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You are here: Home / Organizing & Resistance / Fables Of The Reconstruction / Confederate History Month: Lending a Hand

Confederate History Month: Lending a Hand

by Dennis G.|  April 17, 20109:57 pm| 79 Comments

This post is in: Fables Of The Reconstruction, Good News For Conservatives

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It is heart warming to see so many folks decide to lend a hand to the Republican Confederate Party as they celebrate Confederate History Month.

ConfederateGOP Logo

I think this whole CHM thing is turning out differently than intended and that is a sign of hope.

Just a few days ago the Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity chapter at the College of William and Mary took action to remind Governor McDonnell that not all Virginians share his festive mood about treason and slavery. And now Bob the Reb wants to have a meeting. It is mighty white of him.

Over at the Southern Political Report, John A. Tures decided to fact check the question, ‘Was the Confederacy really about slavery?‘ and it turns out that it was:

So I ran a hypothesis test to determine if states left the Union to join the Confederacy over slavery, or whether that was more of a side issue. I located the declarations of secession for four different states that were available: South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, and Texas.

The word “slave” appears 82 times in these four state declarations. The states even refer to themselves as “Slave-Holding States.” I always thought that was a Northern term. On the other hand, the words “State’s rights,” “states’ rights” or “states rights” do not appear in any of these four secession declarations. The word “rights” appears 14 times and “right” appears 32 times, but many of these references involve “the right to own slaves.”

As a bonus he looked at the economic arguments and found that it was about slavery:

Was it about economics? Cotton and rice don’t appear. Plantation is noted once, but it refers to a place in Rhode Island. Tariffs are never discussed. Tax is mentioned once. Nullification is not included either, though “null” appears three times, mostly to do with leaving the Union. “Econ” (as in economics, economy or any other term) is mentioned twice. And if you read the declarations, they are chock full of excuses for the necessity of slavery that would make the most political incorrect person today cringe

And in Sunday’s New York Times Frank Rich lends his considerable talents to help the Republican Confederate Party celebrate Confederate History Month. Here are a few choice excerpts:

…once McDonnell was asked to explain why there was no mention of slavery in his declaration honoring “the sacrifices of the Confederate leaders, soldiers and citizens.” After acknowledging that slavery was among “any number of aspects to that conflict between the states,” the governor went on to say that he had focused on the issues “I thought were most significant for Virginia.” Only when some of his own black supporters joined editorialists in observing that slavery was significant to some Virginians too — a fifth of the state’s population is black — did he beat a retreat and apologize.

But his original point had been successfully volleyed, and it was not an innocent mistake. McDonnell’s words have a well-worn provenance. In “Race and Reunion,” the definitive study of Civil War revisionism, the historian David W. Blight documents the long trajectory of the insidious campaign to erase slavery from the war’s history and reconfigure the lost Southern cause as a noble battle for states’ rights against an oppressive federal government. In its very first editorial upon resuming publication in postwar 1865, The Richmond Dispatch characterized the Civil War as a struggle for the South’s “sense of rights under the Constitution.” The editorial contained not “a single mention of slavery or black freedom,” Blight writes. That evasion would be a critical fixture of the myth-making to follow ever since. [snip]

The temperature is higher now than it was a month ago. It’s not happenstance that officials from the Sons of Confederate Veterans in Virginia and Mississippi have argued, as one said this month, that the Confederate Army had been “fighting for the same things that people in the Tea Party are fighting for.” Obama opposition increasingly comes wrapped in the racial code that McDonnell revived in endorsing Confederate History Month. The state attorneys general who are invoking states’ rights in their lawsuits to nullify the federal health care law are transparently pushing the same old hot buttons. [snip]

How our current spike in neo-Confederate rebellion will end is unknown.

There is more and the entire column is worth your time. In the age of Michael Steele, Conservative Confederacy worship, TeaBaggers, Obama hatred and fear, Rich makes another point about wingnuts–especially Republican wingnuts–that is spot on:

What is known is that the nearly all-white G.O.P. is so traumatized by race it has now morphed into a bizarre paragon of both liberal and conservative racial political correctness.

Poor babies, life is unfair and their celebration of CHM is just adding to their insecurities.

Happy to help.

Cheers

dengre

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Reader Interactions

79Comments

  1. 1.

    Loneoak

    April 17, 2010 at 10:04 pm

    Confederate History Month could be a delightful blogistan tradition — use April to focus relentlessly on the right’s profound racism.

  2. 2.

    handy

    April 17, 2010 at 10:04 pm

    Really enjoying this series dengre. Keep up the good work.

  3. 3.

    Mark S.

    April 17, 2010 at 10:10 pm

    I have never understood the argument that it had to do with economics. Well, yeah, the North and the South had different economic agendas because one side was industrial and the other was slave-based agricultural.

    In one of the earlier threads there was a discussion about corporate personhood and it reminded how from around 1880 to the time of the New Deal, the 14th Amendment was basically used to protect corporations and other moneyed interests. The Court had little problem with Jim Crow laws.

  4. 4.

    El Cid

    April 17, 2010 at 10:14 pm

    As a native white Southerner, please let me repeat how disgusted I am with those who attempt to define the contemporary American South with the legacy of the supporters of the Confederacy and the ‘Lost Cause’rs who rebuilt this nonsense ‘honorable’ legacy from the 1880s to through the 1950s.

    Again, the majority of our nation’s African Americans reside here in the South, as do so many of our nation’s Latinos, as well as plenty of other ethnic groups (white included) who have no love for the slave plantation economy, the traitorous Confederate battle to destroy the Union in defense of slavery, the post-Civil War / post-Reconstruction terror wars against political and civil rights, or the 60-70 years of Jim Crow malfeasance.

    These bastards may still have a disproportionate political and ideological power, but they no more speak for ‘the South’ than the TeaTards speak for ‘the Nation’.

  5. 5.

    kay

    April 17, 2010 at 10:17 pm

    I love this.

    On the health insurance lawsuits:

    “They tried it here in Arkansas in ’57 and it didn’t work,” Gov. Mike Beebe (D) told reporters recently. “I think you got to tell people the truth. And if I understand the law, the truth is the federal government can’t just be defied by the state governments.”

  6. 6.

