lecture 7, "the kansas-nebraska act and the birth of the republican party"
david blight
-----------
the urgency of political tumult motivated by the discovery of gold in California. California was ready for statehood--and already people realized how big/rich it was. would it be a free state, or slave state?
the South's greatest leader delivered what became known as "The Southern Address", and in it John C. Calhoun said many things: that the North threatens to reduce the question to "resistance or submission." he makes California the litmus test.
one of the oldest ideas in US political culture is that great conflict comes when one side cannot accept the result--that they cannot accept a political outcome. this is the question in the 1850s--can some kind of compromise be reached?
Clay invites Daniel Webster, Northern Whig, who was anti-slavery (though never a card-carrying abolitionist), had been in Congress since 1823. seen as the voice of New England. "Liberty and Union," was his phrase--he always seemed to be the union man, even as he was an anti-slavery man. Henry Clay, slaveholder from Kentucky, founder of the Whig Party, its organizational genius, original founder of the American Colonization Society, was someone with great influence in Congress. He pulls in Clay and says we've got to save the union.
----------------
what were the issues in 1850?
(1) California is ready for statehood, overnight almost. miners flock there.
(2) DC was a huge center of the slave-trade. there was a massive slave jail 2.5 blocks from Congress. foreign visitors would stand in awe of the Capitol, and they would ask, "where's the slave jail?" so there were a lot of Northerners who were saying lets deal with this question as part of the larger compromise.
(3) Fugitive Slaves, in the so-called underground railroad. and the term "underground railroad" emerges in debates on the floor of the House and Senate. Southerners wanted a federally-enforced Fugitive Slaves Act.
(4) and then there was the issue of Texas--the boundaries had never been determined. and the question was how would you divide up Texas (there was no New Mexico or Arizona, yet). the idea was that if you moved the border back 300 or 400 miles, you might free up space for new states (and they would, in the Southern imagination, be slave states, further tipping the national balance in their favor).
-------------
Daniel Webster's support for the five measures of the Compromise of 1850
(1) California would be admitted as a Free State (Clay said that if you were to hold a referendum there there's no question that it would be a Free State; they're all little people that are flocking there)
(2) in return, the South is going to get a whole new, much stronger, federally-enforced Fugitive Slave Act.
(3) abolish the slave trade in DC--Northerners will like that.
(4) let's move the boundary back 350 miles back, and let southerners dream of 2-3 more states in that open space. let's let them feel secure that California may come in as a Free State, but there's potential for new Southern states in the future.
(5) how would slavery be determined in the SW? popular sovereignty--let the people have a referendum, and vote. (except for California, remember--this is the stuff of compromise).
(NB: Daniel Webster says I can't take the Fugitive Slave Act back to MA; Henry Clay says you must).
how was the Compromise finally passed? there was no certainty it would work--after Clay initiated the debate, with an emotional speech. Daniel Webster held forward, in the 7th March speech--"I speak today for the preservation of the Union." he was asking, remember, Northerners to vote to be complicit in the slave trade. people call it the greatest speech in the history of the US Senate--it also ruined Webster's political career.
Calhoun was unable to deliver a speech. he was too sick (he'll be dead by the Fall). delivered, instead, by his colleague Mason. Calhoun's speech actually frightened many Northerners into voting for the Compromise, despite their disdain for it. and so it passed, in early August, 1850.
Henry Clay was terminally ill, had gone home to Kentucky. he'd be out of the picture by the end of that very year. Webster was to be denounced, forever, in his own political party and constituency.
------------
but it passed. and, in some ways, saved the union. BUT: "it was far more an armistice than it really was a compromise. it began to collapse almost as soon as it passed." people were certainly relieved in the North, and there were rally celebrating its passing.
at the same time, the State of Georgia legislature passed its conditional approval of the Compromise, saying that it depends on the North's good faith. North replied in kind.
there were vehement protests against the Fugitive Slave Act. above all else, it was this Act that led to further conflict. it led to as many as 20,000 free blacks and freed slaves leaving the Northern states for Canada, between 1850 and 1857/8.
this will lead to the establishment of special federal magistrates, whose sole job it was to set up a police apparatus to retrieve fugitive slaves and identified (there was a monetary incentive to convict vs. acquit!). this led to famous fugitive slave rescues--abolitionists carted a slave from Syracuse off to Canada, a slave broken out of jail in Boston taken to Concord, MA and then to Montreal.
there were many other slave rescues, as well.
resistance to slavery was direct, sometimes violent--the underground railroad had become overground.
one could argue that the most important thing that happened in the wake of the Fugitive Slave Act was the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin. she made everyone complicit in the slave story (the most despicable character in the book is Miss Ophelia, a thoroughly racist anti-slavery character). the whole world was suddenly reading a work of fiction about slavery (it sold 300,000 copies in its first year; re-printed into 20 languages in its first 5 years of existence). brought an awareness of the slavery problem, as never before.
in the wake of the Compromise of 1850, now, though--the country had to face this question, by 1853/1854 was what was going to happen with Kansas and Nebraska territories. the parts left over from the Louisiana Purchase (1803).
but the Kansas-Nebraska Act was at the front of the agenda of the US Congress at the end of 1853, in the environment of the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act (which was enforced fairly effectively in the North, despite this well-known resistance to the Act). the Anthony Burns rendition case: after the earlier freeing, his trial became a litmus test. there was an all-night vigil held by abolitionists, in protest. eventually they bought him back from a farm in SC.
-------------
what was firing the American imagination at this time was not just the West, but the Railroad West. would the eastern terminus of the West-going railroad be in Chicago, or further south in a slave state? stephen douglass, the man who negotiated the Compromise of 1850, wanted the terminus in Chicago. (though, prof is saying, his approach to slavery is critical: Stephen Douglas believes that climate will solve the problem of slavery--if the soil is good, temperatures are right, slavery will exist--climate will solve the problems!).
back to Kansas-Nebraska--what principle will you apply? had the Compromise of 1850 superseded the Missouri Compromise of 1820? so which rule is in play? do you apply, even the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 (which said it will never exist in the early Northwest)?
in other words, this is the great question of the 1850s--would the American pragmatic tradition "continue" to solve this?
Douglas wrote the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. he wrote three different versions, in fact. went from vaguest to most specific, because Southerners put his feet to the fire.
version 1: January 4, 1854--"as their constitution may prescribe." (leave it to time, climate, and good sense--Southerners said not enough).
version 2: January 10, 1854--a direct statement of popular sovereignty. "decision to be left to the people residing therein." (but, Dixon tells him that he must rid the bill of geographic shackless--repudiate Missouri Compromise, etc.
version 3 (which passed): two measures--(1) explicit repeal of Missouri Compromise line; (2) popular sovereignty. (note: this opens up the whole of the West to the possibility of slavery).
-------------
the Kansas-Nebraska Act is arguably the seminal event of American politics in the 1850s: (1) it will sectionalize American politics; (2) break apart what's left of the Whig party; (3) give birth to the first successful third party coalition movement (the Republican party)
note the vote count: Northern Democrats were split right in half, Southern Democrats voted 57-2 in favor; Northern Whigs voted 45-0 against, and Southern Whigs 12-7. and the four Free Soilers voted against, of course. (113-10 passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, but it breaks apart the system, and brings about an anti-slavery coalition that will elect a President within six years).
