I have always hated the South. Not the people. But the political system. It is meanspirited, hateful, anti-American, downright evil. I want to destroy it once and for all. And being the liberal I am, I would take great delight in killing them with kindness.
| People were offended on three main accounts: First, they did not believe I could hate the political system without hating the people. Second, they did not seem to know that much about the South's political system and equated hating it with Sarah Palin's remarks about the "real parts" of America. Third-somewhat ironically-they really hated the idea of me honestly expressing hatred of anything.
On the first point, I have another diary coming later today or tomorrow. But I think the second point needs addressing first. So I want to present some background information about why I feel the way I do, so we can (hopefully) have an informed and intelligent discussion. The main intent here is not to directly address the current situation, but to illuminate a repeating pattern that can be more easily seen at some remove in time. My big-picture argument is that Southern white elites have repeatedly demanded that the rest of the nation bow to their will as the cost of social peace, and accept their historical narratives, along with the worldviews they embody. Their political culture, institutions and ideology are deeply injurious to America, and accommodating ourselves to them has repeatedly brought us the utmost grief. Above all, it has required us to turn our backs on fundamental moral truths, as well as the plain facts of history. I'm going to draw primarily on two books I reviewed in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The first is Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory by Yale historian David W. Blight, formerly at Amherst. The second is Of One Blood: Abolitionism and the Origins of Racial Equality the last book by the University of California historian Paul Goodman, who died in 1995. |
Prelude
The realities these two books describe are ones we all ought to know and understand-historical realities that include the elaborate creation of enormous shared lies. The perspective they provide is one we all ought to share in common. This is what the struggle for hegemony is all about, to have our reference points commonly understood, well-known and accepted, so that they come to naturally guide us as a nation. Instead, we are still living through yet another era in which a Southern-dictated ideology blinds us to who, what and where we really are. By learning more about past eras, past incarnations, we can mush more readily come to understand the ideology that entraps us today, and how to do away with it.
Race & Reunion: How The South Won The Civil War After All
I start with Race and Reunion because the period it deals with is closer to us in time. I'm going to quote from a number of different reviewers, including myself. But I'd like to begin with Allen B. Ballard, from the African American Review (available via the EBSCOhost Magazines database at many public libraries), because his words echo and amplify what I've written just above (even though I wrote that before I found his review):
The book shows us how Southerners, decisively whipped on the battlefield, managed, nevertheless, to wrest a victory on the intellectual, social, and economic fronts. They did this by willfully manipulating the national press, historiography, and literature to show that the war had been about states rights, the right to property, and the right to live an agrarian life free of the class strife that supposedly plagued the industrialized North. And so was born the myth of the "Lost Cause," popularized in the movies Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind. Historians, lodged in the nation's greatest universities, wrote book after book extolling the virtues of the "civilization" that had been lost when the South was defeated.
Blight's book describes in detail just how all of this took place. It was a manipulation of history only made possible by the acceptance in the North of the belief that white Southerners knew best how to take care of the "black problem." And it required a willful suspension of the belief that blacks had even been a subject of the war, much less participated in it as soldiers (they were ten percent of the Union forces by the end of the war.)
When Race and Reunion came out in early 2001, I began my review for the Denver Post like this:
In an interview with Southern Partisan magazine, Attorney General John Ashcroft said, "Your magazine also helps set the record straight. You've got a heritage of doing that, of defending Southern patriots like Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis. Traditionalists should do more. I've got to do more.
"We've all got to stand up and speak in this respect, or else we will be taught that these people were giving their lives, subscribing their sacred fortunes and their honor to some perverted agenda."
These sentiments, only mildly challenged as lacking sensitivity in Ashcroft's confirmation hearings, reflect the conventional wisdom of 100 years ago and underscore the living significance of the cultural history traced by David Blight in Race and Reunion. How slavery managed to vanish from the core meaning of the Civil War, and the consequences of that disappearance, forms a key theme in Blight's disturbing examination of how the South won the Civil War in the 50 years after Gettysburg.
Slavery could not entirely disappear, of course. But it could be so transformed as to be barely recognizable. As I wrote in another review, this one for the Philadelphia City Paper:
There was no way to make slavery vanish, but it could be presented exactly as Southerners wished it to be: as a lost ideal. Thus, stories of faithful slaves defending plantations against invading Yankee troops became archetypical (like Vietnam War stories about unreturned POWs or protesters spitting on returning troops) while the real history of massive black mobilization on the Union side was virtually forgotten.
