The South’s Folly
Does he have the votes?
I’ve been listening to David Blight’s lectures for his Yale course on The Civil War and Reconstruction. And I find myself continually compelled to think about the political situation in late 1860 through the ahistorical lens of today’s political controversies. After all, if Barack Obama with a popular majority and 59 Democratic Senators can’t get a climate change bill through the Senate, then what kind of anti-slavery legislative agenda would Abraham Lincoln have been able to drive through congress had the South not seceded? The Republicans were committed to excluding slavery from the territories, but perhaps slave state Senators could have just dealt with this through ceaseless filibustering. It was only the withdrawal of the Confederate members from Congress that gave the GOP the majorities it needed to pass its agenda.
Right?
83 Responses to “The South’s Folly”
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June 24th, 2009 at 4:51 pm
Abolishing slavery would have required a Constitutional amendment which would, indeed, have been difficult.
As for less drastic measures restricting slavery (say, keeping it out of the territories), such laws would have been difficult but not impossible. Keep in mind that the President in that day controlled a great deal of political patronage that he could grant or withhold to districts depending on their representative’s vote. Politicking was rather different in those days.
June 24th, 2009 at 4:52 pm
Secessionists viewed Lincoln’s election as a harbinger of things to come, since he was elected without a single southern electoral vote. Yes, they may have been able to filibuster for a time, but not forever. At the first census in 1790, the free and slave state populations were more equal than they were in 1850 or 1860, and with waves of immigrants headed to the North, slave state politicians understood that they would eventually be a powerless minority.
June 24th, 2009 at 4:53 pm
Now you’re thinking.
Given a Senate with 59-60 sitting Democratic members and zero Republicans, how many of those would favor single-payer or public option? All we would need is 31. What kind of energy and climate bills could we get?
June 24th, 2009 at 4:56 pm
I think there was also some causation in the other direction: the south seceded in part because it was becoming clear that the north was likely to win on excluding slavery from the territories. This would presumably lead to, over a period of decades, to more anti-slavery congresspeople, which would eventually lead to abolition. But, it’s certainly true that without the war (both the withdrawal of southern congressmen, and the effect on northern political thought), abolition wouldn’t have happened in anything close to the historic timeline.
June 24th, 2009 at 4:56 pm
The filibuster in the US Senate did not actually come into use until 1917.
Not that there might not have been attempts earlier if slavery had been the issue. But perhaps the existence of the practice might have prevented the Civil War.
But it also might have hurt the expansion of the union into more states, after seeing what a huge fight Kansas statehood caused.
June 24th, 2009 at 4:59 pm
Absolutely correct. Keeping parity in the Senate was a large part of the reason the South kept pushing for slavery to be expanded into the territories.
June 24th, 2009 at 5:02 pm
Slavery was not completely abolished in The US until almost a year after the end of The Civil War. The Emancipation Proclamation abolished slavery in The Confederate States only and it even allowed them sometime to think things over — it gave them the option of returning to the union and keeping their slaves if they did so within a certain time limit.
June 24th, 2009 at 5:09 pm
Presidents had more control over territories than states. The fear was that Republicans would engineer anti-slave majorities in the territories which would lead to them entering the union as free states. Eventually, there would be enough free states to pass amendments eliminating slavery.
That placed the slave states in the position of either blocking the entry of perfectly viable states into the union, or of locking in the eventual elimination of slavery. While they had always counted on allies from non-slave states for compromises that kept slavery alive, stifling the growth of the union when it was poised for a period of rapid expansion was not politically tenable. The Federal government under the Republicans was in a position to make them choke on the precedent of the Kansas-Nebraska act.
June 24th, 2009 at 5:10 pm
While thinking of historical “what ifs” I’ve wondered what would have happenen if actually “separate but equal” schools had been successfully mandated for a decade or two before “Brown v Board of Education” formally eliminated segragation. Could the terrible state of low income, de facto segregated schools have been avoided?
June 24th, 2009 at 5:10 pm
Yes, I agree Matt, we should just let them take their ball and go home. Then they can become the weird, third-world Jesusland they’ve always wanted to be. I guess I’m okay, as NC went blue in a big way this time around; but poor Florida. I don’t know what we’ll do about the inland west, though.
June 24th, 2009 at 5:12 pm
Right. Strategically speaking the South chose the right moment for confrontation. Since the South power was only going to decline from thereon, it made sense to seek a settlement at the point where there was some chance of getting its way.
Very few people or organizations would trade the ultimate demise of the principle goals for the safety of a prolonged ending. The civil war was about all the marbles and rightly so. If there were no civil war, the South’s fate was sealed and the South knew it.
June 24th, 2009 at 5:20 pm
Wrong. It doesn’t take a filibuster proof majority to abolish the filibuster. If the north really wanted to end slavery it could have. Right now both parties feel that they benefit from the anti-democractic norms of the Senate, but that was probably not the case in 1860s.
June 24th, 2009 at 5:23 pm
First, don’t underestimate the importance of the patronage power of the President back then. For example, it was illegal in most southern states to distribute or possess anti-slavery materials, and that was enforced by the postmasters. The idea of Republican postmasters and the resulting availability of progressive tracts was absolutely terrifying to white southerners who thought that even the slightest whiff of anti-slavery sentiment would sprout a thousand Nat Turners.
Then multiply that by a thousand lucrative and powerful government positions all the way up to the President. It didn’t matter whether the South would have one any particular political issue, it was the debate itself that terrified them.
June 24th, 2009 at 5:23 pm
Filibuster what? The admission of new states? IIRC, federal territories were free.
June 24th, 2009 at 5:23 pm
“would have one” = “would have won”, obviously.
Matt’s spelling disease is contagious, apparently.
June 24th, 2009 at 5:25 pm
I too never understood why the various Clay-organized compromises leading up to the Civil War were so focused on maintaining a 50 percent free-state, 50 percent slave-state union, when the US constitution clearly required a much higher hurdle than a 50 percent plus one majority to pass an amendment to it.
June 24th, 2009 at 5:29 pm
If only someone could convince the Deep South to secede again today, perhaps the rest of the nation might sense the delight in the resultant breath of fresh air and let them go. Peacefully. And let ‘em take Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Arizona, even Idaho and Alaska, far as I’m concerned — red states everywhere, all y’all! No war, no mayhem, just don’t let the door hit you in the butt on the way out.
There. That felt good.
June 24th, 2009 at 5:33 pm
The Southern States weren’t satisfied with the status quo. There was a lot that could be done short of abolishing slavery, and more that could be done in favor of slavery. Look at the Fugitive Slave Act. Consider Southern agitation for annexing Cuba for slave plantations.
June 24th, 2009 at 5:35 pm
After all, if Barack Obama with a popular majority and 59 Democratic Senators can’t get a climate change bill through the Senate…
The problem is, the public isn’t paying much attention to the climate issue right now – there’s only so much stuff anyone can pay attention to at once. There’s been the stimulus, the GM bailout, Sotomayor, health care, minor but interesting stuff like Ensign and Sanford, and then there’s climate change. I’d be surprised if more than one in five Americans has a strong opinion on Waxman-Markey. Hell, I’d be surprised if more than one in five Americans has more than a blank look if you say, “Have you heard about Waxman-Markey?” to them.
So the business lobbyists can pretty much run roughshod on climate change. Obama really needs to reshape his strategy – he really can’t do everything at once. Get the public focused on health care, then get it through Congress. Once that’s done, get the public focused on climate change, then get a good bill through Congress. But expecting the public to be on his side and keep Congress in check on both at once is impossible.
June 24th, 2009 at 5:43 pm
This nation spent its first 80 years trying to forge a bipartisan consensus on slavery.
June 24th, 2009 at 5:49 pm
when the US constitution clearly required a much higher hurdle than a 50 percent plus one majority to pass an amendment to it.
The South was trying to defnd its power. It was trying to defend state’s rights (to run the state like a slaveholder would), expand the slaveholding system, or at least ensure it endured in perpetuity, stop the Yankees from being insufferably insulting, avoid the robber baron-style of capitalism taking hold, not to mention they were driven by the fear of lower-class whites failing to be distracted by black and deciding to sort out the southern class relations, and the fear (vastly overamplified) of a slave revolt and the killing of white people.
