The Southern Lie

[marjaerwin]

No, the war was not about "states' rights," it was about slavery.

For decades the slaveholders in the South had sought to expand slavery into the West and impose slavery on the North.

If they had cared about "states' rights," they wouldn't have forced the Fugitive Slave Act and the Mexican War, and wouldn't have sent federal marshals to force Massachusetts to comply with the Fugitive Slave Act. If they had cared about "states' rights" they wouldn't have invaded Kansas in 1854 and neutral Kentucky in 1861. If they had cared about local autonomy they would not have invaded eastern Tennessee or western Virginia in 1861.

But they went to war for slavery, by their own admission. It's in the various articles of secession and the Cornerstone Speech.

Now it's easy to understand why Southern institutions push this lie, but it's harder to understand why the wider public has bought into the lie. I think it absolves the Southern politicians for the war, but just as importantly, it absolves their Northern counterparts for turning their backs on reconstruction, land reform, and civil rights for the freed victims of the slave system.

Inspired by the recent Salon excerpt from Tracy Thompson's The New Mind of the South

http://www.salon.com/2013/03/16/the_south_still_lies_about_the_civil_war

And by James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me

http://www.alibris.com/booksearch?qwork=22520482

By the way, tomorrow is Saint Patrick's Day. Given the topic, let's remember that Saint Patrick was himself enslaved by Irish raiders for six years before escaping.

Comments

[radgeek (from livejournal.com)]

". . . No, the war was not about 'states' rights,' it was about slavery."

How is a claim like this supposed to be evaluated? It's obviously true and easily documented that the Confederate government, and before that the politicians who went on to run it, cared mainly about perpetuating and expanding slavery, and very little about "states' rights," local autonomy, etc. It's also clear, and I think also easily documented, that when the war started, Lincoln, his war cabinet, and his generals did not raise their army or invade Virginia with the intention of ending slavery, but rather because they regarded secession as treason, had their own nationalist and materialist reasons for wanting to keep the Southern states under the control of their government, and intended to use overwhelming force to restore the political status quo ante, including the preservation of slavery in the South and its enforcement by means of federal bayonets. (Not even to get into the complexity of talking about the views and motives of people other than the politicians who were also caught up in the Civil War.) Part of that changed, years later, as the war dragged on; views also changed, somewhat less, on the Confederate side (remember Loewen's discussion of the increasing incoherence of Southern newspaper editorials in the late war). So what are we supposed to say that the war was "about"? The thing that inspired secession? The thing that inspired the attack on Ft. Sumter, or the retaliatory invasion? The things that sustained the war, either on the winning side or on the losing side? Because it seems to me that these aren't all the same thing -- the motives and practices weren't equal-but-opposite mirrors of each other.

[radgeek (from livejournal.com)]

I mean, I mention this in part because I think it has to be understood as part of the answer to your later question, about the way that the Lost Cause myth is perpetuated in the first place -- growing up in Alabama one of the most common things for me to see happen was for someone to point out that, you know, slavery was pretty important to the Confederates and this was a reason not to fly the battle flag or celebrate dead Confederate generals or to put up statues memorializing slaving murderers like Lee, Jackson, Jeff Davis, Forrest, etc. And the immediate first line of response was always to insist that the war really wasn't "about slavery" and to defend this claim by citing Lincoln's "paramount object" letter to Greeley or his first inaugural address; or by referring to slavery in the border states, Grant's sometime slaveholding, or various other sorts of standard loosely-sourced neo-Confederate talking points. Of course this is all a red herring -- it could be completely true that Lincoln et al.'s motives were completely dishonorable and had little to do with ending slavery, and yet still remain also completely true that the Confederates' motives were also completely dishonorable and had everything to do with perpetuating slavery. But the point of the response is to rely on, and reinforce, the two-side, mirror-image picture of how to talk about a war -- so that if you can show that one side in the war had less than admirable motives, this somehow explains and vindicates the "other" side without needing to look at what they actually said or did.