Showing posts with label david blight. Show all posts
Showing posts with label david blight. Show all posts
Thursday, April 2, 2009
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
lecture 6, "expansion and slavery: legacies of the mexican war..."
david blight
------------
frederick douglass' 4th of July speech: "like Beethoven on steriods, with language as weapon."
given in 1852, in Rochester, NY, in the wake of the crisis that has gripped the country in the wake of the Compromise of 1850, as slavery expands into the West.
"why have you invited me to speak on your Fourth of July?" a critique of American hypocrisy--utilizing "by the rivers of Babylon" passage from Bible.
------------
in 1847, in the midst of that expansionist war (and a modest number of Northerners who opposed it; and certainly abolitionists, who saw it as a war for the expansion of slavery), Douglass called America a "nation of inconsistencies."
------------
the anti-slavery impulse that takes hold in the American north goes through various stages:
(1) 1830s-1840s: an expansion of organization of American abolitionisms--tended to be a kind of Garrisonian moral suasion. largely devoted to this idea of reforming or changing the heart of American people. driven very much by the Second Great Awakening.
(2) 1837, with the birth of the Liberty Party--we see this moral line take a political turn. a political party begun by some quite serious abolitionists. in the 1840s, after minimal political success, the Liberal Party becomes the Free Soil Party, in 1848 (directly in response to the expansionist war with Mexico). directly committed to keeping the West (and, America's future) free from the institution of slavery.
it is a fear of slavery, a fear of the way slavery as a system could control America's future that comes to the front and center in American politics after the Mexican War (1846-1848, following formal annexation of Texas in 1845--effective annexation had come 9 years earlier, in 1836).
-----------
how did we get the Mexican War?
after the annexation of Texas by the United States in 1836, which was to be that great Western border that was seemingly limitless (for that matter, there was no Southern border decided upon). the US simply took Texas. Mexico never accepted the Rio Grande as the border. they assumed that, if there was a border, it would be the Nueses river, further North and East.
we've talked about how the Western expansion of the South was booming from 1820s-1840s--and there was a deep and abiding sentiment in American society, now known as Manifest Destiny, of inevitablity. a "racialism" that informed a deep commitment to these territories and their colonization.
this was seen, of course, in the policy re: Native Americans--Indian Removal Act (1830) under President Jackson in the 1830s physically removed Native Americans from their homelands. the five great tribes were, between early-mid 1830s were removed, outwest--to Oklahoma and further. that Indian removal was part and parcel of opening up this Southern frontier to the cotton boom. and the development of the greatest source of wealth in the Southern US.
in the presidential election of 1844, James K. Polk, an avid expansionist, Democrat, and a slaveholding cotton-planter from Tennesee, ran against Henry Clay (intellectual founder of the Whig party, which operated from 1833-1856 on a platform of supremacy of Congress, among other things), who also ran on an expansionist platform. But the Whigs tended to argue for expansion by negotiation(!). Polk said," negotiation=bullshit, elect me and I will give you Mexico and Oregon. "
it was a close election, Polk won by 36,000, out of 2.8 million. (Liberty Party won 16,000, mostly in NY). just before John Tyler left office, he pushed through the annexation of Texas in 1845 (not as a negotiated treaty, but as a State--i.e., without 2/3 approval of Congress). but James K. Polk became the sixth of the first ten American presidents who was a slaveholder. before the American Civil War, 2/3 of all American presidents were either slaveholders or deeply sympathetic. 2/3 of all members of the Supreme Court. James K. Polk was, as far as we know, the only president who bought and sold slaves from the Oval Office(!).
Polk ordered troops to move South to the Rio Grande in order to, in effect, see what the Mexicans would do. in early 1846, there was a brief attempt at negotiation (which was conducted in French, actually, because neither spoke the other's language). Mexico had never acknowledged the Rio Grande. there was a three-week stand-off along the river, and then on the 24th of April 1846 a Mexican cavalry contingent ambushed American troops on the other side. two weeks later, Zachary Taylor's dispatch reached to the White House, announcing that hostilities had commenced in Mexico. Polk received the news and immediately asked Congress for a declaration of war, saying "Mexico had invaded American soil(!)" Approved, even if with a number of abstentions from Northerners in Senate.
-----------
the first major expansionist war of American history. a flurry of speculation about what soldiers, settlers might find in Mexico. Herman Melville said, "the people here are all in a state of delirium... nothing is talked about but the halls of Montezuma." Illionis paper arguing "reptiles on the path of progressive democracy."
many abolitionists had very serious things to say about the war. James Russel Lowell: "a national crime committed in behoof of slavery, our national sin." Ralph Waldo Emerson (in his private journals, however): "the US will conquer Mexico, but it will be as though a man swallows arsenic... Mexico will poison us..."
by the end of 1846, the US had established dominion over the southern half of California. in 1847, US forces conquered Mexico City. and, by the end, a treaty was negotiated, on dictated terms. Treaty of Guadaloupe-Hidalgo, in the US lost 13,000 Americans in a year and a half of fighting, the vast majority of disease. an estimated 50,000 Mexicans died.1848, gave the US all of the western part of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Utah, Nevada, parts of Colorado). Payment was $15 million.
that same year, 1848, was a tremendous turning point (as important in American history as in Europe, some argue). as these nationalistic revolutions against monarchy were breaking out all over Europe (Austria, Hungary, Italy, Germany, France--some will succeed, some will fail), republican America was seizing territory, and launching an Empire on its own continent.
sitting in House of Representatives, young Congressman from IL, Abraham Lincoln, voted against the Mexican War every chance he got, calling Polk's justification "a half-insane mumbling of a fever dream."
------------
why all the fuss? what did the war unleash?
Daniel Webster, the great Whig of MA, probably the most powerful and important Northern politician, kept trying to argue that this wasn't really all that important. (the Southwest was all desert--we won't expand slavery there, "an imaginary Negro in an [inhospitable] place"
but why did so many people care?
first, Northerners (prof is admitting that he is generalizing): (1) they cared about this because there was a belief that slavery could indeed take place in the Southwest (in mining, e.g.)--and, lo and behold, what was discovered in California, but gold! and why couldn't you build canals/railroads/etc. with slaves? (2) lots of Northerners in politics favored non-extension on constitutional grounds. (3) didn't want to be complicit in the expansion of slavery--"don't ask me to vote, to create a new territory, which will become a Slave state." Northerners wanted to confine slavery to the South--make slavery sectional, but free labor national. (4) there was also racism, involved in this. they saw the West as a place that would be free for small, white farmers--free from competition from a powerful Southern oligarchy. (5) and finally, of course, there were some abolitionists around, who believed in the immorality of slavery's expansion. (and sometimes there would be a mix of all this: racism, moral opposition, etc..--Abraham Lincoln, e.g.)
the South: (1) cared, in part, because an assumption had set in that it was not just because it was considered the South's destiny, but also a necessity for its economic system ("to check the expansion of slavery would be to strangle the Southern economy and way of life"). (2) the growing slave population in existing Southern states was a possible powder-keg--they feared the "shrinking" South as an economic entity, as a political culture--an economy turning in on itself, possibly. (3) political party in the Congress. new states meant two new senators. in 1850, the ratio of slave states to free states was 1:1 (15 to 15). they wanted to sustain that parity. California will be the test case. (4) and then there's a question of State's rights--did anyone have the right to prohibit anyone else from taking their property anywhere? "you Northerners have no right to stop me from taking my wagon, my horse, and my slave, anywhere I wish."(5) there's a sense of honor, here--the legal standing of slavery in the Western territories stood as a measure of its moral standing everywhere. if you tell me that slavery is not a part of America's future, then you're telling me that it's wrong in my home. and that's unacceptable.