In fact, all the big Republican issues of the last decade or so (except foreign policy) are pretty much a rewrite of antebellum Southern policy: low taxes (low tariffs keep the Federal government weak which keeps the Yankees from interfering with the South), state’s rights (same), fear of terrorists being moved into the US (slave revolts), fear of stimulus and bigger government (more money for lower class whites who might get uppity), a black president (isn’t that obvious), anti-liberalism (insufferably smug Yankees!), and of course, keeping the Federal government out of capitalism (paternalistic slaveholders truly care for their charges, etc. etc.).
That’s aside from threatening secession. That’s also aside from the accusations of old, that slaveholders were engaging in immoral polygamous (incestuous?) relations with slave women, which drove people crazy, particularly because it tended to be true. Sorta like people going on about infidelity and then running off to Argentina.
max
['Nothing new under the southern sun.']
June 24th, 2009 at 5:51 pm
It only takes a majority to admit a new state. Admit enough free states and an amendment could have been passed abolishing slavery.
Another reason for the South to fear a Republican president (or a series) is that they would presumably be appointing Supreme Court justices, justices who might modify Dred Scott (1857) (which among other things barred prohibiting slavery in US territories).
Admittedly it might be an interesting alt history to imagine what would have happened if most of the southern states hadn’t seceded.
June 24th, 2009 at 5:52 pm
18. Excellent point. The antebellum South was at its heart a completely undemocratic place, and never hesitated to use their Congressional clout to force such anti-democratic measures on the rest of the nation.
The Fugitive Slave Act was the most egregious example of this Southern anti-democratic tendency because it impinged on the rights of the states that failed to recognize the concept that black people were agricultural property.
Combine that with the asinine plantation aristocracy that excluded virtually every WHITE person from participating in democratic institutions like voting and holding elected office, it’s hard to see how the South was ever AMERICAN, and much more difficult understanding just why so many conservatives idealize what the South did.
June 24th, 2009 at 5:56 pm
Max, excellent points. A disproportionately large amount of Southern energy, pre and post Civil War, has been devoted to “keeping people in their place”. You see a great deal of that in the predictable freakouts whenever a non-white person attains a position of academic or political power. It’s an almost Feudalistic view of society.
June 24th, 2009 at 6:17 pm
Lincoln would have had a very tough row to hoe pushing his program through a Congress without Secession. Democrats would have controlled the Senate, and Republicans, who had only had a plurality in the previous House, actually lost seats in the House in 1860. Moreover, the Supreme Court was still Roger Taney’s court, and Dred Scott v. Sanford, which declared prohibiting slavery in the territories unconstitutional, was still the law of the land. Indeed, many white southern opponents of secession were making just that argument–that Lincoln’s election was hardly the threat that secessionists were making it out to be, and that slaveholders retained a lot of support elsewhere in the country, from Democrats in particular. A lot of conservative white southerners thought secessionists were loony-tunes, and that they’d hasten exactly the calamity they feared.
But what secessionists mainly feared from Lincoln’s election wasn’t that he’d swing the federal government against slavery, but that from then on the federal government would not be used to support slavery, as it had been in the past. Federal non-enforcement of the Fugitive Slave clause of the Constitution was a big issue among secessionists. Also, as Stephen Douglas had pointed out in his debates with Lincoln in 1858, even after Dred Scott slavery would only take root in the territories if the people of that territory provided for it by law–and it was clear that in Kansas, at least, the popular majority was against it. Thus the most radical secessionists wanted the federal government to impose slavery on the territories, to protect what they considered [after Dred Scott] to be the constitutional rights of slaveholders. That’s what terrified the white South–not the prospect of “big government,” but the prospect of a government that would no longer do their bidding.
June 24th, 2009 at 6:19 pm
The Southern position seems all the more out of whack when you consider the original proposed 13th Amendment (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corwin_Amendment), which would have prohibited amending the constitution to bar slavery. Sure, slavery in the territories would have been limited, but Northern politicians were literally falling over themselves to say that they would protect slavery in the South.
June 24th, 2009 at 6:35 pm
Max, I think you have it backwards. The southern policies of old are actually more similar to liberal ones now. It always amazes me that so many liberals have such a distorted view of history particularly with this topic. The south was trying to get out from the grip of the yankee capitalist machine (ie banks and industry-republicans) in order to pursue a life on the land (a million percent more environmentally sound than the northern way).
THeir anti tarrif views were based on the fact that tarrifs made selling agriculture abroad impossible while increasing prices at home (benefiting yankee robberbaron capitalists and industrialists). The civil war was as much about tarrif policies, foreign policy, and the balance of states rights as it was slavery (if not much more so). The south had legitamate differences in economy, history, and social attitudes from the north (ie checkoslovakia splitting for similar reasons) and tried to peacefully pursue their own rule.
Idealogy says slavery is the worst way to live, but reality shows that the lives of slaves were no worse than those of the basically indentured peasants working 18 hour days for pennies in the factories of the north.
Today the liberals are fighting the same battle the south did, and is likely to be taken through the ringer just like they were unfortunately. The reason the south is now so conservative is a legacy of carpetbagging that has left it very bitter against the establishments of the north and left it incredibily impoverished compared to the rest of the country and governed by the same sleezy carpetbagging types as always.
June 24th, 2009 at 6:40 pm
Idealogy says slavery is the worst way to live, but reality shows…
It doesn’t take too long for them to crawl out from their rocks, does it.
You know what Lowell’s monument to the soldiers who fell in the War of the Rebellion looks like, Mack?
It’s a wing’ed Nike, holding aloft a crown of laurel, as if to lay it on the brow of the downtown. Glory glory halleluia.
June 24th, 2009 at 6:56 pm
My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause.
-Lincoln
June 24th, 2009 at 6:58 pm
Slavery wasn’t going to establish itself in the territories no matter who was running the country: the climate west of eastern Texas was just all wrong for slavery. Oklahoma might have become a slave state and that was it. What the South really wanted was to conquer territory in the Caribbean and maybe Central America where slavery could be exported. That’s what Republican control would prevent. (Odd that the GOP was the anti-imperialist party then)
June 24th, 2009 at 7:21 pm
JonF – you basically can’t compare the mid-19th Century parties to what we have now. Simply too much has changed. Plus, favor/opposition to war in the 19th century was pretty regional, with the Northeast most opposed and the South most in favor. This held pretty constant regardless of what the war was – the US lost the War of 1812 largely because the militias in New York, Massachusetts, etc., refused to fight; opposition to the Mexican-American War was strong in the Northeast (e.g., Thoreau); etc.
June 24th, 2009 at 7:27 pm
It only takes a majority to admit a new state. Admit enough free states and an amendment could have been passed abolishing slavery.
See the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which permitted those new states (once admitted; the latter wasn’t until 1867) to vote on whether they were free or slave. It was one of the beginnings of the end. But you see how if you push out the power to the individual states, you inevitably make the real struggle one of which states to admit, when, and under what circumstances. There were three major historical crises in the decades leading to the Civil War surrounding precisely that.
Count me among one of those who believes that an unheralded role was played as Free States more and more refused to comply with the various Fugitive Slave laws — which obviously wouldn’t have existed if the northern states were complying anyway. Essentially it made the South’s position more and more untenable.
But we’re getting away from Senate politics now.
June 24th, 2009 at 7:35 pm
@Mack:
Southern attitudes aren’t just about Northern carpetbaggers. The attitudes of the groups that settled there, Southern religion, and the Civil War all have contributed to the Southern mindset.
And that mindset has contributed to many of the ills that afflict the US to this day. This is one reason why it really fucking sticks in my craw when Southern yokels call themselves “real Americans”, with the implicature being that Northerners like me aren’t.
