More Marxist/socialist "Civil War History"

Unfortunately for you "liberation" did have a reality for the slaves of antebellum America, as it would have had for the prisoners of Bataan or Sachsenhausen or Magadan. I don't directly equate all these things, but it does indicate that there is a reality behind the word that can't be denied in some situations. You can't simply excise the word from the dictionary because Marxists used it.

Two points: your disclaimer aside, your use of preterition to sideswipe the South with an implicit accusation that their practice of slavery was morally equal to the atrocities you cite -- specifically including Sachsenhausen, which IIRC was a destructive-labor camp similar to Magadan, or worse, a death camp -- absolutely won't hold water. Sorry, point denied. The sum of antebellum treatment of slaves does not add up to a Holocaust, no matter that you happen to think, in your polemical fevers, that it did. It was a particularly harsh form of slavery in that Anglo-Saxon and in particular U.S. property law conduced to freeing the hands of the worst slaveowners to visit harsh punishments on slaves that would not have been countenanced in other societies. But it was not premeditated destruction, or genocide, or a Holocaust.

Second point, you are engaging in a fallacy of distraction, by responding to an argument not made. I didn't argue that slavery was a Good Thing. I didn't argue that detractors and detractions of slavery were Intrinsically Evil. I did argue that Marxists in particular are fond of arguing, for ideological reasons that satisfy them, that the Civil War was a "war of liberation" -- when it wasn't. You just repeated the argument by drawing a bogus parallel with Magadan and the Nazi death camps, proving only that you are a fellow traveler of the Marxists, or that perhaps you enjoy the taking the Marxist perspective yourself, when it rains on someone you despise.

Which is an argument for better hygiene in polemic on your part. Wear a condom, x, you don't know where your used arguments have been.

And the anti-bourgeois current in 1860 came from the from Southern secessionists.

I disagree. It came, more inclusively, from anyone who had a lot of money and who wanted to "get over" the hoi polloi. Fallacy of exclusion, is it? -- evidence that doesn't support, or which tends to support other theses, is not included: you exclude critiques of the behavior of Northern elites, even when our friends GOPcapitalist, 4CJ, and others adduce Northern newspaper editorials in an attempt to discuss Northern political agenda and motives.

Those who peddle the line that Northern factory owners were worse oppressors than slave owners or that slaves were more secure than free workers are espousing precisely an anti-bourgeois line. The contempt of the pro-slavery element for "free society" and free economies should not be denied or ignored.

This is a syllogistic error, in this case converse accident, as well as exclusion fallacy as before. You speak to Southern aristocrats' hauteur (I don't doubt it for a moment), when perhaps you might more profitably survey the upper crusts more widely, because a generalization might perhaps apply rather than a particularity. The hauteur you describe can be found in Harvard graduates today and is independent of income these days but still smells the same. Antidemocracy is antidemocracy. It remains to show that the planter aristocracy were explicitly and peculiarly antidemocratic. If they were, they kept their mouths shut in the society that Andy Jackson and Pennsylvania rifles made equal. OTOH, Sinclair Lewis's polemical portrait of the contemptuous Yankee banker grown great on the gopher prairies seems to require at least that you extend your imputation of oligarchic enthusiasm to include the Northern elites, which you studiously omit to critique in your disquisitions against Southern society -- said exclusion fallacy and converse accident tending to impeach your scholarship. But let me be explicit: My argument is that certain antisocial tendencies that you attribute to Southerners exclusively, hanging your canard on the nail of slavery, were more generally shared, and if we want to understand the politics of the 19th century, and the causes of the Civil War, which was a leadership fight, we must look at everyone's antisocial behavior, which culminated in a totally antisocial slaughter of manhood of the lower orders of society. To say that the Lords Ordainers of politics failed their constituents is to say the very least.

You may prefer that we talk about the moral liabilities of the South exclusively, but only a chump would take you up on that proposition. Fantasizing that only Southern conditions and the peculiar institution caused the Civil War certainly serves a polemical purpose in fastening the viewer's gaze where you want it; but don't expect Southerners, or anyone who wants the whole story, to cooperate.

I don't think "capitalism" or "free enterprise" or "democracy" or "change" are always good things. But it's clear that there is a middle ground between slavery and socialism that is worth occupying.

Well, I don't think socialism and slavery, or slavocracy more precisely, belong on a continuum, or that they constitute poles of some major axis of differentiation of sociopolitical arrangements. Athens was a pure democracy, but maintained the institution of slavery. The ancient Judeans were monarchist, and also practiced morally-bounded slavery. Ancient Germans, Tacitus tells us, were democratic but had the equivalent of petty khans, or kinglets, of whom Arminius was one -- until he attempted to restructure his political status, and was corrected by a cousin with a spear. Talk about bad political reviews.

England is a monarchy without slavery, France a republic without, Mauretania.......a one-armed republic, with. I don't think there is a good correlation between the practice of slavery or its prohibition with democracy.

I don't think free-enterprise capitalism has been an "anti-change" institution. Capitalists in the modern mold, unlike their forerunners in the ancient storage economies, are very much proponents of change -- change in society, and lots of change in their pockets, preferably gold.

It has been some essentially conservative populist movements, like Anchorism, that have sought to protect families against atomization and exploitation by capital intent on utilizing their labor for little or nothing. Remember, as Milton Friedman pointed out, labor syndicalism, whether practiced by 19th-century Anchorites or modern labor unions, is conservative of free-market principles in that it brings balance to an unbalanced market. A dash of oligopoly in organizing and leasing labor is the cure for oligopsony in hiring it.

