Greg Abbott channels Ross Barnett and other dismal characters

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s latest political antics around "nullification" are reminiscent of George Wallace "standing int he schoolhouse door." But they are even more like Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett inciting and facilitating a violent insurrection to prevent James Meredith from being admitted to the segregated University of Mississippi as a Black student.

Full post: https://brucemillerca.substack.com/p/greg-abbott-channels-ross-barnett

Confederate Heritage Month 2021, April 28: Nullification fever in Arkansas

"Look, it’s pretty basic. A large proportion of America’s rural white folks lost it over Barack Obama, and they ain’t come back yet. They thought Trump was going to return America to 1954, but now he’s gone, and they’re still hiding out in the woods."

So writes Gene Lyons in a column about the state of Arkansas' current effort to return to the Jim Crow era of white supremacy, Arkansas keeps trying to return to 1954 Chicago Sun-Times 04/16/2021

The column is in particular about legislation against transgender children. But he also cites a March anti-abortion bill and also an outright nullification bill against federal gun laws.

While none of those three actions have directly to do with race, they are actions aimed at challenging the authority of the federal government to protect the civil rights of people in the US from states violating them, and legislating a Christian fundamentalist version of so-called traditional values. But all of those are efforts to validate the same kind of abuse of state power to suppress African-Americans from voting and acting that were part of the original Jim Crow segregation system. And every Arkansas legislator and pretty much all their constituents know that.

As Austin Bailey wrote of one of the gun nullification bills as it was making its way through the legislature, "Anyone who has ever taken a United States civics class will recognize the unconstitutionality of the bill." (Arkansas senators declare federal gun laws null and void within state borders Arkansas Times 03/31/2021)

And he elaborates, "[this] audacious bill is a huge F.U. to the federal government, practically a declaration of secession. Its message essentially is that the guys in D.C. can take their laws and shove it."

Gene Lyons diagnosis of the nullification fad:

Arkansas legislators also have declared all federal gun laws null and void within the state, a direct challenge to the Constitution’s supremacy clause that is absolutely certain to fail. Serious gun nuts don’t care. They don’t expect to win. They just want their collective amygdala massaged — the fight-or-flight organ buried deep in the limbic brain.

Pretty much the reason they’re gun nuts to begin with.

See also: Andrew DeMillo, Arkansas lawmakers OK reworked bill that nullifies gun laws AP 04/28/2021;

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2019, April 3: Calhoun, Crittendon, and secession

The liberal historian Richard Hofstadter wrote about the odious John Calhoun (1782-1850) in From Calhoun to the Dixiecrats Social Research 16:2 (June 1949). The Dixiecrats were the pro-segregation, anti-black "States Rights Democratic Party" split-off from the Democratic Party in 1948 that ran Strom Thurmond for President that year. Fifty-four years later, as things sometimes happen, Thurmond's Dixiecrat candidacy came back to haunt then-Majority Leader Trent Lott, a Mississippi Republican, when he gushed at Thurmond's 100th birthday party, "I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either." (Sheryl Gay Stober, Under Fire, Lott Apologizes for His Comments at Thurmond's Party New York Times 12/10/2002)

Steve Bannon didn't exactly create white nationalism.

John Calhoun, on the other hand, would have a better claim to the title. Hofstadter's Calhoun/Dixiecrat analogy is this:

In the 1830's a cleavage between North and South became acute during a time of general social ferment in the North, and also of widespread criticism of the slave system. In the recent past, great social changes have again been telescoped within a relatively brief period. Simultaneously the Negro has again gained friends and allies outside the South, numerous enough to give him powerful leverage in changing his racial position. Again the South has reacted militantly.

Hofstadter focuses on Calhoun's doctrine of the "concurrent majority," which is the cornerstone of the claim made by Calhoun's admirers for the traitor's status as a great political theorist:

At various times in his life he was identified with efforts to achieve coalition between the South and the agrarian West, and also between the South and northern capital, but he feared that inevitably the major parties would become sectional instruments. If this were to happen, he believed that in order to stay in the Union the South would first have to manifest total solidarity and then insist upon a formal, constitutional check to uphold her interests. He arrived at this conclusion during the controversy over the tariff that led to the nullification crisis of the 183o's. It was at this time that he worked out his familiar doctrine of the concurrent majority, insisting that government must be carried on not by a mere preponderance of individuals, a numerical majority, but by a concurrent majority, a concert of major economic interests, each of which would have the right to veto acts of the federal government. Nullification, the refusal of a state or combination of states to enforce a federal law deemed by the people in nullifying conventions to be intolerable violations of their interests, was one attempt to establish this principle. It was defeated by Andrew Jackson, but Calhoun did not cease to believe in the central notion of the concurrent majority. [my emphasis]

This wasn't some Burkean stroke of brilliance in political thought. It was a transparent device to give the slave states absolute veto power against any attempt to abolish the system of ownership of human beings.