June 24th, 2009 at 8:18 pm
I know the thing to say is that the South attempted to secede only to preserve slavery because secessionist slaveholders were evil people who only acted out of evil motives and to suggest any other motive would be to suggest that they are somehow less evil, but there was likely another motive. The nineteenth century was filled with romantic nationalist revolts with little chance of seceding, in places like Poland, Italy, Hungary, and Germany. There had been a whole wave of them in Europe in 1848, twelve years earlier, all put down without difficulty by the established governments. In at least one case, that of Hungary, the natioanalists were able to get almost everything they wanted later through negotiation.
Its hard to put much credit in the idea that Lincoln was powerful enough to end slavery, which he had promised he wouldn’t anyway, though the normal US political process but somehow wouldn’t be able to put down an armed revolt by a few states. Probably the southern elites were just tired of preserving slavery through bargaining and peaceful obstruction and just wanted their own country. Slavery would have lasted longer if the slaveholders had held 40% of the power in the United States instead of 100% of the power in the Confederate States, but then again people often leave secure wage jobs to found small businesses despite the high startup failure rate.
June 24th, 2009 at 8:35 pm
“Right?”
Right.
June 24th, 2009 at 8:39 pm
True, but you’re ignoring the use of slaves for mining. The western states are rich in metals, and some of them are rich in coal. It is certainly possible that that the equivalent of a plantation system for mining would have developed, with rich, powerful individuals taking possession of resource rich areas, working their mines with slaves and putting local competitors out of business.
This would have been a horror. While agricultural slavery is evil, it is nothing like the brutal nature of slave mining.
June 24th, 2009 at 8:48 pm
True, but you’re ignoring the use of slaves for mining. The western states are rich in metals, and some of them are rich in coal. It is certainly possible that that the equivalent of a plantation system for mining would have developed, with rich, powerful individuals taking possession of resource rich areas, working their mines with slaves and putting local competitors out of business.
This would have been a horror. While agricultural slavery is evil, it is nothing like the brutal nature of slave mining.
Pretty sure that McPherson and others have made a pretty impressive case that Southern industry – which very much did exist – used slave labor effectively. So did many mining operations.
Frankly, with the example of the Soviet Union – the Reich was evil, but absolutely incompetent in the usage of slave labor – in the modern era, there’s no reason that mining, logging, and industry couldn’t have used slaves.
One of the reasons that the slaveholders themselves preferred to look south to Cuba, etc., was that those islands and countries either still had slaves or had had slaves in the past. The remaining indigenous populations could also be re-enslaved, or wiped out in the way that they were in the Southeast between 1783 and 1860.
June 24th, 2009 at 8:55 pm
the Republicans were committed to excluding slavery from the territories, but perhaps slave state Senators could have just dealt with this through ceaseless filibustering. It was only the withdrawal of the Confederate members from Congress that gave the GOP the majorities it needed to pass its agenda.
They might have, but not for long since demographics were against them. They had some early victories in Kansas, but Kansas was on a long-term trend of becoming locked in as free soil because northerners outnumbered southerners there. Northerners were beginning to settle in Nebraska and the Dakotas, it was clear they would be become states sometime in the next twenty-thirty years. Not to mention that California and Oregon voted for Lincoln.
Where could the the south expand slavery so they pick up Congressional votes? Oklahoma was Indian Territory (then it was thought it was going to be Indian Territory permanently). There was New Mexico and Colorado. Though slaves could be used in mines, that wasn’t exactly prime plantation territory.
No matter what you think of their personal morals or decisions, if you were a southern politician in 1860 who wanted to permanently preserve slavery, succession was logical if not the only choice.
June 24th, 2009 at 8:58 pm
Can the climate bill be done via reconciliation so that it only needs 50 votes?
Have you looked into this?
Have you asked a lawyer who’s a licensed parliamentarian?
June 24th, 2009 at 9:05 pm
Those David Blight lectures are great. Incredibly big of Yale to put them online for free . . .
June 24th, 2009 at 9:12 pm
Mack @ 27.
. It always amazes me that so many liberals have such a distorted view of history particularly with this topic. The south was trying to get out from the grip of the yankee capitalist machine (ie banks and industry-republicans) in order to pursue a life on the land (a million percent more environmentally sound than the northern way).
Very good point. In truth, southerns and some western states were in love with “internal improvements”, “pet banks” and weird, almost coporatist arrangements. Like the Georgia Railroad & Banking Company that dominated banking and business in Georgia before the war. The north had them too but they were beginning to become passe by 1860.
The reason that they split with the Whigs over such “socialist” or “federalist” measures is that they wanted them centered on the state level, not the federal. It wasn’t any kind of modern libertarian principle concerning “free trade”, it was over where centralization of government would take place.
June 24th, 2009 at 9:33 pm
You leave out the part where he explains that this is his conception of his official duty as president in a time of civil war, and that he is personally for abolition.
June 24th, 2009 at 9:53 pm
Re: Nathan (29) That letter to Horace Greeley is always quoted for this purpose, but the context should be mentioned-this was Lincoln writing to a journalist writing for an opposition party newspaper (the Democratic New York Tribune) trying to hold Unionist Democrats in the fold and broaden his base of support when he was presiding over a nation that was falling apart. It is, perhaps, not the moment at which a politician might be expected to give the most unvarnished views on a controversial subject.
While Lincoln consistently argued against immediate abolition from the date of his entry into politics, 3he was a strong believer in eventual manumission over the course of decades to a century. He stated repeatedly throughout the 1850s that slavery was a moral evil which must eventually wither away.
Both Matt and several commenters are right that the South was kinda crazy in seceding, since they almost certainly could have prevented national abolition for some time, but others are correct in pointing out that they were also kinda not nuts. Lincoln meant the end of a 50/50 balance in the Senate. Forever. And the balance was growing further out of whack, and the economic, population, and especially industrial might of the North was growing over that of the South every decade. If the South was going to bolt, 1860 was the year to do it.
Re NYC Charles (26): What I think you’re missing here is that Lincoln and the Republicans utterly rejected the proposed 13th Amdmt.-it simply wasn’t on the table (and actually had the same problem of throwing the 50/50 balance out of whack).
It was widely believed (rightly or wrongly) that for economic, political, and agricultural reasons (having to do with exhaustion of soil) that slavery had to expand to survive. This explains why closing the door on expansion caused the South to walk out the back.
Several commenters have noticed that the fillibuster is a more modern creation. At the time, to fillibuster meant to take over some Latin American territory in a phony rebellion and seek admission to the US (See: Texas, William Walker, etc.)
Re: Ed (34): Yes, there were many motives for secession. Many of them weren’t as evil as slavery (okay, none of them were as evil as slavery). But if you look at what the newspapers, documents of secession, and politicians of the time said over and over again, it recurs like a drumbeat: slavery, slavery, slavery. There was a lot mixed in with that, I don’t deny it; in some cases you could argue that State X would have stayed in the Union in spite of slavery had A, B, and C happened (to some degree, that did happen in four states), but it’s really impossible for me to imagine any state seceding without the slavery issue. It wasn’t the only reason, but it was the Big Enchilada.
June 24th, 2009 at 10:03 pm
Marc Davidson of the University of Amsterdam’s philosophy department had an interesting 2008 article in Climatic Change on the parallels in the arguments made against abolishing slavery and against adopting the Kyoto protocols.
Freely available here:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/q5021×4506k0r622/
June 24th, 2009 at 10:09 pm
The antebellum South strongly was involved in speculation export economy. Most slave owners were heavily leveraged and slaves sold in a ratio with the price of cotton. However, the Impending Crisis, written just before the Civil War by the Southern gentleman and widely read in the North and South, clearly showed that the South was failing vs. the North on agriculture. The slave/cotton bubble was bursting and many of planatation owners were close to dropping back to cabin dwelling that they came from.
One of the best books to understand old South is Honor & Slavery by Greenberg — a short and fun read showing the true relationship between the Southern system of honor and the need for slavery. Very fascinating.
June 24th, 2009 at 10:10 pm
Mack (27): never before have I seen an absolutely dumb-as-shit-racist-history-distorting-retard-fucktard argument made with such detail and such care.