    El Cid

    April 17, 2010 at 10:23 pm

    Frank’s line about the “just whistling Dixie,” by the way, references Jim Crow, apartheid- and death squad enthusiast NC Senator Jesse Helms’ treatment of African American Senator Carole Moseley Braun, as he reportedly began whistling “Dixie” in the elevator when she was present. (He also suggested that if Bill Clinton were to visit NC he should wear a ‘flak jacket’, but in no way should anything like that ever be taken the wrong way.)

  7. 7.

    d.s.

    April 17, 2010 at 10:23 pm

    @El Cid:

    You end up getting defined by your leaders and the prevailing trends. That’s just how it works.

    When Democrats removed the Confederate flag from the Georgia state flag there was a massive freakout that ended up flipping control of the state legislature and the governorship to Republicans.

    The Confederate sympathizers aren’t a fringe. They’re a pivotal force in Southern politics.

    If the TeaTards succeed in electing their candidates and enacting their “agenda” then we won’t be able to write them off as a fringe force that doesn’t speak for the public.

  8. 8.

    Dennis G.

    April 17, 2010 at 10:24 pm

    @El Cid:

    I think it is important to remember that the terms ‘Confederate’ and ‘Southern’ are not interchangeable. It is always a mistake when one extends the problems of the Confederacy to the South as a whole.

    It is true that the Republican Confederate Party is strongest in the South, but they are in every State and their myths, lies and ideology can be found everywhere.

    In my life I have lived in Michigan, Colorado, Georgia, Texas, Georgia and Maryland. I found a strong Confederate Party in each of those States.

    And I have also found people fighting this philosophy of hate everywhere. This ain’t about geography. It is about justice.

    Cheers

  9. 9.

    Greg

    April 17, 2010 at 10:25 pm

    I prefer “Treason Awareness Month” when speaking of the Confederacy.

  10. 10.

    Annie

    April 17, 2010 at 10:25 pm

    Dennis G — thanks…You truly are a treasure

    cheers,

    Annie

  11. 11.

    El Cid

    April 17, 2010 at 10:34 pm

    @Dennis G.: Just to be clear, I’m not suggesting that you or anyone sane is conflating ‘the South’ with the neo-Confederate nut-squad — rather that this is one of the traditional ‘we’re so oppressed and the victim of elite anti-Southern attitude’ games played by the neo-Redeemer types. They want ‘the South’ to be conceptualized as exclusively the white, conservative, Jim Crow recidivist South, just as the TeaTards want to define ‘the Nation’ as exclusively consisting of TeaTards, just as the Bush Juniorites defined ‘American’ as only including those in favor of invading & occupying Iraq.

  12. 12.

    valdivia

    April 17, 2010 at 10:35 pm

    yes thanks for this series. excellent.

  13. 13.

    General Egali Tarian Stuck

    April 17, 2010 at 10:39 pm

    And to top it all off, now it looks like the GOP aka Confederate Party is seceding from itself. Wonder why, Mr. Steele? Woe is they.

  14. 14.

    El Cid

    April 17, 2010 at 10:41 pm

    @d.s.: I’m not so worried about how ‘we’ are defined as I am denying the neo-Confederate fucktards the ability to claim an entire god-damned region as their own. I’m cool with people mocking the Southtards, I do it all the time. What we can’t do for one second is allow these right wing shitbags to claim an entire region as their own when it is an ethno-political sub-culture we’re talking about.

    There’s nothing these fuckers like more than pretending ‘we’re all’ like this and it’s somehow us poor Southrons bein’ looked down on by the book larnin’ Starbucks latte-sippin’ ay-leets from ‘tha Eastern Establishment’ and please won’t the Palintards speak up for us poor good Southern Real Amurkan pure as driven snow rural folk.

    My state of Georgia might be predominantly run by neo-Confederate TeaTard frauds, but that doesn’t mean that all those of us not in that group — particularly the huuuuuge black and Latino and Asian population of Georgia — should let these 1890s fetishist freaks think they are the only people here.

    Good grief, even in Georgia, Obama got 47% of the vote. Fuck you, Lost Causetards.

  15. 15.

    Belafon (formerly anonevent)

    April 17, 2010 at 10:43 pm

    @El Cid: I grew up in Texas, and have been back here after college and the Navy. I will say, other than a small minority, Texans still want to believe everything Dennis keeps bringing up: The North attacked the South unfairly, it was about states rights, and blacks – other than the ones they work with – just get handouts and never actually do any work. One “friend” I know, who I otherwise consider sane, still believes that the states have the right to secede. Even concerning health care, these people believe that the new law just means that “those” will not work.

    As another friend of mine says, there are reason stereotypes exist.

    @El Cid: A valiant fight, and I’m right along with you, but there sure are a lot of windmills.

  16. 16.

    angulimala

    April 17, 2010 at 10:46 pm

    One wonders what the revisionists think when they read those Declarations of Secession.

  17. 17.

    ellaesther

    April 17, 2010 at 10:49 pm

    @El Cid: I’m very interested to see this. I’ve been thinking a lot lately — even before CHM! — about the experience of being someone like you. What does it mean to come from a place and culture that the broader culture identifies so thoroughly as being largely defined by the Civil War and its aftermath, and by all the racism and backwardness that is assumed in that definition — when clearly, not everyone living in the South can be fairly seen that way. Or, as you said: “These bastards may still have a disproportionate political and ideological power, but they no more speak for ‘the South’ than the TeaTards speak for ‘the Nation’. ”

    My contribution to CHM has been to work on getting to know a few heroes of the American South, people I should have heard of but never did before: General George Henry Thomas, Elizabeth Van Lew, Robert Smalls, and Andre Callioux. Southerners who fought for freedom and justice for American Blacks, and for the preservation of the Union.
    http://emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com/2010/04/14/confederate-history-month/

    As Dennis G. says, “I think this whole CHM thing is turning out differently than intended and that is a sign of hope.”

  18. 18.

    monkeyboy

    April 17, 2010 at 10:57 pm

    @Mark S.:

    I have never understood the argument that it had to do with economics. Well, yeah, the North and the South had different economic agendas because one side was industrial and the other was slave-based agricultural.