The connection between the rewriting of Civil War and Vietnam War history is anything but accidental. The need to re-create past wars as noble is so deep that massive, fundamental realities are completely wiped from public memory, while utter fantasies or rare exceptions become the basis for central narratives, providing meanings the no one at the time would have thought of. I continued:
This cleared the way for a new central story, one of male bonding: a sacred battle between equally noble white brothers who mystically had to fight each other in order to eventually reconcile and unify as they could never have otherwise done. This story, celebrating heroism and valor on both sides, clearly required Lee's nobility, which meant he must have fought for a noble cause, as the South had always claimed. The triumph of the South's interpretation facilitated economic reintegration on acceptable terms: segregation and the loss of all black political power.
And so it was that mere historical facts-such as the 200,000 blacks who fought for their own freedom-were utterly erased by the blind insistence on Southern nobility and honor (morality is so taken-for-granted, it need not even be mentioned).
Blight explores three different broad visions of Civil War memory-reconciliationist, emancipationist and white supremacist-which serve to illuminate one another through their contrasting interpretations and various interactions. . The reconciliationist vision began with wartime responses to its terrible brutality. This was epitomized by Walt Whitman's experience of tending the wounded and dying of both sides. Given the extreme hostility that pervaded the air, it's hard to see anything but guileless innocence in Whitman's actions. Yet, by the time Blight's story is done, the reconciliationists will have utterly abandoned everything the Union fought for. The book concludes at the time of the 50th Anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, a reunion of Northern and Southern veterans to which no blacks were invited, and which Blight justifiably calls "the triumph of segregation."
It did not have to be this way, of course. And that is the whole point of Blight's book-to explore the war that was fought to remake the meaning of the Civil War, after the fact. That meaning totally dominated American memory up to the time of the Civil Rights movement. What is remarkable, however, is that having been pushed aside for a brief time, it appears to have fully re-established itself. Indeed, Peter S. Carmichael, in Civil War Times (also available via the EBSCOhost Magazines database), began his review of Race and Reunion thus:
IN THE LAST EPISODE OF KEN Burns's epic documentary The Civil War, images of Union and Confederate veterans flash across the screen as the nostalgic sounds of a violin echo in the background. Seeing these gentle old men, with their long white beards and stooped shoulders, standing together and shaking hands, can make one forget that bitterness, hatred, and differing political beliefs over human slavery animated them during the war. Burns, like many other Americans, seems drawn to these postwar images because they project a comforting spirit of unity, forgiveness, and mutual respect between North and South. Such a version of the past, however, ignores the political causes and consequences of the war, the contributions of African-Americans, and the contentious battles of Reconstruction. White Americans since the 1880s have preferred this selective view and have celebrated the mutual heroism and sacrifice of Johnny Reb and Billy Yank as the true legacy of the Civil War.
In simplest terms, the reason this reconciliationist vision has prevailed in the form it has depends on its relationship to the two other visions-the emancipationist vision that it turned away from, and the Southern white supremacist vision, whose fundamental narratives and definitions it has accepted.
The larger emancipationist vision was, of course, present inherently among abolitionists long before the war. itself. They knew that if war must come, then ending slavery would be the reason for it. But Blight's focus is on the actual war, no matter how distorted the memories may be. And for this, Blight locates the source of this vision in the natural outgrowths of the Abolitionists vision: in the Emancipation Proclamation and in the over 200,000 black combatants who joined the Union Army and Navy to fight for their own liberation and that of their people.
In a review in American Studies International (also available via EBSCOhost Magazines), István K.Vida, made a very important point about Blight's treatment of the emancipationist vision:
Probably the most remarkable achievement of Blight in Race and Reunion is that he attributes enough significance to the opinion of the advocates of the so-far neglected emancipationist view, namely that of African Americans and abolitionists. He makes extensive use of articles published in the black press, and statements by black spokesmen. Carefully-selected, lengthy quotations offer an insight into Frederick Douglass's contribution to the ideological meaning and memory of the Civil War. The reader cannot help feeling dumbfounded by the sharp-sightedness of Douglass, "Black America's principal symbol of a people's journey from slavery to freedom" (301), which became manifest when he realized how the national commitment to blacks' rights decreased as time passed. We learn about the battles Douglass had to fight to provide a momentum to the emancipationist vision of the Civil War, so that it could survive in the national memory, and especially in black communities. Besides the celebrated advocates of the three above-mentioned views (Booker T. Washington, whose reconciliationist "Atlanta Compromise" speech receives lengthy treatment by the author, Lost Cause and white supremacy orators as former Confederate-President Jefferson Davis and Mildred Lewis Rutherford, historian general of the United Daughters of the Confederacy), such "nameless" African-American voices as black soldiers, writing letters to their beloved ones from the trenches, or freed people, whose heart-rending advertisements searching for a kin separated from them by slavery were published in black newspapers even twenty years after the Civil War are rallied for the support of the emancipationist vision.
