Posted on 05/23/2002 8:52:25 AM PDT by stainlessbanner
The New York Review of Books
June 13, 2002
Look Away! A History of the Confederate States of America
by William C. Davis
The South vs. the South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War
by William W. Freehling
Lee and His Army in Confederate History
by Gary W. Gallagher
The War Hits Home: The Civil War in Southeastern Virginia
by Brian Steel Wills
The field of Civil War history has produced more interpretative disputes than most historical events. Next to debates about the causes of the war, arguments about why the North won, or why the Confederacy lost (the difference in phraseology is significant), have generated some of the most heated but also most enlightening recent scholarship. The titles of four books reveal just some of the central themes of this argument: Why the North Won the Civil War (1960); How the North Won (1983); Why the South Lost the Civil War (1986); Why the Confederacy Lost (1992).
Answers to these why and how questions fall into two general categories: external and internal. Exter-nal interpretations usually phrase the question as Why did the North win? They focus on a comparison of Northern and Southern population, resources, economic capacity, leadership, or strategy, and conclude that Northern superiority in one or more of these explains Union victory. Internal explanations tend to ask, Why did the South lose? They focus mainly or entirely on the Confederacy and argue that internal divisions, dissensions, or inadequacies account for Confederate defeat.
The most durable interpretation is an external one. It was offered by General Robert E. Lee himself in a farewell address to his army after its surrender at Appomattox: "The Army of Northern Virginia has been compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources."[1] This explanation enabled Southern whites to preserve their pride, to reconcile defeat with their sense of honor, even to maintain faith in the nobility of their cause while admitting that it had been lost. The Confederacy, in other words, was compelled to surrender not because its soldiers fought badly, or lacked courage, or suffered from poor leadership, or because its cause was wrong, but simply because the enemy had more men and guns. The South did not lose; Confederates wore themselves out whipping the Yankees and collapsed from glorious exhaustion. This interpretation became the mainstay of what has been called the Myth of the Lost Cause, which has sustained Southern pride in their Confederate forebears to this day. As one Virginian expressed it:
They never whipped us, Sir, unless they were four to one. If we had had anything like a fair chance, or less disparity of numbers, we should have won our cause and established our independence.[2]
In one form or another, this explanation has won support from scholars of Northern as well as Southern birth. In 1960 the historian Richard Current provided a succinct version of it. After reviewing the statistics of the North's "overwhelming numbers and resources" two and a half times the South's population, three times its railroad capacity, nine times its industrial production, and so on Current concluded that "surely, in view of the disparity of resources, it would have taken a miracle...to enable the South to win. As usual, God was on the side of the heaviest battalions."[3]
In 1990 Shelby Foote expressed this thesis in his inimitable fashion. Noting that many aspects of life in the North went on much as usual during the Civil War, Foote told Ken Burns on camera in the PBS documentary The Civil War that "the North fought that war with one hand behind its back." If necessary "the North simply would have brought that other arm out from behind its back. I don't think the South ever had a chance to win that war."[4]
At first glance, Current's and Foote's statements seem plausible. But upon reflection, a good many historians have questioned their explicit assertions that overwhelming numbers and resources made Northern victory inevitable. If that is true, the Confederate leaders who took their people to war in 1861 were guilty of criminal folly or colossal arrogance. They had read the census returns. They knew as much about the North's superiority in men, resources, and economic capacity as any modern historian. Yet they went to war confident of victory. Southern leaders were students of history. They could cite many examples of small nations that won or defended their independence against much more powerful enemies: Switzerland against the Hapsburg Empire; the Netherlands against Spain; Greece against the Ottomans. Their own ancestors had won independence from mighty Britain in 1783. The relative resources of the Confederacy vis-à-vis the Union in 1861 were greater than those of these other successful rebels.