---------------
the fuss, then, is this is because this is really a debate about American's future.
there were four plans put in place:
(1) Wilmont Proviso: penned by a young Democratic HofR, who got up in the midst of the Mexican War, who got up during the debates and said, "in any new territory we gain from Mexico, there won't be slavery." it became the rallying cry of the Free Soil movement. all but one Northern legislature endorsed it; all the Southern legistlatures condemned it. it passed the House of Representatives, but did not pass the Senate (where the slave states still had parity). there was a good deal of racist support for the Proviso (and here we see the mixture of Northern anti-slavery sentiments)--"I have no sympathy for the slaves... I speak on behalf of the free white men..." Keep the West free of black people, essentially.
(2) State sovereignty (South's position): ultimately, no federal legislature, President, etc., had the authority to stop slavery's expansion.
(3) Popular sovereignty: the simple idea that there would be no act of Congress--take Congress out of the story, and simply let the people in the Western territory have a vote. let there be a referendum, popular democracy. "a charm of ambiguity"about this proposal. the problem, of course, was when do you hold the vote? do you establish a rule about the #'s of ppl there. Southerners wanted the vote later in the process, because it would take them a while to take slaves/their system out there.
(4) they went back to the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which prohibited slavery North of the parallel. half of California, of course, was North of that line. in the 1850s, people suggesting that we continue to draw careful geographic lines across the West.
-------------
the election of 1848 was crucial: Democrats ran on a popular sovereignty platform, candidate was Lewis Cass. Zachary Taylor was the Whig candidate, recent war hero, "ol' rough an' ready." problem was, of course, that he was a Louisiana slaveholder, not very committed to Whig principles.
there were two new political offshoots, at this time, over this furore: (1) the conscience Whigs--a group of abolitionists created in MA who broke with the Whig party (and would never go back, harbinger of its future demise) (2) Free Soil Party, created in 1848, and ran Martin Van Buren, a former president. and they stood for one thing--stopping slavery's expansion. they took 10%!
Zachary Taylor was elected.
and, lo and behold, gold was discovered in California--and so suddenly there was a desperate need to find a middle-ground. on a night in January 1850, Henry Clay gets together with Daniel Webster and they cut a deal, that became the Compromise of 1850 (they're drunk, prof is noting).
that month, Clay would announce the five provisions of the Compromise before the Senate (holding a piece of George Washington's coffin, to boot!). people were very worried that the Union was going to unravel, and fall apart.
and indeed, it almost did.
david blight
------------
frederick douglass' 4th of July speech: "like Beethoven on steriods, with language as weapon."
given in 1852, in Rochester, NY, in the wake of the crisis that has gripped the country in the wake of the Compromise of 1850, as slavery expands into the West.
"why have you invited me to speak on your Fourth of July?" a critique of American hypocrisy--utilizing "by the rivers of Babylon" passage from Bible.
------------
in 1847, in the midst of that expansionist war (and a modest number of Northerners who opposed it; and certainly abolitionists, who saw it as a war for the expansion of slavery), Douglass called America a "nation of inconsistencies."
------------
the anti-slavery impulse that takes hold in the American north goes through various stages:
(1) 1830s-1840s: an expansion of organization of American abolitionisms--tended to be a kind of Garrisonian moral suasion. largely devoted to this idea of reforming or changing the heart of American people. driven very much by the Second Great Awakening.
(2) 1837, with the birth of the Liberty Party--we see this moral line take a political turn. a political party begun by some quite serious abolitionists. in the 1840s, after minimal political success, the Liberal Party becomes the Free Soil Party, in 1848 (directly in response to the expansionist war with Mexico). directly committed to keeping the West (and, America's future) free from the institution of slavery.
it is a fear of slavery, a fear of the way slavery as a system could control America's future that comes to the front and center in American politics after the Mexican War (1846-1848, following formal annexation of Texas in 1845--effective annexation had come 9 years earlier, in 1836).
-----------
how did we get the Mexican War?
after the annexation of Texas by the United States in 1836, which was to be that great Western border that was seemingly limitless (for that matter, there was no Southern border decided upon). the US simply took Texas. Mexico never accepted the Rio Grande as the border. they assumed that, if there was a border, it would be the Nueses river, further North and East.
we've talked about how the Western expansion of the South was booming from 1820s-1840s--and there was a deep and abiding sentiment in American society, now known as Manifest Destiny, of inevitablity. a "racialism" that informed a deep commitment to these territories and their colonization.
this was seen, of course, in the policy re: Native Americans--Indian Removal Act (1830) under President Jackson in the 1830s physically removed Native Americans from their homelands. the five great tribes were, between early-mid 1830s were removed, outwest--to Oklahoma and further. that Indian removal was part and parcel of opening up this Southern frontier to the cotton boom. and the development of the greatest source of wealth in the Southern US.
in the presidential election of 1844, James K. Polk, an avid expansionist, Democrat, and a slaveholding cotton-planter from Tennesee, ran against Henry Clay (intellectual founder of the Whig party, which operated from 1833-1856 on a platform of supremacy of Congress, among other things), who also ran on an expansionist platform. But the Whigs tended to argue for expansion by negotiation(!). Polk said," negotiation=bullshit, elect me and I will give you Mexico and Oregon. "
it was a close election, Polk won by 36,000, out of 2.8 million. (Liberty Party won 16,000, mostly in NY). just before John Tyler left office, he pushed through the annexation of Texas in 1845 (not as a negotiated treaty, but as a State--i.e., without 2/3 approval of Congress). but James K. Polk became the sixth of the first ten American presidents who was a slaveholder. before the American Civil War, 2/3 of all American presidents were either slaveholders or deeply sympathetic. 2/3 of all members of the Supreme Court. James K. Polk was, as far as we know, the only president who bought and sold slaves from the Oval Office(!).
Polk ordered troops to move South to the Rio Grande in order to, in effect, see what the Mexicans would do. in early 1846, there was a brief attempt at negotiation (which was conducted in French, actually, because neither spoke the other's language). Mexico had never acknowledged the Rio Grande. there was a three-week stand-off along the river, and then on the 24th of April 1846 a Mexican cavalry contingent ambushed American troops on the other side. two weeks later, Zachary Taylor's dispatch reached to the White House, announcing that hostilities had commenced in Mexico. Polk received the news and immediately asked Congress for a declaration of war, saying "Mexico had invaded American soil(!)" Approved, even if with a number of abstentions from Northerners in Senate.
