and of Trumpism)

Today we have another quote from Richard Nelson Current's "John C. Calhoun, Philosopher of Reaction" The Antioch Review 3/2 (Summer, 1943), in tis slightly modified version of a post from a previous year's Confederate "Heritage" Month series. This one connects the thinking of the godfather of secession to rightwing groups of more contemporary status in 1943. After noting that some defenders of slavery like Jefferson Davis and George Fitzhugh were more crass in their view that the master himself, Current writes:

But it is the spirit of Calhoun, not that of his more forthright followers, which lives on. It is a spirit that may be about to materialize in new and startling forms. Now, if ever, is the time for right-wing Republicans to join with Bourbon Democrats in the sort of reactionary alliance that Calhoun envisaged. The shibboleths of these allies will be not Nullification, indeed, but certainly State Rights; not the Four Freedoms exactly, but Liberty with the connotations it had for Calhoun and for the American Liberty League. The real objects of their attack will be the social controls which liberals will seek to maintain in the interests of world peace, and the democratic aspirations which have been let slip with the cry of havoc but which cannot be chained up again with the dogs of war. The leaders of the new movement will no doubt point with pride to Thomas Jefferson. But the Sage of Monticello is not their man. Let them look, instead, to the political metaphysician of South Carolina, John C. Calhoun. [my emphasis]

Today, we see that alliance between what in 1943 were Southern Democrats and conservative Republicans fully realized in the Republican Party. It took a long time. It took McCarthyism, the Goldwater movement, the Reagan Revolution, the Gingrich Revolution, and their successors in the Cheney-Bush Administration and the Trumpist desublimation of of the underlying impulses of its predecessors. But they have finally achieved it. And in spectacular fashion.

And, yes, when the white nationalists talk about the Founders, it's John Calhoun, "the political metaphysician of South Carolina," on whose thinking they draw, far more than that of actual Founders like Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Andrew Jackson. (Yes, Andrew Jackson actually fought in the Revolutionary War, so he counts as a Founder!)

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2019, April 9: The long shadow of John Calhoun's white supremacist ideology

This is the second of three posts on Southern Agrarian Frank Owsley's essay, "Scottsboro, the Third Crusade: The Sequel to Abolition and Reconstruction" American Review 1:3 June 1933. I originally posted this April 20, 2011, as part of that year's Confederate "Heritage" Month posts, which gave particular attention to the group of pro-segregation writers who were known as the Southern Agrarians, aka, the Nashville Agrarians. (This is a somewhat modified version of the original post.)

In the first post of those three posts (Confederate "Heritage" Month 2001, April 19: Frank Owsley on the "Scottsboro boys" case (1) 04/19/2011), I talked about the contemporary concerns Owsley's piece with defending Southern segregation from Yankees who wished to commit "outside interference with the relationship of the whites and blacks in the South." In this post, I'm concerned with the way he uses neo-Confederate/Lost Cause history to provide an ideological frame for his contemporary (1933) application of segregationist ideology.

John C. Calhoun (1782-1850)

The first crusade in Owsley's historical trilogy of grievances inflicted on the white South by the damnyankees was abolition. Owsley's Lost Cause perspective dictated that he had to deny that slavery was in any way really the cause of the Civil War. As usual, such claims don't bear up under close scrutiny. Owsley's twist is to argue there was a basic competition between the industrialists of the North and the beautiful agrarian society of the South. The fact that one was based on free labor and the other on chattel slavery is somehow supposed to be incidental in this particular Lost Cause twist. But in Owsley's construction, the anti-slavery movement in the North was a sinister plan by the evil Yankee industrialists against the white South:

In order to subordinate the South it would be necessary to destroy [the] balance [of power between the North and South]. But the industrialists, carefully coached by their lawyers and statesmen and "intellectual" aides, realized the bad strategy of waging a frank struggle for sectional power; they must pitch the struggle upon a moral plane, else many of the intelligentzia [sic] and the good people generally might become squeamish and refuse to fight. Shibboleths and moral catchwords must be furnished. It was therefore found convenient to attack slavery as an evil and the slaveholder as a criminal, in fact to impugn the morality of the South, in order to create opinion in the East and North in favour of the industrialists' plans of Southern restriction.