June 24th, 2009 at 10:10 pm
The antebellum South strongly was involved in speculation export economy. Most slave owners were heavily leveraged and slaves sold in a ratio with the price of cotton. However, the Impending Crisis, written just before the Civil War by the Southern gentleman and widely read in the North and South, clearly showed that the South was failing vs. the North on agriculture. The slave/cotton bubble was bursting and many of planatation owners were close to dropping back to cabin dwelling that they came from.
One of the best books to understand old South is Honor & Slavery by Greenberg — a short and fun read showing the true relationship between the Southern system of honor and the need for slavery. Very fascinating.
June 24th, 2009 at 10:23 pm
Sorry about the double post
June 24th, 2009 at 10:32 pm
The real Southern folly was that they didn’t arrange a deal to have the slaves purchased by the Federal government and then set free. It would have been much, much better for all concerned.
The South was by no means uniformly for succession, with succession fever in a region being mostly in proportion to the local density of slave plantations. I wonder how many people know that the (mostly non-slave) North-West corner of Georgia tried to secede from Georgia when Georgia seceded from the Union. I have ancestors from North Georgia who left there and served in the Union army during the Civil War as part of that same sentiment.
Mack @27 has a decidedly strange view of the ecological soundness of a tobacco plantation.
June 24th, 2009 at 11:05 pm
JonF,
I hear this argument that slavery only ‘worked’ under the climatic conditions that allowed cotton or sugarcane production, and I don’t buy it. Slavery could well have persisted in the industrialized or mining regions if the political environment had favored slavery. As the experiences of Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia and Apartheid South Africa show, it’s perfectly possible for an industrialized economy to make fiendishly efficient use of forced labor.
If slavery had been allowed to persist in the South, sooner or later it would have spread to the North as well, and the United States would have been united under a demoniacal Slave Empire. Lincoln said that in crushing the Confederate Rebellion the Union was fighting for its own ideological survival, and he was dead right. The world was not big enough for a Union and a Confederacy, and only one could survive.
June 24th, 2009 at 11:45 pm
But if you look at what the newspapers, documents of secession, and politicians of the time said over and over again, it recurs like a drumbeat: slavery, slavery, slavery . . . it’s really impossible for me to imagine any state seceding without the slavery issue. It wasn’t the only reason, but it was the Big Enchilada.
More simply put, slavery was the only issue worth killing anyone over. The South had evolved an entire culture based on slavery, the social ranking of the rich plantation owners, the poorer slave-owning landowners and businessmen, and the millions of impoverished dirt farmers, with the slaves at the bottom. The entire construct was underlaid by virulent, gut racism of the kind that still pops up periodically, a half century after the end of lynching, when some red-neck decides to drag a black man behind a pick-up for a mile or so just to watch him suffer and die.
Ed-#34 has a point, however, in the romantic urge behind the secessionist movement. The creation of a distinction southern culture and society from colonial times was an important factor in making war inevitable. We have seen again over the last thirty years with Movement Conservatism. The hard-core right has created their own history, their pantheon of heroes–Reagan, Nixon, Hoover, Patton, McCarthy–and villains–”hippies,” liberals, feminists, etc. Like the southerners of the 1850s, they have elevated their status as “gentlemen” and demonized their enemies to the point that they have no concept of fair play, mutual respect, or manners, even while professing to admire them all. Packing the supreme court, cheating in elections, and keeping control of Washington even after losing an election makes perfect sense to them. Their enemies are held to be so evil and contemptible that any weapon can be used, any lie told, any cheat or betrayal is just.
All the rational alternatives mentioned here had little or no chance of preventing a war in 1860, because southern culture and politics had ceased to be rational. Clawing at their enemies, defying them, was all the “fire-eaters” could do. There was no middle ground for them. No matter that Lincoln gave mincing re-assurances about their “institutions” in every speech, they “knew” that Lincoln wanted to destroy them and give their women to the n******s. The sensible moderates in the south couldn’t beat that kind of intensity.
June 24th, 2009 at 11:49 pm
“It was only the withdrawal of the Confederate members from Congress that gave the GOP the majorities it needed to pass its agenda.
Right?”
Right!
For well over 150 “The South” has blocked progressive legislation of all kinds. They have been a bane on the nation. It makes no difference if they call themselves Republican or Democratic.
“The North” has been wrong often enough, but they have no where near the consistency of the south.
We are stuck with those in the south preventing the rest of the country from moving forward and enacting the legislation needed in changing times.
Just go back over the last sixty years and imagine how different the elections in that time period would have been without the south. And then imagine how much more legislation would have been passed. And then understand how much better off we would (have) be(en) without “The South.”
June 24th, 2009 at 11:53 pm
That’s a counterfactual I’ve not heard before. Considering that the (free) North was on the upswing, why do you think that slavery would have taken hold there?
June 25th, 2009 at 12:29 am
That’s a counterfactual I’ve not heard before. Considering that the (free) North was on the upswing, why do you think that slavery would have taken hold there?
Dred Scott. The law of the land said you could live with your slaves anywhere and they would stay your slaves. Add to that the compromise of 1850, the declining relevance of the Missouri Compromise line, etc. and you can see why the North swung to the Republicans. Lincoln said it in his House Divided speech; the country was destined to become all one thing or all the other.
June 25th, 2009 at 12:57 am
Great thread. Doesn’t get any better.
I would add a what if, maybe for another time. What if the South had won? It was certainly a possibility. The more I read, the more I am convinced that if Stonewall Jackson was in command of the Army of Northern Virginia instead of Robert E. Lee, the old lemon sucker would have bagged the whole Army the Potomac -kit and kaboodle- and captured Washington.
It’s shocking, and I know I would be lynched for saying so in certain parts country, but I have come to believe we have only Bobby Lee’s incompetence to thank for a Northern victory.
June 25th, 2009 at 1:04 am
Minos (43) you are mistaken about the Corwin Amendment, which passed both houses of Congress.
June 25th, 2009 at 6:32 am
Re: True, but you’re ignoring the use of slaves for mining.
The western states (California 1850, Oregon 1858, Nevada 1864) showed no desire to use slavery for mining. Dirt cheap labor for mining was readily available. Nor was slavery much in use for mining in the resource-rich eastern states. Coal was plentiful in Kentucky and (soon-to-be West) Virginia but the coal mining areas of those states had few slaves.
Re: Oklahoma was Indian Territory
Yep– and slavery was in use there. The Five Civilized Tribes claimed their “civilized” in part bercause they had adopted the white man’s institution of Negro slavery
Re: Lincoln and the Republicans utterly rejected the proposed 13th Amdmt.-it simply wasn’t on the table (and actually had the same problem of throwing the 50/50 balance out of whack).
The 50/50 balance had been thrown out of whack by California in 1850, then by Oregon in 1858. There were simply no more slave states in the pipeline with the possible exception of Oklahoma. Also, any potential pro-slavery Amendment was liable for repeal at some later date.
Re: The real Southern folly was that they didn’t arrange a deal to have the slaves purchased by the Federal government and then set free.
One word: racism. That’s why even the majority of non-slave owning Southern whites supported slavery and were willing to defend it with their lives. Southerners were horrified at the thought of having four million Black free citizens in their midst. Yes, they already had some free Blacks, but they were a small minority, and the Southern states had been passing laws for a while making it difficult to impossible for any more slaves to freed by their owners.
Re: I hear this argument that slavery only ‘worked’ under the climatic conditions that allowed cotton or sugarcane production, and I don’t buy it.
Then how to explain the declne of slavery in the North long before abolitionist sentiment came into vogue? Slavery was legal throughout British America originally, yet only took root and grew in the South.
Re: As the experiences of Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia and Apartheid South Africa show, it’s perfectly possible for an industrialized economy to make fiendishly efficient use of forced labor.
Use, yes. Efficient use, no. The Soviet Union collapsed largely because its economic system was hugely inefficient. (And South Africa’s apartheid was odious, but it was not the equivalent of slavery, but rather of our Jim Crow system). In direct competition free labor beats slave labor, which is actually more expensive overall (counting externalities).
Re: If slavery had been allowed to persist in the South, sooner or later it would have spread to the North
No, for reasons both cultural and economic. The North was no more going to embrace slavery than Victoria Britain’s was going to reinstitute medieval feudalism.
