It’s just weird to see what sick twisted bastards we were dealing with when the southern part of this country refused to acknowledge the moral bankruptcy of human bondage. James Loewen looks at five myths about why the South seceded from the Union. Here’s the first mythbusting:
1. The South seceded over states’ rights.
Confederate states did claim the right to secede, but no state claimed to be seceding for that right. In fact, Confederates opposed states’ rights — that is, the right of Northern states not to support slavery.
On Dec. 24, 1860, delegates at South Carolina’s secession convention adopted a “Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union.” It noted “an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery” and protested that Northern states had failed to “fulfill their constitutional obligations” by interfering with the return of fugitive slaves to bondage. Slavery, not states’ rights, birthed the Civil War.
South Carolina was further upset that New York no longer allowed “slavery transit.” In the past, if Charleston gentry wanted to spend August in the Hamptons, they could bring their cook along. No longer — and South Carolina’s delegates were outraged. In addition, they objected that New England states let black men vote and tolerated abolitionist societies. According to South Carolina, states should not have the right to let their citizens assemble and speak freely when what they said threatened slavery.
Other seceding states echoed South Carolina. “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world,” proclaimed Mississippi in its own secession declaration, passed Jan. 9, 1861. “Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of the commerce of the earth. . . . A blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization.”
And then you have people like Trent Lott palling around with White Citizens Councils and telling us its a shame that Strom Thurmond wasn’t elected president on his Jim Crow-forever platform. Haley Barbour tells us that the civil rights era in Mississippi wasn’t that big of a deal.
I’m sorry. You have to make a clean break with your past. If you cling to it, you are beyond contempt.
Do you ever wonder what our country would be like if Richard Nixon hadn’t been such a son of a bitch? What would the GOP look like today if Nixon had been too decent to pursue a Southern Strategy? How much depends on the willingness or unwillingness of public figures to stoke and exploit hatred?
Virulent Southern racism has survived in the South because of the co-dependent relationship the public outside the South have had to it. And sometimes (Detroit “race” riot, Louise Day Hicks) the non-Southern appropriation of the the Southern attitude. Without the Pete Kings, Steve Kings, Michele Bachmanns,…in American history, things would have come to a head more quickly.
Baptist and Methodist conventions in Southern states, for example, in the 1780s passed manumission resolutions in the spirit of liberty and equality. And there were a number of slaves freed as a result. John Hope Franklin’s first major historical work was about freedmen and their experience in the South. But the movement was not encouraged. Why? New England shipping interests were still involved in the slave trade and would be until the Constituionally-mandated deadline.
Abolitionists were always a minority of the non-Southern public, right up to the Civil War. And to confuse things more, there were Southern abolitionists (and feminists) like the Grimke sisters of Charleston, SC. Outside the South, the issue wasn’t slavery as much as the extension of slave states that carried forward the South’s “peculiar institution”.
When in the 1890s, the South instituted segregation by law, outside the South there was segregation in fact. Outside the South, the Supreme Court affirmed the Constitutionality of segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson. Outside the South, Harry Truman could not get an anti-lynching law passed.
It was the rest of the country, longing for unity in 1876 that put Confederate and Union soldiers equal in nobility for their cause. (There were Indian Wars going on, and experienced troops from both sides were needed to fight them.)
It was the rest of the country that made “The Birth of a Nation” one of the most popular films during World War I.
It was the rest of the country that tolerated the spread of the Ku Klux Klan during the 1920s.
It was northern craft unions that opposed the tactic of desegregation in the textile workers strike of 1938 in the South. A move that destroyed the labor movement in the South and directly led to Taft-Hartley.
Southern racism would never have persisted without the collaboration of folks outside the South, who shared a lot of the same attitudes. Southern racism persists today because of the general bigotry used to turn out votes for the Republican Party–the party that started with a call for Free Soil, Free Money, Free Labor, Free Men. And the silence of the Democrats.