-----------
the first major expansionist war of American history. a flurry of speculation about what soldiers, settlers might find in Mexico. Herman Melville said, "the people here are all in a state of delirium... nothing is talked about but the halls of Montezuma." Illionis paper arguing "reptiles on the path of progressive democracy."
many abolitionists had very serious things to say about the war. James Russel Lowell: "a national crime committed in behoof of slavery, our national sin." Ralph Waldo Emerson (in his private journals, however): "the US will conquer Mexico, but it will be as though a man swallows arsenic... Mexico will poison us..."
by the end of 1846, the US had established dominion over the southern half of California. in 1847, US forces conquered Mexico City. and, by the end, a treaty was negotiated, on dictated terms. Treaty of Guadaloupe-Hidalgo, in the US lost 13,000 Americans in a year and a half of fighting, the vast majority of disease. an estimated 50,000 Mexicans died.1848, gave the US all of the western part of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Utah, Nevada, parts of Colorado). Payment was $15 million.
that same year, 1848, was a tremendous turning point (as important in American history as in Europe, some argue). as these nationalistic revolutions against monarchy were breaking out all over Europe (Austria, Hungary, Italy, Germany, France--some will succeed, some will fail), republican America was seizing territory, and launching an Empire on its own continent.
sitting in House of Representatives, young Congressman from IL, Abraham Lincoln, voted against the Mexican War every chance he got, calling Polk's justification "a half-insane mumbling of a fever dream."
------------
why all the fuss? what did the war unleash?
Daniel Webster, the great Whig of MA, probably the most powerful and important Northern politician, kept trying to argue that this wasn't really all that important. (the Southwest was all desert--we won't expand slavery there, "an imaginary Negro in an [inhospitable] place"
but why did so many people care?
first, Northerners (prof is admitting that he is generalizing): (1) they cared about this because there was a belief that slavery could indeed take place in the Southwest (in mining, e.g.)--and, lo and behold, what was discovered in California, but gold! and why couldn't you build canals/railroads/etc. with slaves? (2) lots of Northerners in politics favored non-extension on constitutional grounds. (3) didn't want to be complicit in the expansion of slavery--"don't ask me to vote, to create a new territory, which will become a Slave state." Northerners wanted to confine slavery to the South--make slavery sectional, but free labor national. (4) there was also racism, involved in this. they saw the West as a place that would be free for small, white farmers--free from competition from a powerful Southern oligarchy. (5) and finally, of course, there were some abolitionists around, who believed in the immorality of slavery's expansion. (and sometimes there would be a mix of all this: racism, moral opposition, etc..--Abraham Lincoln, e.g.)
the South: (1) cared, in part, because an assumption had set in that it was not just because it was considered the South's destiny, but also a necessity for its economic system ("to check the expansion of slavery would be to strangle the Southern economy and way of life"). (2) the growing slave population in existing Southern states was a possible powder-keg--they feared the "shrinking" South as an economic entity, as a political culture--an economy turning in on itself, possibly. (3) political party in the Congress. new states meant two new senators. in 1850, the ratio of slave states to free states was 1:1 (15 to 15). they wanted to sustain that parity. California will be the test case. (4) and then there's a question of State's rights--did anyone have the right to prohibit anyone else from taking their property anywhere? "you Northerners have no right to stop me from taking my wagon, my horse, and my slave, anywhere I wish."(5) there's a sense of honor, here--the legal standing of slavery in the Western territories stood as a measure of its moral standing everywhere. if you tell me that slavery is not a part of America's future, then you're telling me that it's wrong in my home. and that's unacceptable.
---------------
the fuss, then, is this is because this is really a debate about American's future.
there were four plans put in place:
(1) Wilmont Proviso: penned by a young Democratic HofR, who got up in the midst of the Mexican War, who got up during the debates and said, "in any new territory we gain from Mexico, there won't be slavery." it became the rallying cry of the Free Soil movement. all but one Northern legislature endorsed it; all the Southern legistlatures condemned it. it passed the House of Representatives, but did not pass the Senate (where the slave states still had parity). there was a good deal of racist support for the Proviso (and here we see the mixture of Northern anti-slavery sentiments)--"I have no sympathy for the slaves... I speak on behalf of the free white men..." Keep the West free of black people, essentially.
(2) State sovereignty (South's position): ultimately, no federal legislature, President, etc., had the authority to stop slavery's expansion.
(3) Popular sovereignty: the simple idea that there would be no act of Congress--take Congress out of the story, and simply let the people in the Western territory have a vote. let there be a referendum, popular democracy. "a charm of ambiguity"about this proposal. the problem, of course, was when do you hold the vote? do you establish a rule about the #'s of ppl there. Southerners wanted the vote later in the process, because it would take them a while to take slaves/their system out there.
(4) they went back to the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which prohibited slavery North of the parallel. half of California, of course, was North of that line. in the 1850s, people suggesting that we continue to draw careful geographic lines across the West.
-------------
the election of 1848 was crucial: Democrats ran on a popular sovereignty platform, candidate was Lewis Cass. Zachary Taylor was the Whig candidate, recent war hero, "ol' rough an' ready." problem was, of course, that he was a Louisiana slaveholder, not very committed to Whig principles.
there were two new political offshoots, at this time, over this furore: (1) the conscience Whigs--a group of abolitionists created in MA who broke with the Whig party (and would never go back, harbinger of its future demise) (2) Free Soil Party, created in 1848, and ran Martin Van Buren, a former president. and they stood for one thing--stopping slavery's expansion. they took 10%!
Zachary Taylor was elected.
and, lo and behold, gold was discovered in California--and so suddenly there was a desperate need to find a middle-ground. on a night in January 1850, Henry Clay gets together with Daniel Webster and they cut a deal, that became the Compromise of 1850 (they're drunk, prof is noting).
that month, Clay would announce the five provisions of the Compromise before the Senate (holding a piece of George Washington's coffin, to boot!). people were very worried that the Union was going to unravel, and fall apart.
and indeed, it almost did.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
lecture 5, "telling a free story"
david blight
-------------
slaves, of course, are the greatest witnesses to this context and this war, in many ways--if it is somehow all about them, "what did they think?"
douglass' 1845 narrative is perhaps the greatest of the literary narratives. he was an almost mystically great writer, for someone who escaped so young (he learned literacy from his white mistress).
the book is full of metaphor--of one kind of tale after another.
for a fugitive slave to write his story and publish it in the western world was to say "i am free, i am somebody--i am claiming my idenity."
douglass spoke in london, at one point, before 10,000 people in london, in 1846.
the most beautiful metaphor in anti-slavery literature--Douglass seeing white sailboats on the Chesapeake Bay. acts of language that made Douglass free; a form of liberation.