The white supremacist vision was gradually formulated in recovery from the South's shock of military defeat. It took some time to gain strength and coherence, but once it got going it swept all before it, and eventually came to dominate reconciliationist thinking in a formula that sacrificed racial reconciliation for the sake of sectional reunion. Carmichael summarizes succinctly:
The Lost Cause dismisses slavery as the cause of the war, while insisting that slaves flourished under a benevolent system of labor that made the Old South a superior civilization. Furthermore, the argument goes, the Confederacy lost not on the battlefield but because of the North's superior war machine and overwhelming numbers. Rarely, if ever, do blacks surface as actors in their own struggle for freedom. They always stand on the periphery of dramatic events, confused and frightened observers who cannot survive without white assistance. Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind best captures the "moonlight and magnolias" perspective of the South and the Confederacy, a fantastic, sentimental journey through the Civil War era.
I'd like to beginning winding down this section with the last two paragraphs of my Philadelphia City Paper review, and a brief summary comment:
There were definite stages in the process of reshaping memory, which Blight's broadly chronological account recognizes without overstressing. Instead, threads of continuity stand out. The overnight popularity of Booker T. Washington's formula for accommodation to segregation is a case in point. Washington satisfied Southern white supremacist fantasies of black leadership willfully submitting to and celebrating them, which reinforced their long-held mythology of faithful slaves defending the Confederacy. He satisfied white reconciliationists of both sections by denouncing Reconstruction as a mistake: a common white view for nearly a generation before Washington echoed it. At the same time, he satisfied black longings for progress reflected in an emerging literature celebrating black achievements since Emancipation, although he placed definite limits where others would not. The only significant opposition he encountered, among other blacks, was also framed in terms of evolving interpretive traditions with roots predating Emancipation, which provided themes that would prove central to 20th-century leaders as diverse as Marcus Garvey and Martin Luther King.
Race and Reunion is a deeply unsettling, pioneering work that raises far more questions than it can possibly answer: questions that should continue to trouble us. John Ashcroft's Civil War views provide striking testimony that the myths and lies forged over a century ago still have us locked in their chains.
By quoting other reviewers along with my own reviews, I hope to have laid a good foundation for saying that my outlook is well-supported by Blight's book, and I am not simply reading my own views into his. Blight's book, in turn won the highly prestigious Bancroft Prize from Columbia, along with several other top prizes, including two from the Organization of American Historians. We are not talking Michelle Malkin here.
What I hope to have established is two-fold:
First: that there's a strong case to be made that the meaning and significance of the Civil War have been and continue to be not merely distorted, but virtually turned inside out, due to the triumph of a Southern-based white supremacist ideology that has been so successful it is no longer even recognized as such. While race clearly plays a central role in this, the fierce denial of historical reality is so outlandish that it impairs our ability to think and form sound policies on a wide range of subject matters.
Second: that this Southern-base white supremacist ideology has triumphed through and because of a morally corrupt ideology of reconciliation without truth between Northern and Southern whites, excluding the very people whose struggle for freedom was the central historical fact that has thus been denied.
In the next section, I discus another book that explains how a similar reconciliatory ideology between North and South had to be challenged in order to begin the process of Abolitionist movement-building that eventually lead to the freeing of America's slaves. But first, a concluding excerpt from a review in The American Historical Review, (also available via the EBSCOhost Magazines database) by Jim Cullen:
A century ago, Douglass struggled mightily to keep alive an emancipationist faith of the 1860s via the power of his rhetoric. Blight too is striving to keep an emancipationist faith alive, one nurtured as much by the 1960s as the 1860s. And yet one wonders whether his approach, so deeply invested in the norms of academic history, can reach beyond the people who least need convincing.... Bright has succeeded on the terms he has set for himself: this is an important book by an important scholar. It may well be that form now on, it is not light that is needed but fire, not the gentle shower but thunder. A challenge awaits.