Re: Dred Scott. The law of the land said you could live with your slaves anywhere
Not quite, Dred Scott said that slaves were not legal persons and could not sue, and also that the propety rights of Southern slave-owners could not be abrogated when they traveled as visitors to free territory. However if a Southerner took up residence in a Northern state and became a citizen thereof (state citizenship was actually meaningful back then), then he came under that state’s laws and could not own slaves there. Dred Scott was not the equivalent of Roe vs Wade– it did not overturn anti-slavery laws in the North insosfar as they applied to each state’s own citizens.
June 25th, 2009 at 7:01 am
all the big Republican issues of the last decade or so (except foreign policy) are pretty much a rewrite of antebellum Southern policy – Max
As others have already indirectly pointed out, you mean not “except foreign policy” but “including foreign policy”: the neo-cons continue the Southern tradition of a militant foreign policy (*), c.f. Michael Lind’s book Made in Texas.
As to Mack’s point, the GOP actually is opposed to actual capitalism (for one thing, a truly free labor market requires an extensive safety net to keep the labor supply elastic), but rather would like feudalism disguised as capitalism. And, as Lind and others have pointed out, the Democratic party (to its detriment sometimes as they often block or water down necessary, progressive legislation from within) is lousy with Northern financiers, even to the point of resembling McKinley’s GOP.
(*up until the Reagan years and the final Southernization of the GOP, the GOP had a large isolationist component, which is now reduced to a few racist nuts like Pat Buchannan. I remember my dad and his mother’s family — very conservative and anti-communist though they were — explaining, in all seriousness, the Vietnam War to me as “we went to war because the bullet manufacturers needed to sell their products”. Remember Dwight D. “military-industrial complex” Eisenhower was a Republican!)
June 25th, 2009 at 8:28 am
A view of the states monolithically for and against slavery or single-payer health insurance or whatever and … thereby blocking this or that in the Senate is … simplistic in the extreme.
For one thing, it leaves out national and international class, market, and financial interests. These were and are subversive of merely legal constructs like states.
For instance, the kludge known as Texas is and always was 5-7 states functioning badly as 1 and a 1/2 countries. These are dominated by financial factors, concession-tenders, and such like agents from other states or foreign countries who exploit the cheap land, cheap oil, cheap credit, and cheap labor here at the expense of our diverse citizenry.
You do not have to be a Marxist to recognize such things, simply not as narrow-minded and parochial as our lawyer-politicians and their self-serving, pleading/settlement paradigm of flimsy “deals” masquerading as practical solutions.
Secondly, our Federalist and Whig military-political institutions: a property-qualified franchise and long-term hire (enlisted) and professional (cadet-based) military lend themselves to weak, undisciplined parties with jingoistic, rather than genuinely patriotic foundations.
It is true that the Jacksonian Democrats split over slavery, but so did the Whigs by 1860. In any event, the Union, before that, the Confederacy, and before that even the original notion of a “republic, if you can keep it…” were never all that firmly established: John Adams — a Federalist, no less — had to dismiss Hamilton from his military post for anglophile “treason” (his word).
And, of course, we know how little neo-Federalists today think of “states rights” and even “voting rights” today from recent decisions by Law Lords on the SCOTUS.
In matters of avoiding civil war and making economic progress despite cultural differences, the Anglo-American overclass (Judis + Lind) never really got the meaning of “a well regulated militia” or “quartering”. They never embraced Swiss-style universal manhood suffrage or military obligations.
The result by 1860 was a property-qualified franchise and voluntary (decorative) militias that varied wildly from state to state, priviliging land-owners over black slaves and white share-croppers in the South, but also merchant-factors (pro-South) and industrialist-ship-owners(anti-South) over catholics and laborers in the North.
For a more robust view of these matters, I have always enjoyed Bernard Cornwell’s Copperhead-series of historical novels. But, the sort of counterfactual historical speculation involved in discussing the paralysis of Democrats in Congress today is also illuminated by (a) Eric Flint’s Rivers-series of alternative history as well as, of course, Turtledove and Dreyfuss’s The Two Georges.
And, of course, there is simply John Kenneth Galbraith’s little bit of “American Exceptionalism:
June 25th, 2009 at 9:02 am
That letter to Horace Greeley is always quoted for this purpose, but the context should be mentioned-this was Lincoln writing to a journalist writing for an opposition party newspaper (the Democratic New York Tribune) trying to hold Unionist Democrats in the fold and broaden his base of support when he was presiding over a nation that was falling apart.
When you pedantically lecture other people about putting things in context, you ought to get the context right. The Tribune was a Republican paper, and Horace Greeley was a prominent Republican.
June 25th, 2009 at 9:34 am
Well, but it was still an opposition papaer, though—Greeley was a Radical Republican at the time, not a Lincoln-brand Republican–he wanted someone other than Lincoln as president, someone who would prosecute the war more vigorously and take a more openly abolitionist line regardless of the consequences in the border states (by 1872, he was the Democratic nominee for president, but that’s another story). Anyway, Greeley was sort of the Ralph Nadar of his day.
June 25th, 2009 at 9:46 am
Re: Use, yes. Efficient use, no. The Soviet Union collapsed largely because its economic system was hugely inefficient. (And South Africa’s apartheid was odious, but it was not the equivalent of slavery, but rather of our Jim Crow system). In direct competition free labor beats slave labor, which is actually more expensive overall (counting externalities).
JonF,
The Soviet economy experienced its fastest economic growth during the high Stalinist era when it made heavy use of forced labor. And that was incredibly fast. Look at statistics on industrial production in the 1930s. It became much less productive later on, in the relatively more liberal Brezhnev and Gorbachev eras. And yes, I’d concede that this was in part related to the lasting effects of Stalinism on the relationship between Russians and their government. But the facts simply compel us to acknowledge that Soviet citizens during the 1930s and 1940s worked exceptionally hard, exceptionally productively and very efficiently for very little reward. They had to, because they knew they might be sent to a Siberian labor camp if they clocked in late to work too many times. Or that they might die of starvation- income differentials under Stalin were higher than in the capitalist West, as Alec Nove pointed out, and if we believe that income differentials are a good incentive to make people work in the west, they should have worked under Stalin too- and they did.
To say this is _not_ to endorse Stalinism, which I despise. It’s to acknowledge that brutal savagery often works, whether the savages call themselves Bolsheviks, Nazis, Capitalists, Confederates or Boers. If it didn’t, people would not be savage and brutal so often.
June 25th, 2009 at 10:20 am
Slave state senators feared much more than Union control of the territories.
In 1860, Presidents had enormous powers of patronage. In principle, a Republican President could use his patronage power to build up a Republican party in the South. Ok, the yeomen farmer non-slaveowners (a majority of Southern voters)who would make up such a party were no lovers of blacks, but it would be interesting to consider how Lincoln would have handled “Reconstruction” without a Civil War.
Lincoln wanted to set slavery on a “course of destruction”. He did not (before 1862) necessarily see himself as the President who would witness total Emancipation.
June 25th, 2009 at 10:33 am
I accept Hector’s point with the caveat that Soviet workers were motivated to build a worker’s paradise. They actually believed in the ideology. American slaves were not similarly motivated.
Also, the context of Lincoln’s letter to Greeley was that he had already written the Emancipation Proclimation. It was sitting in the drawer in his desk awaiting the next significant Northern victory. The wait was uncomfortably long and Antietam just barely suited the bill but Lincoln’s intended policy and his words to Greeley were at varience.
June 25th, 2009 at 11:06 am
Yes, I think thats about right. The population bit is immaterial, the South already was outnumbered in the house but they could block whatever they wanted in the Senate. Patronage is a somewhat interesting point, but you have to remember how much smaller the Federal government was. Basically the only patronage the President controlled beyond Washington was tax collectors at ports and the postal service. That isn’t really much leverage.
As far as the territories, the senate could block the admission of states as well. I’d argue that the cause was tempermental. Secessonists weren’t willing to be an obstructionist minority in a country they felt was hostile to them and their institutions, mainly slavery, although they thought it went deeper than that. You can have all sorts of arguments about why that was. Political culture, mindset created by slavery, honor to name some suggestions. Regardless, the radicals were able to seize control of events and drag everyone else along with them, even though if you had polled southern whites after lincoln was elected you probably wouldn’t have gotten a majority in favor of seccession.