The Confederacy waged a strategically defensive war to protect from conquest territory it already controlled and to preserve its armies from annihilation. To "win" that kind of war, the Confederacy did not need to invade and conquer the North or destroy its army and infrastructure; it needed only to hold out long enough to compel the North to the conclusion that the price of conquering the South and annihilating its armies was too great, as Britain had concluded with respect to the United States in 1781 or, for that matter, as the United States concluded with respect to Vietnam in 1972. Until 1865, cold-eyed military experts in Europe were almost unanimous in their conviction that Union armies could never conquer and subdue the 750,000 square miles of the Confederacy, as large as all of Western Europe. "No war of independence ever terminated unsuccessfully except where the disparity of force was far greater than it is in this case," pronounced the military analyst of the London Times in 1862. "Just as England during the revolution had to give up conquering the colonies so the North will have to give up conquering the South."[5]
Even after losing the war, many ex-Confederates stuck to this belief. General Joseph E. Johnston, one of the highest-ranking Confederate officers, insisted in 1874 that the Southern people had not been "guilty of the high crime of undertaking a war without the means of waging it successfully."[6] A decade later General Pierre G.T. Beauregard, who ranked just below Johnston, made the same point: "No people ever warred for independence with more relative advantages than the Confederates."[7]
If so, why did they lose the war? In thinly veiled terms, Johnston and Beauregard blamed the inept leadership of Jefferson Davis. That harried gentleman responded in kind; as far as he was concerned, the erratic and inadequate generalship of Beauregard and especially Johnston was responsible for Confederate defeat. In the eyes of many contemporaries and historians there was plenty of blame to go around. William C. Davis's Look Away! is the most recent "internal" study of the Confederacy that, by implication at least, attributes Confederate defeat to poor leadership at several levels, both military and civilian, as well as factionalism, dissension, and bickering between men with outsize egos and thin skins. In this version of Confederate history, only Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson remain unstained.
For any believer in the Myth of the Lost Cause, any admirer of heroic Confederate resistance to overwhelming odds, the story told by Davis (no relation to the Confederate president) makes depressing reading. It is a story of conflicts not on the battlefields of Manassas or Shiloh or Gettysburg or Chickamauga or the Wilderness they are here, but offstage, as it were but conflicts between state governors and the Confederate government in Richmond, between quarreling Cabinet officers, between Jefferson Davis and prominent generals or senators or newspaper editors and even his vice-president, Alexander Stephens. Davis chronicles different examples of internal breakdown under the stresses not only of enemy invasion but also of slave defections to the Yankees, of Unionist disloyalty in the upcountry, particularly in such states as Tennessee, of galloping inflation and the inability of an unbalanced agricultural society under siege to control it, of shortages and hunger and a growing bitterness and alienation among large elements of the population.
These problems seemed more than sufficient to ensure Confederate failure, but they were greatly exacerbated by the jealousies and rivalries of Confederate politicians, which remain Davis's principal focus. He does not explicitly address the question of why the Confederacy lost, but his implicit answer lies in the assertion that "the fundamental flaw in too many of the big men of the Confederacy... [was] 'big-man-me-ism.'"
There are, however, two problems with this interpretation. In two senses it is too "internal." First, by concentrating only on the Confederacy it tends to leave the reader with the impression that only the Confederacy suffered from these corrosive rivalries, jealousies, and dissensions. But a history of the North during the Civil War would reveal similar problems, mitigated only by Lincoln's skill in holding together a diverse coalition of Republicans and War Democrats, Yankees and border states, abolitionists and slaveholders which perhaps suggests that Lincoln was the principal reason for Union victory. In any event, Look Away! is also too "internal" because the author is too deeply dependent on his sources. It is the nature of newspaper editorials, private correspondence, congressional debates, partisan speeches, and the like to emphasize conflict, criticism, argument, complaint. It is the squeaky wheel that squeaks. The historian needs to step back and gain some perspective on these sources, to recognize that the well-greased wheel that turns smoothly also turns quietly, leaving less evidence of its existence available to the historian.
Look Away! falls within one tradition of internal explanations for Confederate defeat. More prevalent, especially in recent years, have been studies that emphasize divisions and conflicts of race, class, and even gender in the South. Two fifths of the Confederate population were slaves, and two thirds of the whites did not belong to slaveholding families. What stake did they have in an independent Confederate nation whose original raison d'être was the protection of slavery? Not much stake at all, according to many historians, especially for the slaves and, as the war took an increasing toll on non-slaveholding white families, very little stake for them either. Even among slaveholding families, the women who willingly subscribed to an ethic of sacrifice in the war's early years became disillusioned as the lengthening war robbed them of husbands, sons, lovers, and brothers. Many white women turned against the war and spread this disaffection among their menfolk in the army; in the end, according to Drew Gilpin Faust, "it may well have been because of its women that the South lost the Civil War."[8]
If all this is true if the slaves and some nonslaveholding whites opposed the Confederate war effort from the outset and others including women of slaveholding families eventually turned against it, one need look no further to explain Confederate defeat. In The South vs. the South, however, William W. Freehling does not go this far. He says almost nothing about women as a separate category, and he acknowledges that many nonslaveholding whites had a racial, cultural, and even economic stake in the preservation of slavery and remained loyal Confederates to the end. But he maintains that, properly defined, half of all Southerners opposed the Confederacy and that this fact provides a sufficient explanation for Confederate failure.