    In terms of immediate needs, the Northern industrialists wanted both high import and export tariffs so that their products enjoyed a price advantage over imports and they could buy say Southern cotton at an advantage over the British. Southern planters wanted the higher prices the British might pay without tariffs and wanted to buy manufactured goods at the least cost, whether domestic or imported.

    The U.S. had to have a national economic policy or otherwise say if South Carolina was a duty free zone then it would turn into a transhipment center.

    In the short term, Northern industrialists didn’t care about slavery and some may have appreciated it because it gave cheap cotton, but as long as they could buy it cheaper than the British could they were happy.

    In the long term, Northern industrialists wanted to preserver the union because of economic and potential military competition with France and Britain (the War of 1812 was fairly recent), preferential access to domestic production, and maybe they thought free people would have money to buy their products and be willing productive workers in their industries.

    The South’s long terms goals was basically to perpetuate their status quo, grow in size, and sell for more while buying for less. What finally freaked them out was the prohibition of slavery in the new territories, which they thought would soon turn into prohibition in the old South. The Abolitionist movement was not all that large in the North and it didn’t have much economic power behind it (it was mainly middle class do-gooder women and their preachers). However it was the scary enemy that the South rallied to fight against.

    If the South had been allowed to succeed, how many different countries would the present U.S. be divided into and how many wars would there have been fought between them?

  19. 19.

    d.s.

    April 17, 2010 at 11:00 pm

    @El Cid:

    It’s pretty obvious when liberals attack crazy Southern politicians they’re not talking about Jim Clyburn and John Lewis.

    I object to the idea that you can never make any characterizations about a region. I think it’s implicit when you do so you’re talking about the majority, or the prevailing trend, and not about every single inhabitant in the region.

  20. 20.

    Tazistan Jen

    April 17, 2010 at 11:03 pm

    I think this whole CHM thing is turning out differently than intended and that is a sign of hope.

    Exactly so. I have learned a ton – mostly that my teachers were far too polite about the confederacy.

  21. 21.

    Dennis G.

    April 17, 2010 at 11:04 pm

    @El Cid:

    I get you point and I was attempting to reinforce it. These neo-Confederate TeaTard fuckwads are everywhere. Folks expect them to be in South and they are. They are also everywhere else. This is getting the wheels turning about another CHM post.

    Cheers

  22. 22.

    Tazistan Jen

    April 17, 2010 at 11:05 pm

    @El Cid:

    I am denying the neo-Confederate fucktards the ability to claim an entire god-damned region as their own.

    I get it. Sorry you are being misunderstood.

    My mom (the original hippy) loves the U.S. flag and always says the wingnuts can’t claim it for just them. She always carries one when she goes to a peace march. :-)

  23. 23.

    Tazistan Jen

    April 17, 2010 at 11:07 pm

    @Dennis G.:

    These neo-Confederate TeaTard fuckwads are everywhere.

    Yeah, the culture is the most concentrated in the south, but there are pockets everywhere.

  24. 24.

    monkeyboy

    April 17, 2010 at 11:25 pm

    Have you noticed that the U.S. flag (the Stars and Stripes) has become the new Confederate flag? The only people you see at rallies carrying it are right wingers, Republicans, Confederates.

    I was at a Health Care Town Hall meeting where around 2000 people were waiting to get into an auditorium that held only 300. The Black and Hispanic in that crowd attracted a lot of ire with many people yelling at them things like “Go back to where you came from” and “I work for my health care”.

    Some young guy had tricked out his pickup truck with a pole in the rear flying a 6′ x 10′ U.S. flag. He drove it up to the high point above the parking lot where people were waiting and loudly started honking his horn, drawing a lot of cheers from the crowd.

    The U.S. flag like the Confederate flag now seems to be a dog-whistle to indicate that some Americans don’t count.

  25. 25.

    Tom

    April 17, 2010 at 11:29 pm

    @monkeyboy:

    If the South had been allowed to succeed, how many different countries would the present U.S. be divided into and how many wars would there have been fought between them?

    A hugely important point. Many castigate Lincoln for putting preservation of the Union over abolishment slavery, but Lincoln saw clearly that allowing the southern states to secede meant that the Union was a charade and the federal Constitution meaningless. The nation would quickly dissolve into loosely associated nation-states, and the United States would cease to exist in any real sense.

    Thus preserving the Union had to come first – ending slavery in the United States would have been pointless if the United States itself had ceased to exist.

  26. 26.

    KDP

    April 17, 2010 at 11:35 pm

    Thank you for these posts, I’ve found them so insightful and illuminating that I’ve been sharing them on Facebook. Gary Farber suggested that I share the existence of the, Yankee Heritage Facebook group, which honors the soldiers who put an end to slavery.

  27. 27.

    Jess

    April 17, 2010 at 11:37 pm

    From what I know about the Civil war (not an expert, just a reasonably well-educated person), not only was the South’s position primarily about slavery, but it was also a reaction AGAINST state’s rights. Certain northern states claimed the right to treat the blacks within their borders as free citizens, and the southern states wanted the federal government to intervene and force those states to capture and return any escaped slaves.

    So not much has changed–the Confederates, then and now, rewrite history, claim rights that they wish to deny others, and claim victimhood while victimizing others.

  28. 28.

    Smiling Mortician

    April 17, 2010 at 11:39 pm

    @angulimala:

    One wonders what the revisionists think when they read those Declarations of Secession.

    I see your problem. “Think” and “read”? I’m thinking no.

  29. 29.

    Kay Shawn

    April 17, 2010 at 11:42 pm

    Anybody remember the “New South” ?! Whatever happened to that?

  30. 30.

    Phoebe

    April 18, 2010 at 12:06 am

    @El Cid: There are many Alaskans who have only recently begun to feel something of your same pain. But they are outnumbered and outshouted by the Alaskans who love her. They know they are the minority, but they really hate the entire state being painted all the same shade of moron.

    That’s the trouble with states generally, and you see it during presidential elections, and these polls that color every state red and blue. I live in Missouri, which was on the absolute knife edge in the last election, and finally went for McCain when the votes were all counted maybe a week later. The reason we held on that long was because of record turnouts in dark blue St. Louis.

    I wish the colors on these maps would just be like sattelite photographs with tiny dots of red and blue, and state lines only drawn in so you could more readily identify where you lived on the map, and also no electorate college.