I would happily, in a perfect Randian world, work for a true Randite employer and respect his rock-ribbed insistence on his rights in property and capital, if he adhered to the ethic advanced by Rand as the noblesse oblige of an author of society. Unfortunately, the experience of 5,000 years of labor relations is that employers love to cheat their workers, shortchange them, bullsteer them, tell them fantasy stories, and fire them on a pretext when they get pregnant or grow old, or when some newcomer promises to work for less. And I've heard that from the horse's mouth -- from a very credible source, my old boss. So Randism doesn't work, because businessmen aren't up to it.

But that does not excuse the Lost Cause myth that slavery was not the cause of the war. That myth only began at the end of the war and did not exist before hand. It is pure revisionism.

It isn't a myth. The proximate cause of the political fight between Lincoln's Republicans and the South was the slavery issue, and the Southerners' correct assessment of Lincoln's agenda as being one of total abolition despite his stump rhetoric about the Territories. But the underlying cause was the North's high rate of net immigration and its overreaching of the South politically, which threatened to make the South, whose leaders were as proud as any Knickerbocker and moreso, the political province, plaything, and glory hole of Northern economic interests -- which were interested in tariffs and corporate welfarism and had an endless laundry list of goodies they proposed to make the South and West pay for, starting with the Morrill Tariff.

Or have we failed to make that sufficiently clear to you? Or do you just like slavery because it's a moral argument, like an Ace of Spades that you can pull out of your sleeve and play again and again, trick after trick, trumping every lesser (because Not Moral) argument?

Methinks you-all are simply addicted to having things all your own way, just the way your Northern history teachers always taught you that you were entitled by God and history to expect.

Concluding.......

Therefore, I must conclude that neither immigration nor expansion, nor the admission of new states was the major factor in producing the war and the crisis which led up to it. Of course, slavery alone couldn't have produced secession and war. Otherwise the union would been in danger in 1800 or 1810 or 1840, but it was a major factor -- likely the major factor as seen from our post-slavery, anti-slavery nation -- in producing the war.

I'm at a loss how you can concede on the one hand that slavery wasn't the whole issue, having just insisted that the arrival of the nation at the political tipping point at which the Senate would begin to pass anti-slavery legislation against the best efforts of the South, and to pass tariffs and preferments and national charters like the Republicans did for the railroads during the War, somehow didn't make the major difference why the South left in 1860, not in 1810 or 1840. I guess we will just have to disagree.

The South saw all their issues about to be defeated in detail, for as far as the eye could see, and so they left the Union rather than become a backwater, and their common fate the plaything of unfriendly strangers, forever. Who wouldn't respond to such a prospect in the same way?

I never said -- again, for the record -- that slavery was not an issue. I said it wasn't The Issue that the Marxists dishonestly say that it was, for their own purposes.

Doubtless the NAACP and the Times did have their own agenda, but given the interest in Black history that developed in the last half-century it was inevitable that scholars would come to think differently about the Civil War and the Confederacy, and to look beneath the veil that obscured the slave question. Your view is an oversimplification. Scholars who have addressed the question did so not out of antipathy toward the South or Southern Republicans.

Pardon me if I disagree. The political thrust vectors behind the new scholarship are unmistakable, even when it comes to the new scholarship on slavery and slave life -- as one scholar stated on PBS, the study (in that scholar's opinion) was undertaken in order to take possession of the issues, so to speak. Surely that isn't the only reason, but politics being a zero-sum game, it can hardly be an accident that it's Charlie Cracker who gets cut.

And please explain to me how my view is an "oversimplification": or is that rhetoric for "you're still wrong, even though I can't prove it"?

You adduce the new interest in black history, not all of which, I will agree, is driven by Political Correctness and power struggles over Martin Luther King's birthday being celebrated, while at the same time Confederate monuments must be neglected, or even taken down, as too "pro-Confederate" and politically incorrect. But you must admit that there is a lot of the latter prejudice being put about, mostly by the NAACP working through their community resources and friendly corporate boards and editorial rooms, and it is purely bloody-shirt, agenda-driven politics. You can blink it if you wish, but it's there, and eventually even you will have to admit it when it becomes blatant enough. Kids are already being sent home from school and disciplined (even at Texas A&M University, where Texas Money rules as elsewhere) for displaying Confederate flags on their personal gear, while other kids are not sent home for wearing the Black Muslim "X" that cancels whiteness in a person's name and more generally symbolizes the annihilation of "white". It will only be a matter of time before men start losing their jobs. (Oh, wait....)

"Pluralism", the accepted elixir of democratic happiness, calls for the free exercise of constituent cultures by their inheritors. That this is not true in the case of Southerners, is demonstrated by the examples that are posted every week here in Free Republic, and more than that, by the disappearance of the Confederate flag from various distinctly Southern public events, like NASCAR races, as the business interests that run that pure-dimensionally Southern pastime drive out the hallmarks of Southern particularity, in order to "broaden" stock-car racing's appeal. When it's MLK Day, we must all be spiritually black, and vicarious Freedom Riders -- but it won't do for people named Rudd and Bodine and Marlin to display their ancestors' battleflag and go around acting like a bunch of rednecks. I mean, cutting donuts in the infield -- how lame. We've got to do something to discourage that kind of thing, before the Heineken-drinkers tune out.

The denial of the rights of pluralism to a subpopulation was once called Jim Crow. Now it's Crow Jim, but you don't seem to mind if other people who hate Southerners passionately rewrite Southern history, while they take down their old flag. Which, to my mind, makes you worse than the perpetrators: you know better, but you insist on lying down with these people and helping them spread around their revisionist, Marx-derived history. Justify your conduct if you wish by pointing at the objects and saying that they started it, that they deserve the abuse for a hundred reasons: but by condoning it, you validate the original fascistic and supremacist positions of the Ku Klux Klan, simply turning them inside out, and make liars out of all the civil rights orators. If you lie down with the revisionists, the Marxists, and the wannabe Crow Jims, it won't be about civil rights any more: it'll just be about the back of the bus.