Of course, there is now a tendency to assume that racism is somehow ended, now that we have our first black President. To counter such fantasies, we have more black men in prison than ever before, the vast majority for drug-related crimes, when blacks and whites use drugs at a virtually identical rate. Indeed, by virtually every measure except for current presidents-elect, progress in redressing undeserved black disadvantage remains virtually or totally stalled. The fact that we can elect a black President-which costs us nothing-and yet cannot materially lift the chains off the vast majority of ordinary black citizens, is a testament not to the breadth of our progress, but to the narrowness of it, and of our vision.
Of One Blood: The Abolitionist Defeat of The Colonialist Fantasy
"[God] hath made of one blood all nations of men..." Acts 17:26
Race and Reunion had a very focused theme that was right up my ally for the purpose of this diary. Of One Blood is not that sort of book. It is a more multi-dimensional exploration of how the Abolitionist movement developed, relating this development to broader cultural developments (such as why many evangelicals became Abolitionists, while many others did not) and examining in particular the roles of people who have previously been under-appreciated, from the free blacks who first inspired the white Abolitionists to the large numbers of working class whites-particularly young women working in New England textile mills-who went to meetings, signed petitions, in short, acted politically when the official political system had no more of a place for them than it did for blacks.
My particular focus is on one aspect of this whole story, the way in which Northern and Southern elites came together to form a common hegemonic framework on how to deal with the "black problem", and how the free blacks of the North came together to oppose it, first organizing internally, then reaching out and sparking the birth of the white Abolitionist movement. As the publisher's description puts it:
In the half-century following the American Revolution, a sizable free black population emerged, the result of state-sponsored emancipation in the North and individual manumission in the slave states. At the same time, a white movement took shape, in the form of the American Colonization Society, that proposed to solve the slavery question by sending the emancipated blacks to Africa and making Liberia an American "colony." The resistance of northern free blacks was instrumental in exposing the racist ideology underlying colonization and inspiring early white abolitionists to attack slavery straight on. In a society suffused with racism, says Goodman, abolitionism stood apart by its embrace of racial equality as a Christian imperative.
Unfortunately, I don't have access to my original book review or my notes-only the relatively meager marginal notes I made. Hence, this section has a totally different, and much briefer format.
Here is a key passage of the book, which lays out much of the essential historical argument:
In the half-century following the American Revolution, a large free black population emerged for the first time in American history, the fruit of state-sponsored abolition north of the Mason-Dixon line and individual manumissions in the slave states. By 1830 their numbers had grown to three hundred thousand. These free blacks proved to be a troubling presence. To Henry Clay, echoing common opinion in the 1820s, they were "the most corrupt, depraved and abandoned" people in the country. Whether one attributed their condition to inherent defects of character and intelligence or to white prejudice that prevented them from developing their capacities, Clay believed that blacks would forever remain a degraded people as long as they lived in the United States. "No talents however great, no piety, however pure and devoted, no patriotism, however ardent," Clay was certain, ever could earn African Americans equal rights or respect in the land of their birth. White prejudice was permanent, unalterable, "invincible." In African repatriation lay the only hope.
By 1817, African colonization had become more than a speculative idea. In the next decade, hundreds of prominent Americans--political leaders including Presidents Madison and Monroe and religious leaders in most of the large denominations, from Presbyterian Lyman Beecher of Massachusetts to Episcopalian bishop William Mead of Virginia--threw their prestige and influence behind the America Colonization Society (ACS), which established the colony of Liberia in West Africa. One of the most impressive voluntary societies of its day, the ACS boasted over two hundred state and local auxiliaries by 1830. It was quietly assisted by President Monroe and endorsed by state legislatures and the major religious denominations, as well as by an illustrious panoply of notables.
