Confederate “Heritage” Month 2024, April 26: An Irish look from 1862 at the causes of the American Civil War

Today I’m taking a look at another book on the “Slave Power,” this one from 1862, still early in the Civil War. It was written by classical political economist John Eliot Cairnes (1823-1875), the namesake of today’s J.E. Cairnes School of Economics at the University of Galway, Ireland, where he also taught.

As Cairnes wrote, the Confederacy had initially made some attempt to official minimize the role slavery played in secession. But that was always bogus, as he explains:

I have been at some pains to show that the question at issue between North and South is not one of tariffs—a thesis prescribed to me by the state of the discussion six months ago, when the affirmative of this view was pertinaciously put forward by writers in the interest of the South, but which, at the present time, when this explanation of the war appears to have been tacitly abandoned, cannot but appear a rather gratuitous task. (1)

Cairnes' description of the incredulity of the English public when the learned about secession had its echoes in the wake of Trump’s attempted coup of January 6, 2021:

The first announcement by South Carolina of its intention to secede from the Union was received in this country [England] with simple incredulity. There were no reasons, it was said, for secession. What the constitution and laws of the United States had been on the eve of Mr. Lincoln's election, that they were on its morrow. It was absurd to suppose that one half of a nation should separate from the other because a first magistrate [the President] had been elected in the ordinary constitutional course.

The January 6 zealots of 2021 in the US were and are also absurd. But that’s a much later story.

Cairnes explains that, initially, Englanders were inclined to think that there must be some commercial differences or some kind of fiscal policy causing it. He describes what he took to be the prevailing initial English view, which actually bears a strong resemblance to the later Lost Cause type of argument:

The North fancied she had an interest in protection; the South had an obvious interest in free trade. On this and other questions of less moment North and South came into collision, and the antagonism thus engendered had been strengthened and exacerbated by a selfish struggle for place and power-a struggle which the constitution and political usages of the Americans rendered more rancorous and violent than elsewhere. But in the interests of the two sections, considered calmly and apart from selfish ends, there was nothing, it was said, which did not admit of easy adjustment, nothing which negotiation was not far more competent to deal with than the sword.

It was polite of the English public, I guess, that they were willing to take such forgiving view of the obsessive greed for power of American slaveowners. Naïve, surely, but polite.

He proceeds to describe how Englanders viewed the idea of slavery skeptically as a cause of secession:

As for slavery, it was little more than a pretext on both sides, employed by the leaders of the South to arouse the fears and hopes of the slaveholders, and by the North in the hope of attracting the sympathies of Europe and hallowing a cause which was essentially destitute of noble aims. The civil war was thus described as having sprung from narrow and selfish views of sectional interests (in which, however, the claims of the South were coincident with justice and sound policy), and sustained by passions which itself had kindled ; and the combatants were advised to compose their differences, and either return to their political partnership, or agree to separate and learn to live in harmony as independent allies.

Yeah, they really were naïve.

But British views of the Confederacy were never unanimous or fixed in stone. The British workers movement of the time was able to create substantial political pressure on the government to not formally recognize the Confederacy, for instance.

And, not unlike many banks and businesses in the American North, many British companies were making considerable amounts of money on the cotton business fed by the South’s slave economy. So the British business elite was far more receptive to normalizing its relations with the slave South, even though that would have meant helping the slaveowners to win the Civil War. (2)

Cairnes didn’t mince words. He was writing before Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was issued. But he didn’t have trouble seeing what led to civil war. And this is a very good brief summary:

But what has been the career of the Slave Power since [the Missouri Compromise of 1820]? lt is to be traced through every questionable transaction in foreign and domestic politics in which the United States has since taken part - through the Seminole war, through the annexation of Texas, through the Mexican war, through filibustering expeditions under Walker, through attempts upon Cuba, through the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 through Mr. Clay's compromises, through the repudiation of the Missouri Compromise so soon as the full results of that bargain had been reaped, through the passing of the Nebraska Bill and the legislative establishment of the principle of " Squatter Sovereignty," through the invasion of Kansas, through the repudiation of "Squatter Sovereignty" [the doctrine advocated by Northern appeasers of slavery like Stephen Douglas in the 1850s] when that principle had been found unequal to its purposes, and lastly, through the Dred-Scott decision and the demand for protection of slavery in the Territories - pretensions which, if admitted, would have converted the whole Union, the Free States no less than the Territories, into one great domain for slavery. This has been the point at which the Slave Power, after a series of successful aggressions, carried on during forty years, has at length arrived. lt was on this last demand that the Democrats of the North broke off from their Southern allies-a defection which gave their victory to the Republicans, and directly produced the civil war. And now we are asked to believe that slavery has no vital connexion with this quarrel, but that the catastrophe is due to quite other causes-to incompatibility of commercial interests, to uncongeniality of social tastes, to a desire for independence, to anything but slavery.

But we are told that in this long career of aggression the extension of slavery has only been employed by the South as a means to an end, and that it is in this end we are to look for the key to the present movement. " Slavery,'' it seems, "is but a surface question in American politics." The seeming aggressions were in reality defensive movements forced upon the South by the growing preponderance of the Free States; and its real object, as well in its former career of annexation and conquest, as in its present efforts to achieve independence, has been constantly the same-to avoid being made the victim of Yankee rapacity, to secure for itself the development of its own resources unhindered by protective laws. [my emphasis]

Notes:

(1) Cairnes, J[ohn] C[airnes] (1862): The Slave Power: Its Character, Career, & Probable Designs. London: Parker, Son, & Bourn. In: Reprint Edition (2010). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

(2) See: British Support During the U.S. Civil War (n/d). Lowcountry Digital History Initiative (LDHI). <https://ldhi.library.cofc.edu/exhibits/show/liverpools-abercromby-square/britain-and-us-civil-war> Accessed: 2024-25-04).