The actual history of the abolition movement - including the sometimes violent rejection of it in the North - the need for fugitive slave laws to return human property that had absconded from the humane and civilizing conditions of slavery, the slave revolts and the paranoid panics over possible slave revolts that increasingly characterized conditions in the slave states: all of that has to be ignored or minimized for the Lost Cause pseudohistory to maintain a thin film of credibility even to those predisposed to accept it.

For the Lost Cause, abolition was just a nasty Yankee plot against the put-upon whites of the South. Owsley, typical of Lost Cause partisans, echoed the slaveowners' pre-Civil War accusations against the damnyankees. Given the ideology of racial superiority that became stronger and stronger over time in the slave South, the reality of slaveowners fathering their own children with their slaves was a particular embarrassment to the owners of human property. Owsley takes up their cause retrospectively by pointing to Yankee hypocrisy:

... when ... the moralist crusaders of the Northeast were painting a picture of universal prostitution and miscegenation in the South, information was available to those same moralists which showed sexual degradation in the factories of the East to have reached depths hitherto unknown in the experience of a modern civilized nation. Illegitimacy was more common in the industrialized East than in any country in the world. Yet these crusaders offered little criticism of a society which forced young girls into semi-prostitution.

He goes on to gripe about the nastiness of working conditions in Northern factories. All of this was standard slaveowner polemics prior to the Civil War. Since, as we saw in the last post, Owsley was especially worried about alleged Communist influence over civil rights agitation in 1933, it's appropriate here to quote an observation by Communist Party leader William Foster from his 1954 book The Negro People in American History (1954):

The furious debates of the 1850's over the question of slavery presented a rare spectacle of the two quarreling sectors of capitalism - the Southern planters, with their obsolete production system, and the Northern industrial capitalists, representing the interests of capitalism as a whole. They exposed and denounced each other's system of exploitation, and many true words were spoken in these mutual unveilings. Never, in any country, have the sinister workings of capitalism been so thoroughly aired from within.

Which is true enough, as far as it goes, although I can't vouch for the international comparison. John Calhoun actually incorporated such a conception of exploiting class differences into his political strategy and theory, as Richard Current explains in John C. Calhoun (1963). At the beginning of the Martin Van Buren Administration in 1837, Calhoun was becoming increasing unhappy with the Democratic Party:

There was much that he disliked about the party, including its name. He was himself no democrat, and he had little in common with the city workingmen to whom, among others, the party catered. That is, he had little in common with them except for the votes which they could cast and which he, in some future presidential election, might receive. In practice he was fond of "the people," including the workers. In principle he feared the "needy and corrupt" many, whom he expected to rise sooner or later in revolt against their betters, the rich and wellborn few. At heart he preferred the Whigs to the Democrats, the party of the rich to the party of the poor.

That appeal to urban labor was key to what "Jacksonian democracy" meant. Calhoun, to put it mildly, was no Jacksonian.

What Calhoun hoped for was an enduring alliance which would include working class Northern voters and Southern slaveholders. And in the service of that goal, Calhoun elaborated a nominally pro-labor viewpoint which, not coincidentally, also served as an indictment of the Northern system of free labor that increasingly competed directly against the slavery-based Southern agricultural economy. Current writes:

"It is useless to disguise the fact," Calhoun frankly informed his fellow senators (1837). "There is and always has been, in an advanced state of wealth and civilization, a conflict between capital and labor."

And he provides the following quotes from the Senator from South Carolina. From 1847:

Where wages command labor, as in the non-slaveholding States, there necessarily takes place between labor and capital a conflict which leads, in process of time, to disorder, anarchy, and revolution, if not counteracted by some appropriate and strong constitutional provision.

For, as the community becomes populous, wealthy, refined, and highly civilized, the difference between the rich and the poor will become more strongly marked; and the number of the ignorant and dependent greater in proportion to the rest of the community. With the increase of this difference, the tendency to conflict between them will become stronger; and, as the poor and dependent become more numerous in proportion, there will be ... no want of leaders among the wealthy and ambitious, to excite and direct them in their efforts to obtain the control.

It worth noting that in 1847 Karl Marx at this time was still an obscure Young Hegelian German scholar and polemicist with a tiny group called the Communist League (Bund der Kommunisten).