That by itself doesn't explain the institutional persistence of the mythistory outside of the South, but I think the answer to that is that these patterns of arguments, deployed in favor of both the Union and the Confederate "sides," ultimately rely on and reinforce basically the rhetorical equivalent of a two-party system with respect to attitudes toward the Civil War. And while part of the function of a two-party system is to put on a showcase of enmity and rivalry between the "sides," the other, ulterior function of it is to constrain debate within the horizons of picking one of the two "sides," and to hide the deeper loyalty that they have to each other (in this case, the deep loyalty between the Nationalist and the neo-Confederate schools of history -- being to the ideals of American nationalism, governmentalism and white supremacy).

And one of the most important outcomes of such systems is to create and promote a sort of muddled-middle "moderate" bipartisanship -- in this case, the reconciliationist, "Bungling Generation" schools of history, which became and remained the dominant institutionalized approach to Civil War history for most of the century between the end of the war and the early impact of the Freedom struggle on education and academic history, very deliberately trying to split the difference between the two sides so as to vindicate their motives by making the whole thing out as an error of judgment, and to view the real malefactors as having been the "extremists" and "fanatics" (the white Southern fire-eaters on the one hand, and Garrison, Douglass, John Brown, etc. on the other -- it's really pretty remarkable how unremittingly hostile mainstream historical and textbook writing on the abolitionists was during most of the 20th century) who rejected the entire two-party political apparatus as such, and so supposedly instigated the crisis. I agree that the aims of a white-supremacist political reconciliation -- the abandonment of Reconstruction, complicity in the rise of Jim Crow, etc. -- were a central part of the mechanism, but I think it's just as important to keep an eye on how much apparent conflict and enmity there was in the different retellings of history being put out throughout this time -- it's just that it was apparent conflict whose rhetorical parameters and horizons were carefully managed to allow some kinds of argument and not others. The erasure of slavery from the picture is to a great extent a consequence of that stage-managing.

[marjaerwin]

I certainly don't mean to defend the Unionist war aims. Only to expose a strain of history I had to deal with in Virginia, about the Confederate war aims. I mean... tarriffs? as a major cause of the war?

I think the presence of slavery made secession more explosive than it would have been in the absence of slavery. First off, slavery was itself war. An independent slavery-based state would require substantial armed forces to patrol its borders and prevent escapes. Second, slavery was unpopular in large areas of the south, some of which sided with the Union. Lincoln couldn't abandon west Virginia. Conversely, Davis couldn't permit a series of pro-Union states from west Virginia through east Tennessee, which would have made it infinitely harder for the Confederacy to patrol its borders. Third, Fire-Eaters had been demanding the expansion of slavery. Sooner or later they would attempt again to seize Kansas, or New Maxico, or even Pennsylvania. Fourth, the secession of some slave states destroyed the 'balance' between the slave states and the 'free' states. If it left only a few slave states, as it did, it could easily lead to civil war within these remaining slave states between factions trying to keep them in the Union and factions trying to shift them into the Confederacy. Isn't that what happened in Missouri? Fifth, if Maryland secedes, it leads to a Fort Sumter crisis over DC.

So instead of Bleeding Kansas, independence would lead to a long bleeding border from the Atlantic to the plains. Given their actions in the previous decade, I'm not sure the Confederates really aimed for independence, so much as to provoke a war - and grossly underestimating the North militarily - expecting to conquer the remainder of the Union.

[radgeek (from livejournal.com)]

Marja,

Thanks for this. And I didn't mean to suggest that you were trying to defend Unionist war aims. I just think it's important to stress the worst-of-both-worlds character of the motives on each side of the war -- partly because it's indicative of something pretty generally true about wars between governments, but also because of the concerns I have about how the usual mirror-image models of what the war was or wasn't "about" tend to feed off each other, and actually strengthen Nationalist, neo-Confederate and reconciliationist accounts, at the expense of the truth (and of accounts that might get a glance at the war through more marginalized eyes). I am on the whole an old Garrisonian about the whole thing, and think that peaceful disunion would have greatly aided the cause of emancipation by substantially destabilizing the Confederate states' ability to go on enforcing slavery; but meanwhile the collapse of the system from within would have laid the material and political groundwork for a much more positive post-emancipation outcome (both for former slaves who would be in a much stronger position to claim their due, and also for the poor whites who were fairly mercilessly in the cross-fire throughout the war).