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2022, April 25: Slavery and the founding principles of the US

Sean Wilentz reminds us of the key role that slavery played in the development of what we know by names such as Western culture and European values: "A fixture and force in Western culture, time out of mind, slavery, and more specifically racial slavery, had been essential to the European settlement of the New World ever since the Portuguese pioneered the plantation system with enslaved African labor in the sixteenth century." (American Slavery and ‘the Relentless Unforeseen’ New York Review blog 11/19/2019)

Wilentz gives us a brief intellectual history of the strain of European thought that developed a critique of modern slavery, an important step in the development of democracy, personal freedom, and social justice.

But he also reminds us that simple historic narratives of democratic progress can easily obscure important aspects of how such progress as took place actually did happen, i.e., by people fighting for it. He summarizes a liberal version of this narrative that is true as far as it goes:

The historian Bernard Bailyn has offered one influential version of this view in his description of how the Revolution unleashed a “contagion of liberty.” Slavery, although a central part of American society, hardly encapsulated the ideals of the Declaration of Independence; it contradicted them, for reasons later explained by no less of an authority than Abraham Lincoln. The American Revolution may not have overthrown the institution of slavery but its egalitarian principles were at least implicitly antislavery. The anomaly became more glaring over the succeeding two generations when, in yet another unfolding of the unforeseen, American slavery did not die out as most expected but expanded, turning the American South into the most dynamic and ambitious slavery regime in the world. Still, when Emancipation arrived, it did so as a vindication and affirmation of America’s founding principles, the “new birth of freedom” that Lincoln pronounced at Gettysburg in 1863. It confounded the claims of those reactionary proslavery apologists who belittled Thomas Jefferson as a cunning dissembler and who regarded the Declaration’s assertion of self-evident equality as, in the words of one Indiana senator from 1854, “nothing more than a self-evident lie.” [my emphasis]

Part of the process of creating a nation is creating narratives that function as myths, i.e., more-or-less sacred events and principles and heroic achievements that are taken as valid and shared by a large portion of the people. And in the United States, where we still operate under a constitution that became effective in 1789, readings of historical events and previous interpretations of them over 200 years ago can even have significant implications for court rulings.

American reactionaries and "reactionary radicalized conservatives" (a term Austrian political scientists Natascha Strobl uses to describe figures like most of the Republicans currently in Congress) are very suspicious of critical thinking about history. As evidence by their ridiculous jihad against their bogeyman version of "critical race theory."

Wilentz describes the limitation of the Bailyn view this way:

One problem with this familiar view is that it obscures how new, how radical, antislavery politics were during the revolutionary era, and how, for many patriots, American slavery and American freedom were perfectly compatible. ...

These proslavery Americans and apologists for slavery and their progeny were no less products of the American founding than the early abolitionists inspired by Woolman and Benezet or the conflicted enlightened Virginians like Jefferson. Plantation slavery grew stupendously in the United States after the Revolution, generating a well-organized slave power that long dominated national politics. Slavery’s defeat was not inevitable. Nor, obviously, did white supremacy die with slavery. Over the century and a half since slavery’s abolition, the racist Americanism of Charles Pinckney and Roger Brooke Taney has survived and flourished in new forms, along with dominating social and political structures that uphold it. Far from vanquished, it has morphed and resurged in ways expected and unexpected, from the bloody overthrow of Reconstruction to the menacing rise of Donald J. Trump. [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)

Was slavery America's "original sin"?

James Goodman has an interesting piece on why It's time to stop calling slavery America's 'original sin' CNN 02/16/2021.

Historian Jeff Ostler is a specialist in the history of the North American indigenous peoples, and he highlights this aspect of Goodman's article:

Good points by James Goodman:

1. Slavery a crime against humanity, not an "original sin."

2. "If our British and then American ancestors had a first sin, it surely must include taking that land, which continued for hundreds of years."https://t.co/VF0CHnCuQ0

— Jeff Ostler (@Jeff__Ostler) February 16, 2021

Godman reminds us that historical metaphors always have to be used with care, including the slavery-as-original-sin one:

The habit might seem harmless, shorthand for saying that slavery was distant, deeply embedded and bad. All history is hindsight. We often see things that people couldn't or didn't see at the time. We tell stories and offer interpretations that depend on our knowledge of events that happened between then and now. We make comparisons and all kinds of judgements. We employ metaphors.

And he continues, "The problem is that it is a weak, misleading metaphor, concealing much more than it reveals about early American history, the institution of slavery, the aftermath of slavery and the messy business of making a nation."

But I'm also particularly interested how he describes the risk of using the Christian religious concept of Original Sin in this historical context. Because the notion of Original Sin has a strong element of inevitability about it. The religious version doesn't eliminate individual guilt. But it also sees guilt as a historical destiny. And Goodman also describes how it echoes pro-slavery arguments in America.

And this is also a real problem for using Original Sin to understand American slavery:

Then there is the question of who committed "our" original sin. Was it the European slave traders and enslavers -- first Portuguese and Spanish, then Dutch, French and English, all aided and abetted by African enslavers and traders -- who began to transport Africans to the Americas in the early 1500s? Were they our Adam and Eve, leaving everyone who came after them as the inheritors of their sin? Or was it the former British colonists, who, in the Declaration of Independence, nearly three centuries later, argued that all men are created equal and condemned King George III for inciting domestic insurrection?