Bookmark this passage, and remember where you heard it first.

Methinks you-all are simply addicted to having things all your own way, just the way your Northern history teachers always taught you that you were entitled by God and history to expect.

"Methinks" that you are engaging in projection. For the first 80 years of the nation's history, the south pretty much had their way over slavery. From the 3/5 compromise, to the fugitive-slave provisions, to the 20 year grace period for the continuation of the Atlantic slave trade to the Missouri Compromise, to the admission of additional slave states, to the Kansas Nebraska Act to Dred Scott and the FSA, the North continued to roll over to the slave power.

Yes, the North grew in population and wealth as compared to the south. But that was because the north embraced the modern world whereas the south was attempting to move back to the middle ages where a small group of the 'anointed' controlled the social, economic and political future of their region. The ultimate in "having it their way' was the south's blatant rejection of the very founding principles of this nation when they disassociated themselves from the Declaration principles. When the north finally developed the fortitude to say 'stop', the slavepowers reacted as any spoiled, pampered teenager would do when they for the first time were told 'enough is enough.'

Yes, we can blame the north for the Civil War, but that blame properly goes to the north’s ever compromising with the slavepower in the first place. The ‘compromises’ themselves stretching over a period of 80 years made the war inevitable.

For the first 80 years of the nation's history, the south pretty much had their way over slavery. From the 3/5 compromise, to the fugitive-slave provisions, to the 20 year grace period for the continuation of the Atlantic slave trade to the Missouri Compromise, to the admission of additional slave states, to the Kansas Nebraska Act to Dred Scott and the FSA, the North continued to roll over to the slave power.

Oh, please. You sound spoilt-rotten. The first three items in your cite all belong to the Constitution, without which not. Do I infer correctly that you'd have been happier if the South had said, in 1787, "oh, I'm sorry, but we've reviewed the issues here, and notwithstanding your professions of willingness to compromise with us on the subject of slavery, nevertheless we perceive your reluctance, and we think you'll want to go back on your deal as soon as you can.......so we've decided not to ratify the Constitution, but to remain with the Articles of Confederation instead"? How's about them apples, Billy Bob? What if the South had trumped the secession argument by simply refusing to ratify in the first place, on the grounds of irreconcilable differences?

I'm waiting to see your answer. This should be good.

Yes, the North grew in population and wealth as compared to the south. But that was because the north embraced the modern world whereas the south was attempting to move back to the middle ages....

Really? All the way to the Middle Ages? Really? Evidence?

And the North grew in comparison to the South partly because the climate was healthier for Irishmen fleeing the Potato Famine; they died like flies in the Irish Channel of New Orleans, and word got back to Ireland pretty quickly.

.......where a small group of the 'anointed' controlled the social, economic and political future of their region.

Oh, you mean the Four Hundred of the Gilded Age. (Just joking.)

The ultimate in "having it their way' was the south's blatant rejection of the very founding principles of this nation when they disassociated themselves from the Declaration principles.

Don't look now, Ditto, but the South didn't have to "dissociate" themselves from "Declaration principles" -- which is a Declarationist, not a Federalist or Antifederalist, buzz phrase, and therefore bound in our own time and not Hamilton's and Jefferson's. The only principles the South had to abide by were carved into the Constitution. It alone governed. When that wasn't good enough any more for Northern opinion, the South split. Yes, we can blame the north for the Civil War, but that blame properly goes to the north’s ever compromising with the slavepower in the first place. The ‘compromises’ themselves stretching over a period of 80 years made the war inevitable.

I guess you just answered my question. No, the South shouldn't have ratified the Constitution, and should have left New England to fend for itself in the War of 1812. Now, that would have been a pretty near-run thing!

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Do I infer correctly that you'd have been happier if the South had said, in 1787, "oh, I'm sorry, but we've reviewed the issues here, and notwithstanding your professions of willingness to compromise with us on the subject of slavery, nevertheless we perceive your reluctance, and we think you'll want to go back on your deal as soon as you can.......so we've decided not to ratify the Constitution...

Exactly. But when you say 'the south" what you really mean are South Carolina and possibly Georgia. The other 'slave states" in 1787 which included four 'northern states' would have agreed to a constitutional provision ending slavery just as they approved a provision for ending the slave trade. All but the most radical slavers saw the deep contradiction between the sentiments of the Declaration and the Constitution and the existence of chattel slavery. The Union would have functioned just fine without South Carolina and it likely would not have been long before the Charleston planters changed their minds.

The 'mistake' was ever compromising with slavery in the first place and ever trying to appease the slave power. The desire for unanimity by the framers set the nation on a course that could only have one ending. In their defense, the framers were convinced that slavery would end on its own through both acts of conscience and the weak economics of slavery in their day. They did not envision the rise of King Cotton.

"Liberation" is not solely a Marxist idea. If you read many secessionist pronouncements, you will find something very like it expressed there. What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, and there's no justification for using the rhetoric of liberation oneself and calling it "Marxist" when others use it.

Recent research has suggested that the strongest Whig and Republican supporters weren't so much those who were rich, as those who wished to become richer, by promoting economic development. That's not a hard and fast rule. In New England, Whiggery had an ethnic dimension. Whiggery won support in Massachusetts and Vermont from rich and poor as being the party of the respectable in the region. In the lower South, the Whigs' strongest supporters do seem to have been wealthy planters (though there were probably as many wealthy planters in the Democratic column). But for the rest of the country, Whigs weren't an established aristocracy of the rich, but those who were aspiring to better their condition. Of course it depends on whose eyes one looks through, but the idea of the Whigs or the Republicans as a powerful oligarchy of the rich in the 1850s and 1860s is a flawed one. Wealthy merchants, aristocratic heirs, and even many factory owners wanted to maintain their ties to Europe and the South and weren't drawn to the more middle-class Republicans. But we have debated this point.

