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)]

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.