    Also: I’d like to join in the chorus of thanks for this series, dengre, and to CHM for the gift that keeps on giving.

  31. 31.

    Tom

    April 18, 2010 at 12:14 am

    As an aside, over at Veetle (a video streaming site – you have to download a proprietary plugin) the DOC channel is broadcasting Ken Burns’ entire Civil War Documentary on fairly regular repeats through the month. It just finished up a cycle earlier today, but should start up again tomorrow or the day after.

    http://www.veetle.com/view/index.html#4b7a4cc2adb36

    Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with Veetle or the guy who runs the DOC channel there. It’s just a cool site with lots of movies and sports.

  32. 32.

    DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)

    April 18, 2010 at 12:17 am

    Keep up the great work Dennis, you are doing an excellent job using a topical approach for the discussion (and dissection) of this subject. This needs to be an annual thing, maybe designate a week or month that… Oh yeah, they already did that for us! How considerate of them.

    They can’t bitch about it being brought up when they brought it up in the first place. If you want to let it all hang out then don’t be surprised when someone slams it in the door. :)

  33. 33.

    handy

    April 18, 2010 at 12:21 am

    the Confederates, then and now, rewrite history, claim rights that they wish to deny others, and claim victimhood while victimizing others.

    Well said. A point which can’t be made enough about the modern day GOP.

  34. 34.

    geg6

    April 18, 2010 at 12:22 am

    Dennis, you have been a treasure on this whole CHM remembrance. Between your posts and TNC’s the last few weeks, I have learned so much about the history that is rarely covered in textbooks and survey courses. As a dyed in the wool liberal Yankee, I find the whole mindset of the original and, even moreso, the neo-Confederates to be impossible to fathom. The amount of anger, resentment, self-delusion, paranoia, insecurity, dishonesty, and aggressive posturing these people have is just astonishing. They haven’t changed a bit in 150 years and they just keep nurturing the same resentments and delusions, endlessly.

    What I have found inspiring in all this historical exploration here and at TNC’s have been the stories about the black regiments and Southerners who didn’t go along with the Confederate program. The post TNC had about slave children who were slaves simply due to the “one drop” of African American blood they had was just an amazing thing to read. Not because I wasn’t aware of such things, but because this is so rarely explored in a popular medium. And of course, no one writes about such things as beautifully as TNC. It was another post he wrote that had me ordering Grant’s autobiography, my own personal way of celebrating Confederate History Month.

    Thanks for all you done on this again, Dennis.

  35. 35.

    cleter

    April 18, 2010 at 12:23 am

    If the Confederacy had come into existence because of conflict over “state’s rights,” then you would expect the Confederate constitution to have a very different balance of federal vs state power than the US Constitution, with more state power and less federal power in the Confederate version. But…that’s not how it is. The federal/state power balance is the same. The only new limitation on federal power in the Confederate constitution has to do with…you guessed it…slavery. The Confederate government was constitutionally barred from doing anything about slavery. The only new “state’s right” was the right to not have the federal government tell you what to do about slavery.

  36. 36.

    Phoebe

    April 18, 2010 at 12:26 am

    @cleter: very good point which should shut everyone up instantly. But it won’t!

  37. 37.

    The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge

    April 18, 2010 at 12:44 am

    @geg6:

    Project Gutenberg has a really nice HTML edition of General Grant’s autobiography.

    You shouldn’t take the Confederate traitors’ evaluation of Uncle Billy Sherman at face value, either. (Or the American Indian Movement’s—they tend to get him mixed up with Phil “The only good Indian is a dead Indian” Sheridan.)

    And of course Logan’s The Great Conspiracy is highly recommended, too.

    Thank goodness for Project Gutenberg! (I probably put too many links in here, but oh well—maybe somebody’s up.)

  38. 38.

    Jess

    April 18, 2010 at 1:02 am

    @cleter:

    If the Confederacy had come into existence because of conflict over “state’s rights

    And just to add to the hypocrisy of it all, as I noted above, originally the states’ rights in question were those of the northern states, who did not want to return escaped slaves to their owners in the south. The south was all for federal intervention at that point, of course.

  39. 39.

    Mum

    April 18, 2010 at 1:08 am

    @Loneoak:

    Can’t we do National Poetry Month instead?

  40. 40.

    Janet Strange

    April 18, 2010 at 1:18 am

    @Tom: This is the point I had the hardest time understanding. I read Battle Cry of Freedom and listened to David Blight’s lectures a few months ago – spurred to do it by TNC’s writing – and I kept wondering about the whole “we have to preserve the Union!” attitude of the Northerners (most of them, anyway), and of course, especially Lincoln. I kept thinking, why didn’t the North just say, OK, goodbye and good riddance?

    (I say this, btw, as a lifelong Southerner with an ancestor who fought for the Confederacy and who is very glad that that didn’t happen, that the Confederates lost, and that I was born an American.)

    I did finally get it – what you said. But I wish more time was spent on this point. Even between Blight and McPherson, it seemed like it was almost a throwaway point. They mention in passing that there was a fear that once succession was accepted, both the South and the North would simply begin to fragment into many independent countries.

    But so what, I found myself thinking. Would it be so terrible if North America were more like South America? More smaller countries instead of three large ones? As I said, I wish more writers and thinkers would encourage the thought experiment of where would be now if that had happened.

    And this is all looking at it from the point of view of 150 years later. We know what a United States of America became. We can imagine that we wouldn’t like the alternative. But was the picture so clear to Americans then? Why the willingness to endure such horror of such a terrible war for so long, so much death, so much blood. . . ?

    Not exactly my question, but TNC’s One War. Three Sides. is part of it.

  41. 41.

    Mnemosyne

    April 18, 2010 at 1:52 am

    Between this, TNC’s series, and Nixonland, it’s becoming even more clear what a devil’s bargain the Southern Strategy was, because it ended up requiring the Republican Party as a whole to adopt the traditional Southern attitudes towards things like labor relations and Lost Cause versions of “states’ rights.”

    Nixon thought he was co-opting the Southerners, but it was the other way around.