Freehling defines the South as all fifteen slave states and Southerners as all people slave as well as free who lived in those states. This distinction between "the South" and the eleven slave states that formed the Confederacy is important but too often disregarded by those who casually conflate the South and the Confederacy. Admittedly, some 90,000 white men from the four Union slave states (Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, and Delaware) fought for the Confederacy, but this number was offset by a similar number of whites from Confederate states (chiefly Tennessee and the part of Virginia that became West Virginia) who fought for the Union.
But Freehling's central thesis that "white Confederates were only half the Southerners" raises problems. This arithmetic works only if virtually all black Southerners are counted against the Confederacy. At times Freehling seems to argue that they should be so counted. At other times he is more cautious, maintaining that "the vast majority" of Southern blacks "either opposed the rebel cause or cared not whether it lived or died." Freehling does not make clear how important he considers that qualifying "or cared not." In any event, let us assume that all three million slaves who remained in the Confederacy (as well as the one million in the border states and in conquered Confederate regions) sympathized with the Union cause that would bring them freedom. Nevertheless, their unwilling labor as slaves was crucial to the Confederate economy and war effort, just as their unwilling labor and that of their forebears had been crucial to building the antebellum Southern economy. These Confederate slaves worked less efficiently than before the war because so many masters and overseers were absent at the front. Unwilling or not, however, they must be counted on the Confederate side of the equation, which significantly alters Freehling's 50/50 split of pro- and anti-Confederates in the South to something like 75/25.
Freehling draws on previous scholarship to offer a succinct narrative of the political and military course of the war, organized around Lincoln's slow but inexorable steps toward emancipation, "hard war," and the eventual mobilization of 300,000 black laborers and soldiers to work and fight for the Union. This narrative is marred by several errors, including the repeated confusion of General Charles F. Smith with General William F. "Baldy" Smith, the conflation of combat casualties with combat mortality, the mislabeling of a photograph of Confederate trenches at Fredericksburg as Petersburg, and the acceptance at face value of Alexander Stephens's absurd claim, made five years after Lincoln's death, that the Union president had urged him in 1865 to persuade Southern states to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment "prospectively," thereby delaying the abolition of slavery five years. Nevertheless, Freehling has made a strong case for the vital contribution of the two million whites and one million blacks in the South who definitely did support the Union cause. Without them, "the North" could not have prevailed, as Lincoln readily acknowledged.
Freehling does not take a clear stand on the question of whether Union victory was inevitable. At times he seems to imply that it was, because the half of all Southerners whom he claims supported the Union (actively or passively) doomed the Confederacy. But at other times he suggests that this support was contingent on the outcome of military campaigns and political decisions. No such ambiguity characterizes the essays in Gary Gallagher's Lee and His Army in Confederate History. In this book and in his earlier The Confederate War, Gallagher has argued forcefully and convincingly that Confederate nationalism bound most Southern whites together in determined support for the Confederate cause, that the brilliant though costly victories of Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia reinforced this determination, and that morale even in the face of defeat and the destruction of resources in 1864 1865 remained high until almost the end.
Gallagher does not slight the problems of slave defections to the Yankees, class tensions among whites, personal rivalries and jealousies among Confederate leaders, and other internal divisions that have occupied historians who see these problems as preordaining defeat. But he emphasizes the degree of white unity and strength of purpose despite these faultlines. Plenty of evidence exists to support this emphasis. A Union officer who was captured at the Battle of Atlanta on July 22, 1864, and spent the rest of the war in Southern prisons wrote in his diary on October 4 that from what he had seen in the South "the End of the War...is some time hence as the Idea of the Rebs giving up until they are completely subdued is all Moonshine they submit to privatations that would not be believed unless seen."[9]
"Until they are completely subdued." That point came in April 1865, when the large and well-equipped Union armies finally brought the starving, barefoot, and decimated ranks of Confederates to bay. Gallagher revives the overwhelming numbers and resources explanation for Confederate defeat, shorn of its false aura of inevitability. Numbers and resources do not prevail in war without the will and skill to use them. The Northern will wavered several times, most notably in response to Lee's victories in the summer of 1862 and winter spring of 1863 and the success of Lee's resistance to Grant's offensives in the spring and summer of 1864. Yet Union leaders and armies were learning the skills needed to win, and each time the Confederacy seemed on the edge of triumph, Northern victories blunted the Southern momentum: at Sharpsburg, Maryland, and Perryville, Kentucky, in the fall of 1862; at Gettysburg and Vicksburg in July 1863; and at Atlanta and in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley in September 1864. Better than any other historian of the Confederacy, Gallagher understands the importance of these contingent turning points that eventually made it possible for superior numbers and resources to prevail. He understands as well that the Confederate story cannot be written except in counterpoint with the Union story, and that because of the multiple contingencies in these stories, Northern victory was anything but inevitable.