The ACS unintentionally mobilized black opposition, however, and though this opposition was ignored at first, it eventually made profound inroads on white opinion. From the outset, African Americans in the free communities from Boston to Baltimore defiantly rejected colonization, warning that they never would freely abandon the land of their birth, which they had drenched with their blood and sweat. They would struggle for full equality, encouraged by the impressive advances they already had made in the decades since winning their freedom. By the 1820s, the free black communities of the large Northern cities had developed resources, leadership, self-confidence, and militancy that proved formidable, even against so weighty an opponent as the ACS. By 1830, African American leaders had begun to convince whites who supported colonization that racism underpinned slavery and colonization, that colonization stood in the way of emancipation, and that as long as Northern whites embraced both, there was no prospect for ending slavery in the United States. By insisting on their inherent equality, by acknowledging but explaining black deficiencies as the result of slavery and persisting white prejudice afterward, and by pointing with pride to their patriotism and piety and to their achievements through education and industry, blacks affirmed bourgeois values that they shared with whites. Black confidence that whites could overcome prejudice if they only opened their eyes to black aspiration and accomplishment thus challenged a core assumption of colonization.
By the early 1830s, free blacks had convinced a small but prophetic vanguard of white men and women to repudiate colonization and embrace immediate emancipation and racial equality. By virtue of their personal example and through the power of their argument, they created the modern biracial abolitionist movement. Their faith in the ability of white people to change, to abandon colonization for integration and racial prejudice for equality, was the triggering force behind the emergence of racial egalitarianism. Yet the fact that only a small sector of white opinion proved susceptible to African American persuasion necessarily complicates any explanation of the origins of racial equality in Jacksonian America. Along with the story of the fight against racial prejudice, the story of that prejudice also must be told.
What needs to be added are two things: First, that it colonization was always a totally ridiculous concept as a "solution" to America's racial problems-even if it were solely limited to free blacks, whose numbers were constantly swelling. There were simply far too many blacks to send them all back to Africa. The Wikipedia entry for the ACS notes:
Although the ratio of whites to blacks was 8:2 from 1790 to 1800, it was the massive increase in the number of free African-Americans that disturbed proponents of colonization. From 1790 to 1800, the number of free African-Americans increased from 59,467 (1½ % of total U.S. population, 7½ % of U.S. black population) to 108,378 (2 % of U.S. population), a percentage increase of 82 percent; and from 1800 to 1810, the number increased from 108,378 to 186,446 (2½ % of U.S. pop.), an increase of 72 percent.
In contrast, the ACS had managed to relocate a mere 13,000 blacks to Liberia by 1867. Thus, colonization was always a white racist fantasy, the perfectly-matched solution for the fantasy fears it was meant to address.
The second thing that needs to be added is that colonization met the needs of both northern and southern white elites in a way that justified the indefinite continuance of slavery as a "necessary evil". It was thus of direct material benefit to Southern white elites. At the same time, it let northern whites off the hook, morally. The fantasy that someday all would be solved allowed them to ignore the inconvenient truth that in the real world, nothing at all was actually getting solved. It was, in short, the ultimate "post-partisan," "pragmatic," "non-ideological" solution imaginable. And nothing could be done to move toward abolition and racial justice without directly attacking it.
Once that happened, there was a resurgence in the long-dormant tradtion of actively pro-slavery argumentation, as can be seen in the chronological developments laid out in Larry Tise's 1990 book, Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701-1840. As other parts of Of One Blood describe, some evangelical Christians were powerfully drawn to the Abolitionist cause. Others, however were not, or were even drawn to oppose it. Indeed, Tise documents that Northern ministers actually began making pro-slavery arguments in the early 1830s before Southerners joined in. But from here on, not only was slavery defended as a positive good, rather than a necessary evil, it was also justified overwhelmingly based on arguments from the Bible. However frustrating or disheartening this may have been for the evangelical abolitionists, it was a clear sign that the Colonialist hegemony was gone for good, the battle was joined on new grounds because the old ideology had been shattered.
The Moral Of My Story
What these two historical accounts indicate is the dominant power that Southern elite interests have had in shaping our national political discourse to satisfy their own ends. That race was central was inevitable, but that was only, at bottom, because race was central to their class interests. Controlling black bodies meant controlling white bodies (and minds) as well, as the well-honed politics of resentment assured, generation after generation, after generation. As clearly indicated in the section on Race and Reunion, the ideologies shaped well over 100 years ago are still alive today. But new ones have been layered over them as well. It is no easy matter to deal with untangling even one generation of lies, but we are faced with dozens of them. And that is why we need to focus on the lie-makers, their motivations and their traditions of lie-making. It is far and away the most effective approach for getting a handle on all the means and methods meant to distract us from grasping the truth, and acting together in the common interest of us all. |
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