Or was it the men in Philadelphia, 11 years later, who produced a Constitution that preserved and protected slavery in significant ways, including the fugitive slave clause and the three-fifths clause[?]

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 2020, April 24: the history Zombie of the happy slaves

A new popular history by Peter Charles Hoffer takes a debunking look at some common assumptions among Americans about our own history, Zombie History: Lies About Our Past that Refuse to Die (2020).

One such “Zombie” he discusses is the “Sambo” image, “the happy darky, the slave who loved his master.” This particular historical Zombie “sang and danced through the pages of antebellum southern writers and intellectuals.” It was a propaganda narrative, of course. In the real world:

When slaves gave testimony from firsthand knowledge, they revealed that slavery was inherently a brutal and brutalizing institution. In law, it reduced human beings to chattel - pieces of property that could be bought and sold, inherited and gifted away, at the will of the owner (or his creditors). In practice, it allowed all manner of physical and psychological abuse so long as the owner, his agent, or any free white person called it “correction.” In law the slave could offer no resistance to such punishment, as in law the slave was not a person with any rights.

Defenders of slavery then and later offered the following response—in practice, slavery was far gentler than it was in law. [my emphasis]

That “later” includes today, when advocates of a Lost Cause view of American history do invoke a version of the “sambo Zombie,” often as part of a common arguments from Republicans that African-Americans today are lazy and look for the government to take care of them, because they got used to be so well cared for under slavery. Whites opposing Reconstruction took up that argument as soon as the Civil War ended. So Zombie really is a good name for it. It’s undead self has been staggering ever since.

Hoffer writes further:

In response, abolitionists then and observers now demonstrate that free persons never wanted to change places with slaves, denouncing more onerous callings as slavery. For example, female household help in the antebellum North rejected the term “servant” and wanted to be called “maid” because servant was a code word for slave. Slaves wanted to be free. The constraints on acting on this desire were familial - slaves did not want to be parted from their children, parents, or other relatives. In fact, while few slave families were intentionally severed, at auction and in wills mothers were separated from children. Every slave family would have known or seen such separations, and the threat of them, perhaps more terrifying than physical correction [i.e., beating and other forms of abuse including murder], hung over every slave family. In particular, the expansion of slavery from coastal regions farther to the south and west broke up families. When slaves could run away from bondage safely, for example during the Civil War, they did so in the hundreds of thousands. [my emphasis]

It's very remarkable from the point of view of the slavery apologists' Zombie claim, that there was no clamor from Southern whites to be allowed to become slaves so they could enjoy that allegedly cushy lifestyle!

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 2020, April 20: Charles Sumner on the “Barbarism of Slavery”

Sen. Charles Sumner, Republican of Massachusetts, gave a famous speech in 1860 to the Senate that became known as the "Barbarism of Slavery" speech. In an introduction to a published edition of it (quoted here from The Barbarism of Slavery, 1863), he described the stakes in the Civil War then under way:

... there are two apparent rudiments to this war. One is Slavery and the other is State Rights. But the latter is only a cover for the former. If Slavery were out of the way there would be no trouble from State Rights.

The war, then, is for Slavery, and nothing else. lt is an insane attempt to vindicate by arms the lordship which had been already asserted in debate. With mad-cap audacity it seeks to install this Barbarism as the truest Civilization. Slavery is declared to be the "corner-stone" of the new edifice. This is enough.

The question is thus presented between Barbarism and Civilization; not merely between two different forms of Civilization, but between Barbarism on the one side and Civilization on the other side. If you are for Barbarism, join the Rebellion, or, if you can not join it, give it your sympathies. If you are for Civilization, stand by the Government of your country with mind, soul, heart and might!

Such is the issue simply stated. On the one side are women and children on the auction-block; families rudely separated; human flesh lacerated and seamed by the bloody scourge; labor extorted without wages; and all this frightful, many-sided wrong is the declared foundation of a mock commonwealth. On the other side is the Union of our Fathers, with the image of "Liberty" on its coin and the sentiment of Liberty in its Constitution, now arrayed under a patriotic Government, which insists that no such mock Commonwealth, having such a declared foundation, shall be permitted on our territory, purchased with money and blood, to impair the unity of our jurisdiction and to insult the moral sense of mankind. [my emphasis]

The rhetoric of barbarism and civilization was a key element of Western colonial thought at that time used as a justification for Europeans subjugating non-white people, including the settler colonialism in the Western Hemisphere directed against indigenous peoples. In the prof-slavery polemics, the South Peculiar Institution was defended as necessary to the maintenance of Civilization. Sumner here is making a polemical inversion of that argument, pointing out the cruelty and comparAtive economic backwardness as well as the deficiency of republican institutions in the Confederacy.

That use of "barbarism" is archaic now, though people in the wealthiest countries still find ways to make invidious comparison between themselves and other countries that are held to be "underdeveloped" or "less advanced". "Barbaric" and "barbarism" now are typically used in the kind of polemical sense Sumner was employing in the 1860s, to refer to cruelty and viciousness.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2020, April 9: Was God anti-slavery and pro-Union?

