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

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

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

John C. Calhoun (1782-1850)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robert Barnwell Rhett

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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