24 June, 2015

There Is No "Right Side" of History

I read with interest Ta-Nehisi Coates' recent historical essay for The Atlantic, "What This Cruel War Was Over." The article is worth reading. It consists mostly of quotations pulled from Southerner declarations, debates, and editorials from the Civil War and late antebellum eras, all on the theme of slavery and the desperate need to preserve it. One example Coates gives is the words spoken by James H. Hammond (then a South Carolina senator) on the senate floor in 1858:
What is most astonishing about this quotation (and the others like it that Coates cites) is how completely alien this kind of talk would have sounded to a Southerner living two or three generations before Hammond's time.

One of the best books of American political or social history that I have yet read is William Freehling's The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 1776-1854. The book is a true pleasure to read. This cannot be said honestly about most historical tomes published over the last few decades, but it is true here. Freehling also manages to fill his book with insights about the nature of power and politics that are applicable to places and periods far removed from the antebellum South--long term readers might remember how I've used his observations to make sense of patterns in contemporary Salafist-jihadist terrorism. One of the major themes of Freehling's work is the diversity of interests and opinions found in antebellum Dixie. The rough division between "north" and "south" we used today was much harder to draw in the American republic's earliest days. As Freehling takes great pains to prove, there were many souths within the South, each with a different interest and attitude towards slavery. Slavery's greatest defenders saw this with horror and dismay. They knew their peculiar institution would not be preserved into perpetuity until the many souths learned to act in concert as The South, united by a shared commitment to slavery. Creating this sense of unity and mission was a political project that took almost a century to complete. Surprisingly, their greatest challenge in radicalizing Southern society was the slave holding class itself. In the colonial and early antebellum eras the majority of southern aristocrats did not see slavery as something worth defending. 

For example, here is what Thomas Jefferson had to say about slavery near the turn of the 19th century:
As in so much else, Jefferson's words were those of a hypocrite. Jefferson's life curse was to  pen rhetoric that was powerful enough to inspire idealists across the ages while creating a standard he could never personally live up to. Not that this mattered much in the eyes of his contemporaries; a plantation master was never judged on what he physically accomplished. It was a man's ideas and manners that mattered on the Tidewater, and Jefferson's ideas were shared by many. Most intellectual southerners living at the turn of the century would willingly admit that chattel slavery was a wretched institution. They defended it on grounds of precedent and social stability: their society had not chosen slavery, the argument went, but inherited it from their British fore-bearers, and now that it was around it could not be done away with in a stroke without much suffering and misery. But there was a common expectation that slavery would end sooner than later, as economic and social forces slowly made the practice obsolete. This is exactly what happened in the state of New York. Southern gentry of Jefferson's day expected that this would happen everywhere else--and that America would be better off for it. 




[1] James Henry Hammond, in Congressional Globe, 35th congress, 1st session, appendix, p. 71 (4 March 1858). Hammond's speech is one of the more famous defenses of slavery as a positive good, but it is not the most sophisticated. For that see E.N. Elliot, ed., Cotton is King and Pro-Slavery Arguments, comprising the writings of Hammond, Harper, Christy, Stringfellow, Hodge, Bledsoe, and Cartwright on this important subject, (Augusta GA: Pritchard, Abbott and Loomis, 1860).

[2] Merrill D. Peterson, ed.  Thomas Jefferson: Writings (New York: Library of America, 1984), pp. 288-291.

1 comment:

russell1200 said...

There was a lot of descent in the South about succession and going to war. If you consider that much of the Piedmont Region came down the wagon trail from Pennsylvania and went well down into Mississippi as small farmers, that isn't particularly surprising. The South's violent reaction to any counter argument within their own ranks I think further advances the case you make.