Another Civil War song today, Battle Hymn of the Republic, in a folky version from Elizabeth Knight:

Here are the lyrics from the liner notes from the Songs of the Civil War album (1960) depicted on the YouTube clip above:

BATLE HYMN OF THE REPUBLIC sung by Elizabeth Knight with Jerry Silverman and The Harvesters:

Words: Julia Ward Howe
Music "John Brown's Body"

This is the great inspirational hymn which came out of the darkest hours of our nation's history. Mrs. Howe, in later years an ardent leader of the woman's suffrage movement ... [c]omposed the song in November, 1861. lt first appeared in print in the pages of The Atlantic Monthly in February, 1862. Mrs. Howe was paid five dollars by the magazine for the right to print the sang. Of all the songs produced by the Civil war, this one undoubtedly has become a more permanent part of our national idiom than any other.

The song is a God-is-on-our-side anthem used by the Union side. There is always some ambiguity in that kind of song. In this case, it represents a continuation of the theological side of the slavery debate of the prewar years. Defenders of the Peculiar Institution argued that slavery was an institution endorsed by the Bible. Opponents argued that it was against God's will and violation of the Christian view of the worth of the human being founded on the Bible.

Hermeneutic questions aside, the God of Moses and the Exodus was an inspiration to American slaves themselves, as well as popular movements for centuries, in what we would today broadly call Christian liberation theology. The militant antislavery leader John Brown was a devout Calvinist who understood it to be his Christian duty to fight against slavery. Of all the commonly known white American leaders prior to the Civil War, John Brown, who also supported the vote and legal equality for women, is the one who most clearly reflected the left-liberal views of race and gender of 2020.

There is a famous part of Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address that addressed the religious considerations at stake in the conflict, which he introduced this way (text from OurDocuments.gov):

One eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the Southern half part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union, even by war; while the government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war, the magnitude, or the duration, which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding.

Slavery was the cause of the war, as Lincoln here emphasized. As in all wars, there were contributing factors of various kinds. But neither side pretended at the time that slavery was not the central cause of the war, much less the ludicrous neo-Confederate claim that slavery had nothing at all to do with precipitating the war.

He continued with the God part (may paragraph break):

Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully.

The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!" If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offences which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him?

Fondly do we hope -- fervently do we pray -- that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said f[our] three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether." [my emphasis]

I have no reason to doubt that Lincoln believed in the Christian religion. But he was speaking here as a national leader who had the task of finishing the Civil War and then taking on the task of reconstructing a new Union and a free-labor economy instead of slavery for the whole country.

At some point, I want to take a closer look at what Lincoln actually had in mind for Reconstruction. But here, he was invoking the widely shared religious tradition of the North and the South, and doing so in a way that, to my reading, leaves no doubt that Lincoln himself assumed that God was very much on the anti-slavery side. And that "if God wills that it continue" part is great rhetorical construction that defined slavery as a national sin, not simply one by the Confederate side.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2020, April 8:: "Copperheadism" in the North

The existence of "Copperhead" Confederate sympathizers in the North during the Civil War is an important reminder that it really was a civil war. It is a staple of neo-Confederate ideology that it wasn't actually a civil war but rather sectional conflict. That's how the label "War Between the States" became the favorite neo-Confederate label for the conflict.

Philip Van Doren Stern wrote in The Life and Writings of Abraham Lincoln (1940), a book which itself is an example of a left/progressive treatment of American history of that time, wrote about an important event that obviously included some antiwar, pro-slavery, Copperhead sentiment, the antidraft riot of 1863 in New York City:

Even in the summer of 1863, when the North was in the full flush of victory, many of its own people were doing their best to defeat its cause. Copperheadism was on the increase. Disaffected areas were rife with opposition to the Northern war policy; treason became commonplace. Recruiting had fallen off so badly that men had to be offered large bounties for enlistment. Even this did not help. Men had to be drafted into the army, and the resistance to this measure became so great that in New York City it flared out into open violence only ten days after Gettysburg.

An attack was made on an office where names were being drawn for the draft. The building was burned, and police and soldiers were assaulted. The mob then surged through the city for four days terrorizing the populace, burning a Negro orphan asylum and running down and killing Negroes wherever they could be found. Nearly one thousand people were killed or wounded, and property damage ran into several millions of dollars. [my emphasis]

("Copperhead" was a polemical term, and how much the categories of Copperhead, Peace Democrats, and Southern sympathizers overlapped would also be a separate discussion.)

That event is known as the Draft Riot of 1863. The current Britannica article on it relates:

[The] Draft Riot of 1863, [was a] major four-day eruption of violence in New York City resulting from deep worker discontent with the inequities of conscription during the U.S. Civil War. Although labouring people in general supported the Northern war effort, they had no voice in Republican policy and occasionally deserted from the army or refused reenlistment. Because of their low wages, often less than $500 a year, they were particularly antagonized by the federal provision allowing more affluent draftees to buy their way out of the Federal Army for $300. Minor riots occurred in several cities, and when the drawing of names began in New York on July 11, 1863, mobs (mostly of foreign-born, especially Irish, workers) surged onto the streets, assaulting residents, defying police, attacking draft headquarters, and burning buildings. Property damage eventually totaled $1,500,000. [my emphasis]

Of course, $1.5 million in 1863 dollars converted into 2020 dollars would be much larger. (I'm not going to attempt the conversion here!)

The account quoted above shows how various political currents fed into the New York draft riot, which as we see quickly became an anti-black race riot. One factor is that military conscription is always unpopular, even when there is broad public support for a military conflict. There was definitely a class factor, because wealthy people could simply pay not to be drafted, an option not available for the vast majority of conscripts.

Plain old white racist hatred was obviously an important factor, apparently by far the most important in this case.

Nativism/anti-nativism was involved, as well. As was partisan and religious tribalism. And it would not be surprising if there weren't some organized Copperhead effort encouraging this, though how much is unclear.