I think Matt is right though, to see it as a strategic blunder . Abolitionism in the North was a minority position, Lincoln would not have tried to end slave in the South and he couldn’t have even if he had wanted to. The slave south did participate in its own destruction. That said, it isn’t that hard to imagine a scenario in which the Confederacy was able to win if a few things had gone differently.
June 25th, 2009 at 11:15 am
@55: The more I read, the more I am convinced that if Stonewall Jackson was in command of the Army of Northern Virginia instead of Robert E. Lee, the old lemon sucker would have bagged the whole Army the Potomac -kit and kaboodle- and captured Washington.
You don’t have to go that far. If Jackson had survived Fredericksburg and been in command of the northern end of the Confederate line at Gettysburg instead of the inadequate replacements Lee was forced to turn to, TANV would have been in DC by August 1863 at the latest. Although the policy seemed to change sometime in the late 1990’s, God once looked after fools and the United States of America.
June 25th, 2009 at 11:46 am
Coming back a little late, but for the record..
@ joe 28
I do not and am unsure why I should. THe point im trying to make is that there are many systems to organize the relationship of worker to “management”. Slavery, indentured servatude, wage earners. Our lofty ideals say that slavery is morally wrong and we are right, but treating workers (wage earners) like they were treated at the same time in history by industrialists was -similarly- wrong (of a similar amount of wrongness). They lived in squalor, had little food, made pennies a day, and had unsafe work environments. Having their freedom could not have been a great consolation since they had no money to move or even eat. Whether one is a slave to corporations (in industrialist society you could choose which factory maybe, but they were all the same) or a slave of a person you are in reality still a slave. Labor protections for wage-earners didn’t even start to exist till well into the 1900s (while laws for slave protections already did at civil war times).
@ SN
I agree for the most part. I think the root of these things, however, is the humiliation and subjigation of the south by the north for half a century. See 17 Frugalchariot for the norths equivalent to “were the real americans”. Maybe the south figured out that culturally and economically, a union made no sense and just now the north is figuring out why and starting to agree(do nothing bipartisan legislation, strongly opposing views on cultural issues, etc).
@ Kropotkin
You are right and that is mostly what I’m getting at. States rights/government was the principle issue for the south. and, the south had its own enterprises of course, but I just simplified the arguement for brevity.
@ Philly
Um.. 1st, for the most part I’m playing devils adv. here buddy. And, for the record, see above how I view slavery. It existed for 10000 years and only for the last 1-2 hundred was it racially based. My arguement has nothing to do with race. In other words.. slavery is wrong because people are not property. Racism is wrong because people should not be judged by their skin color. A person could be anti-slavery and racist (as was very common in the north at the time, the arguement against slavery was a philisophical one unrelated to race) or pro-slavery and not racist. Understand? And, I would suppose that the “accepted” or common history is the distored one (written by the winners and such), and there is plenty of reason to believe that there is much missing.
@ Marshall
Tobacco plantation vs. steal smelt, which is more environmentally sound? The point is that their way of life was, on average, more ecologically stable than that of the industrialists.
June 25th, 2009 at 12:50 pm
One minor quibble: the “GOP” at the time, was not the Republicans. The Grand Old Party used to refer to the Democrats, being by far the older party, as they stretch back to the days of the Democratic-Republicans.
GOP was first used for the Republicans ironically, and then as they became more staunchly conservative over time it became a less ironic epithet.
June 25th, 2009 at 12:57 pm
Folly? That’s generous. Think of Stevie Smith’s great poem:
Was It Not Curious?
[...]
He never said he thought it was wicked
To steal them away for slaves
To steal the children away
To buy and have slavery at all
Oh no, oh no, it was not a thing
That caused him any appal.
Was it not curious of Gregory
Rather more than of Aúgustin?
It was not curious so much
As it was wicked of them.
June 25th, 2009 at 1:20 pm
The really interesting question
I think that others above have stated the answer to MY’s question, that the Republican Congressional majority, along with their control of the presidency meant that slavery in the territories was a lost cause, and thus the vast territories in the West would all enter the Union as free states. Their Congressional delgation, had they stayed in the Union, could have fended off abolitionism for many years, because that would have taken an amendment, but that was the foreseeable end to the process that the 1860 election started.
What I find the more interesting, related question, is why the seceding states withdrew their Congressional delegations before their secession was recognized by the federal government. Sure, if you believe that secession is a state’s right under the Constitution, that would inherently mean that the decision would be the state’s, and not require permission form the federal government. But there were serious questions of commingled possessions that needed to be sorted out before a former state of the Union could go its own way. Even if divorce is allowed at either party’s discretion, that partner to the marriage still has to settle matters of commingled property with the other partner before leaving the marriage union. The Confederacy tried to negotiate secession as if it were already an independent state, so they conceded the necessity. It seems to me that not only would their negotiating position have been formally stronger if backed up by large numbers within Congress, but the acknowledgement that the break-up would have to be negotiated, if only in its consequences and entailments, and not givng the northern states a veto on the fact of secession, would have decisively undercut in the North the backing for the policy of maintaining the Union by force of arms.
My sense is that people in the North were willing to support war to maintain the Union because they had reached the point of giving up on any other means of ending “the irrepressible conflict” over slavery, and especially slavery in the territories. An offer by the Confederacy to give up all claims to the territories in exchange for the hand-over of federal property in the Confedrate states would, it seems to me, have offered northerners all that they wanted, a final end to the irrepressible conflict, even if it failed to achive abolition in the South, which I suspect was far form a majority goal in the North. Continued participation in the Congress would have reasured enough people in the North, including enough Republican Congressmen and Senators, that the Confederacy was serious about secession as a clean break, as a final concession that the territories would be free states, that the votes of the seceding states, added to those of Republicans happy with this outcome, would have blocked war as a means of resolving the secession question.
Perhaps that was the problem, that southern opinion hadn’t really reconciled itself to the reality that secession, even if not oppposed militarily by the North, meant that the territories were all lost for good. But I haven’t seen this question addressed by folks who might be knowledgable about these issues.
June 25th, 2009 at 1:23 pm
Interesting. I invoked Lincoln today, but in a different way, comparing Obama to Lincoln instead of FDR, which is more what we want him to be.
More Lincoln than FDR
Obama may be using Lincoln’s patience to wait out the change that the GOP and MSM is trending behind.
June 25th, 2009 at 1:30 pm
the humiliation and subjigation of the south by the north for half a century
What are you talking about? Talk about Fables of the Reconstruction….
June 25th, 2009 at 2:19 pm
Yeah, somebody really likes his slave-owning secessionists.
Chancellorsville. And while much ink has been spilled about Gettysburg, the Army of the Potomac was fighting on its home ground and really only had to avoid destruction to win that campaign. I think the real missed chance for the Confederacy was Special Order 191 and the botched invasion that wound up with the Battle of Antietam.
And it is true that the Republicans got a lot done after the traitors went home to Dixie. Homestead Act, Pacific Railroad Act.
June 25th, 2009 at 2:54 pm
@55: The more I read, the more I am convinced that if Stonewall Jackson was in command of the Army of Northern Virginia instead of Robert E. Lee, the old lemon sucker would have bagged the whole Army the Potomac -kit and kaboodle- and captured Washington
Debatable, at best. Jackson was a very odd duck, indeed, and we don’t really know how he would have handled a larger independent force than those he commanded in the valley in 1862. In any given war, there are usually only a handful of generals who can properly administer a large army and march it about from Point A to Point B without mishap. Perpetual failures like Bragg or Burnside kept being given commands year after year because the fear that the next guy in line might be a Floyd or Fremont if he got promoted over his head.