----------
abolitionism--its roots, its characters, barriers they faced. and its chronology--stages of its development.
the first of the four eras of reform the prof identified earlier (very suspect--what about strike era, pre-taft/hartley?)
this was an age, the 1830s, for a small group (never exceeded 15% of the population of the Northern states--concentrated in upstate NY, MA, CT, etc.). BUT: like most highly organized reform groups, their significance is much greater than their numbers.
what were they up against?
the American abolitionists has to deal, by the 1820s, with the new generations being born who did not experience the revolution. that revolution had at least a two-fold legacy: (1) it was an event that ushered in/stood for those great Enlightenment principles; (2) fostered an intensification of slavery in the South (whereas it had abolished slavery in the North by the 1820s), and, as corollary, had to develop a defense to deal with this Great American Contradiction (prof of course not mentioning the other Great American Contradictions).
any abolitionist would have to deal with the Constitution, which is rooted deeply in Federalism. States' rights doctrine. Then you take the 3/5 clause, the Fugitive Slaves Cause, and the postponing of the question of banning the slave trade for 20 years--and you see that the Constitution is complicit in this great American sin. put another way: abolitionism would have to become extra-legal.
and then of course, they were up against the deep defense of slavery rehearsed in the South. they would have to call for social, economic, and legal revolution in a society that did not want it (and a society to which they did not belong!). to be an abolitionist in the 1830s was to take on an issue that no one saw resolving itself for generations.
anti-slavery in America, though, takes stages:
first, the idea of colonizing black people, elsewhere, as a resolution to slavery at home. colonization as an idea is not new, by 1816, when the American Colonization Society was formed (had Congressional funding--founded by James Monroe, Henry Clay (slave-holder from Kentucky), John Marshall (chief justice of the Supreme Court). but in the wake of the War of 1812, the idea was that in the boundless West, the problem of slavery might have to be faced. and the idea was that it may be solved by ridding America of black people--and they would begin with free people, who would be "asked not coeerced." the ACS founded the nation of Liberia in 1820/1822--it would ship approximately 1500 free African-Americans to Liberia, between 1821 and 1831. and they would found a capital at Monrovia (named after James Monroe, president of USA!).
but colonization, of course, had all kinds of flaws at its root. essentially rooted in the assumptions that racial equality in America was never going to happen. a fear of the rising free black population, that had really boomed in the aftermath of the American Revolution (manumissions in the Upper South, and emancipations in the North). a fear of slave insurrections, of course.
there was this idea, too, that colonization would be a safety-valve--it might only remove 5 or 10%, but even that would ameliorate tensions in the South.
a strange attractiveness, but mainly to white folk. roundly opposed by free blacks in the North.
"gradualism" fueled the proposal--and it was "gradualism" that was white America's first response to slavery, prof is arguing. example of CT, passing a law in 1790s, saying that every slave born in that state after this date would be free on their 21st birthday. (this is Abraham Lincoln's proposal, in fact, on the eve of the Civil War! and he would even compensate the slave-holders!)
BUT: several things begin to happen in the 1820s and 1830s, that radicalize anti-slavery thinkers. the roots of a more radical abolitionism--of "immediatism." four roots, prof is arguing:
(1) evangelical christianity--some of their radicalism they took from their faith, at the time of the Second Great Awakening (1790s-1840s) it was their duty to save souls. it was only one step further, to save society as well. (if it can happen in a person, why can't it happen in society?).
(2) perceptions of Southern intransigence/truculence--in the 1820s, a lot of these young anti-slavery advocates were gradualists until they began to realize how deeply committed the South actually was--morally, economically, socially, philosophically-- to slavery. and that leaving it to the South was never going to solve anything. by 1829, William Lloyd Garrison used metaphors of icebergs to characterize what he perceived as Southern intransigence.
(3) British influence--abolitionists were deeply influenced by the two or three decades-old anti-slavery crusade in England. which had first been a crusade against the slave trade, which succeeded in an act of Parliament in 1807, and then ultimately the movement against slavery itself (and the British empire will free its slaves, by 1833).
(4) "immediatism" also, prof is arguing, stems from events--in the 1810s, 1820s and 1830s there were events that informed this posture. (a) famous insurrections in the South (insurrection in SC in 1822, and the 28/30 ppl executed in its wake; (b) Negro Seamen's act passed in SC in 1822, which said that any ship sailing into the harbor, if it had black sailors, those sailors would be jailed in Charlestown while the ship was in harbor; (c) the Ohio Resolutions in 1824, State legislature suggested that a gradual plan for emancipation be put in to place over generations, and they sent it to all the Southern legislatures (they were rebuffed--letters from Southern governers saying "mind your own business");(d) massive growth of the domestic slave trade; (e) Nat Turner's insurrection in 1831, which had a radicalizing effect, no question.
------------
now who was William Lloyd Garrison? by no means the whole abolitionist movement (he did found, edit and publish the longest-running anti-slavery newspaper, from 1831 to 1865, nine months after the end of the Civil War, the week of the ratification of the 13th amendment).
he was the real thing--a professional, radical reformer. born into utter poverty! raised by his mother; he was apprenticed out at the age of 12, because his mother couldn't raise him, to a printer.
if you want to understand Garrison, you have to understand him through his ideas. here, you see the contours of "immediatism," which will begin to garner support, for sure, particularly among free blacks in the North. but it will also, of course, begin to garner widespread enemies.
but, here, his seven ideas (what "immediatism" became, in his hands):
(1) moral perfectionism: a stern, demanding call for abolitionists to remove themselves personally from any complicity in the slave system. deeply religious, of course.
(2) pacificsm, or non-resistance: he rejected all forms of violence, in any form (well, until the war broke out)
(3) anti-clericalism: opposition to what he saw as the hypocrisy of the American churches, and the Protestant clergy. (remember: Garrison was Douglass' mentor, father-figure, etc.)
(4) disunionism: no union with the slave-holders. he advocated a personal secession from the Union. that northern states not participate in the same constitution.
(5) not voting: to vote in an American election, he believed, was to be morally complicit in slavery. he advocated political non-participation.
(6) women's equality (another form of radicalism that made him a lot of enemies)
(7) civil rights advocate: a tremendous early demander of civil rights, at a time when there really weren't any advocates.
------------
what happens with this anti-slavery activism?
in a sense, two kinds of abolitionism emerged: one "white" and one "black"
the former: thousands and thousands across the North writing petitions, starting slave societies, etc. even fledgling political parties, though Garrison wouldn't touch this.
the latter: free blacks in the North, who couldn't risk the theoretical abstractions that the white abolitionists would waste time on (what are we doing for my children, who don't have a school, etc.?)
by the 1840s, a division will evolve between these two groups.
------------
amidst all this, fugitive slaves kept coming from the South (though there is a myth/legend problem, here--next lecture).
david blight
-------------
slaves, of course, are the greatest witnesses to this context and this war, in many ways--if it is somehow all about them, "what did they think?"
douglass' 1845 narrative is perhaps the greatest of the literary narratives. he was an almost mystically great writer, for someone who escaped so young (he learned literacy from his white mistress).
the book is full of metaphor--of one kind of tale after another.
for a fugitive slave to write his story and publish it in the western world was to say "i am free, i am somebody--i am claiming my idenity."
douglass spoke in london, at one point, before 10,000 people in london, in 1846.
the most beautiful metaphor in anti-slavery literature--Douglass seeing white sailboats on the Chesapeake Bay. acts of language that made Douglass free; a form of liberation.