Much of the best scholarship on the Civil War during the past decade has concentrated on the local or regional impact of the war. A fine example is Brian Steel Wills's The War Hits Home, a fascinating account of the home front and battle front in southeastern Virginia, especially the town of Suffolk and its hinterland just inland from Norfolk. No great battles took place here, but there was plenty of skirmishing and raids by combatants on both sides. Confederates controlled this region until May 1862, when they were compelled to pull back their defenses to Richmond. Union forces occupied Suffolk for the next year, staving off a halfhearted Confederate effort to recapture it in the spring of 1863. The Yankees subsequently fell back to a more defensible line nearer Norfolk, leaving the Suffolk region a sort of no man's land subject to raids and plundering by the cavalry of both armies.
Through it all most white inhabitants remained committed Confederates, while many of the slaves who were not removed by their owners to safer territory absconded to the Yankees, adding their weight to the Union side of the scales in the balance of power discussed by Freehling. White men from this region fought in several of Lee's regiments, suffering casualties that left many a household bereft of sons, husbands, fathers. Yet their Confederate loyalties scarcely wavered.
Northern occupation forces at first tried a policy of conciliation, hoping to win the Southern whites back to the Union. When this failed, they moved toward a harsher policy here as they did elsewhere, confiscating the property and liberating the slaves of people they now perceived as enemies to be crushed rather than deluded victims of secession conspirators to be converted.
Wills does not make a big point of it, but his findings stand "in sharp rebuttal" to the arguments of historians who portray a weak or divided white commitment to the Confederate cause as the reason for defeat. "These people sought to secure victory until there was no victory left to win." In the end the North did have greater numbers and resources, wielded with a skill and determination that by 1864 1865 matched the Confederacy's skills and determination; and these explain why the North won the Civil War.
[1] The Wartime Papers of R.E. Lee, edited by Clifford Dowdey and Louis H. Manarin (Little, Brown, 1961), p. 934.
[2] Quoted in Why the North Won the Civil War, edited by David Donald (Louisiana State University Press, 1960), p. ix.
[3] Richard N. Current, "God and the Strongest Battalions," in Why the North Won the Civil War, p. 22.
[4] "Men at War: An Interview with Shelby Foote," in Geoffrey C. Ward with Ric Burns and Ken Burns, The Civil War (Knopf, 1990), p. 272.
[5] London Times, August 29, 1862.
[6] Joseph E. Johnston, Narrative of Military Operations (Appleton, 1874), p. 421.
[7] Pierre G.T. Beauregard, "The First Battle of Bull Run," in Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, 4 volumes, edited by Robert U. Johnson and Clarence C. Buel (Century, 1887), Vol. 1, p. 222.
[8] Drew Gilpin Faust, "Altars of Sacrifice: Confederate Women and the Narratives of War," The Journal of American History, Vol. 76, No. 4 (March 1990), p. 1228.
[9] "The Civil War Diary of Colonel John Henry Smith," edited by David M. Smith, Iowa Journal of History, Vol. 47 (April 1949), p. 164.
Under natural law, not U.S. law.
You are easily exposed.
Walt
The people of the whole United States are the sovereigns; the states are not.
--Just as Jefferson Davis indicated.
Walt
Take issue with what Lincoln -said-.
What a snooze.
"As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy."
Let's assume that you have the power beyond all other men to look in another's heart.
What was Lincoln thinking when he wrote that?
It looks pretty deep. Was it not?
It is SO easy to make you look a fool.
You'll get tired of this soon enough and the next crop of secesh apologists will be diving through the eyes of so many digital needles.