Myth 3 is very interesting. It is based on a supposition. The fact is that we do not know one way or another how common whites in the South felt about slavery except (1) there was fear of slave rebellions (especially after the 1830 Nat Turner rebellion), (2) they likely knew better than to express their opionon, and (3) they didn’t matter anyway because they didn’t have the rights of direct democracy except to elect the legislature and the governor. No one counted the turnout in the Secession referenda. The supposition is that attitudes were driven by the same things that drive the attitudes of common whites in the South today. The problem is that Unionism was much stronger outside of the plantation belts of Southern states than is generally recognized in textbooks. This caused the western part of Virginia to secede from Virginia and for Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, and Delaware to not secede at all. North Carolina seceded only because South Carolina and Virginia had, and it feared war from two directions. And it became necessary for the Confederate states to individually institute a draft in 1863 in order to have enough troops. Bottom line: there is no way to know how widespread support of Secession was in 1860. That’s not an excuse but a failure of actual data.
Part of it depends on how much public figures are willing to stoke and exploit hatred. Most of it depends on the public toleration of them doing so, even when they are out-of-state. The bigotry in Arizona matters very much to the future of the rest of the country. The bigotry in Mississippi matters very much to the future of the rest of the country (thus the Freedom Riders of the 1960s). The bigotry of Wyoming and Kansas matters very much to the future of the rest of the country. Many if not most native Southerners have been working through their attitudes about race and have gotten over it. It rankles us to be stereotyped as those who haven’t made the effort, to be the scapegoat for national failure of progressive Democrats. Which is why we have to remind folks that Pete King is from New York, Steve King is from Iowa, Michele Bachmann is from Minnesota, Jan Brewer is from Arizona,…and a lot of the voters there are natives of other states.
For those who are passionate about the moral bankruptcy of human bondage, the euphemism to watch these days is “forced labor”. The International Labor Organization has a pubic campaign against forced labor, especially in some of the economic “tigers”. In the US, not a peep. And yet this practice is why US workers in some industries are “noncompetitive”. The solution is not tariffs; it’s global labor standards and it is going to be as hard a political fight as abolition–because it is abolition all over again.
We also need to watch out for the Randian nitwits who would see the return of child labor and lifetime labor contracts. There are some advocates of indentured servitude among the radical libertarians (talk about contradictions).
In the words of Dennis Green, “They are who we thought they were!”
Incredible at defense and in the return game?
It’s not on Loewen’s list but there’s an extremely important myth that deserves mention.
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2011/4/7/162237/4554
But first let me explain what I’ve been doing lately — since the Gabby Giffords shooting, I’ve been researching the Religious Right, which was prompted in part by Palin’s use of bullseye targets in a political advertisement. In religious circles, the targeting of enemies is known as “spiritual mapping.” Adherents of the practice use “imprecatory prayers,” in which one prays for ‘bad things’ to happen to the chosen target.
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2010/7/13/115425/990
Let me cut to the chase — a large segment of the Christian Right is being subjected to a revisionist history which began as a roughly contemporaneous movement to the Civil war but has been revived in recent times. The point of this revision is to rationalize a current course of action. Allow me to quote and comment below:
Most non-religious progressives underestimate the influence of the Christian Right on current political events, and I say this even though I admit that the Christian Right’s motives are not Christian in the true sense of the word. However, they see them as such, so it’s an academic issue. What’s clear — to me at least, and to others — is that there’s a large group of rightwing Christian activists who are engaged in clandestine efforts to overthrow or destroy many of our institutions.
Revolutions require rationales and the “Dominionist” revolution has Rooshdoony’s (based on Benjamin M. Palmer’s), which not only justifies slavery in the past tense but in the current tense, too. Revisionism is evident in his writings and the sources he draws upon but the point is not to apologize for slavery but to defend it.
The idea that anyone would actually want slavery tends to be overlooked by many of us here. However, the sphere of economics is still well-populated with this type of thinking, and there’s a tension between our democratic ideals and the authoritarian/aristocratic ideas that persist in the workplace. Issues such as the anti-union efforts in Wisconsin reveal this authoritarian lineage. It wasn’t about the money that could be saved at the expense of public employees but the fact that they had rights and people such as Rushdoony or Benjamin M. Palmer don’t like this.