Calhoun's condemnation of the evils of industrial capitalism was entirely cynical politics and reactionary political theory. Which is not to say he wasn't correct in some of the things he had to say on the subject.

But the Lost Cause ideology expounded by Owsley in this essay is a direct descendant of Calhoun's pro-slavery positions. What may sound in isolation like perceptive criticism of the evils of the American form of capitalism circa 1933 - the failings of which were painfully evident in the early years of the Great Depression - are embedded in a defense of a Southern Agrarian ideal, which was really a dystopian vision meant to defend the existing system in the South: segregation, sharecropping, thoroughly corrupt politics that were democratic more in form than content, poverty and hopelessness for the majority of the rural population white and black. Owlsey was taking his stand on the grounds John Calhoun and other defenders of slavery had lain out years before the Civil War.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2019, April 8: John Calhoun, "the cast iron man" and patron saint of American white supremacy

John Calhoun of South Carolina was the godfather of secession and the patron saint of the post-Civil War violent overthrown of the democratic Reconstruction state government, Jim Crow laws and segregationism.

(This is a partially revised version of a post from a previous year's Confederate "Heritage" Month's posts.)

John C. Calhoun (1782-1850) "I never saw any one who so completely gave me the idea of possession." (Harriet Martineau)

Richard Current in John C. Calhoun (1966) writes:

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.

That is now the spirit that dominates today's Republican Party, from the state and local levels to the national scene.

Current quotes a passage from the travel memoirs of Harriet Martineau, Retrospect of Western Travel, Vol. 1 (1838), on her encounter with Calhoun in 1835:

Mr. Calhoun, the cast-iron man, who looks as if he had never been born and never could be extinguished, would come in sometimes to keep our understandings upon a painful stretch for a short while, and leave us to take to pieces his close, rapid, theoretical illustrated talk, and see what we could make of it. ... His mind has long lost all power of communicating with any other. I know of no man who lives in such utter intellectual solitude. He meets men, and harangues them by the fireside as in the Senate; he is wrought like a piece of machinery, set going vehemently by a weight, and stops while you answer; he either passes by what you say, or twists it into a suitability with what is in his head, and begins to lecture again. ... Mr. Calhoun is as full as ever of his nullification doctrines; and those who know the force that is in him, and his utter incapacity of modification by other minds (after having gone through as remarkable a revolution of political opinion as perhaps any man ever experienced) will no more expect repose and self-retention from him than from a volcano in full force. Relaxation is no longer in the power of his will. I never saw any one who so completely gave me the idea of possession. [my emphasis]

Today, he would do very well as a commentator on FOX News. Or as Trump's new Secretary of Homeland Security.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2019, April 7: Anti-democracy reaction around the Nullification Crisis and the democratic tradition opposing it

Southern Agrarian Andrew Nelson Lytle's "The Backwoods Progression," his history of the development of rural life in American history, appeared in the 1:4 (1933) number of The American Review. It sheds some light on the historical role an images of the two leading founders of the Democratic Party, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. Yes, both of them were slaveowners and American reactionaries have long found good reason to hate them.

(This is a partially revised version of a post from a previous year's Confederate "Heritage" Month's posts.

Robert Barnwell Rhett

As history, Lytle's piece is not very impressive. But it does illustrate something about Lytle's version of the Southern Agrarian ideology. His criticism of Thomas Jefferson illustrates how much Lytle's thinking falls within the tradition of late 18th century, anti-democracy thought:

The weak point in Jefferson's defense [of property rights] was his own belief in a distorted conception of property, albeit a specific kind, landed property and the kind of life it supported. This meant that his political activity concerned itself fundamentally with the same thing the Federalists espoused: the principle that the chief duty of the State is the protection of the property of individuals and aggregates of individuals. This is certainly one duty of government, but only as a means of guaranteeing the security and self-perpetuation of the family. Prohibiting kings, then allowing private citizens to own the State is certainly hopping from a very slow pan to a very hot fire. Instead of laying the broad foundations a State needs to rest upon - and these foundations are best laid upon the dogma of one religion - he raised the question as to which will, the middle-class or the agrarian, would own the continent.