Walt
I see your argument about the long war between libertarian Jeffersonians and statist Hamiltonians. It's something the Progressive historians built on a century ago. They praised Jefferson and Jackson and demeaned the Hamiltonians and Whigs, and found good things to say for the Confederacy while criticizing Lincoln for his connections to Northern industrialists. Unfortunately for the libertarian angle, in their own time, Beard, Parrington and the other progressive historians were great fans of Bryan, Wilson, or even the socialist Debs. Conflicts and polarities persist throughout history, but their content can't always be fixed as a struggle between the same two principles.
Where I disagree is to say, first that ordinary politics alternate with crisis politics. In between critical periods like the early years of the Republic, the Civil War, the Depression and perhaps the Jacksonian and Progressive periods, there are periods of consensus, like the Era of Good Feeling, the 1840s, the Cleveland years, the 1920s and the 1950s. Partisan feelings might have run high, but political divisions were less pronounced. It's a mistake to take discussion about protection or regulations in these periods as war-like, Manichean struggles between good and evil principles. Secondly, the Civil War was our most turbulent eras of conflict, but to my way of thinking the passions of the Civil War era, had far more to do with slavery than with on-going questions of the tariff or internal improvements. Not that there weren't disagreements about these matters, but they weren't the primary focus of division.
Nor do I think it's fair to talk about "30 years of Northern political agression." Most of those years were years of normal, low-level political conflict. South Carolina had its fit in 1830, but for the most part the Compromise of 1820 held and kept the peace until 1850 or 1854. And are Southern efforts to spread slavery be regarded as "defensive" and Northern efforts to check expansion as "aggressive"? That hardly seems to make sense. If you want to get deeply into the Southern radical mindset, I guess spreading slavery was "defensive," but that was hardly the only point of view. Northern efforts to resist slavery's expansion seem to me to be more defensive, and more defensible.
What came out of the war, of course, was a shift in the country's center of gravity towards industry, the cities, the North and protection, but it would be anachronistic and distorting to ignore the real conflicts over slavery in the 1850s and say that this was what people thought the war was about at the time. That's not to say that in some sense worries about one section prevailing over another weren't involved in the beginnings of the war, but it's a mistake to overlook the real conflicts over slavery in the territories and the "defense of the peculiar institution" and make the Civil War simply an attempt by Northern industrialists to crush Southern agriculturalists.
You also seem to be applying the attributes of the later, monopolistic, inegalitarian world that came out of the war to the pre-War world. If anything, it looks like Southern politics in the ante-bellum period were far more elitist than Northern. Social elites in the North, especially outside New England, were very anti-Republican. I'll wait until I see more information, but my own impression is that Republican politics were far more driven by small towns merchants, farmers, little manufacturers, than by big bankers and mill owners. But we've discussed this before and weren't able to convince each other.
I will agree with you that Rockefeller built on Lincoln's achievement, but this wasn't foreseen in Lincoln's day. Lincoln's ideal of opportunity and social mobility was far more egalitarian and "liberal" in the old sense of the word. A society where farmers could become successful and their sons could make their way as craftsmen, merchants and small manufacturers was much more to his taste. Certainly what came out of the war would not have been forseen by many. It was technology that turned this vision sour by allowing the development of monopolies. Today we can see the connection between protection and monopolies, but for many in Lincoln's day, protection's advantages outweighed its drawbacks.
Now of course you will be able to find Southern prophets who railed against industrialism and capitalism for decades before the war. But it wasn't a choice between the rural Eden and the industrial Babylon or urban Sodom. The rural garden also had it's negative features, and it's Southern promoters carried around a lot of baggage of their own. In a nation of men who grew up like Lincoln, splitting rails and making fences, the idea of new jobs in new cities, of working to advance one's self and one's family in a free and vigorous economy must have seemed very attractive to many. If the dream has gone sour, it's still sweeter than life in much of the world.
Lincoln's vision was to free the ambitious and industrious from brute labor on unprofitable farms. Eventually he also took action against even more oppressive ways of life. Being shackled to a time clock or cubicle or gouged by the taxman is also a kind of servitude. But absolute freedom is not of this world, and there are always gradations. Perhaps there is a happy medium that is most satisfying, but I can't help comparing what we have to what one can see in other parts of the world or in periods of our own past and thinking it better.
Jefferson based his system on the possession of thousands of acres of unused land, a frontier open to all. With the end of that frontier, the kind or degree of freedom his generation knew would necessarily be lost. Jefferson said as much. But freedom itself wasn't lost. And it still offers us much.