Looking at the oligarchic politics of antebellum South Carolina or Mississippi, it's not clear that planters with aristocratic pretentions had to "keep their mouths shut." The Democratic party may have been democratic in its origins, but like today's Democrats, they had strayed from them by the 1850s. They had become the "natural party of government" with an openness at the top to elite ideas. This point we have also debated.

The one constant of US politics from Jefferson and Jackson to the present has been the alliance of Southerners (poor and rich) with the plebians and immigrants of Northern cities (with a few rich patrician mavericks as well) against the Yankees of New England and their decendants. You saw this in the eras of Lincoln, Bryan, Wilson, FDR, JFK, and (reversing polarity) Nixon and Reagan. The talk of "two countries" and "red and blue America" that we saw after the last election was because this alliance broke up, really for the first time in our history.

In the early 1850s there was no reason to believe that the Southern-dominated Democrats couldn't keep their allies in the big cities, and even increase their share of Congress as immigration and urban growth proceeded. That alliance wouldn't always have won, but there's no inherent reason why it couldn't have been as powerful in the 1860s and 1870s as it was under Jefferson, Jackson, and FDR.

The reason why that alliance broke down and the South had to face policies it disapproved of was slavery and the conflict over its expansion. If the war was the result of the slaveholding South facing policies it abhorred, and the reason those policies became dominant was the conflict over slavery, it's hard to see how one can avoid giving that struggle over slavery the blame for secession and war. Statecraft failed, and slavery was the reason. But we have also exhaustively argued this issue.

There probably is some ideological motivation to the new interest in Black history, but when a disenfranchised group achieves civic rights and equality it's natural that scholars will turn towards the history of that group, especially if it was here since the beginning, and especially if its role has been at times so important to the country's history. If you want to overcome the current trends that you deplore setting yourself wholly against them probably isn't the way to do so. Finding the good in the past and joining it with the good in the present is a better way to proceed than fighting for the dead past with its good and evil against the present with its own mixture of good and evil. In other words, co-optation is a more effective strategy than across the board repudiation. Political skills and alliance making pay-off in a democracy. But as in the 1860s, one can't always count on people making use of them.

Maybe I'm an optimist. Certainly the Civil War is a blow to all optimist: sometimes things just don't work out. But I don't think we're living through another American Apocalypse. In a few years the anti-Confederate-Battle-Flag forces will have some symbolic victory (in a battle over symbols all victories and defeats are symbolic). Then Southern business, political and civic elites will realize 1) the Civil War is good for tourism, 2) fighting to take the Confederate label off everything is more divisive than leaving it on some things, and 3) nobody really believes in the the Confederacy, or secession or segregation any longer. Jay Leno will crack a few jokes about the NAACP, and a prominent black celebrity will say that he really doesn't care about about the stars and bars. And so, things will die down for another generation, until the NAACP plans a new membership drive.

The reason why that alliance broke down and the South had to face policies it disapproved of was slavery and the conflict over its expansion.

No, the reason the alliance broke down is that the Republican Party and its message of anti-Southern sectionalism succeeded in uniting Northern electoral blocs in a crusade against the South.

If the war was the result of the slaveholding South facing policies it abhorred, and the reason those policies became dominant was the conflict over slavery, it's hard to see how one can avoid giving that struggle over slavery the blame for secession and war.

Again, this is a matter of emphasis: whether the Northern anxiety over the availability of good land in the Territories actually constituted the moral repudiation that your argument implies, or rather that the 1850's Republican message implied, is another factor contributory to war that ought to take its place in a thoroughly expounded and reasoned argument about the causes of the Civil War. To elevate slavery over all other causes is to subside in intellectual acquiescence to the Republican argument: unable to make a legal or a constitutional argument against the practical problem of latifundism, Lincoln and the Republicans resorted to making it a moral issue -- which you know as well as I do, is the intellectual equivalent of kicking over the table and shooting out the lights.

Statecraft failed, and slavery was the reason. But we have also exhaustively argued this issue.

We haven't exhaustively argued this issue. We have hit the major high notes as a couple of armchair scholars may please themselves to do, but we haven't explored them. An awful lot of work needs to be done to explore the history of the Civil War rigorously, which the new generation of scholarship is proceeding to do, in order to deal with the various revisions that are on offer. The better revisions will survive attempts to dismiss them, and the ideologically-based ones will be smelled out by later generations of historians, when presumably the history of the American Civil War, with its tendency to define (still) so many current issues, will have lost its status as the latest whore of power and politics.

There probably is some ideological motivation to the new interest in Black history, but when a disenfranchised group achieves civic rights and equality it's natural that scholars will turn towards the history of that group, especially if it was here since the beginning, and especially if its role has been at times so important to the country's history.

Oh, please. You barely bother to disguise your teleology. Just because the Irish eventually became a factor in western European history of some kind, doesn't justify launching an entire school of archaeology to "discover" the pivotal, or seminal, or foreshadowing role of Ireland in the Bronze Age. The Nazis, and Himmler in particular, used to be enamored of that kind of thinking when they founded the SS-Ahnenerbe at the Wewelsburg to conduct pseudoscientific "research" to buttress their propaganda of pseudo-Teutonic and Nazi glorification. I am only disappointed that the remains of this dark chapter of antihistory wasn't slighted and systematically destroyed -- including the Externsteine; but if I had hoped that politically motivated revisionism had been discredited -- teleologically, if you like -- by the outcome of the Second World War, nevertheless I'm very disappointed to see it return, this time in the service of another ideology.

If you want to overcome the current trends that you deplore setting yourself wholly against them probably isn't the way to do so.