The aesthetic joys of the rural life clearly weren't the only concerns of the Southern Agrarians.

I am impressed with Lytle's comments on the historical significance of Andrew Jackson. Although I approve what he finds reprehesible. Speaking of the Nullification Crisis with South Carolina, Lytle writes:

South Carolina, under the prompting of such men as [Robert Barnwell] Rhett and [James Henry] Hammond, made such active opposition that the great leader of the state, Calhoun, abandoned his nationalistic stand and proposed his Nullification theory of redress. Andrew Jackson's romantic idea of the Union and his dislike of Calhoun joined together in his stubborn mind to play him into the hands of the enemy. Although he had destroyed the National Bank, he threated to send troops into Carolina to make tariff collections. For a moment war seemed inevitable; but Henry Clay came forward with a compromise, Calhoun accepted it. The Congress voted favourably on Jackson's force bill, and voted to reduce the tariff. Two great blows to State rights were struck at once. The South got temporary relief, and for this relief agreed to a sacrifice of principle. There can be no compromise between two antithetical ways of life. What appears a compromise is a postponement of the issue. The South, by accepting this postponement, doomed itself to ruin. The high prejudices of his heart and a limited political vision led Jacxkson to squander the great strategic moment by which his backwoods could have established its rule. Life a good backwoodsman, he took "the responsibility" and Calhoun refused it; but the South, not Calhoun or Jackson, suffered the consequences.

Jackson's "romantic idea of the Union" was his notion of the United States as a united country based on democracy. (More specifically at the time, democracy for an expanding number of white men.) He articulated the idea of democratic national patriotism to which the North held in the Civil War and which still defines the formal notion of American patriotism today.

As Lytle says, Jackson backed "the enemy". Or rather what was considered "the enemy" in the eyes of the enemies of democracy, the enemies of America, the enemies of the Constitution. This is what makes the image of Andrew Jackson, despite his very real faults, especially on slavery and Indian relocation, such an important symbol of American democracy. A wealthy man, he sided with the small farmers and the urban workers against the concentrated economic power facilitated by the Bank of the United States. A slaveowner and a supporter of slavery, when forced to choose between Calhoun's anti-patriotic defense of slavery in the Nullification Crisis, on the one hand, and democracy and American patriotism on the other, Jackson made the right choice. In an important sense, Lytle is right in saying that the slave South "doomed itself to ruin" in the Nullification Crisis. And to the extent that is true, to that same extent Andrew Jackson was the executioner.

Lytle, of course, sides with Calhoun. His shares the anti-democratic tradition of Calhounian thought his fellow Southern Agrarian Frank Owsley expressed in the previous issue of The Southern Review.

Lytle explains who the Confederates were supposedly forced into their treason and their war to destroy the American government by those evil Yankees and especially by that Southerner Old Hickory:

There was after this [Jackson's defeat of the secessionists in the Nullification Crisis] only one avenue left open to the South - secession. Calhoun still hoped to concetrate Southern leadership and make the fight within the Union. But his plans of effecting his ends by controlling the Democratic Party failed. With desperation he took up a last position, secession through the common action of all the Southern States. But Clay's American plan - an extension of capitalism - and his compromises, the god of all opportunists, had done their work. In this crisis Calhoun's chief lieutenant, Robert Barnwell Rhett, proposed a policy of coercion. He contended that if one State acted separately, the other State, all believing in their own sovereignty, would follow the lead. He supported his contention by reminding his political peers that the revolt against England did not take place until the tea had been thrown into Boston Harbour.

At least one Southern Agrarian in 1933 was looking at the Tea Party as a useful symbol to defend the white South!

When common action did take place, it came about by South Carolina's single-handed withdrawal; but it came ten years too late and brought Appomattox, not independence.

And he notes in the Calhounian demogogic mode, "The fall of the Confederacy removed the last great check to the imperialism of Big Business."

John Calhoun and Robert Barnwell Rhett, fighters for the workers' revolution! This is the kind of idiocy to which the neo-Confederate/Lost Cause line of thinking inevitably leads.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2019, April 6:: John Calhoun and the Tea Party Republicans

Richard Sale has some thoughtful observations about the Fort Sumter Republicans in Concurrent Majority Sic Semper Tyrannis 10/09/2013. (This is a slightly modified version on a post from a previous year's Confederate "Heritage" Month series.)