----------
abolitionism--its roots, its characters, barriers they faced. and its chronology--stages of its development.
the first of the four eras of reform the prof identified earlier (very suspect--what about strike era, pre-taft/hartley?)
this was an age, the 1830s, for a small group (never exceeded 15% of the population of the Northern states--concentrated in upstate NY, MA, CT, etc.). BUT: like most highly organized reform groups, their significance is much greater than their numbers.
what were they up against?
the American abolitionists has to deal, by the 1820s, with the new generations being born who did not experience the revolution. that revolution had at least a two-fold legacy: (1) it was an event that ushered in/stood for those great Enlightenment principles; (2) fostered an intensification of slavery in the South (whereas it had abolished slavery in the North by the 1820s), and, as corollary, had to develop a defense to deal with this Great American Contradiction (prof of course not mentioning the other Great American Contradictions).
any abolitionist would have to deal with the Constitution, which is rooted deeply in Federalism. States' rights doctrine. Then you take the 3/5 clause, the Fugitive Slaves Cause, and the postponing of the question of banning the slave trade for 20 years--and you see that the Constitution is complicit in this great American sin. put another way: abolitionism would have to become extra-legal.
and then of course, they were up against the deep defense of slavery rehearsed in the South. they would have to call for social, economic, and legal revolution in a society that did not want it (and a society to which they did not belong!). to be an abolitionist in the 1830s was to take on an issue that no one saw resolving itself for generations.
anti-slavery in America, though, takes stages:
first, the idea of colonizing black people, elsewhere, as a resolution to slavery at home. colonization as an idea is not new, by 1816, when the American Colonization Society was formed (had Congressional funding--founded by James Monroe, Henry Clay (slave-holder from Kentucky), John Marshall (chief justice of the Supreme Court). but in the wake of the War of 1812, the idea was that in the boundless West, the problem of slavery might have to be faced. and the idea was that it may be solved by ridding America of black people--and they would begin with free people, who would be "asked not coeerced." the ACS founded the nation of Liberia in 1820/1822--it would ship approximately 1500 free African-Americans to Liberia, between 1821 and 1831. and they would found a capital at Monrovia (named after James Monroe, president of USA!).
but colonization, of course, had all kinds of flaws at its root. essentially rooted in the assumptions that racial equality in America was never going to happen. a fear of the rising free black population, that had really boomed in the aftermath of the American Revolution (manumissions in the Upper South, and emancipations in the North). a fear of slave insurrections, of course.
there was this idea, too, that colonization would be a safety-valve--it might only remove 5 or 10%, but even that would ameliorate tensions in the South.
a strange attractiveness, but mainly to white folk. roundly opposed by free blacks in the North.
"gradualism" fueled the proposal--and it was "gradualism" that was white America's first response to slavery, prof is arguing. example of CT, passing a law in 1790s, saying that every slave born in that state after this date would be free on their 21st birthday. (this is Abraham Lincoln's proposal, in fact, on the eve of the Civil War! and he would even compensate the slave-holders!)
BUT: several things begin to happen in the 1820s and 1830s, that radicalize anti-slavery thinkers. the roots of a more radical abolitionism--of "immediatism." four roots, prof is arguing:
(1) evangelical christianity--some of their radicalism they took from their faith, at the time of the Second Great Awakening (1790s-1840s) it was their duty to save souls. it was only one step further, to save society as well. (if it can happen in a person, why can't it happen in society?).
(2) perceptions of Southern intransigence/truculence--in the 1820s, a lot of these young anti-slavery advocates were gradualists until they began to realize how deeply committed the South actually was--morally, economically, socially, philosophically-- to slavery. and that leaving it to the South was never going to solve anything. by 1829, William Lloyd Garrison used metaphors of icebergs to characterize what he perceived as Southern intransigence.
(3) British influence--abolitionists were deeply influenced by the two or three decades-old anti-slavery crusade in England. which had first been a crusade against the slave trade, which succeeded in an act of Parliament in 1807, and then ultimately the movement against slavery itself (and the British empire will free its slaves, by 1833).
(4) "immediatism" also, prof is arguing, stems from events--in the 1810s, 1820s and 1830s there were events that informed this posture. (a) famous insurrections in the South (insurrection in SC in 1822, and the 28/30 ppl executed in its wake; (b) Negro Seamen's act passed in SC in 1822, which said that any ship sailing into the harbor, if it had black sailors, those sailors would be jailed in Charlestown while the ship was in harbor; (c) the Ohio Resolutions in 1824, State legislature suggested that a gradual plan for emancipation be put in to place over generations, and they sent it to all the Southern legislatures (they were rebuffed--letters from Southern governers saying "mind your own business");(d) massive growth of the domestic slave trade; (e) Nat Turner's insurrection in 1831, which had a radicalizing effect, no question.
------------
now who was William Lloyd Garrison? by no means the whole abolitionist movement (he did found, edit and publish the longest-running anti-slavery newspaper, from 1831 to 1865, nine months after the end of the Civil War, the week of the ratification of the 13th amendment).
he was the real thing--a professional, radical reformer. born into utter poverty! raised by his mother; he was apprenticed out at the age of 12, because his mother couldn't raise him, to a printer.
if you want to understand Garrison, you have to understand him through his ideas. here, you see the contours of "immediatism," which will begin to garner support, for sure, particularly among free blacks in the North. but it will also, of course, begin to garner widespread enemies.
but, here, his seven ideas (what "immediatism" became, in his hands):
(1) moral perfectionism: a stern, demanding call for abolitionists to remove themselves personally from any complicity in the slave system. deeply religious, of course.
(2) pacificsm, or non-resistance: he rejected all forms of violence, in any form (well, until the war broke out)
(3) anti-clericalism: opposition to what he saw as the hypocrisy of the American churches, and the Protestant clergy. (remember: Garrison was Douglass' mentor, father-figure, etc.)
(4) disunionism: no union with the slave-holders. he advocated a personal secession from the Union. that northern states not participate in the same constitution.
(5) not voting: to vote in an American election, he believed, was to be morally complicit in slavery. he advocated political non-participation.
(6) women's equality (another form of radicalism that made him a lot of enemies)
(7) civil rights advocate: a tremendous early demander of civil rights, at a time when there really weren't any advocates.
------------
what happens with this anti-slavery activism?
in a sense, two kinds of abolitionism emerged: one "white" and one "black"
the former: thousands and thousands across the North writing petitions, starting slave societies, etc. even fledgling political parties, though Garrison wouldn't touch this.
the latter: free blacks in the North, who couldn't risk the theoretical abstractions that the white abolitionists would waste time on (what are we doing for my children, who don't have a school, etc.?)
by the 1840s, a division will evolve between these two groups.
------------
amidst all this, fugitive slaves kept coming from the South (though there is a myth/legend problem, here--next lecture).
Monday, March 30, 2009
lecture 4, "a northern world view: yankee society, antislavery ideology..."
david blight
----------
from a northern point of view, how do we get to this passage? story of a yale college junior, abolitionist, who enlisted in the first regiment he could get into--the sixth new york cavalry. had denounced the gov't he's serving in 1861 and 1862 for its failure to explicitly make the war a war against slavery. by march 1863, he had concluded that emancipation would indeed be achieved by the war (january 1863 is the emancipation proclamation). killed in april 1865, in the last major engagement of the civil war.
how do you get to this man? bright, connected-enough--but he gave it all up for a cause he saw more worthy. and if, in general, you can come to understand white, young, Northern, Yankee, Anglo-Saxon fighters, who believed strongly in the War of 1861 (and who, despite racism in the North against immigrants and African-Americans, eventually supported a war that came to be waged on slavery).