There is that message again: Lie down, Old South, lie down and die. It's okay, everything dies, and now it's your time -- trust me, I have only your best interests at heart! Yeah, right.

Finding the good in the past and joining it with the good in the present is a better way to proceed than fighting for the dead past with its good and evil against the present with its own mixture of good and evil. In other words, co-optation is a more effective strategy than across the board repudiation. Political skills and alliance making pay-off in a democracy.

That's the Clinton voter in you talking. Hell, I can hear Slick pronouncing those words himself, with his forked tongue flicking in and out as he spoke. No, history is all about the past, neighbor, warts and all, and it isn't the political vehicle you and Slick and the little pink Marxists want to make it -- not among honest people, anyway.

All but the most radical slavers saw the deep contradiction between the sentiments of the Declaration and the Constitution and the existence of chattel slavery.

We've had a very long exchange about this, but to repeat, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution diverged in their treatment of many themes. The Constitution governed the status of slavery in the United States, and it was the Southerners' lawful if imprudent insistence that their rights in slaves be recognized in all the States in all circumstances that sufficiently chafed the Western agriculturalists to bring the Republicans to power.

Nevertheless, you have yet to explain why the Northerners didn't owe the Southerners an explanation of their own, why a Yankee banker could take his capital to Illinois or Kansas and demand that his property rights be respected, but that a Southern planter, if he wanted his property rights respected, had to stay out of the Territories. Oh, there were reasons in politics and policy --- but none of these rose to the level of abridging the rights of millions of citizens categorically, without anyone's bothering even to establish the category.

Another way to put it is, the North made a damn poor case for increasing liberty, by constricting the freedom of the South. "Let's all be free -- but y'all have to do it our way!"

The South, as you never tire of delightedly pointing out, never solved the conundrum of divided liberty -- which was not relieved by the Civil War, but only reassigned from Southern blacks to Southern whites. But you've never bothered to offer your own intellectual solution. You think it's enough to sit on Grant's victory laurels and tell the other fellow, "you lost".

Excellent post, dear sir.

Nevertheless, you have yet to explain why the Northerners didn't owe the Southerners an explanation of their own, why a Yankee banker could take his capital to Illinois or Kansas and demand that his property rights be respected, but that a Southern planter, if he wanted his property rights respected, had to stay out of the Territories.

Because many of same guys who wrote the Constitution also wrote the Northwest Ordinance that banned slavery in the territories. Northern and Southerner political leaders both generally agreed that slavery was unjust and an embarassment to a nation that proclaimed the rights of man to be paramont. That 'political calculation' did not change until the rise of King Cotton and the key roll that slaves took in creating riches for a small but influential class of southern planters. It was only then that we saw both the rise of a religious based justifications of slavery and the supposed "rights" of slave owners put above the rights of man as a political issue. Slavery was on the way out in 1787. The cotton gin changed all of that.

Sorry, I never voted for Clinton or for any of those other Southrons the DNC chooses to rule over us.

If the latest NAACP campaign means the end of the South, it was a pretty feeble flower. More likely what's going on now will pass quickly if you show good sense and don't lose your heads. I can't imagine the anti-CBF campaign going on forever without becoming a laughing stock. If the South survived the Civil War, Reconstruction, the boll weevil, Jim Crow, the Great Depression, the mechanization of agriculture, Civil Rights and the latest migration of people from other parts of the country and the world it isn't going to die now. If it didn't survive, then what's there to talk about now? If it's the end of the South it's probably the end of the rest of us, too. But so far that seems to be an unrealistically pessimistic prediction.

You also confuse the natural tendency to give Blacks the place in American history that they were denied with the loonier theories of Afrocentrism. Surely much of what earlier generations were taught excluded the contributions of Blacks to American history. And though recent generations sometimes go too far in remedying that absence, it's natural and good that some effort be made to put African-Americans back where they belong. Of course the idea that Africans created all that's worthwhile in Western Civilization takes things too far. As does the rampant Southronism of some neo-confederates. "Metaphysical" Southernism of the "we're inherently better than you; we have depths that you can't plumb" sort promoted by some people has some of the same dangers as Afrocentrism.

Back to the history: the Republicans would have remained a minority party if Southern Democrats hadn't lost their heads. I suppose both sides overreacted and provoked each other into further overreaction. Politicians on both sides turned away from compromise. But it looks like the Southern leaders had great power in the union and threw it away. A little more political sense, and they could have preserved the union and their power in it, but the radicals among them had already accepted secession in their minds, and the others couldn't restrain them. Their actions to expand slavery could only be seen as provocations by Northerners, but of course, the ineptitude of Northerners like Douglas also played a role, as did the equally provocative action of abolitionist radicals.

The war is long over, and I'm inclined to regard it just as a great and terrible tragedy and leave it at that. I think most people are. But these theories of the evil North and the poor victimized Confederates irritate people and reopen old wounds to the point where those who don't share them have to speak up.

And okay, we haven't exhaustively discussed these issues, but until those new historians come around and we read them we are likely to just go on repeating ourselves.

Thank you, suh.

Because many of same guys who wrote the Constitution also wrote the Northwest Ordinance that banned slavery in the territories. Northern and Southerner political leaders both generally agreed that slavery was unjust and an embarassment to a nation that proclaimed the rights of man to be paramont.

Sorry, that won't do.

I'll grant you that Jefferson probably regarded slavery as an intellectual embarrassment to protagonists of freedom as a theory and policy of government. I'll even grant you James Madison -- tho' I don't recall -- so there are two of the most brilliant, Rationalist leaders of the Revolution and Federal Period.