John Calhoun (1782-1850) was the political and intellectual godfather of secession and the Civil War, one of the true villains of American history. And I'm talking Dick Cheney levels of villainy. He has the reputation of being a significant political theorist, largely on the dubious virtues of his snooze-inducing books, A Disquisition on Government and A Discourse on the Constitution and Government of the United States.

John Caldwell Calhoun (1782-1850), by some reports later reincarnated as Dick Cheney

Gerald Capers in his article on Calhoun in the Encyclopædia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite (2012) calls him, not without ambiguity, "a genius unto himself." (The Britannica is my baseline for stolid respectable opinion.) "Calhoun's two books on government, published posthumously, and his many cogent speeches in Congress have gained him a reputation as one of the country's foremost original political theorists. He has been credited with preceding Karl Marx in advancing an economic interpretation of history." (Richard Current in the Calhoun biography cited below notes that Capers' own 1960 John C. Calhoun, Opportunist: A Reappraisal "is refreshingly critical and realistic," rejecting "eulogistic" views of Calhoun's historian admirers like Charles Wiltse and Margaret Coit.)

Richard Hofstadter famously portrayed Calhoun as "the Marx of the Master Class."

And Calhoun certainly was influential. But however sophisticated or creative his political ideas were in some kind of larger picture, their focus was preserving the institution of slavery in the American South. Sale explains his theory and how it broadly relates to current events - oddly without the word "slavery" appearing in his post, though race does - as follows:

It was John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, who in 1833, invented the idea of the "concurrent majority," the strategy being used by the Tea Party today. As a person, Calhoun was a dour, humorless intractable man. He was entirely addicted to complex abstractions. His thought had a white-hot and relentless intensity. He would wander about and mutter, "This indeed is a real crisis." As he was dying, a friend asked him to sum up his life, and he replied, "I see nothing to repeat and little to correct," practically the same words President George W. Bush used in describing his presidency. But make no mistake and don’t be distracted. Intellectually, Bush wasn't within shouting distance of Calhoun.

As a thinker, Calhoun was concerned about the power of section versus section, obsessed by the waning power of the South which he felt was being increasingly overwhelmed by the growth of the North. As a result, Calhoun pronounced the South "a fixed and hopeless minority." In other words, the white people of the South were being denied the means to make their power nationally felt, thanks to the majorities of the North. If you think of the shrinking numbers of white people that will live in America in ten years, the growing number of Asians, Hispanics, gays, etc. the "white" Right Wing Republicans and Tea Party people would probably say the same thing about America today that whites in America "are a fixed and hopeless minority." Think of the eve of last year’s election when Bill O'Reilly cried out in anguish that America wasn't "white" any more. That observation encapsulates the major Tea Party fear.

The concept of the concurrent majority was a device to boost certain interests at the expense of others. We have all read items that have highlighted the role of Right Wing billionaires who are funding and supporting certain candidates who are working to restrict weaken and hamper the rights of minorities to prevent them from becoming majority voices. To the Tea Party, any minority that enjoys any degree of majority support is an enemy. We usually think of minorities as a group laboring to become part of the majority. A Virginia politician, William H. Roane, in the 1850s said that he thought that chief right of minorities was that of "freely, peaceably and legally converting themselves into a majority whenever they can." To prevent certain rising minorities becoming part of the national majority is the aim of the Tea Party program.

The brilliant American historian, Richard Hofstadter, said that the concurrent majority was designed specifically "to protect a vested interest of considerable power.["] [my emphasis]

Capers describes the Calhounian theory in its original historical context this way:

In the summer of 1831 he openly avowed his belief in nullification, a position that he had anonymously advanced three years earlier in the essay South Carolina Exposition and Protest. Each state was sovereign, Calhoun contended, and the Constitution was a compact among the sovereign states. Therefore, any one state (but not the United States Supreme Court) could declare an act of Congress unconstitutional. The proponents of the nullified measure, according to the theory, would then have to obtain an amendment to the Constitution — which required a two-thirds vote of each house of Congress and ratification by three-fourths of the states — confirming the power of Congress to take such action.