IF true, what would that make the document they ratified? You are easily exposed.
Ask Chief Justice John Marshall, from Sturges v Crowninshield, 4 Wheat. 122, (1819):
When the American people created a national legislature, with certain enumerated powers, it was neither necessary nor proper to define the powers retained by the States. These powers proceed, not from the people of America, but from the people of the several States; and remain, after the adoption of the constitution, what they were before, except so far as they may be abridged by that instrument.What was that Court case? McCullough v Maryland? From Marshall again:
No political dreamer [except Walt] was ever wild enough to think of breaking down the lines which separate the States, and of compounding the American people into one common mass. Of consequence, when they act, they act in their States. But the measures they adopt do not, on that account, cease to be the measures of the people themselves, or become the measures of the State governments.See, I didn't even leave your line out. Something later perhaps? How about Justice Thomas, In US Term Limits v Thornton, 514 US 779, (1995):
To be sure, when the Tenth Amendment uses the phrase "the people," it does not specify whether it is referring to the people of each State or the people of the Nation as a whole. But the latter interpretation would make the Amendment pointless: there would have been no reason to provide that where the Constitution is silent about whether a particular power resides at the state level, it might or might not do so. In addition, it would make no sense to speak of powers as being reserved to the undifferentiated people of the Nation as a whole, because the Constitution does not contemplate that those people will either exercise power or delegate it. The Constitution simply does not recognize any mechanism for action by the undifferentiated people of the Nation.The people of the differentiated states are the sovereigns - not the people of the whole United States en masse.
You tickled a memory. In Sibley's Confederate invasion of New Mexico, Union troops did make a mule bomb. They tied boxes of howitzer shells to two old mules, lit fuses, and whipped the mules across the Confederate line. They were hoping to stampede the Confederate cattle herd to deprive the Confederates of meat.
Suddenly the mules turned around and came back toward the Union soldiers. The soldiers then ran like crazy and the mules followed. Finally, the soldiers got far enough ahead of the mules that they weren't hurt when the shells exploded. The Confederate cattle barely stired.
Source: Civil War in Texas and New Mexico Territory by Steve Cottrell.
I use these terms because they are the language of political science, which would have been understood by the Founders in similar language and with similar concepts. The concepts came down from classical usage for the most part -- Plato, Aristotle, Polybius, and Cicero would have been familiar to the educated men among them, and likewise the dark musings of Tacitus on the subject of how tyranny grew up in a great republic, and how the morally and politically downfallen condition of his own countrymen contrasted bleakly with the vigor and virtue of the free Germans, whom he professed to admire. These lessons will absolutely not have been lost on the Framers, who were very conscious of the Aristotelian life-cycle of societies, and who were educated in the received vocabulary of political science.
Madison was famously concerned with faction, from his knowledge of the English parliamentary system and from Polybius, who particularly condemned the bad influence on Athenian policy of the demagogues. Of course, Pericles was a demagogue, too, but Polybius likes to overlook that when currying favor with his Roman masters by comparing them to Pericles and deprecating the Athenian model in favor of the Roman.
Madison believed very much as the Bush family do, that politics ought to be a hobby of the idle (but educated) rich. I don't agree with him all that much, except in this, that a republic dominated by combinations of schemers is a Bad Thing. I catalog Faction among the diseases of Republic (along with straight-ticket voting and The Lobby, among others). But I'm enough of a Jacksonian to think that the country was better off when ordinary men paid close attention to politics, and made strong demands on the ethics of their politicians. The memoir of Davy Crockett that someone posted to the Internet -- I think here on FR -- was a small classic, and the kind of thing I want to see more of, in which an honest farmer gave his congressman a stern lesson in ethics and showed him why he shouldn't have voted for a pork appropriation. Madison never contemplated such a scene: he was above correction by mere yeomen. So I take many of his lessons, but I reject his classism and country-squire comfort with the idea that "people like us" would run the country, and all the rest of us fall down with gratitude at their transactions on our behalf.
The larger nation allowed more free play for groups to combine and work for common goals.
But that's Faction!
It also allows greater stability as divisive issues, powerful interests and the political ambitions of politicians and their followings are diluted in the larger sea of national life. The result is more freedom for the individual from those who would dragoon him or her into this or that local army or party.