Nevertheless, I would like to see posted some concrete evidence of what you appear to claim, that slavery went out of fashion for moral rather than practical or intellectual reasons in the North, or that the South acquiesced in the freesoil provision of the Northwest Ordinance for reasons other than the simple geographical propinquity of the Northwest Territories to the former colonies whose leaders thought free soil a good policy (no doubt reflecting the wishes of their farmers and leading landholders). Notice that the freesoil policy Congress thought appropriate for the Northwest, they did not apply to the Old Southwest; and plantation agriculture spread to Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas without check. In Texas, which was a different case, and whither slaveholders like Jared Groce of Georgia brought the first slaves in wagon trains, the would-be planters had to rely on the grudging toleration of both the Spanish commissioners and their Spanish-speaking, Crown-subject American and French empresarios (Beaumont was a Frenchman).

By the way, this would be a good point at which to interject that Moses and Stephen F. Austin were longtime residents of Missouri and Crown subjects, from when it was a French possession, and then Spanish; and that chattel slavery was against policy in the Spanish empire. Spaniards preferred their labor levies without any pretense of the obligations of proprietorship, working their oppression through the caciques and the corregidor system, and through the truly neo-feudal encomiendas, which last had been abolished before the American settlement of Texas. Therefore it is erroneous to assign to Stephen F. Austin the "blame" for slavery coming to Texas; rather it was the unintended consequence of opening Texas, in a however limited way, to controlled immigration of Americans from the old Southwest, that determined whether Texas would become a slave state.

The American settlers were admitted as part of a Spanish imperial policy modelled on a Roman precedent which had settled the Franks on the right bank of the Rhine in the fourth century. The Franks had defended the Roman frontier furiously four generations later when their cousins poured across the frozen Rhine in December, 405; and the Spanish, having read their Gibbon and Jordanes, essayed the same policy for the purpose of retaining first the left bank of the Mississippi, and then Texas and the Southwest.

The source area for American "pre-migrants" for the fundamentally anti-American "backfire" settlements in Texas, was that part of the United States, perforce, in which slavery was practiced; and so, as a practical matter, the Spanish authorities winked at Groce's arrival, and permitted not only his keeping his slaves, but also -- and this was probably a critical error -- his application for a merced, or land grant, in the name of each individual slave, which increased Texas's attractiveness to the planter class instantly and enormously.

It was such abstruse and tangential causes, influences, and purposes that spread slavery, and straightforward calculations of policy by various players in different countries, that made the old Northwest a freesoil region, while slavery followed its practitioners west with the great migration. It was not the intellectual embarrassment of some Southern planters, or their moral shamefacedness, that kept it out of the Northwest, any more than it was spite or moral arraunt that caused slaveholders like Jared Groce to take their slave-filled households west with them into the old Southwest and Texas.

That 'political calculation' did not change until the rise of King Cotton ...It was only then that we saw both the rise of a religious based justifications of slavery and the supposed "rights" of slave owners put above the rights of man as a political issue.

I disagree. Natural law was old in the time of the Greeks, and it was natural law that condemned African blacks and New World Indians to lives of forced labor. I think you are correct, but for the wrong reasons, that the appearance of formalized apologias for slaveholding appeared from the pens of Southern writers: I think I have read, and it seems a reasonable argument to me, that slaveholders wanted to continue to benefit from slave labor, but that they wouldn't have bothered with apology had it not been for the morally-based attack by Northern churchmen, who had begun parallel campaigns of moral improvement against both slavery and the use of alcohol. Arch-abolitionist Theodore Weld, who attracted both Beechers to the movement and molded the early opinions of young Edwin Stanton, was attracted to the Revivalist movement in the 1820's and made a name for himself as an advocate of temperance before he found the abolitionist cause early in the 1830's, just before he met the Beechers and Stanton. It was the onset of the moralizing, selfrighteous, sectionalist, and unforgiving Abolitionist movement that caused the abolitionists of Virginia to fall silent, and the possibility of a civilized discussion to slip away.

And as for your last statement, the property rights of a slaveholder were the rights of man, under the Constitution; and one could only free the slaves by trampling those rights -- which has always been okay by short-sighted people insensible to the damage to their own rights, and to their own stature in law and custom as they confront increasingly gigantic structures of public and private power.

The Marxists, however, who make their advances by the deprecation of human rights and their dissolution in a miasma of "collective" rights (there are no "collective" rights), have appreciated with quicker wits the opportunity this same contradiction affords them, and their scholars have seized upon it to advance their totalitarian agenda through the arguments that are the subject of this thread.

Glad to hear you never voted for Slick. I don't think I did, either -- I'm sure I voted tactically for Perot in '88, to reduce Bush 41's hat size a little bit as regards his obvious majority in Texas, but I can't remember what I did in 1992 -- I'm sure I could never have voted for Clinton, he looked like sidewalk spittle already, even back then. I think I might have had to vote for 41, rather than third-party, regardless of my dislike for his Yankee-dandy Kennebunkport yacht-kiddie ways.

I can't imagine the anti-CBF campaign going on forever without becoming a laughing stock. If the South survived the Civil War, Reconstruction, the boll weevil, Jim Crow, the Great Depression, the mechanization of agriculture, Civil Rights and the latest migration of people from other parts of the country and the world it isn't going to die now.

Well, no, I don't think it's going to blow away, but I am very leery of the private power of newspaper editorialists, who have repeatedly demonstrated their willingness to prostitute themselves in order to obtain political results and social changes. Consider the organized maltreatment of cigarette smokers, so-called "gay rights" -- which I set off in quotes because nobody has ever defined them as rights -- and abortion, to cite just three press campaigns of the last 25 years, when there are, by smarmy journopol Jonathan Alter's count, about 10-15 in progress.

