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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2019, April 18: Neo-Confederate hackery from Dinesh D’Souza and Dick Cheney's favorite historian

I have another citation from Kevin Levin's Civil War Memory blog, Victor David Hanson and the Republican Obsession With Confederate Monuments 03/14/2019. Whatever Hanson's academic credentials may be, he is a hack Republican ideologist. Dick Cheney during his time as Vice President referred to Hanson as his fa vorite historian. VDH was an enthusiastic fan of the disastrous foreign policy known as the Iraq War.

Kevin gives a good summary of a silly rightwing claim that's actually become a standard white nationalist argument in the Trumpified Republican Party, as described by the sad, weird propagandist Dinesh D’Souza:

Historians have tended to point to a gradual realignment of African Americans from the Republican to Democratic Party beginning in the 1930s and continuing through the 1960s. In the late 1960s, early 70s the Republican Party refocused efforts on a “Southern Strategy” that sought the support of white southerners in the former states of the Confederacy. That shift helped to solidify the Democratic Party as the party of civil rights and widespread African American support. According to D’Souza this is a myth. I am not going to go into too much detail here, but what you need to know is that according to D’Souza the Democrats have always been the party of white supremacy going back to the antebellum period, through the Civil War and Reconstruction and into the twenty-first century. In short, there was no party realignment. The Republican Party has always been the true political party of civil rights and racial equality.

Kevin's characterization of this political tall-tale is spot on: "Needless to say the historical rigor behind these claims is flimsy at best and easily debunked."

But this brings up the question of whether debunking actually matters. Of course, I think it does. (A recent journatlistic presentation of the debunking-doubting case is This Article Won’t Change Your Mind by Julie Beck The Atlantic 03/13/2017.)

One of the obvious problems of the D'Souza nonsense argument is that it has been mostly Democrats pushing for removal of Confederate-ideolatry monuments in recent, while Republicans have been more likely to support the pro-Confederate advocates. (Republican Nikki Haley provided an exception to Repüublican neo-Confederate sympathies in 2015: Transcript: Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina on Removing the Confederate Flag New York Times 06/22/2015)

Kevin writes, "This obsession with protecting these monuments and memorials was reinforced for me after reading Victor David Hanson’s piece earlier today at National Review." He notes in the following that it's a "poorly argued piece," although that a bit redundant, since he had already noted that the author was Victor David Hanson.

Hanson is a noted Conservative historian and author of The Case For Trump. It’s a poorly argued piece beginning with his failure to distinguish between history and memory/commemoration and his decision to equate the vandalism and removal of Confederate monuments with the destruction of religious monuments by ISIS. Nowhere does Hanson mention that in most localities public conversation has been the order of the day nor does he mention state laws preventing removal in places where monuments/memorials have been vandalized.

But what is truly revealing is that Hanson fails to mention other instances of monument removals that I have no doubt he supports. Perhaps the best example is the destruction of the Saddaam Hussein monument in Baghdad by the United State military. More to the point, I would love to know what Hanson’s thoughts are regarding the often violent destruction of monuments celebrating communist leaders like Lenin and Stalin in former Soviet-bloc countries at the end of the Cold War. [my emphasis]

If there were a Nobel Prize for hackery, VDH woulkd have won it long ago.

Kevin's has written a number of times at Civil War Memory about the Confederate monument controversies.