  42. 42.

    electricgrendel

    April 18, 2010 at 1:52 am

    It does seem as if April is the cruelest month. But please- don’t stop! I’m loving this series of posts. Great job!

  43. 43.

    electricgrendel

    April 18, 2010 at 1:52 am

    It does seem as if April is the cruelest month. But please- don’t stop! I’m loving this series of posts. Great job!

  44. 44.

    JGabriel

    April 18, 2010 at 1:54 am

    El Cid:

    These bastards may still have a disproportionate political and ideological power, but they no more speak for ‘the South’ than the TeaTards speak for ‘the Nation’.

    I would like to believe this. You’re there, so you should know better than those of us who aren’t, but it does make it hard to believe when the South keeps electing Confederate apologists like McDonnell and Haley Barbour.

    .

  45. 45.

    JGabriel

    April 18, 2010 at 1:58 am

    Janet Strange:

    I kept thinking, why didn’t the North just say, OK, goodbye and good riddance?

    I’m not a historian, but Southern rhetoric at the time, if I recall correctly, was opposed, not just to ending slavery, but to limiting it to the South. Were the Confederacy allowed to secede, it wouldn’t have stopped there. War would have been inevitable anyway, as each side pushed to claim territory in the West for itself. The entire country / continent would have been plunged into skirmishes and mid-grade intra-state, and intra-territory, civil wars – much like Kansas in the period preceding the War of Southern Insurrection.

    .

  46. 46.

    JGabriel

    April 18, 2010 at 2:10 am

    @RE. post 44: Please disregard – I see that the issue was more fully discussed as the thread proceeded. Shouldn’t have jumped in without reading the following discussion.

    .

  47. 47.

    Linkmeister

    April 18, 2010 at 2:33 am

    I just reserved the book Rich cites in his column at my library (“Race and Reunion,” the definitive study of Civil War revisionism, [by] the historian David W. Blight).

    This whole episode has gotten me to read books I’d not have otherwise read. Dave Noon of Lawyers Guns & Money suggested “Forever Free” by Eric Foner, which Noon says would be the most definitive account of Reconstruction if not for Foner’s earlier book “Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877.”

  48. 48.

    slightly_peeved

    April 18, 2010 at 3:59 am

    I kept thinking, why didn’t the North just say, OK, goodbye and good riddance?

    Considering that one group wanted to keep people as slaves and the other didn’t, I’m guessing one of the reasons the Union didn’t was Fuck the Confederacy, That’s Why.

    As seen in Europe in the subsequent century, reasons for war aren’t always necessarily done on what could be described as an entirely pragmatic basis. Often wars were declared because one side figured they could smash the other in one decisive strike and be home by Christmas. Maybe the Union just figured they were going to kick the Confederacy’s ass.

    And they did.

  49. 49.

    Viva BrisVegas

    April 18, 2010 at 4:44 am

    @Janet Strange:

    why didn’t the North just say, OK, goodbye and good riddance?

    Because before Lincoln even had a chance to decide on a course of action, Beauregard fired on Fort Sumpter.

    Asking why the North didn’t choose not to fight after Fort Sumpter is like asking why the US didn’t refuse to fight after Pearl Harbor. The decision was made for them by a belligerent enemy.

    Refusing to initiate the war was probably the only way that the Confederacy could have successfully seceded. Unfortunately for them they were too arrogant to understand that.

  50. 50.

    El Cid

    April 18, 2010 at 5:00 am

    @d.s.: I didn’t suggest you couldn’t make any generalizations about a region. I generalize about the South all the time.

    For example, every time there’s a poll on Obama’s approval ratings, I have to look and see if there’s a regional breakdown, because it’s usually (see R2K and Gallup breakdowns) the case that Obama is very highly approved of in every region of the country except the South, which drags the average down.

    This isn’t confusing.

    You either let these right wing neo-Confederate shit-heads prance around acting like they own an entire region of the country because right now they still have the most political power here, or you try to keep complexifying the system. You shove the fact that there are huge populations who reject their view in their face.

    Or not. Do whatever you want. I don’t give a shit. I’ve had to put up enough with these shit-heads growing up here, such that every time one of these jackasses tries to talk about what “we” feel down “here” in “the South”, I remind them, “What you mean ‘we’, kemosabe?”

  51. 51.

    cs

    April 18, 2010 at 5:04 am

    @angulimala:

    Speaking from experience, if you expose the revisionists to the original documents, you either get very cold silence from them or they will actually admit they never had seen them before and they’ll start to change their minds about the merits of the Confederacy. Either way, you win the argument in a satisfyingly firm manner.

  52. 52.

    El Cid

    April 18, 2010 at 5:27 am

    @JGabriel:

    I would like to believe this. You’re there, so you should know better than those of us who aren’t, but it does make it hard to believe when the South keeps electing Confederate apologists like McDonnell and Haley Barbour.

    Well, the place is full of a whole lot of shit-heads, apparently more and more concentrated than other places.

    What can you say? Jesse Helms almost lost to a black liberal city mayor. He barely pulled it off, but Helms won. We were stuck and the nation was stuck with 6 more years of the bastard. But maybe the ‘almost’ was important.

    It helped inspire a lot more Republicans to flat-out racist campaign advertising, and Mr. ‘White Hands’ ad author Alex Castellanos still gets to be on CNN panels where he gets to ask after Obama won the NC primary if this means Obama will appoint Bill Ayers to a cabinet position, and John King has to put the worthless pile of shit Urk Urksun on the TV box, a guy whose great Macon government claim to fame was trying to defund the police.

    And thank god the national Democratic Party no longer thinks you have to have a conservative seeming Southerner on the ticket to win Presidential elections and base your campaign on what the Southern Reagan Democrats might want.

    On the other hand, black and Latino and certain urban areas in the South send a pretty high number of Democrats to Congress, and occasional Senators. Over time we’ll get more of that. Especially if it keeps sinking in to Southern conservatives that they don’t have veto power over every national election, and OMG, what if eventually non-Southern Republicans start thinking that they may not want these neo-Confederate concrete shoes on all the time?