As Hofstadter goes on to note, the club of secession was always at the core of what passed for Calhounian political theory: "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."

It wasn't ultimately about Contitutional purity, "states rights", limited government, etc. It was about slavery. The conflict took on a theoretical appearance of an argument about states rights for the very reason that Hofstadter notes. The national Consitution protected slavery but did not guarantee it. So slave states had to use secession as an ultimate threat to preserve their Peculiar Institution so along as it it couldn't be written into the basic Constitutional law.

In the immediate run-up to the Civil War after Lincoln's election in 1860, Kentucky Sen. John Crittendon (1787-1863), a Whig turned American Party (aka, the Know-Nothings) turned Constitutional Union Party, introduced what became known as the Crittendon Compromise, which would have meant Republicans and Northern Democrats agreeing to a vast formal extension of slavery. In their standard history text, A Concise History of the American Republic (1977), historian Samuel Eliot Morison, Henr Steele Commager, and William Leuchtenburg described it this way:

... when Senator John J. Crittenden of Kentucky proposed to extend the old 36° 30' line between free and slave territories to the California boundary, the Republicans were willing to go so far as to admit New Mexico as a slave state if the people there chose slavery. A Peace Convention summoned by the Virginia legislature also broke on the rocks of Southern intransigency. Even the adoption of a 'never-never' proposition to the effect that neither by law nor constitutional amendment could Congress ever interfere with slavery in the states or the District of Columbia proved unavailing. All formal compromises failed to bring back the 'wayward sisters .' The repeal by several Northern states of personal liberty laws, and the breaking up of an abolition meeting in Boston to commemorate John Brown, seemed insufficient [to the pro-slavery secessionists as] evidence of a change of heart. [my emphasis]

During the war, one of Crittendon's sons served as an officer in the Union Army, another in the Confederate Army. It really was a civil war, not just a sectional one.

In understanding the problems of the Lost Cause narrative of the Civil War, though, in which the war was about the abstract question of states' rights and not about slavery, it's important to remember that in the various major controversies over the extension of slavery between the Nullifiction Crisis of 1832-33, which did involve states rights, and the secession crisis after Lincoln's election as President in 1860, they all involved the South using the power of the federal government which they controlled to impose pro-slavery measures against free states asserting their states' rights not to cooperate with slavery in measures such as the Fugitive Slave Acts. Just as the "states' rights" of Strom Thurmond in 1848 and Trent Lott in 2002 were about segregation and racial discrimination, so was John Calhoun's "states' rights" advocacy of 1832 and thereafter about slavery and white supremacy.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2019, April 2: Andrew Jackson, states rights and the South

This is a re-up (and very slight re-working) of a previous post of mine from early in this blog's history in 2003. It deals with the how the real history of early and antebellum America give the lie to basic assumptions of neo--Confederate ideology. I'll note by way of introduction, I refer at the end to the Indian Removal Act, which was the legislative authorization of what now is known as the Trail of Tears. Here, I'm not looking at the grim topic of that Act in itself, but rather at how the regional political alignments over it contradict a key part the neo-Confederate narrative.

The pro-Confederate view of history, also known as the Lost Cause ideology, insists that slavery was not the cause of the Civil War. Instead, in that view, the war was fought primarily over the issue of states rights. One of the main set-pieces in this argument is the Nullification Controversy of 1831-32, during Old Hickory's first Administration.

Briefly, the federal Tariff of 1828 was extremely unpopular in South Carolina. Many South Carolina leaders threatened to "nullify" the tariff, arguing that a state could impose its authority to block the implementation of a federal law it rejected. The dispute escalated to a point where a military confrontation threatened. Through the compromise efforts of Kentucky Senator Henry Clay, President Jackson secured from Congress both a reduction of the disputed tariffs and a Force Bill expressly authorizing him to use military force to put down state defiance of the federal law.

Lost Cause advocates love to point to this as a key event leading to the secession of 1861, though it occurred three decades earlier. In the Lost Cause view, this was an instance where the Southern states were grouped against a sectional bloc of Northern states, the latter using national power in the form of Jackson and the Force Act to impose an unconstitutional law on a state. And the issue here was a sectional one focused on tariffs, not slavery.