These people could do people's free-speech rights a lot of harm if they start advocating, as Left commentators have done for years, the Soviet-style economic shunning of people whose views are politically inconvenient. I've repeatedly seen liberal columnists advocate firing anyone who is discovered ever to have been in the Klan; and while as I said before that I don't carry a brief for them, it doesn't require a rocket scientist to figure out that this is maltreatment of people for their politics, and beyond the pale. The thread next door about the man who lost his job as a telemarketer, for crying out loud, is a case in point. Would he have been fired for showing up wearing one of those ubiquitous Liberal Cause ribbons, or a Black-Muslim "X" on his hat? Mutatis mutandis, if he can be fired within management's discretion, then I'm going to insist on hiring Democrats and feminists, and then firing them right before Thanksgiving, just to make the point that needs to be made here. That would be base and mean of me to do that, but the management that fired that man for a tattoo certainly isn't blushing.

If it's the end of the South it's probably the end of the rest of us, too. But so far that seems to be an unrealistically pessimistic prediction.

It's the official policy of the Atlanta Constitution, and they and their friends have made a lot of progress. You can sing "We Shall Overcome" at a football game in Oxford, Mississippi, but you'll be expelled for singing "Dixie" or showing up with a Confederate flag. Still feeling confident? Of course you are. You don't live here.

You also confuse the natural tendency to give Blacks the place in American history that they were denied with the loonier theories of Afrocentrism.

No, I don't. I'm confident that Afrocentrism and creationism will find their way to the ash-heap without much assistance or worrying on my part. But what I was speaking to was more the tendency of historiography to whore around after ascendant factions, singing melodiously for its supper. Consider the fashion for social Darwinism, which hasn't left us yet -- how true are its tenets? How descriptive is it of human behavior, whose flowering if not survival is so dependent on eleemosynary impulses not just of parents, but of many members of a society one of whose individual members is troubled or endangered?

But phony Darwinism sails on, undisturbed, evincing in everyday life (in the Enron and World Crossing scandals, for example, and in the elevation and career of unlovely people like "Chainsaw Al" Dunlap), its animating power unimpaired by any real reflection on its truth or speciousness among the class of decisionmakers it so toadishly flatters.

I don't begrudge the New York slave-cemetery excavation project, or the research into the evolution of slave quarters in the eastern U.S., which is already giving us some subtle insights into the daily life of the slave which may have eluded even a lot of the slave's contemporaries. All this is a welcome addition of the corpus of knowledge. But I am concerned with the propensity of people doing grant work to spin a little: to deliver moral judgements on the slaveholders as if the judgements were requisite "compulsories", for example, just as once upon a time the historian might have felt that he ought not to say anything good about, ee.gg., Spartacus, Pugachev, and Denmark Vesey.

The same general complaint is true against the current state of imperial and colonial history, which is often presented by neo-Marxist professors (we have a real bell-ringer in a blonde prof at University of Houston: she just hates white people) in the same spirit in which one of the postcolonial equitorial African states, either Sao Tome' or Gabon, I forget which, presents meritorious achievers with the Order of the Mosquito, honoring the insect that killed so many white people.

Back to the history: the Republicans would have remained a minority party if Southern Democrats hadn't lost their heads. ....But it looks like the Southern leaders had great power in the union and threw it away.

I agree, and it is a mark of their desperation that they did throw their remaining advantages away, which could have spun out a delaying action for a long time.

A little more political sense, and they could have preserved the union and their power in it,.....

Well, the first part is true, but not the last. Stick a fork in them, they were done as soon as the Republicans managed to unite Northern opinion. The argument might better be framed, if the South's future depended on defanging Northern opinion in the middle of a war in time for the elections of 1864, then mightn't they have had a better chance without the war? But that is 20/20 hindsight working again, and the Southerners also had pressing on them the knowledge that 1860 was the moment for decision, and that if they waited any longer to assert their right to revolution by secession, it would have become counterfeit in the face of future Northern population and infrastructure growth. It has been said that the Southerners were fire-eaters, brash in expression, and I'm sure they were; but their timing of their move for secession suggests that they were rather more aware of their practical circumstances than their oratory lets on.

Their actions to expand slavery could only be seen as provocations by Northerners, but of course, the ineptitude of Northerners like Douglas also played a role, as did the equally provocative action of abolitionist radicals.

I agree with the point about provocation, it's incontrovertible the effect Southern efforts to assert their rights as they saw them had on Northern opinion.

I think the role of the Abolitionists was mostly to make Lincoln look reasonable by comparison. They weren't that much a factor in themselves, but they certainly helped to set the scene for war.

Douglas is the tragic figure. Lincoln saved the Union at the cost of the peace, and of radical changes to the Constitution both written and unwritten: if the States are diminished, how much more diminished are its individual citizens? Douglas could have saved both the Union and the peace -- if. In the end, he failed, and I think we agreed that his failure to keep Breckenridge and the Southerners -- or their failure to stay -- doomed the Union, the peace, and the South.

Douglas's failure is probably the most inconspicuous, because overshadowed by Lincoln, and yet the most important, in American history. I haven't seen any books or essays about it, however. It's a story that ought to be told, prominently and with diagrams, pictures, and examples of e.g. the presumptive rights Americans enjoyed in 1854, when Douglas floated "popular sovereignty", versus those they enjoyed in 1954 in the heyday of the Establishment, corporatism, conformism, and McCarthyism. It'd be an interesting eleventh-grade essay assignment.

I can't say for sure whether the NAACP campaign will last or suceed. The early academic political correctness and multiculturalism faced and face laughter in the general public, but it may still be in power in the universities. And anti-smoking mania and affirmative action are still around. Corporate sensitivity training would be a great target for satirists but they don't dare. But the ridicule that afrocentrism and PC-speak faced is reassuring. I think people are waiting for some threshhold of visibility and obnoxiousness to be passed. The dispute over this new film "Barbershop" is a sign that even entrenched pieties don't escape satirists forever.