----------
if the South was a slave society, the North was a market society--booming by the 1820s/1830s/1840s (this began, even, in the late 18th century). this booming commercial, consumerist society with its faith and defense in free labor--that ideology would be something that a lot of white Southerners would actually fear.
a time of roads, railroads, technological innovation--1800/1810/1820, you can actually find, in the North, a fear of technology.
the "market revolution", of course, was driven by the growth of cities, which became centers of economic activity. it's that time when 18th century subsistence farmers (who engaged in "mixed agriculture", growing all kinds of foodstuffs for themselves) gave way to commercial farmers producing for a much larger market (cities on the East coast, and even a global market). it's a time when the home and farm became their own domestic factory--the vast majority were still farmers, but they began to buy things on the market (from a peddler, or a store in town).
this all, of course, leads to a change in "mentalitites"--brought about fundamental alterations in aspirations, habits, activities, in conceptions and definitions of work and leisure. it would fundamentally change the conception of a "laborer"--becoming part of a collective force, put into opposition against Capital and manufacture.
there's a habit in the US to think that the idea of "individual rights" began with the Bill of Rights--but this got profoundly shaped by the "market revolution"
it's going to change the idea of mobility, where you can go and how.
and--this is crucial--it's going to change, for Northern people (and immigrants), people's conception about what they can give their children. the idea that if labor is left free, the small guy has a chance--rooted in "free labor" ideology is this idea of social mobility. especially in a society that had this thing called "the West."
even such American concepts as "self-reliance" is changed by the Market revolution--people keep seeing evidence that shows them that, in the face of the market, their individualism is not so powerful.
the level of ideas, thinking, and common behaviour, would bring about a combination of tremendous, broad optimism (possibly like we've never experienced since), simultaneous to a certain sense of anxiety/dread/despair. it will lead to great wealth (fortunes in railroads by the 1840s and 1850s, and the textile industry, and on Wall Street), but, also, inequality will grow.
the workplace would become less personal, as factories emerged. women went to work, most famously in Lowell factories in MA. for the first time, in significant numbers, young girls and young women left the realm of domesticity.
the market revolution would also lead to environmental degradation--people worried a lot about the destruction of natural habitats (rivers, etc.)
it came, also, with boom and bust cycles--a crisis in 1837, and in 1857 (which would play a part in the story of the Civil War).
even the idea of what a child is (of childhood), and the family, undergoes a revolution in 20 or 30 years. by the 30s and 40s in an immigrant family, a child meant a wage. in the growing middle-class of course, there was a more modern definition of childhood--the child was to be a protected youth. "parenting", as moral guardianship.
the market revolution was a tremendous engine for the idea of "progress"--America was growing, and it was now going to be the nation of "progress". it looked like it could expand, forever. as walt whitman wrote, in poem after poem, America would be the beginning of a "new man". a new start for humankind.
AND: "if you come to believe we are the hope for humankind--we are "progress", and our creed is written down in the constitution--what have you done? you've said, we are really special, and we are really important, and we are really good. you've kind of set yourself up, haven't you?" the doctrine of progress, prof is arguing, has always bred its contradictions.
1820s New York, 1820s/1830s Philadelphia, 1850s Chicago (railroad capital of the world).
part of the change to the North, of course, was immigration--in the 1830s, 600,000 immigrants came to the US, almost all from western Europe. in the 1840s, 1.5 million. in the 1850s, almost 3 million more. by 1852/1853, Boston and New York had 50% foreign-born populations. it's close to this in Philadelphia.
all this, of course, was fueled by the transport revolution. the eerie canal, which was profitable from 1820-1880s. 300 such canals built in the 1850s. steamboats became the romantic symbol of this revolution (though they too brought dread; 1/3 of all steamboats built in the 1850s, exploded!).
and then, of course, railroads--no continent, you could argue, had ever been as ready-made as the US for railroads. they revolutionized an American sense of time, ability to travel, manufacturing--and it made Chicago, Chicago. it made the first multimillionaires, the first great fortunes. and it became a great example of the relationship between the Federal Government and Business--they were built, by and large, by government subsidies, and a tremendous amount of corruption. had a lot to do with linking northeast with northwest, which created a certain sense of isolation in the South.
and, at this time, we can identify also the idea of manifest destiny--which prof is calling an inherently white supremacist idea, that was a part of American culture from the outset. the idea that we have to expand, colonize, and civilize this continent.
------------
NOW, in any society changing this much, this fast (doubling its population, in 20 years; if the rate of population growth from 1820-1850 had been sustained, over time, we'd have today roughly 1.5 billion people in the US), both reform/change and anxiety are inevitable.
four major reform periods of American history (a period in which people became professional reformers; whole movements, magazines, etc.), in prof's opinion. the first is this era, 1820s-1850s, ante-bellum America (emphasized most obviously by the anti-slavery movement). the second great era is the progressive era, a great response to urbanization/industrialization/immigration. the third is, in all likelihood, the New Deal (incredible emergency/crises over question of what government owes its people, etc.). the fourth is the 60s--civil rights movement, vietnam war, etc.
in Am. history, reform crusades have had to do with one of several objects/purposes/problems.
the first is the industrializing process: we've been leaving the history of this reform ever since our first market revolution.
the second is racial equality: and we're still having that reform movement.
the third is gender equality.
the fourth is peace.
the fifth kind of American reform is religious and individual morality--and here it takes on some distinctly American characteristics.
-----------
to be anti-slavery in America by the 1820s and 1830s was to face a host of barriers: sanctity of US constitution, depth of pro-slavery argument. abolitionists did not believe they would see the end of slavery in their lifetime.
and last point: one of the barriers for an anti-slavery activist, whatever your reasons, is the simple fact that the United States was a republic, and that the sides that owned those slaves, their leaders were free to defend their system. they were free to dissent--they were republicans (small R), as well. the greatest tragedy of American history, perhaps, is that this struggle could not be resolved politically.
david blight
----------
from a northern point of view, how do we get to this passage? story of a yale college junior, abolitionist, who enlisted in the first regiment he could get into--the sixth new york cavalry. had denounced the gov't he's serving in 1861 and 1862 for its failure to explicitly make the war a war against slavery. by march 1863, he had concluded that emancipation would indeed be achieved by the war (january 1863 is the emancipation proclamation). killed in april 1865, in the last major engagement of the civil war.
how do you get to this man? bright, connected-enough--but he gave it all up for a cause he saw more worthy. and if, in general, you can come to understand white, young, Northern, Yankee, Anglo-Saxon fighters, who believed strongly in the War of 1861 (and who, despite racism in the North against immigrants and African-Americans, eventually supported a war that came to be waged on slavery).