    In the meantime things change and also stay the same, and I’ll expect as normal a bunch of screaming from politicians and Talibangelicals and TeaTards about Obamunism or “HA IT’S COLD IN THE WINTER EXPLAIN THAT AL GORE” and Jesus rode with dinosaurs and ‘I didn’t come from no monkey‘ and hear from people I have never met how ‘someone’ has to ‘get rid of’ the President, and of course I’ll have to say, yup, I’m still in the fucking South, but I do bear in mind that with demographics being what they are, even down here those types won’t be the majority forever.

  53. 53.

    Xenos

    April 18, 2010 at 6:17 am

    @JGabriel: Actually, your point about Bloody Kansas is an important one. After the outrage of Dred Scott and the ongoing horror of Kansas many in the North and the border states saw a future of chaos and anarchy if the Confederacy was not destroyed. This view was pretty hardened before the South seceded, but the Confederates appear to have not understood how far the rest of the country was willing to go to stop such a future.

    I suspect that there was a lot of ‘epistemic closure’ of the Confederate mind at the time… the Confederates were believing their own press releases, then just as now.

  54. 54.

    WereBear (itouch)

    April 18, 2010 at 6:26 am

    El Cid’s point about Southern prejudice reminds us it is a sword which cuts both ways. When I hear certain accents Up North, I don’t assume anything about their attitudes; because how can I?

    Those who do have regrettable attitudes are an embattled minority now, in some cases in their own cities. Television shows don’t have to worry that having a black character will mean the show gets cut up or pre-empted, as was true in my childhood.

    And if this state of affairs chaps some hides: good.

  55. 55.

    elaneland

    April 18, 2010 at 6:38 am

    @Loneoak:
    April 1st will do just fine.

  56. 56.

    Jamey

    April 18, 2010 at 7:07 am

    @Loneoak:

    use April to focus relentlessly on the right’s profound racism.

    Can that really be accomplished in only one month a year?

  57. 57.

    Boudica

    April 18, 2010 at 9:02 am

    If I recall correctly, in “Drawn with the Sword” ( a great book about the Civil War, btw), the author makes the point that preserving the Union was important because we were such a new country. If our little experiment with democracy failed after 80 some odd years, it would be an embarrassment in front of the Europeans who had their doubts about this whole democracy thing, and then a return to monarchy could ensue. Governance of the people, by the people and for the people would end.

  58. 58.

    Admiral_Komack

    April 18, 2010 at 9:36 am

    @cs:
    Or they will change the subject.

  59. 59.

    Dennis G.

    April 18, 2010 at 9:43 am

    @Xenos:

    Violence was/is as importance to the Confederate Party as was/is slavery/racism. This point is often missed as the slavery question takes center stage, but these fuckers are always quick to resort to violence from Kansas Bloody Kansas to the KKK to Tim McVeigh to the ‘lone wolf’ Teatards of the day. That is why calls to reload and “come armed next time” carry such a real threat.

    Cheers

  60. 60.

    Bob L

    April 18, 2010 at 9:54 am

    @Mark S.: The plantation system that was economic bases of The South required slavery because the margins were so low. If they just released their slaves The Southern economy would collapse, even Lincoln admitted this.

    The joke was this was a viscous circle. Slavery undercut the free labor so no middle class could form in The South to diversify the Southern economy to the point it wasn’t solely dependent on slave grown cotton.

  61. 61.

    jrosen

    April 18, 2010 at 10:01 am

    The argument of the 1850’s (abolitionists, a relatively small minority, aside) was about the status of slavery in the “new” territories, those wrested from Mexico in the War of 1848. You all might want to Google “Cooper Union Speech” amd “Sam Waterson” to see the latter’s delivery of the speech that made Lincoln a contender for the President in 1860. The question of slavery in the territories and the right of the Federal government to regulate it was the entire subject of the speech, which was not only a rebuttal of Stephen Douglas’ “popular sovereignty” dodge, but also the Dred Scott decision.*

    And there was an economic reason for the controversy. The agricultural methods of cotton farming tended to deplete the soil, so that after some time, it became less productive. (Ultimately this created the “Dust Bowl” of the ’30s.) So in order to survive, cotton growing, and the slavery that made it possible, had to expand to fresh soil or expire. Lincoln’s stated policy before the war was not to interfere with slavery where it existed;he and many others expected that it would die a natural death if it were contained. (His private opinion was that it was wrong.) This of course was also clear to those who dominated the slave states politically and it was why they fought, sometimes literally to the death (cf. Kansas and Missouri) to expand into the territories.

    The actual process of secession and the formation of the Confederacy was a complex thing…Lincoln as President had to maneuver carefully so that the rebellion started the shooting…and obviously he was successful.

    BTW, I am of the opinion that that sort of racism which denies the humanity of the subjugated is really a form of bad conscience. Somehow we all know that, as our sense of morality has developed, treating a human being as property is deeply wrong. If that is so, there are two courses possible: stop the subjugation (which could entail much pain, economic and psychic) or deny the humanity of the subjugated. It’s obvious which is the more convenient path.

    *Is “Citizens United” our own Dred Scott case? Discuss.

  62. 62.

    frankdawg

    April 18, 2010 at 11:02 am

    this entire series has made me glad to have an internet, you all deserve some credit, Dennis most of all.

    I’d like to add a tiny thought on “what would have happened if the North just let the South go”

    One of the least discussed preoccupation of the slave holders pre-1860 was in exporting plantation life to the rest of the new world. ‘We’ invaded Cuba several times and even succeeded in setting up Southern style, plantation supporting governments in Central America by force of arms.

    Plantation owners would regularly raise armies and send them to Central American nations to overthrow the local government and install an “American” one. I expect, particularly after the US Army kicked their asses if they tried that out West, this would have become their focus & Spain (weak as she might have been) and France would have stepped up to protect their interests there. That might have been fun.

  63. 63.

    El Cid

    April 18, 2010 at 11:29 am

    @frankdawg: South America was the destination of most of the Africans brought in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade in plantation agriculture (hugely in sugar, which arguably launched the major phase of the slave trade in plantation slavery production in parts of Portugal and particularly off the coast on the island of Madeira), and U.S. plantations were largely mimicking the slave plantations of the Caribbean which were the first major ones of the hemisphere, so it’s unlikely that the existence of a separate Confederacy would have affected the existing slave states in the Southern hemisphere.