Jackson never had to worry about grand strategy or politics in his commands. He just had to move fast read the other guy, and hit hard. Very good at that. Come up with a plan involving troops spread out all over Virginia and negotiate with Jeff Davis at the same time? Not nearly the same thing
June 25th, 2009 at 3:16 pm
Chancellorsville. And while much ink has been spilled about Gettysburg, the Army of the Potomac was fighting on its home ground and really only had to avoid destruction to win that campaign. I think the real missed chance for the Confederacy was Special Order 191 and the botched invasion that wound up with the Battle of Antietam.
Ifs, could have beens, and maybes. Both sides had a lot of them. One the enduring myths about the American Civil War, particularly among scholars, is that it had to be a long war of attrition or that the North had an overwhelming advantage in numbers that made southern defeat inevitable.
This is projecting World War I or II back in time. There were not enough men on the ground in most any big war before 1870 to make anyone’s defeat impossible or inevitable. Each combatant in the Civil War had, at most, four discrete large armies in the field at a given time and any one of them would have been subject to complete destruction if mishandled. Most of the “slows” people complain about among Civil War generals stemmed from their awareness that any given day they were engaged with an enemy without a major fortress in reach was a day they could personally be responsible for losing an entire army and maybe the war.
Destroying an enemy army, Cannae style, was extremely difficult with the weapons of 1860, but not impossible. Ruining an enemy army in a fast-moving campaign with multiple engagements, as Napoleon had done to the Prussians in 1806, was well within the capabilities of both armies in 1862 to 1865. Grant did it three times. Lee nearly did it against McClellan on the peninsula, managed it nicely against Pope a month later, and planned to do it to Meade in 1863.
The loss of a major field army could have a devasting effect on either side. The North, which had to attack and occupy the South to win the war, was at a serious strategic disadvantage in this respect. The south, with its vast spread of territory and dispersed resources, was a very difficult strategic target. Deleting one of the major Union armies in any of the campaign seasons from 1861 to 1864 might have won it its independence.
June 25th, 2009 at 4:02 pm
The real Southern folly was that they didn’t arrange a deal to have the slaves purchased by the Federal government and then set free. It would have been much, much better for all concerned.
In a rational world, that would have been a valid alternative. Unfortunately, one of the evils of slavery is the way it creates its own culture of class/ethnic bigotry and paranoia. The American version of white-on-black racism derives directly from Colonial America’s cultural rationalization for slavery.
English legal tradition, Enlightenment philosophy, and the Judeo-Christian tradition made slavery hard to justify, morally. Slaveowners in the English colonies did so by identifying black Africans as intellectually inferior, emotionally animalistic, unable to make judgements for themselves, sexually promiscuous, and violent when not strictly controlled. By the time of the Revolution, areas of the south with a substantial slave population had a constant dread of slave revolts. A planter (like Jefferson or Washington) who manumitted his slaves risked becoming a social outcast–which is why it was better to do it slowly, carefully, and to do it in your will, so you’d be dead while the lawyers took all the heat.
By the 1850s, with millions of slaves scattered all over the south, bound by brutal police-state laws and customs, slavery was not just an economic issue, it was a system for keeping the beasts under control, the zombie hordes outside the fence, the werewolves out of the forest.
You couldn’t pay most of the readers here enough money for the purpose of letting a pack of pit bulls run wild in their neighborhood. The south had the same attitude towards buying out and freeing the slaves, which is why Lincoln liked to chatter about settling freed slaves in Africa. It was logistically ridiculous, but it was the only idea that had a prayer of getting past white southern paranoia.
June 25th, 2009 at 5:46 pm
The South refused to join the Northern Democrats, unless they got a Federal Slave Code in the territories. They bolted the Democratic Party (which by 1860 consisted entirely of the people who were trying to get along with the South), and rejected their greatest Northern friend, Stephen Douglass, for President, on that ground.
It was that, and quite possibly only that, which gave the Republicans the election. (Where the Northern Democrats united, they won.) The South fought the election, and the War of the Rebellion, in order to have slavery in Nebraska – a goal which became hopeless as soon as they took up arms.
Why? The nearest explanation I have ever found is what Langston Hughes heard from a friend: “Their hind brains don’t work.”
June 25th, 2009 at 6:20 pm
Fables of the reconstruction? The north occupied the south and administered it with a combination of northern beaurocrats and high ranking military officers. The land was almost completely appropriated by the government and distributed to carpetbaggers, connected union soldiers, and southern scalywags, and the government installed by the north were mostly crooks. Lastly, the souths entire way of life was outlawed and eradicated with no hope of return. In short, the north came in, destroyed their cities, occupied what was left, took everything they had, and outlawed their way of life. In what universe is that not humiliation and subjugation?
The states were all equal and independent in the beginning. Its obsurd to think that a state would not have the right to exit the union legally if they wished it, which is why the whole subject is ignored in the constitution. This would be the first of many wars to expand the imperial reaches of the us government. But your elementary school history books didnt say it like that, so I must be a big fat liar, right?
June 25th, 2009 at 7:37 pm
The Southerners were led by the self-proclaimed “Fire-Eaters”, so rationality would not have been their lead tactic.
Another overlooked issue is the 3/5ths compromise, which gave Southern states a disproportionate share of Congressional representation and federal spending since none of those were going to the non-white inhabitants (federal revenue was primarily tariffs and thus not paid based on state population).
On Midland’s point (#75), could the South really have won after the Union implemented its blockade and captured New Orleans ? Perhaps capturing DC and the Union government would have worked but otherwise it seems dubious. It also seems that the Union could have won earlier (1862-63) but Lincoln and the generals were horrified at the tremendous casualties at that time but by 1864-65 they accepted those casualties in order to end the war.
“Carpetbaggers” is the Southern “spin” for the northerners who came to the South to protect the rights of the newly freed slaves. The Reconstruction governments did spend money for public works and assisting ordinary people (similar to Northern state governments) including the black population, which was a departure from customary practice of the slave-holding and segrationist governments that preceded and followed them. However, the Reconstruction Governments were not mostly “crooks” particularly when compared to the Southern state governments between 1890 and 1970 (e.g., Huey Long). But when have segregationists chosen cold facts over comforting fantasies ?
June 25th, 2009 at 9:33 pm
Fables of the reconstruction? The north occupied the south and administered it with a combination of northern beaurocrats and high ranking military officers. The land was almost completely appropriated by the government and distributed to carpetbaggers, connected union soldiers, and southern scalywags, and the government installed by the north were mostly crooks. Lastly, the souths entire way of life was outlawed and eradicated with no hope of return. In short, the north came in, destroyed their cities, occupied what was left, took everything they had, and outlawed their way of life. In what universe is that not humiliation and subjugation?
Perhaps in the universe where all of that occurred? Not sure what “way of life” you’re talking about other than the slave society. If you’re mourning that in the year of Our Lord 2009 then there’s no use in further discussion. As for the military occupation, there’s no other way the US government could have maintained order and enforced the terms of the surrender. The public works projects, railroads, etc., were well intentioned and helped modernize the southern economy but were admittedly marred by corruption. Certainly not all aspects of Reconstruction were well administered. Of course, the southerners’ real complaint is that Reconstruction attempted to enforce the equality of freed slaves….which gets back to the precious lost “way of life.” Ultimately, Reconstruction lasted only until 1877, hardly the “half a century” you complained about. And when it ended, Confederate officers were re-elected to Congress and showed up on their first day wearing their Confederate uniforms. Then they proceeded to re-enslave southern blacks in all but name and deprive black Americans of their civil rights for the next three quarters of a century. So the words “subjugation” and “humiliation” ought never to pass the lips (or keyboard, as it were) of any confederate sympathizer except as part of an abject apology.
June 25th, 2009 at 10:32 pm
Fabulous! Decades before movement conservatives and Evangelicals created their own history of the United States, ex-Confederates and sympathizers were creating their own:
The Lost Cause school of scholarship was a leading influence in academic and educational circles right up until the Civil Rights movement. Lost Cause scholarship even made “common cause” with Communists in the 20th Century. They agreed that industrial Capitalism was evil and its workers “wage-slaves”, so the southern “agrarian” economy (upper-class slave-owners and dirt-poor white subsistence farmers,) therefore represented the last stand of individual freedom against our corporate masters.