When the Republican Party was formed in 1854, it attracted not only antislavery voters of various kinds but also attracted nativist voters who were also opposed to the Catholicism supported by most Irish immigrants. And the Pope at the time was particularly opposed to the antislavery movement in the US, regarding it as what was then known as "red republicanism". Irish immigrants tended to support the Democratic Party. So anti-immigrant, anti-slavery, and anti-Catholic sentiments could all figure into opposition to the Democratic Party at that time.

Understanding contradictions in the US Constitution – and using them

Historian David Blight has an essay that wrestles with an aspect of how we build narratives about History, ‘A Doubtful Freedom’ New York Review of Books 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]

In the humanities, descriptions and accounts are often referred to as "narratives," which in modern speech philosophy like that of Jürgen Habermas are recognized as being the products of a social process.

With the history of nations, including American history, the narratives of academic professionals inevitably co-exist with political and sentimental narratives in popular usage. The controversies over Confederate symbolism are examples of that difference, since the serious historical accounts generally diverge greatly from political understandings of the moment that use historical images and memories to construct narratives for current political purposes.

Blight is reviewing a book by Andrew Delbanco that looks at how the fugitive slave issue affected the conflict between slave and free states, The War Before the War (2018).

Here he comments on the contradictory concepts incorporated into the Constitution and how democratic activists could base their arguments in part on the more democratic and liberal current of the American

At the same time, today we need the reminder that the nature of federalism — the attempted balancing of state and federal power — at the heart of the Constitution is itself rooted in the protection of slavery. Our ongoing struggle over states’ rights owes much to its origins in Madison’s and other founders’ insistence on local control of their chattel in moral persons.

Whether this was a matter of principle or politics for Madison may be beside the point. Delbanco shows how the Constitution’s main author 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]

It's also a fact that the US Constitution was ratified in 1788. It has been amended various times since then. But as we see in the current Trump impeachment debate, how contemporary political actors interpret the intentions of the Founders has not only a theoretical but practical relevance. And the precedents of constitutional law also date from the beginning of the Constitution.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2019, April 30: A short but useful take on the politics of slavery, the real version and the Lost Cause version

One of the more interesting developments in US political journalism in recent years is the fact that some of the most interesting pieces on politics and popular history are to found in ... Teen Vogue!

Adam Sanchez wrote in 2017 about how the Trump Administration was then glorifying Robert E. Lee, Abraham Lincoln and Civil War Myths, Explained 11/03/2017:

Earlier this week, Trump’s chief of staff, John Kelly, stated on Fox News that Confederate General Robert E. Lee was an “honorable man” who fought “for his state” and that “the lack of an ability to compromise . . . on both sides" led to the Civil War.

In these comments, Kelly parroted one of the many Civil War myths: that the war was a dispute over states’s rights. This fable was widely promoted by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which rewrote textbooks across the South to deemphasize the “right” that Southern leaders were most concerned with: profiting from the ownership of other human beings. This “Lost Cause” myth is particularly useful for Kelly and the Trump administration because it hides the essential reason the South seceded — to preserve slavery and white supremacy — allowing Trump’s white supporters to claim that they are preserving their “heritage” rather than racial privilege. Today, the idea of Confederate “heritage” as a unifying call for the white South pits white people against people of color. [my emphasis]

This is a short article that nevertheless gives a good glimpse at the complicated politics of slavery and race through in which Abraham Lincoln operated. Sanchez also mention the exodus of slaves from their plantations after the Emancipation Proclamation, a critical event which seems to be often under-appreciated.

He summarizes the challenge of reaching a nuanced understanding of that period, "The reason this history is so often hidden or distorted is because truly understanding the causes of the Civil War, and how that war was transformed, requires a view of history that sees beyond presidents, generals, and the elites."

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 23: The slave economy of the South and innovative accounting

Sam Seder recently interviewed Caitlin Rosenthal on the topic Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management w/ Caitlin Rosenthal Majority Report 4/15/19 (interview begins around 19:25 in this video):

Caitlin Rosenthal is the author of the book Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management (2018), which looks at the accounting methods of the Southern planters, some of which turn out to have been notably innovative. She finds, for instance, that the accounting practice of depreciation was one of their innovations. That is a method of allocating the cost of capital purchases like large machinery to annual income over several years. It can get complicated. But the basic idea is that a capital investment like machinery often has benefits spread over a period of years. And as the machinery is used, it also gets wear and tear that reduces its monetary value from what it was when it was purchased.

Slaveowners depreciated their capital invested in human beings, their slaves. As she explains in Why Management History Needs to Reckon with Slavery Harvard Business Review 11/13/2018:

... one of the key developments in the emergence of modern business is the idea that you should analyze your products to see exactly how much everything costs. And related to this is the analysis of depreciation – so thinking about how a large fixed cost like a railroad train might change in value over time, and how you should account for that.

In one of the most prominent accounting guides for planters, Thomas Affleck’s “Plantation Record and Account Book,” he gives advice on how to appreciate and depreciate enslaved people. For him, these are long-lived, complex, capital assets. They are human capital. He doesn’t call them that, but he gives instructions on how to account for their growth and value as they get older, as they learn new skills and how to account for their depreciation as they age or if they’re injured or even if they attempt to escape.