Surprised that you may have voted for Clinton or Perot. Populism and hostility to establishment conservatives sometimes lets real rascals in. I can certainly understand hostility to the Bushes, but one look at the other two convinced me that I didn't have much of a choice.

You're probably right that Southerners would have had a harder time maintaining their power in the Union as industrialization took over in the North. An earlier generation of Virginians embraced national policies expecting that their state would grow as the nation did. Territorial expansion was popular with them, though it would decrease their own power in an expanded union. And after 1815 Madison and Monroe also supported tariffs, a National Bank and some forms of internal improvements. The disestablishment of state churches had a powerful effect in producing one nation. That generation also favored gradual compensated emancipation, with possible resettlement of freedmen elsewere, though they never got around to fully implementing the policy. It's tragic that they lost their faith in nation and union. The lure of King Cotton in the other Southern states proved too hard to resist.

The "slavery was doomed anyway" argument that so many people present has real problems. Mechanization probably would have killed off slavery, but we don't know how long it would take. But Cotton was only King until India, Egypt, Brazil, China and Mexico came on line as large-scale, cheap producers. One probably couldn't have predicted the irrigation of the American Southwest or Central Asia, but given what the English had done with sugar and tea, and what was being done with coffee and chocolate, one ought to have been able to forsee that the American Southeast wouldn't have been the undisputed King of Cotton production forever. Shifting into some other line of production would have been advisable. And, all in all, even with all the problems of today's factory and office labor, modern jobs are probably preferable for most people to spending hours under the sun hand picking cotton. Certainly the rewards can be greater. If the pickers truly owned their own farms, I might change my mind, but since they didn't to large extent, I don't see any reason to do so.

It's a story that ought to be told, prominently and with diagrams, pictures, and examples of e.g. the presumptive rights Americans enjoyed in 1854, when Douglas floated "popular sovereignty", versus those they enjoyed in 1954 in the heyday of the Establishment, corporatism, conformism, and McCarthyism. It'd be an interesting eleventh-grade essay assignment.

That is a good question. I hate to say it, but slavery was a major factor. We can try to read moral objections to it out of history, and we can try to view things "through the eyes of the people of the time." But if we could see the slave markets, the slave patrols, the pass system, the enforcement of slavery and the discipline of recalcitrant slaves with our own eyes, we would have to question how free a society that allowed such things could be. And the argument that the free are even freer in slave societies than they are under free labor regimes is an idea that encourages neo-Marxism. For if slavery is a useful or unavoidable component of any regime, the temptations of winning freedom through slavery may prove too strong for some to resist.

Beyond slavery, the frontier made us free in 1854, as did the remnants of a self-sufficient agricultural economy. You could simply get up and go where you pleased, and, especially once the Homestead Act was passed, you could begin a new life on your own. It couldn't last, though. Once the frontier was gone, so was that elemental freedom. And it made a difference. An Englishman might well feel himself freer in 1980 than in 1880, in spite of all the taxes and regulation, because modernity gave him more of the elbow room and freedom for non-conformity that Victorian societies denied him. Self-sufficient agriculture and home production of necessities required a lot of work and discipline, but those who had their own land were their own masters. This meant that freedom had a different meaning in the 19th century than they do today. You could be free of much political intervention that plagues us today, but your life would be harder and poorer and more disciplined, as much the freedom to do without as the freedom to do that leisured and affluent moderns want. Taxes were low and so was government regulation and intervention.

Clearly high taxes and the absence of free land made us much less free by 1954. "McCarthyism" may have had an effect in New York, Cambridge and Hollywood, but I'm less inclined to think it a major factor. Those who might have spoken up in favor of abolition or polygamy in some communities in 1854 would have felt similar repression. The "conformity" of the 1950s is also something of a bum rap. I don't think the 50s were especially conformist, save in comparison to Greenwich Village of an earlier day. It was precisely because people were chafing under social norms that they would soon overturn that the 50s have earned their reputation as an age of conformity. Late 20th century non-conformists and libertines would have faced similar frustrations and repression in the Victorian era. Our modern political unfreedom due to taxes and regulation and our radical modern social freedom from constraints, our economic freedom to consume and act and our slavery to the time clock have a common origin in the mass-production free market economy.

Douglas is the tragic figure. Lincoln saved the Union at the cost of the peace, and of radical changes to the Constitution both written and unwritten: if the States are diminished, how much more diminished are its individual citizens?

I don't agree with the last question. States are as capable of being oppressive as any other government. They aren't called "states" for nothing.

Many have commented on Douglas's tragedy. I always thought of him as more of an opportunist, unwilling to let sleeping dogs lie. But for Douglas, "Bleeding Kansas" may not have happened. Pierce and Buchanan would have had to do things to appease the various sections, but it would have been easier to do so without the conflict over Kansas. It's interesting to speculate as to whether they could have done so and maintained peace, at least in their own time. He did have a remarkable rise and career though. Or would Cuban annexation or some other event have played the same role as Kansas? Would there have been a Dred Scott decision without the passions generated by Kansas?

FWIW, here's a free book on Douglas. It's about a hundred years old. But it's certainly admiring enough and contains many facts.

It was the onset of the moralizing, selfrighteous, sectionalist, and unforgiving Abolitionist movement that caused the abolitionists of Virginia to fall silent, and the possibility of a civilized discussion to slip away.

Which also coincided exactly with the run-up in slave prices throughout the upper south supplying 'labor' for the new cotton plantations of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas and the coining of the term "sold down the river."

If anything killed the abolitionist movement in Virginia in the 1830s it was the rapid run-up of slave values driven by the industrial-scale cotton plantations of the Gulf States, not ‘self-righteous’ New England preachers. Neither the Virginians nor anyone else paid a damn bit of attention to them when cash was involved.

Surprised that you may have voted for Clinton or Perot.

Never for Clinton. I'd vote for Satan's spotty dog first.