Really. You can look it up at any university library.
. But your elementary school history books didn’t say it like that, so I must be a big fat liar, right?
Actually I distinctly remember textbooks in Minnesota when I was a kid that gave roughly the same view of Reconstruction as you are presenting here. Learned better in college, fortunately.
The north occupied the south and administered it with a combination of northern bureaucrats and high ranking military officers.
Of course they did. What else do you do when you’ve conquered a vast hostile territory teaming with bitter fanatics who think they only lost the war because you cheated? The Americans did the same thing with Germany and Japan in 1945, only they stayed around long enough to do it right. West Germany and Japan were functioning democracies by 1960. Mississippi and South Carolina were not.
The land was almost completely appropriated by the government and distributed to carpetbaggers, connected union soldiers, and southern scallywags.
Ridiculous. If the Yankees had really wanted to steal big chunks of southern land, they would have done a better job of it, like they did with the Native Americans, the Texicans and Californios, and the Hawaiians.
The Freedmen thought someone was going to confiscate land and distribute it among the ex-slaves, but the Johnson administration stiffed them in favor of collaboration with the pre-war ruling class. These people began re-enslaving the Freedmen using dubious bound labor laws and contracts, which led to “Radical Reconstruction.” The radical bit was that black people and white Republicans (“scallywags”) were allowed to vote and hold office. The former Confederates then started up the Redemptionist movement, which combined dirty, corrupt political machinations with a campaign of outright terrorism to recapture southern governments and re-establish racial apartheid all across the former Confederate states. The army officers attempting to enforce Reconstruction were hopelessly outnumbered and under-supported by northern politicians. In 1876, the Republicans betrayed the Freedmen, selling them to the Redemptionists for the price of enough electoral votes to win Rutherford B. Hayes the presidency. The troops were removed, the Klan was unleashed, and African-Americans in the south spent another eighty years under the whip and the noose.
The government installed by the north were mostly crooks.
No more so than the governments installed by the southerners, then and today.
Lastly, the south’s entire way of life was outlawed and eradicated with no hope of return.
Good. Real Americans have always felt that “ways of life” based on slavery, illiteracy, poverty, and class exploitation should by outlawed and eradicated with no hope of return
In short, the north came in, destroyed their cities,
Only a few of them, like Atlanta, Columbia, and Richmond. On the other hand, Nashville, Memphis, Savannah, and New Orleans did quite well.
. . . Occupied what was left . . .
That happens when you lose wars.
. . . Took everything they had . . .
Mostly just their slaves. And their hams, hogs, chickens, and sweet potatoes, for marching food. The majority of southerners didn’t have much worth taking. Union soldiers from the Midwest noted this often in their journals and letters. The grinding, ragged poverty, the ignorance, the dirt and filth, skinny kids with worms and sores, women chewing tobacco. If they had no grievance with southerners before the war, a lot of them learned to dislike them marching down their muddy roads past their shacks and hovels.
. . . And outlawed their way of life.
Doing them a favor, as it turned out. The South was America’s Third World until the New Deal and the Civil Rights movement cleared out most of the those old, burdensome customs.
In what universe is that not humiliation and subjugation?
Well, they sure were begging for it, weren’t they, trying to tear the country apart, force Northerners to chase their escaped slaves, and bragging how they could lick ten times their weight in Yankees? Dead wrong, they were, and still whining about it, a hundred and fifty years later.
The states were all equal and independent in the beginning.
No, they weren’t. The only states that had a choice in the matter were the 13 originals. All the other states except Texas were founded on American territory under Federal law and the authority of the American consitution. Texas agreed to be treated like any state when they were allowed to join the Union in 1845. They were dead broke, couldn’t keep the Comanche from stealing their livestock, and had to cut a deal with the US, Mexico, or Britain to survive.
Either way, its absurd to think that a state would not have the right to exit the union legally if they wished it, which is why the whole subject is ignored in the constitution.
Of course, non-secessionists believed just the opposite. Secession was not mentioned in the constitution because it was absurd that any country would allow chunks of itself to secede at the whim of local political factions. The failed attempts by the former Spanish colonies in Latin America to form big democracies like the United States gave the North Americans examples of how governments that cannot enforce their own sovereign power will fail to govern at all.
This would be the first of many wars to expand the imperial reaches of the us government.
As I noted above, the Lost Cause True believers in academia spent a lot of time dallying with the Communists.
June 26th, 2009 at 8:39 am
[...] only to inform his current political and social outlook. (Here’s an especially egregious Case in Point from another blog.) It’s not that history can’t or shouldn’t inform your [...]
June 26th, 2009 at 3:16 pm
Led, your premise is offbase which is the point I have been trying to make in the first place. Freedmen in the north and south before and during the civil war did not have the same rights as others. It was not about equality it was about abolishing slavery. The north were (and still often are) very racist, but believed it to be a sin (morally wrong) to hold slaves. Equality did not exist for blacks in the north by any means and has become the canard of civil war discourse only in modern times. It is in fact anachronistic. The north has always been more progressive in that respect, but in 1860 equality was not the case.
There are two issues: racism and forced labor. Industrialists treated their labor equally as bad as slaves were treated (see earlier comment) and the living conditions of the common wage earner in the north were aweful(making about $2-4/week for 7 18hr days equivalent to about $25-50/wk today in purchasing power). My point is both systems were bad, so the north really has very little moral standing in this respect (or with racism since it was rampant in the north as well).
For many years the money made from trade of southern ag financed much of the government. The country benefited from the slave system even if indv states didnt have them. Instead of trying to destroy the souths economy from an ivory tower, perhaps the north could have helpped the south slowly reorient its economy so that banning slavery would not be so traumatic. Same outcome but much fewer dead people and destruction.. Modern parallel: Our economy requires burning fossil fuels to function. Burning fossil fuels is morally wrong because it will destroy the planet and human race. If someone said all of the sudden one day you cant burn fossil fuels, its illegal, would it not be devastating? Do you support such a measure Led?
As for Midland
The lost cause movement has some validity, although it is out of favor. The fact is that in todays corporate industrial world, is it truely possible to live an individual agrarian life? I think most would say, in the US, no. Replace “upper class white slaveowners” with “nameless agri-business (and their army of immigrant, underpaid, uninsured food processing work force)” in our current economy. And, you cant buy unprocessed food if you wanted for the most part any more because faceless businesses control our food suppy and care only about profit..
The arguement that occupation of japan and germany produced functioning democracy is sad. This is the only arguement that has had any success in swaying the american population to support aggressive imperialist wars since ww2, and I yearn for the day that Americans stop feeling as tho its our right and duty to aggresively force our supposed system on anyone else by war. That arguement doesnt hold water in Iraq, didn’t in vietnam, and its unimaginable that you would want to use it to justify attacking your brothers and sisters.
The fact is that the north came in victoriously and realized that they had neither the resources nor the understanding to actually implement the goals that they claimed were the basis for the civil war (see Iraq war). The implementation of this policy would have been disaterous for the entire country leading to food shortage, loss of trade, continued civil upheaval, and mass population movements. In other words, they realized that the south was right in the first place (and immediate freedom was impossible), and, in order to save face, turned a blind eye to de facto forced labor through sharecropping etc. THis was because the capitalist industrialists wanted to get back to making money.
I guess to you the north in 1860 was a utopian land of educated, healthy, prosperous, classless people? That is absured. Get off the high horse. THe north didnt invade in order to save the southern underclass from the evil rich slaveholders and educated the masses, they came to make money. War is profitable for well connected businesses (future carpetbaggers) at the cost of the soldiers and taxpayers (see Iraq).
Once a state is created, it is equal to all others. The constitution designates any item not explicit (such as exiting the union, which is not) as a right of the state. Secession had popular support in the south, and was not a whim. There are all kinds of examples of countries splitting over “irreconcilable differences” and doing just fine, and the US often times supports the breakaways (or causes the breakaway): Panama (us forced), North Ireland, Belgium, Luxemburg (kindof), Checkoslovakia, Jordan (by UK), etc.
If you truely believe that the US is not an imperial power dominated by fananciers and businessmen, I’m astounded.