... depreciation is something that I’d gotten used to seeing as a sign of remarkable sophistication. It doesn’t show up in accounting textbooks until the late 19th century and here we are half a century earlier, and we have a Southern planter instructing people how to appreciate and depreciate enslaved people. So that means that he was well ahead of his time in a setting that I had gotten used to thinking about as being one that was relatively backwards, one that wasn’t sophisticated. [my emphasis]

She discusses a different aspect of planter business methods in The perils of Big Data: How crunching numbers can lead to moral blunders Washington Post 02/18/2019:

Running a slave plantation involved lots of data carefully entered into paper spreadsheets and reports that were passed along to absentee owners in England. From the comfort of counting rooms, plantation owners could review this data without having to think too hard about the people it represented.

Some planters received standardized reports every month from their sugar plantations in Jamaica and Barbados. These careful records tracked the daily tasks of the hundreds (sometimes thousands) of people they enslaved, all with an eye to maximizing profits. The accounts monitored the output of plantations as well as the “increase” and “decrease” of laborers, slaveholders’ chilling economic shorthand for births and deaths.

When you understand the context of these records - high mortality, punishing slave labor, racialized violence - the records are horrifying. But without that context, they erase as much as they reveal. They look like antiquarian versions of Excel spreadsheets. And, absent a moral perspective, the productivity enabled by data-driven analysis could be seen not as a marker of degradation but of progress.

This is also related to the historical issue of how much Southern slavery should be considered an integral part of American capitalism or viewed in some other way, e.g., an aristocratic holdover.

In To Remake the World: Slavery, Racial Capitalism, and Justice Boston Review 02/20/2018, Rosenthal talks about how our view of slavery and the kind of economy of which it was a part can have important effects on how we view political systems and human rights:

One place to begin is to describe the abolition of slavery not as a human-rights measure but as a form of market regulation. In the abstract, this shift makes sense: abolition not only stripped slaveholders of their property, it also restricted property rights. It prevented men and women from being sold (or selling themselves) into bondage. Abolition also outlawed certain kinds of transactions and, as a regulation of “bonds,” it restricted the right to contract.

Framing abolition as market regulation inverts conventional ideas about slavery and capitalism, particularly the assumption that free markets are fundamentally connected to other human freedoms. The shared modifier “free” elides vast differences between free markets and other kinds of freedoms: freedom to move, to speak, to assemble, to love. History suggests that these freedoms can both expand together and move in opposition to one another. In the Atlantic world, “free” trade in goods (and bodies) expanded even as millions of Africans lost control over their lives and labor. The relationship between free markets and other freedoms is not inevitable. [my emphasis]

Her analysis there doesn't imply that slavery was not a human rights issue. She's just explaining how the market view is also important. As she notes in the Majority Report interview, the way that slavery was abolished during and after the Civil War was confiscation of property without compensation. This is also relevant to the discussion of reparations for slavery. Because - and here's accounting theory again! - it can also be understood as "giving" individual slaves something of value (their own bodies) rather than paying the planters the money value of the property emancipation took away from them.

I haven't seen this particular angle discussed in the reparations discussion, probably because I'm not familiar with that discussion in any great depth with the issues being discussed in connection with reparations. But I can't imagine it won't be taken up in the policy discussion and polemics. Opponents of reparations could argue that emancipation actually was a substantial form of reparations, while advocates could point to it as an important precedent for the reparations idea.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2019, April 20: Were abolitionists cynical conservatives? (Hint:no)

"Abolitionists succeeded despite rather than because of political and economic elites, many of whom were complicit in the political economy of slavery and would spend a lot of time containing abolition’s reach after emancipation."

That's from a very recent academic article historian Manisha Sinha, "The Problem of Abolition in the Age of Capitalism" American Historical Review 124:1 (Feb 2019). I was attracted by the title of the article, because there are all sorts of interesting questions about the relationship of the Southern slave system in the United States to the broader capitalist economy. But the time I finished the article, I was feeling like a downright fan.

Sinha is the author of The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (2016). Her AHR article uses a book by David Brion Davis, one of the most important historians of American slavery, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (1975) to talk about the various ways historians have described the abolitionists.

The social and class function of abolitionism touches on a couple of major issues in the historiography. One is the question of what role slavery played in the development of American capitalism. One set of views sees slavery as fundamental to the national economy as a whole in the early American and antebellum periods. Another emphasizes the radically different bases of the slave economy in the South and the free-labor economy of the North, regarding both as brands of capitalism.

Another important though quirky historian of American slavery is Eugene Genovese, who also published jointly with his wife Elizabeth Fox-Genovese. His main "quirk" is that he initially established his reputation as one of the most highly regarded of the New Left Marxist historians of the 1960s. He later adopted a John Calhounian perspective, using elements of Marxist analysis but basically becoming an advocate for the big Southern slaveowners.

(Richard Hofstadter famously described John Calhoun as the "Marx of the master class" because he saw a key political conflict based on the varying class interests of the capitalist class and workers, but saw himself as very much the ally of Northern capitalists and Southern planters in that conflict. John Calhoun died in 1850. The Communist Manifesto was published in 1848 but was little known then outside radical democratic circles in the German lands. So far as I'm aware, Calhoun himself never actually heard of Karl Marx, much less being directly influenced by his class analysis. An German intellectual who was an analogous figure to Calhoun in his view of classes and politics was the Bavarian philosopher and theologian Franz von Baader [1765-1841], who was an important figure in reactionary political thought in Europe as Calhoun was in the US.)