Although the tariff was the specific issue in the nullification crisis of 1832–33, what Calhoun was actually fighting for was protection of the South's "peculiar institution," slavery, which he feared someday might be abolished by a Northern majority in Congress. The tariff, Calhoun put forth in one of his public letters, is "of vastly inferior importance to the great question to which it has given rise…the right of a state to interpose, in the last resort, in order to arrest an unconstitutional act of the General Government." [my emphasis]

Hofstadter in From Calhoun to the Dixiecrats Social Research 16/2 (June 1949) noted an important and revealing feature of Calhoun's eventual conception:

Actually, the South had little recourse except to the threat of leaving the Union in order to gain a formal constitutional guarantee of the concurrent majority. Calhoun's final version of this device was a dual executive; each section was to elect one member, each member was to have veto power. This concession could be won, he reminded southerners, only if they abandoned internal party division and manifested complete solidarity and militancy.

This would presumably guarantee the ultimate in the bipartisanship that our star political commentators in the US today cherish so much.

Richard Current in his wonderful 1963 biography, John C. Calhoun, reported that the defender of slavery had a high opinion of his own significance: "Obviously Calhoun ... thought of himself as the Newton, the Galileo, of political science." (p. 110)

But he also writes of Calhoun's political theory:

Probably he was the most systematic thinker among the active American politicians of his time. His argument was, and remains, persuasive. Once his assumptions are granted, his reasoning proceeds pretty well from one step to another, and his conclusions follow almost, but not quite irresistibly. Thus his basic postulates regarding sovereignty lad to his conception of the constitutional compact, and this in turn to his position on nullification, secession, and slavery in the territories.

Even if his assumption be accepted, however, his argument reveals gaps, inconsistencies, contradictions, and downright errors once it is closely examined. If his assumptions are challenged, the whole structure begins to shake. And if they are rejected, it falls in a heap. (P. 112)

This lack of coherence and cynical flexibility in argument is something his spiritual heirs share.

Calhoun's theory revolved around the defense of slavery. Period. As Current puts it, "He was taking a concept that had been invented to defend the divine right of kings and he was using it to defend the divine right of slaveowners." (p. 113) And his theory that ostensibly was meant to protect the rights of minorities, the only minority he was focused on protecting was that composed of white slaveowners. The minority of black Americans, slaves and free, was not one Calhoun had the least interest in protecting. Just the opposite. As Capers puts it, "Although Calhoun is remembered as the defender of minorities, he had no use for any minority — certainly not labourers or abolitionists — except the Southern one. His solution to the problem of the preservation of the Union was to give the South everything it demanded." Hofstadter in 1949 observed:

... although Calhoun has been frequently hailed as a pluralist, his political analysis was essentially dualistic~ So long as he could talk in terms of the protection of "the minority," against the tyranny of "the majority," his ex parte pleading for the southern cause could masquerade plausibly as a universal concern for political restraint, balance, and the general good.

It's pretty obvious how that kind of thinking would be attractive to today's Fort Sumter Republican Party. The whole point of his political theory was to give the white slaveholding minority of the South a veto power over anything and everything the national government might want to do. Which is what today's Republican Party is trying to do in the current government shutdown/debt ceiling fight. Hofstadter wrote of the Dixiecrats in 1949:

Their essential strategy hinges upon the effective marshaling of a minority [pro-segregation Southern whites] in a solid bloc, but they must condemn the same strategy when it is adopted by enfranchised and politically self-conscious Negroes. Thus Governor [Fielding] Wright [of Mississippi], in his speech accepting the vice-presidential nomination of the Dixiecratic party declared: "Government by bloc, by vociferous minorities, is a cowardly thing. It is a disgrace to America. It paves the way for ultimate dictatorship or socialism."

1947 campaign poster for Fielding Wright (1895-1956)

As Current explained in 1963, Calhoun's race-based strategies of resistance found their true heirs in segregation and its strategy of massive resistance to integration, i.e., to adopting the American form of government:

Wherever a White Citizen's Council meets in Mississippi, or a similar group in another of the Southern states, there is to be sought, nowadays, the true spirit of Calhoun. It is to be sought in the activities of conservative - or reactionary - Southern whites. The way they use the lobby, the bloc, the party constitution, and other political devices can be considered as essentially Calhounian.