So the argument goes. But it has several obvious problems. Why does one need to go back 30 years before secession for such an example? Because every other major North-South confrontation from 1833 to 1860 had slavery as an explicit issue. Why does the Lost Cause dogma prefer to gloss over the fact that Jackson was a Southerner and a slaveowner and his movement was primarily based in the South? Because those facts are reminders that the controversy was not at all exclusively a North-vs.-South sectional issue.

Also, it's a matter of some serious dispute among real historians - not just a phony pseudohistorical issue made up by ideologues - as to whether the Nullification Controversy was really primarily about tariffs.

The South Carolina radicals certainly realized that the issue could come to a head over slavery. It had already come up in the slavery controversy settled by the Missouri Compromise of 1820. In 1831, the Nat Turner Rebellion had scared the Slave Power into a near frenzy. And that same year, free farmers from western Virginia forced the legislature to begin what became the last serious free debate about abolishing slavery in the states that eventually joined the Confederacy. (The debate was not "free" to slaves, of course.) The Slave Power felt increasingly on the defensive.

John C. Calhoun, Old Hickory's main opponent on the nullification issue, anonymously authored a pamphlet called The South Carolina Exposition which the defiant South Carolina legislature published. In it, Calhoun argued that the tariff controversy was merely the occasion for demanding the right of nullification. The real issue was defending the "peculiar institution of the Southern States," i.e., slavery.

Jackson later said from his deathbed that he regretted that he hadn't hanged Calhoun for treason over the nullification incident. "My country would have sustained me in the act, and his fate would have been a warning to traitors in all time to come." (And you think political rhetoric today is harsh!) And Jackson was a Southern political leader who saw the issue of secession as being something other than a purely sectional issue. What Jackson the Southern President said in his proclamation to the people of South Carolina in December, 1832, was:

Those who told you that you might peaceably prevent [the] execution [of the laws] deceived you; they could not have been deceived themselves. They know that a forcible opposition could alone prevent the execution of the laws, and they know that such opposition must be repelled. The object is disunion. But be not deceived by names. Disunion by armed force is treason. Are you really ready to incur its guilt?

That's what patriotic American Southerners thought of secession - in 1832 and in 1861.

No wonder old Jackson Democrats during the war used to grumble that if the General were still around, the slaveowners would never have dared to try seceding.

And no wonder the Lost Cause crowd doesn't like to recall great Southerners like Andrew Jackson very often. That part of their "heritage" they would prefer not to remember, much less "honor."

But there was another major North-South controversy during Jackson's Presidency, one in which the vote in Congress was even more clear-cut than on the Nullification Controversy. That was the Indian Removal Act of 1830, in which slavery figured as a very minor issue, if at all.

Yet the silence about this Act from the Lost Cause crowd is deafening, even though it involved a North-South sectional controversy and national power vs. state rights, and slavery was not an issue. Wouldn't this be a perfect example for the Lost Cause argument that the Civil War was a sectional controversy over state rights, and slavery had nothing to do with it?

Well, it would. Except for one little catch. In this case, it was the Southerners, both in Congress and the Presidency, who were pressing for the use of national power to remove Indian tribes from lands coveted by the American whites. And they were willing to override states rights to achieve it. While that wasn't a central argument in the debate, Northern opponents of the bill mocked the Southerners for their willingness to overlook states rights when it was a measure they favored.

Over the following 30 years, there would be other occasions when the Slave Power would be willing to sacrifice the principle of states rights for the preservation of their "sacred institutions of slavery and white supremacy." And for "Southern honor," of course - though not a brand Old Hickory would have recognized as such.

See: Full text of 1832 Proclamation to the People of South Carolina

John Calhoun's rancid soul goes marching on

I've always said that Trump using Andrew Jackson for his Prsidencial symbolism was historically bizarrre. The 1830s ancestor of Trumpism was Jackson's arch-enemy John C. Calhoun. Matthew Whitaker, actually supports state nullification of federal law. (Andrew Kaczynski, Whitaker said he supports state's rights to nullify federal law CNN 11/10/2018)

It doesn't get more Calhounian than that. (Cody Carlson, This week in history: John C. Calhoun and the Nullification Crisis Deseret News 12/17/2012; Nullification crisis Encyclopaedia Britannica 10/26/2018)

John C. Calhoun (1783-1850) (CC-PD)