    @jrosen:
    Plantation agriculture, to be sure, was used in all the labor intensive crops of the South — not just King Cotton, but tobacco (the first cash crop of the colonies), rice (particularly in South Carolina) and more.

  64. 64.

    EdTheRed

    April 18, 2010 at 12:24 pm

    Plantation is noted once, but it refers to a place in Rhode Island.

    Heh. New England history fail. It doesn’t refer to a place in Rhode Island, it refers to Rhode Island itself, the full official name of which is Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.

  65. 65.

    Just Me

    April 18, 2010 at 12:34 pm

    Where I live in Florida, the trend for a while has been to name new upscale housing developments “plantations,” as in Oak Leaf Plantation. I’ve long thought it was a not-so-subtle way of keeping the undesirables out. What black person would voluntarily live on a plantation? (ok, maybe one with a sense of irony)

    But it’s not about slavery. Not at all.

  66. 66.

    Pangloss

    April 18, 2010 at 12:55 pm

    So I guess this means that Abe Lincoln and Lincoln Chafee have more in common than a shared name.

  67. 67.

    scott

    April 18, 2010 at 1:11 pm

    BTW the best blogging on CHM is over at TNC’s place. Very illuminating and alot of it is TNC at his best (and TNC’s best is a pretty high bar)

  68. 68.

    Janet Strange

    April 18, 2010 at 1:23 pm

    @frankdawg: I’m loving this discussion – long live Confederate History Month! The things you should have learned in school but didn’t.

    As many have pointed out – the South wasn’t content to accept the North’s offer of “just keep your disgusting slavery to yourselves (and it will probably fade away in time).” No, the South was determined to expand slavery. To the West, to Central America, to Cuba.

    Again, but why? Why was it so important to the slave-states to expand slavery? One reason of course is that they feared that they were getting overtaken by population growth in the non-slave states and thus would no longer be able to control the agenda in Congress – which through endless “compromises” was essentially protecting the peculiar institution.

    But there’s another aspect that was discussed in this great thread over at TNC’s blog. Because TNC was wondering the same thing – why were they so determined to expand slavery?

    One thing that comes up in the discussion is that American slavery was different from slavery in most parts of the world because it was for life (in many other places, you were a slave for a set time) and there were as many women slaves as men (elsewhere slaves were often captured in war, meaning most were men). So American slaves formed families, as best they could, and had children. So if you were a big slaveowner, the number of your slaves was steadily increasing. But if you couldn’t acquire a lot more land, you didn’t really have more work for them to do. Meaning you had to support them (barely) but their increased numbers weren’t bringing you increased profit.

    Now if there was a market for your excess slaves (what a horrible way to put it, but that’s how they saw it no doubt) – say in a new slave territory – then a) you could sell them, and b) their monetary value would remain high.

    No expansion – hard to sell your slaves. Everyone else in the restricted area where you might try to sell them (the slave-owning states) had the same problem. You have ever-increasing numbers of slaves and their monetary value is plummeting.

    Some numbers on just how huge the wealth tied up in slaves was:

    But in 1860 American slaves, as a financial asset, were worth approximately three and a half billion dollars–that’s just as property. Three and a half billion dollars was the net worth, roughly, of slaves in 1860. In today’s dollars that would be approximately seventy-five billion dollars. In 1860 slaves as an asset were worth more than all of America’s manufacturing, all of the railroads, all of the productive capacity of the United States put together. Slaves were the single largest, by far, financial asset of property in the entire American economy. [TNC quoting Blight]

    As TNC muses:

    A white farmer in Virginia born into slaveholding, would hold the vast majority of his wealth in bonded people. For him to create a guilty/innocent choice, it would not be enough for him to simply realize slaveholding was wrong. Many slaveholders knew that well. He would have to emancipate his slaves, and at the very minimum risk the loss of personal and familial social status. More potently he risked bankrupting himself and his family, and virtually destroying any prospect of inheritance for his children. It’s fine to think of manumitting slaves as a moral act. But it’s also good, not to be crass, to think of it like walking away your house after you’d paid it off.

    When I was in school, learning about the Civil War was a history teacher droning on about this battle and then that battle. I slept through most of it. If we’d learned about things like we’re talking about here, it would have been fascinating.

  69. 69.

    rikyrah

    April 18, 2010 at 1:24 pm

    this has been a good series here. keep them coming.

    Frank Rich is on point once again.

  70. 70.

    Janet Strange

    April 18, 2010 at 1:30 pm

    Meh, missed fixing the link above [TNC quoting Blight]. It’s from “The Ghost of Bobby Lee.”

  71. 71.

    El Cid

    April 18, 2010 at 1:44 pm

    @Janet Strange:

    the South was determined to expand slavery. To the West, to Central America, to Cuba.

    The Caribbean, including Cuba, was filled with slave plantations producing sugar cane for the European market independent of any developments in the Southern United States.

    The Confederacy was not going to initiate slavery in the Caribbean and South America, as it already existed — it’s what the Europeans did shortly after Columbus and after learning that the indigenous didn’t prove quite as successful as slaves.

    What Southern plantation owners aimed to do was to put their own operations in place

    Again: Slavery in the Caribbean and South America long preceded the ‘Confederacy’.

    What was different is that Southern U.S. slavery was worse and more cruel and more inescapable than Caribbean and South American slavery.

    What the American Confederates wanted to do was export their super-cruel, permanent and inescapable slavery to for-profit enterprises or new imperial conquests in the Southern hemisphere.

    With Cuba in particular, Southern states wanted to make sure that if (as some advocated) Cuba were to be made an American state, the Southern absolute, unemancipating, eternal form of slavery as practiced in the South were made the law of the land of the new state.

  72. 72.

    Janet Strange

    April 18, 2010 at 2:12 pm

    @El Cid: Thanks for the clarification. What an awesome link! Thanks for it too.

  73. 73.

    KS in MA

    April 18, 2010 at 3:46 pm

    @Linkmeister: W. E. B. Du Bois’ “Black Reconstruction in America” is also extremely worth reading.

  74. 74.

    The Endless Sheriff

    April 18, 2010 at 8:13 pm

    Another very interesting read on the mind & thinking (yes, I’m aware of the problems with that choice of words) of these neo-Confederates, is Tony Horwitz’s “Confederates in the Attic”.