I don't know whether I agree. Sure, Boss Tweed and Joe Pendergast and corporate actors like the Central (Southern) Pacific Railroad in California and the Mellon Bank in Pennsylvania suborned and seduced people's officeholders to their own agenda. But now we see the same thing happening at the national level, and we hear of similar initiatives being transacted across national borders by conspiracies of corporations, NGO's, and semi-governmental groups from terrorist groups to transnational bureaucracies and secretariats.
One can already see a national consciousness developing then.
Well, sure -- among people who thought they were going to drive the train and ring the bell, and among people who wanted to. But saying so doesn't tell us whether a national consciousness is better than a local one. It is the prejudice of history that wider is better, but then historians are toadies to power who'd like to have been players themselves, so I think we should regard their point of view as treacherous, and not a good indicator of where the best interests of the people lie, but only the enthusiasms of students of Machiavelli.
I think you are referring to the Roman Empire; I can't think of another state in antiquity that took such a latitudinarian view of other people's belief systems. But I think you confuse mere broadness or size of the polity with the consequences of conscious policy. The Romans were systematic in their acceptance of extant cults where they found them (even importing them; a large temple of Isis stood near the Pantheon), but they were not indiscriminate in their acceptance, as the Christians found out to their sorrow. Paul of Tarsus was tried for spreading the beliefs of Christianity, and the complaint of the Jews against him was in part that he was spreading mere superstitions and cultic practices that were not accepted, or acceptable (enter here several canards about Christian practice), within the broad guidlines of Roman policy.
Notwithstanding the prejudice of modern historians and students of politics against "particularisms", I don't think you can correlate the size or multiethnicity (imperial spread) of a state with toleration. The Soviet state extended through what, eleven time zones? And yet it was an intolerant state with regards to belief and opinion.
Yes, that's a good point. I've been a little surprised at how the Democrats splintered into three big pieces, none of which were able individually to compete nationally. Of course, Lincoln wasn't competitive nationally either. Why the Democrats failed to cooperate maximally among themselves in the face of the threat of Black Republicanism, but instead tried to blackmail one another and ended up falling out, is a good book by itself. What I said earlier about political perspicuousness applies here.
....and the Republican saw themselves, with good reason, as responding to the factionalism of the slaveholders and organizing to defend free soil.
Yes, I agree. Donald and other biographers have always agreed, that Lincoln struck his position on containing slavery in sympathy and common cause with Illinois freeholders who anticipated migrating west some day, and who were reasonably concerned that, if slavery were allowed in the Kansas Territory, they would be shut out of the best lands. That's just what happened when Texas was settled, and T. R. Fehrenbach, in Lone Star, describes how slaveholders like Jared Groce (one of the Old Three Hundred who came in the first wave of Texian settlers) were able to use their slaves to multiply the mercedes and labores they could receive from the Spanish Crown, by applying to the empresario (usually Austin) in the name of each and every slave in his household. The "peach bottoms", the good black river-bottoms, of the Brazos River valley and other coastal rivers were preoccupied in this way. Freehold farmers were generally located much farther inland, or on the second-quality land on the Pleistocene terraces on either side of the rivers (which still wasn't bad -- and they didn't have to put up with fire ants!).
Over the longer term, the freeholders still had to deal with the force that drove them off the land eventually -- the effects of economies of scale, and of selling into oligopsonous "free markets" in Chicago and elsewhere. It's ironic: Lincoln won the issue, but the farmers he espoused lost their war to stay on the land.
Curiously, it was the moderate Douglas who did most to create such a heated atmosphere with his Kansas-Nebraska act.
Despite his historic failure to bridge the widening divide, Stephen Douglas deserves credit, like Clay, for having tried to split the differences and come up with something everyone could come up with. Actually, if you think about it, his "popular sovereignty" idea subtly favored the freesoilers, since the slaveholders couldn't do under popular sovereignty what they'd done under the Spanish land-grant program in Texas in 1821. If only the Redlegs hadn't held the Lecompton Convention, and packed it with Missourians (I'm accepting the freesoilers' accusations at face on that point without corroboration), and put the fat into the fire.
There is nothing inconsistant with perpetual union here. There is nothing here that would allow unilateral state secession.
"In the case now to be determined, the defendant, a sovereign state, denies the obligation of a law enacted by the legislature of the Union...In discussing this question, the counsel for the state of Maryland deemed it of some importance, in the construction of the Constitution, to consider that instrument as not emanating from the people, but as the act of sovereign and independent states. It would be difficult to maintain this position....