[radgeek (from livejournal.com)]

I agree that slavery is itself civil war, and feeds every other kind of war (from the slave-patrol conscript system, Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, the war on Mexico, the designs on Cuba, Bleeding Kansas, sending the Marines into Boston to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act, Harper's Ferry, etc. etc. etc.); and you're right about the Confederacy necessarily being a garrison state; on the other hand, I think that in the nonce, it would have found its military, militia, pattyrollers and slave-catchers increasingly unsustainable once they were no longer subsidized by the North. All the things you mentioned would have course be potential powderkegs, although I'd say it's also important to keep in mind that the borders of the Confederacy would not necessarily have reached up to the Upper South if not for Lincoln's decision to invade -- since the mustering of the Army seems pretty clearly to be what pushed the secession votes over the edge in Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina and Arkansas, which would substantially change the Realpolitik considerations for Lincoln (about the occupation of Maryland, etc.). It would also on the one hand, reduce the ability of the rump Union to act as a new haven for fugitive slaves (if they are still trying to accommodate the Upper Southern slave governments), but, on the other, would also strongly reduce the Gulf States' military ability to sustain slavery within their own territory, or to seize territory to the west. It may well be that their remaining in the Union would become an increasingly untenable project if things went as I hope they would (i.e., towards increasing anti-slavery sentiment, the non-enforcement or repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act, etc.) but even there, it would be an interesting question to see what would happen in the states with the largest centers of white anti-slavery / anti-planter sentiment and generally the softest, least-consolidated pro-slavery opinion among the planter elite (e.g. in Tennessee and Virginia). In either case, I suspect that the Gulf states would be significantly destabilized by a flood of fugitive slaves (much as happened anyway, in the event), rebellions, and maroon communities aided by Northern abolitionists. They no doubt would have taken this as a casus belli against the North, but on the other hand they would in that case be even more ill-equipped to sustain any kind of border fight, even with partisan support, than they turned out to be.

As for what the secessionists expected to happen, I strongly suspect that depends a lot on the folks in question -- the ideology of the planter elite in the states that would most likely be staging grounds for a northward attack, tended to be the least inclined towards overt expansionism; the Gulf State fire-eaters tended to be the most hotheadedly expansionist but also the most likely to actually have some kind of genuine ideological interest in secessionist ideas and an ideology of independent regional identity, and I think in general the least interested in grand plans of conquering the North (although they may well have had their eyes on D.C. and ultimately expected an end-game in which the Feds would have to beat a humiliating retreat to a rump Union capital above the Mason-Dixon line, and their bottom-line commitment to the expansion of slavery may well have had an objective tendency towards forcing a number crises, regardless of their intentions, if they had ever managed to gain any significant political influence of the CSA apparat); meanwhile Davis and the rest of the political class that took over administration of the CSA were hawkish but overwhelmingly dominated by a fair amount of cold ambition. If anything I expect that the most likely flashpoints with the Feds, if there had been no immediate invasion and if they were not wholly occupied with the disaster that administering their existing slave empire was almost certain to become, would be over the status of the border states (as you mention), but probably even more over control of and access to the Western territories.

[radgeek (from livejournal.com)]

And yes, lordy, I agree the tariffs thing is some real hog-swallop. (Let alone the absurd mythistory that goes into trying to establish that it could'na been about slavery, Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, et al. were really, actually, agin it.)

Slavery

[catskillmarina.livejournal.com]

Have you ever been to John Brown's fort in Harpers Ferry ? I sometimes run the hill across from Harpers Ferry - when i am there i like to walk across the bridge and see that little place.