Sinha notes that Genovese "portrayed the slave South as a premodern, pre-capitalist society and its critics as bourgeois reformers. The notion that hypocritical abolitionists critiqued slavery while remaining blind to the sufferings of the working poor closer to home had of course originated with southern defenders of slavery, whom Genovese quixotically admired as conservative critics of capitalism." (my emphasis)

This is one of those cases when historical interpretation can be appropriate for a variety of political perspectives. Sinha also recalls, "In American historiography, the Civil War and Reconstruction were long described as imperialist ventures by Progressive historians, where northern industry under the guise of antislavery reduced the agrarian South to the position of an internal colony." (my emphasis)

The best known Progressive historians were Charles and Mary Beard. They were generally regarded as being on the left. But Charles Beard became particularly attracted to Isolationist politics in the 1930s. His last book was President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1941 (1948), which advanced the rightwing-isolationist conspiracy theory that FDR somehow planned or deliberately allowed the Japanese attack o Pearl Harbor in 1941. Britannica Online has an article by historian Robert Dallek on this crackpot theory, which nevertheless is also a sort of foundational theory for many American conservatives. (Pearl Harbor and the “Back Door to War” Theory; revised 11/12/2004)

But even before that seeming hard-right turn in his perspective, Beard's work to some extent a superficial view of economic influence in politics that fit nicely with early 20th century Progressive reformers' good-government concerns, but could all-too-easily fit into a resigned or cynical conservative view, i.e., "everybody's just in it for a buck."

The Progressive theory Sinha describes seems to fit nicely into that dubious category: the abolition of slavery wasn't about freedom, democracy, or human rights, but about manipulative politics by greedy Northern businessmen. Which, as she also indicates, just happens to coincide with the propaganda claims of antebellum defenders of slavery. Conservatives just seem to be more active and creative in finding a "usuable past" for their purposes than the left and center-left generally are.

Sinha's article does quite a bit of debunking of this argument while giving a broad account of the historigraphical currents involved. (And providing copious references to the professional literature.) She argues sensibly and accurately, "Abolitionists succeeded despite rather than because of political and economic elites, many of whom were complicit in the political economy of slavery and would spend a lot of time containing abolition’s reach after emancipation."

Like many social and political movements, abolitionism attracted a wide variety of characters with varying motivations. She writes:

If slavery lies at the heart of the development of Anglo-American capitalism, as some recent historians contend, then surely the movement to abolish it can be seen as, at the very least, its obverse, and anti-capitalist in its very premise, the emancipation of labor. ...

Many abolitionists critiqued the economics of slavery and the oppressive nature of early capitalism. Some flirted with utopian socialism and labor and land reform movements. In my own reading, the abolitionist international of the nineteenth century ... included radical republicans, communitarians, feminists, pacifists, and anti-imperialists ...

In American historiography, the standard definition of an abolitionist has always been someone who not only opposed the existence of slavery but also demanded African American citizenship. In contrast, antislavery could include a range of positions against slavery and no necessary commitment to black equality, even though most antislavery politicians were more open to the possibility of black civil and political rights than their peers. Moreover, the free labor ideology of the antebellum Republican Party was not so much a vindication of wage labor as it harked back to the world of economically independent male republican proprietors, a vision that would become obsolete with the industrial takeoff in the United States from 1870 to 1920.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2019, April 19: Debunking the Lost Cause ideology

Carl Weinberg provided an example several years ago of using Virginia Confederate History Month proclamations to debunk the Lost Cause narrative behind them: The Strange Career of Confederate History Month OAH Magazine of History 25:2 April 2011. The "history" month was April, Confederate Heritage Month by another name.

This particular incident has to do with the 2010 proclamation. "Republican Virginia Governor Robert McDonnell issued a Confederate History Month proclamation that omitted any mention of slavery. Less than a week later and after many protests, McDonnell reissued a new text that prominently included slavery."

A key part of the neo-Confederate/Lost Cause pseudohistorical account is to deny or minimize the role of slavery as the cause of the war. The revised version of the 2010 proclamation, included as a sidebar in the article, opened with, "WHEREAS, April is the month in which the people of Virginia joined the Confederate States of America in a four year war between the states for independence that concluded at Appomattox Courthouse." Weinberg takes off from that passage to provide this helpful dose of real history:

For one thing, there were 500,000 enslaved "people" in Virginia at the time who were legally considered property and could not have taken part in this decision. Further, the [1861] Virginia Ordinance of Secession makes it plain - by reference to "the oppression of the Southern slaveholding states" - that slavery was, once again, the key.

But even if we acknowledge that the Virginia Secession Convention voted to leave the Union on April 17, 1861, the white "people" of Virginia were hardly of one mind on this point. When voting on delegates to that convention took place two months earlier on February 4-the very day that the new Confederate government was seated in Montgomery, Alabama-a majority voted for men known to be against secession. This sentiment was especially strong west of the Blue Ridge mountains, where it prevailed by a five-to-one margin. Once assembled in Richmond February 13, pro-secession delegates failed to win a majority. Meanwhile, western delegates denounced taxation policies (partial exemptions on slaves) and political representation policies (the state version of the 3/5 clause) that favored slaveholders, who were more numerous in the eastern Tidewater and Piedmont regions. Only the attack on Fort Sumter and Lincoln's call for 75,000 volunteers broke the two-month deadlock. Despite the outbreak of war, western Virginia leaders emerged from the convention determined to stay in the Union. At a convention in June in the western city of Wheeling, they renounced secession and formed a new rival state government. Two years later, after much maneuvering, and under the condition that the gradual abolition of slavery be included in its new constitution, the state of West Virginia was admitted to the Union. They had seceded from the secessionists. [my emphasis]

Another clause of the revised proclamation states that slavery was the cause of the war:

"WHEREAS, it is important for all Virginians to understand that the institution of slavery led to this war and was an evil and inhumane practice that deprived people of their God-given inalienable rights and all Vrrginians are thankful for its permanent eradication from our borders, and the study of this time period should reflect upon and learn from this painful part of our history ..."