These white Southerners now face problem quite similar to the one that Calhoun faced more than a hundred years ago. They talk of maintaining white supremacy and he talked of protecting slavery. The problem remains that of defending, against external attack, institution based upon a belief in human inequality. (p. 148; italics in original)

Hofstadter in 1949 emphasized the reactionary nature of Calhoun's basic political theory: "Although Calhoun was notable for his realism as a social thinker, there was little place in his philosophy for social change."

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2019, April 5: John Calhoun and why Communism didn't originate in South Carolina

I've been posting about John Calhoun, his life, his political theory, his reactionary political heritage. This is a somewhat adapted version of a post I made years ago, based on an article by the humorist Roy Blunt Jr. with the title, "Where's the Big Idea?" and the eye-catching subtitle, "Communism didn't originate in South Carolina for a very good reason" The Oxford American Winter 2005.

Blount relates how an interviewer "took me severely to task for having written ... that Southern culture had not produced much in the way of abstract thinking." The interviewer offered John Calhoun as a prime example of the contrary.

Blount was suprised, because he mainly knew Calhoun from his theory of nullification. "That seemed to me a strategem, rather than an idea in the large, ethereal egghead sense," he says. But he started doing come research on the old traitor.

He came across some of the same things that have come up here this month, including Calhoun's class theories that led Richard Hofstadter to label him "the Karl Marx of the master class."

But I read up on Calhoun, and learned that he was regarded widely - not just in the South - as the most brilliant political philosopher of his day. Personally, he struck people as a thinking machine. Varina Howell Davis, wife of Jefferson Davis, called him "a mental and moral abstraction." He was haggard and unhealthy-looking, too, so who am I to question his bona fides? A century later, some political historians argued that Calhoun's critique of Northem capitalism anticipated the thinking of Karl Marx. Maybe that's why Southem intellectualism ground to a halt: the twentieth century would have made even less sense if communism had been from South Carolina, for the wealthy, and called Calhounery.

He definitely has a point. In fact, instead of using the phrase "the theology of the Great God Free Market", I may shorten it to just "Calhounery". That's a word that should be an active part of the American political vocabulary.

Blount still wasn't convinced about abstract thinking in the South, though:

Eurocentric philosophy has come to realize only fairly recently, and with great aha's and alarums, that objective rationality is not the default position of the human mind, much less the bedrock of human affairs. In the South, nobody ever thought it was. The South doesn't produce ideas, it produces rhetoricians, yarn-spinners, visionaries, musicians, demagogues ... all sorts of people Plato would have expelled from his Republic.

Blount comes up with an angle on one of the few things I liked about Robert E. Lee:

Consider Robert E. Lee's most famous remark, as he watched his troops win overwhelmingly at Fredericksburg, slaughtering bluecoats by the thousands: "It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it."

A great utterance. But when you think about it, what does it mean? Was General Lee saying that if war were less terrible it would be worse, because we'd get too attached to it? A more logical, proactive utterance would have been, "Boys, war doesn't get any better than this, and it's still too terrible. Let's quit." But of course that wouldn't have done. (How often, in real-life situations, has sweet reason done?) The only thing I can figure is that Lee was warning us against big-time college football.

Again, he has a point!

But in the end, he decided John Calhoun was what blogger Charlie Pierce might call a colossal dick (though Pierce reserves that label for Rick Santorum):

In Virginia a while ago, I came upon a many-volumed encyclopedia of Southern history printed in 1909. It said that John C. Calhoun "was upholding the rights of the Southern people against the assaults of the abolitionists. The charges made by the latter against the system of slavery he denounced as false. On the other hand, he never grew weary in the work of telling how the Southern people were generously lifting upward the entire body of negro slaves to a higher and nobler plane of life."

On the other hand? What's "on the other hand" about that? Sounds like two sides of the same hand to me. But then "the one hand, the other hand" doesn't make any sense unless the hands are connected by a particular body, and particular bodies tend to be partial to themselves. The body in this case was that of "the Southern people," slaves not being considered, even after forty-four years of retrospect, to be part of that category. We know better than that, now; and heaven help us for what we don't know better than, yet.