--Chief Justice John Marshall, majority opinon McCullough v. Maryland 1819
"That the United States form, for many, and for most important purposes, a single nation, has not yet been denied. In war, we are one people. In making peace, we are one people. In all commercial regulations, we are one and the same people. In many other respects, the American people are one; and the government which is alone capable of controlling and managing their interests in all these respects, is the government of the Union. It is their government and in that character, they have no other. America has chosen to be, in many respects, and in many purposes, a nation; and for all these purposes, her government is complete; to all these objects it is competent. The people have declared that in the exercise of all powers given for these objects, it is supreme. It can, then, in effecting these objects, legitimately control all individuals or governments within the American territory.
The constitution and laws of a state, so far as they are repugnant to the constitution and laws of of the United States are absolutely void. These states are constituent parts of the United States; they are members of one great empiure--for some purposes sovereign, for some purposes subordinate."
--Chief Justice John Marshall, writing the majority opinion, Cohens v. Virginia 1821
"The constitution of the United States was ordained and established, not by the states in their sovereign capacities, but emphatically, as the preamble of the constitution declares, by "the people of the United States."
-Justice Story, Martin v, Hunter's Lessee, 1816
The sovereignty of the United States rests on the people, not the States.
I know I am a brainwashed drone of the NEA. But Chief Justice Marshall and Justice Story were not.
Walt
- Governor Francis W. Pickens of South Carolina, June,1857
In point of fact, southerners controlled the federal government for decades prior to the ACW. What they couldn't abide in 1860 was the outcome of a fair election.
Walt
So why would the assume one position in one case, and a different position in others. Or in McCullough claim both? Could it be that when federal issues are discussed, we are one group of people due to federal representation? And yet thanks to dual sovereignty, the people cannot act as one common group, but must act as a group within state boundaries? The state of Tennessee cannot prevent Georgia from doing anything affecting the citizens of Georgia, and vice-versa. Whatever actions the states want to take with respect to their union or the federal government, the state controls it's own destiny, it cannot force or legislate anything to compel another by it's actions. The ratification of Georgia did not bring Tennessee into the union, and the dissolution of that same political band did not deprive Tennessee of it's position in the Union. As Justice Thomas pointed out so elegantly, "the Constitution does not contemplate that those people will either exercise power or delegate it. The Constitution simply does not recognize any mechanism for action by the undifferentiated people of the Nation."
As I have told you many times "In your eyes only." In the eyes of people who understand what is going on, the fool and idiot is you. But live happily in your self-delusion, arsehole.
"The record blasts everything they say."
The derision that is directed at you is not a result of the effectiveness of your argument, which is basically null and void, it is in response to your unique offensiveness - the only quality that distinguishes you on this forum.
When I am wrong I sdmit it, there is also, of course, your profound stupidity.
When I am wrong I sdmit it, there is also, of course, your profound stupidity.
In a nation larger state different interest groups or parts of the population have to cooperate and work together. They come to realize that they can't have everything their own way and that it's not a zero-sum game. I would not call this faction. I'd think of it more as the beginnings of a party system. I don't think one can really get around such division and coalition building and have effective government in a democracy or representative republic.
Maybe when the "interest group" side of things prevails over the "parts of the population" side you do get faction. If all the industrialists were aligned against all the farmers or workers, on might be able to speak of faction. I'd still find this to be less common in larger units, than in smaller ones. Factions could also be created along regional lines, or around charismatic leaders.
I'm fuzzy on ancient history, but I'm thinking of the death of Socrates and the ferocity some ancient city states brought to civic virtue and the defense of the civic cults. You can see some of this ferocity in Sparta and Rome. The freedom of the ancient city was very different from modern freedom, or even from the freedom of the empires which replaced them. It relied much more on civic virtue and on the freedom of the community to maintain it's cult and culture than on the freedom of the individual from external constraint. The freedom of the ancient city meant a tumultuous and often violent civic life filled with alarms and crises, though the Roman Empire was hardly free of such troubles, at least for those at the top.
I think one could understand Madison as trying to cope with this problem, to weigh or reconcile two concepts of liberty. His federal solution has had many noticeable successes. Individuals are still quite free in their personal lives, and have great mobility and a wide sphere of activity. Those who are attached to local cultures and their autonomy may regret Madison's ideas and the Constitutional system, but there was a trade-off between the autonomous or sovereign, self-contained community and the free and mobile individual. What the 20th century made of the Constitution is another matter, though. It reimposed regulation and regimentation at the federal level.
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