But another clause picks up parts of the Lost Cause narrative:

WHEREAS, all Virginians can appreciate the fact that when ultimately overwhelmed by the insurmountable numbers and resources of the Union Army, the surviving, imprisoned and injured Confederate soldiers gave their word and allegiance to the United States of America, and returned to their homes and families to rebuild their communities in peace, following the instruction of General Robert E. Lee of Virginia, who wrote that, "... all should unite in honest efforts to obliterate the effects of war and to restore the blessings of peace."

It is a stock piece of the neo-Confederate case that the South lost because they were just crushed by the sheer numbers of the Union forces. This diverts attention from mistakes and problems of the Confederate generals and state governments, as well as from factors like the undermining of the Confederate economy by mass desertions of slaves from plantations after the Emancipatio Proclamation. It also frames the Confederate loss as an inevitable tragedy, rather than a disaster created by the fanaticism, greed, and treason of the planter class and their supporters in mounting a armed revolt against the Union.

That latter clause also perpetuates the unhistorical image of Robert E. Lee as a patriotic, benevolent figure after the war. Lee did urge reconcilation, which for conservative Southern whites meant reconcilation between Northern and Southrn white people at the expense of the freedom and well-being of black citizens.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2019, April 16: Slavery and the American Revolution

Historian Sean Wilentz, who has what I take to be a nuanced and sophisticated view of early American and antebellum history, did a review essay last year on Harvard historian Jill Lepore's These Truths: A History of the United States (2018). (The American Revolutions New York Review of Books 11/08/2018)

I've been referring in the last few posts in this series to the conflicting trends we see in American history, such as that between democracy and white supremacy, or between the rule of law and authoritarianism. Wilentz describes three major narratives about slavery in the early decades of the United States as a country:

One well-established line of argument holds that the Revolution unleashed what Bernard Bailyn once called a “contagion of liberty” that eventually challenged the enormity of slavery. Another line is tougher on the Revolution’s hypocrisy, echoing Samuel Johnson’s famous jibe about hearing “the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes.” A still-darker argument asserts that slavery was a cornerstone of the Revolution’s republicanism - that slaveholding aristocratic rebels like Washington, Jefferson, and Madison could, as Edmund Morgan wrote, “more safely preach equality in a slave society than in a free one,” and that they accordingly promoted a racist republicanism that kept poorer whites contented by the fact that they were not black and not enslaved. [my emphasis]

All of those positions are based on real factors. I have a sentimental attachment to the “contagion of liberty” perspective. I try to maintain a critical perspective on my own outlook by paying attention to the Samuel Johnson take, which is based on the very obvious historical reality that slavery and white racism were deeply rooted in the early Republic. As one might guess from the name of this blog, I'm enough of a Hegelian to not be surprised at big contradictions in a country's historial process.

I pay attention to the third perspective. But it still looks to me like a basically reactionary position and ignores some important changes in the institution of slavery itself during the early years of the US, such as the invention of the cotton gin. I don't see how that view is compatable with things like the (pre-Constitution) Northwest Ordnance that banned slavery in northern territories. Or with the voluntary abolition of slavery in various northern states.

Wilentz writes that Jill Lapore "advances an emerging view among historians that there were two eighteenth-century revolutions in America, not one: the familiar successful rebellion against monarchical rule and a less remembered one to abolish slavery that would not succeed until 1865." I'm not sure if he means to differentiate that approach from the "contagion of liberty" outlook, because it seems to be consistent with that view. Also, since a large portion of the left and center-left seem to have written off much of early and antebellum American history as a long, dark night of slavery and reaction, I'm not sure that in popular understanding of history that the Civil War is "less remembered" that the Revolution. I would agree that the Civil War can and should be understood as a second revolution, although in very meaningful ways it was an extension of the first one. Which would be consistent with the "conagion of liberty" perspective, much less so with the slavery-as-a-cornerstone outlook.

Wilentz also makes this important observation about the evolution of the parties on the slavery issue. Note that the party he calls Republican in 1819-20, consistent with the contempory usage, was the Democratic-Republican Party founded by Thomas Jefferson, which was commonly referred to as the Republican Party until later in the 1820s, when it became known as the Democratic Party, of which today's Democratic Party is the same organization. The present-day Republican Party was founded in 1854 as an anti-slavery party.

Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans did not ... align as, respectively, antislavery and proslavery parties prior to the momentous crisis over the admission of Missouri as a slave state in 1819 and 1820; most congressmen in what John Quincy Adams called the “free party” were in fact northern Republicans. Adams, who was by then a Republican himself, did become increasingly opposed to slavery over the following decades, as Lepore relates, but partly on that account, he never “steered the erratic course of the Whig Party,” as the book contends. If he had, something like Lincoln’s Republican Party might have arisen two decades earlier than it did.

Much of Wilentz' essay is devoted to an evaluation of Lapore's analysis of the Populist tradition in US politics. He links that back to pre-Civil War days and the Calhounian trend that on which I've been focusing in several posts in this year's "Heritage" series:

Trump may perhaps reflect the worst in the long history that Lepore relates, but in more ways than she suggests, he also represents a sharp break, matched in our history only by Southern secession and the Civil War. Reclaiming America’s truths means, first and foremost, understanding the exact historic dimensions of the unprecedented crisis—a crisis that, beyond demagogy, lies, and phony populism, goes to the legitimacy of the constitutional order. [my emphasis]