    Re the question about why Lincoln and the North wouldn’t let the Confederacy go: Lincoln and many, both North and South, were nationalists in the vein of Clay, Webster, Jackson and Washington. Take a look at Washington’s Farewell Address of 1796: “The unity of government which constitutes you one people is also now dear to you. It is justly so, for it is a main pillar in the edifice of your real independence, the support of your tranquility at home, your peace abroad; of your safety; of your prosperity; of that very liberty which you so highly prize. But as it is easy to foresee that, from different causes and from different quarters, much pains will be taken, many artifices employed to weaken in your minds the conviction of this truth; as this is the point in your political fortress against which the batteries of internal and external enemies will be most constantly and actively (though often covertly and insidiously) directed, it is of infinite moment that you should properly estimate the immense value of your national union to your collective and individual happiness; that you should cherish a cordial, habitual, and immovable attachment to it; accustoming yourselves to think and speak of it as of the palladium of your political safety and prosperity; watching for its preservation with jealous anxiety; discountenancing whatever may suggest even a suspicion that it can in any event be abandoned; and indignantly frowning upon the first dawning of every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest, or to enfeeble the sacred ties which now link together the various parts.”

    I don’t think I would be far wrong to say they they believed a local majority was still a national minority and couldn’t be allowed to govern the whole.

  75. 75.

    Jeffrey Kramer

    April 18, 2010 at 9:32 pm

    What do the Confederate Republicans make of the actual Confederacy’s hatred of free markets? One of the constant talking points for the anti-anti-slavery authors was how the atheistic doctrine of laissez-faire had made Northern labor a horrific form of “wage slavery” far worse than anything that existed in the South.

  76. 76.

    iriedc

    April 18, 2010 at 10:38 pm

    @El Cid: I am just guessing, but since the slavery was abolished through the British Empire in 1834, and Haitian Revolution ended slavery there, it could be that Southern slaveowners had goals of reintroducing slavery throughout North America. Just guess work on my part. I’ll confess that when I researched slavery in my younger days, I focused on what slaves and abolitionists had to say. I had little patience for reading slaveowners’ self-justifying BS.

    So again, I have this blog and TNC to thank for expanding my education about the economics and politics of slavery. Including learning about what drove slaveowners to continue the abomination. Confederate History Month, indeed.

  77. 77.

    Rebecca

    April 19, 2010 at 3:47 am

    @monkeyboy:

    It’s like the British flag in GB. The only people flying it are the fucking BNP.

  78. 78.

    El Cid

    April 19, 2010 at 4:25 pm

    @iriedc: No doubt the Haitian revolution drove a lot of slave owners into paranoia overdrive. Jefferson Davis himself warned the Congress that only the maintenance of slavery could prevent a barbaric Haitian / San Domingo style insurrection.

    I don’t mean to devalue the work of British abolitionists, but Britain was by this time not primarily economically engaged with slavery itself, though the trans-Atlantic slave trade was certainly still going on until its banning.

    But unlike the American South whose elite economy was entirely established upon slave labor to produce labor-intensive cash crops, Britain was able to make vast, ridiculous, cruel sums from its colonial territories, the imperial practice of which was not considered slavery.

  79. 79.

    Sui Generis

    April 21, 2010 at 5:29 am

    @El Cid:

    Jefferson Davis himself warned the Congress that only the maintenance of slavery could prevent a barbaric Haitian / San Domingo style insurrection.

    Actually Thomas Jefferson was more appalled with the Haitian Slaves freeing themselves. Napoleon had sent his Army there not once but twice and was beat both times.

    Thomas Jefferson was horrified at the only independent self ruled Black Republic in the Western world so close to our shores that he slapped an embargo on Haiti which remained until Abraham Lincoln lifted it.

    The French were enraged because Haiti was the fertile supplier of most of France’s wealth: coffee, sugar, lumber, and more maintained the lavish French lives and wars.
    The French ordered Haiti to pay reparations for their property losses (the slaves, themselves!) which beggared the population for decades.

    The French, having lost their battle and their greatest source of income, agreed to sell of their remaining land in America. So Jefferson acquired the Louisiana Purchase.

    But the Slave trade built the North. I’ll let some quotes describing the basis for a film Traces of the Trade that I watched o n PBS awhile ago:

    First-time filmmaker Katrina Browne makes a troubling discovery — her New England ancestors were the largest slave-trading family in U.S. history. She and nine fellow descendants set off to retrace the Triangle Trade: from their old hometown in Rhode Island to slave forts in Ghana to sugar plantation ruins in Cuba. Step by step, they uncover the vast extent of Northern complicity in slavery while also stumbling through the minefield of contemporary race relations.

    The DeWolf family fortune was built in part on buying and selling human beings. Over the course of 50 years and three generations, from 1769 to 1820, the DeWolfs were the nation’s leading slave traders. They brought approximately 10,000 Africans from the west coast of Africa to auction blocks in Charleston, South Carolina, and other southern U.S. ports; to Havana, Cuba, and other ports in the Caribbean; to their own sugar plantations in Cuba; and into their own homes.

    The family continued in the trade despite state and federal laws prohibiting many of their activities in the late 1700s. Their efforts to circumvent those laws eventually led them to arrange a political favor with President Thomas Jefferson, who agreed to split the federal customs district based in Newport, Rhode Island. This maneuver permitted the appointment of a customs inspector just for Bristol, and the choice was Charles Collins, the brother-in-law of James DeWolf, who conveniently ignored the slave ships moving in and out of harbor. One member of the family, George DeWolf, even continued in the trade after 1808, when Congress banned the importation of slaves into the United States, until 1820, when Congress made slave trading a hanging offense.

    Their complicity in slavery continued even after that, however — the family maintained slave plantations in Cuba, and James DeWolf invested his slave trade profits in textile mills that used slave-produced cotton. Today, there are as many as half a million living descendants of the people traded as chattel by the DeWolfs.

    This was stunning, moving experience to watch the white relations coming to grips with the truths that their (our) white privilege was based on the particularly cruel American variety of slavery. Slaves built this nation and created much of the wealth.

    There is more very concise history at the site.

    There is also an excellent PBS program on Haiti’s early years.

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