----------
if the South was a slave society, the North was a market society--booming by the 1820s/1830s/1840s (this began, even, in the late 18th century). this booming commercial, consumerist society with its faith and defense in free labor--that ideology would be something that a lot of white Southerners would actually fear.
a time of roads, railroads, technological innovation--1800/1810/1820, you can actually find, in the North, a fear of technology.
the "market revolution", of course, was driven by the growth of cities, which became centers of economic activity. it's that time when 18th century subsistence farmers (who engaged in "mixed agriculture", growing all kinds of foodstuffs for themselves) gave way to commercial farmers producing for a much larger market (cities on the East coast, and even a global market). it's a time when the home and farm became their own domestic factory--the vast majority were still farmers, but they began to buy things on the market (from a peddler, or a store in town).
this all, of course, leads to a change in "mentalitites"--brought about fundamental alterations in aspirations, habits, activities, in conceptions and definitions of work and leisure. it would fundamentally change the conception of a "laborer"--becoming part of a collective force, put into opposition against Capital and manufacture.
there's a habit in the US to think that the idea of "individual rights" began with the Bill of Rights--but this got profoundly shaped by the "market revolution"
it's going to change the idea of mobility, where you can go and how.
and--this is crucial--it's going to change, for Northern people (and immigrants), people's conception about what they can give their children. the idea that if labor is left free, the small guy has a chance--rooted in "free labor" ideology is this idea of social mobility. especially in a society that had this thing called "the West."
even such American concepts as "self-reliance" is changed by the Market revolution--people keep seeing evidence that shows them that, in the face of the market, their individualism is not so powerful.
the level of ideas, thinking, and common behaviour, would bring about a combination of tremendous, broad optimism (possibly like we've never experienced since), simultaneous to a certain sense of anxiety/dread/despair. it will lead to great wealth (fortunes in railroads by the 1840s and 1850s, and the textile industry, and on Wall Street), but, also, inequality will grow.
the workplace would become less personal, as factories emerged. women went to work, most famously in Lowell factories in MA. for the first time, in significant numbers, young girls and young women left the realm of domesticity.
the market revolution would also lead to environmental degradation--people worried a lot about the destruction of natural habitats (rivers, etc.)
it came, also, with boom and bust cycles--a crisis in 1837, and in 1857 (which would play a part in the story of the Civil War).
even the idea of what a child is (of childhood), and the family, undergoes a revolution in 20 or 30 years. by the 30s and 40s in an immigrant family, a child meant a wage. in the growing middle-class of course, there was a more modern definition of childhood--the child was to be a protected youth. "parenting", as moral guardianship.
the market revolution was a tremendous engine for the idea of "progress"--America was growing, and it was now going to be the nation of "progress". it looked like it could expand, forever. as walt whitman wrote, in poem after poem, America would be the beginning of a "new man". a new start for humankind.
AND: "if you come to believe we are the hope for humankind--we are "progress", and our creed is written down in the constitution--what have you done? you've said, we are really special, and we are really important, and we are really good. you've kind of set yourself up, haven't you?" the doctrine of progress, prof is arguing, has always bred its contradictions.
1820s New York, 1820s/1830s Philadelphia, 1850s Chicago (railroad capital of the world).
part of the change to the North, of course, was immigration--in the 1830s, 600,000 immigrants came to the US, almost all from western Europe. in the 1840s, 1.5 million. in the 1850s, almost 3 million more. by 1852/1853, Boston and New York had 50% foreign-born populations. it's close to this in Philadelphia.
all this, of course, was fueled by the transport revolution. the eerie canal, which was profitable from 1820-1880s. 300 such canals built in the 1850s. steamboats became the romantic symbol of this revolution (though they too brought dread; 1/3 of all steamboats built in the 1850s, exploded!).
and then, of course, railroads--no continent, you could argue, had ever been as ready-made as the US for railroads. they revolutionized an American sense of time, ability to travel, manufacturing--and it made Chicago, Chicago. it made the first multimillionaires, the first great fortunes. and it became a great example of the relationship between the Federal Government and Business--they were built, by and large, by government subsidies, and a tremendous amount of corruption. had a lot to do with linking northeast with northwest, which created a certain sense of isolation in the South.
and, at this time, we can identify also the idea of manifest destiny--which prof is calling an inherently white supremacist idea, that was a part of American culture from the outset. the idea that we have to expand, colonize, and civilize this continent.
------------
NOW, in any society changing this much, this fast (doubling its population, in 20 years; if the rate of population growth from 1820-1850 had been sustained, over time, we'd have today roughly 1.5 billion people in the US), both reform/change and anxiety are inevitable.
four major reform periods of American history (a period in which people became professional reformers; whole movements, magazines, etc.), in prof's opinion. the first is this era, 1820s-1850s, ante-bellum America (emphasized most obviously by the anti-slavery movement). the second great era is the progressive era, a great response to urbanization/industrialization/immigration. the third is, in all likelihood, the New Deal (incredible emergency/crises over question of what government owes its people, etc.). the fourth is the 60s--civil rights movement, vietnam war, etc.
in Am. history, reform crusades have had to do with one of several objects/purposes/problems.
the first is the industrializing process: we've been leaving the history of this reform ever since our first market revolution.
the second is racial equality: and we're still having that reform movement.
the third is gender equality.
the fourth is peace.
the fifth kind of American reform is religious and individual morality--and here it takes on some distinctly American characteristics.
-----------
to be anti-slavery in America by the 1820s and 1830s was to face a host of barriers: sanctity of US constitution, depth of pro-slavery argument. abolitionists did not believe they would see the end of slavery in their lifetime.
and last point: one of the barriers for an anti-slavery activist, whatever your reasons, is the simple fact that the United States was a republic, and that the sides that owned those slaves, their leaders were free to defend their system. they were free to dissent--they were republicans (small R), as well. the greatest tragedy of American history, perhaps, is that this struggle could not be resolved politically.
lecture 3, "a southern world-view: the old south and proslavery ideology"
david blight
----------
in a speech before the Virginia secession convention in late-April 1861, the newly-elected, vice-president of the confederacy Alexander Stevens (a slave-holder) argues that the cornerstone of their movement/their freedom was "American Negro slavery." ("as a race, the African is inferior to the white man... he is not equal to the white man... and cannot be made so by the actions of humankind.")
you always have to worry, in history, when people begin to invoke "Nature"
but how do we get to 1861, and Alexander Stevens declaring that it's all about slavery?
today, then, the Southern defense of slavery (and its evolution).
(of course, what caused this war, remains a question--it cannot be "soundbyted" away.)
----------
professor is relating de Tocqueville's account of the "indolent" South. (the enervating effects of slavery on the society, etc. -- his own aristocratic complexes shining through.) "you see few churches and no schools." not accurate, in his estimations of Southern stagnation. but he did predict the Northern domination of the South. ("Man is not made for servitude").
----------
in the South, what developed was one of the world's true "slave societies." what does this mean?
essentially, any society where the relationship between ownership and labor is defined by slavery--where slavery affected everything about social relations in society (where people were socialized by it, married/reared children, and conceived of the idea of property around the institution). other slave societies in human history (controversial this), were Ancient Greece and Rome, Brazil (by 18th and 19th century), the whole of the Carribbean (the West Indies sugar-producing empires of the Dutch, French, British, Spanish, etc.), and the American South.
there were other, localized slave societies, to be sure. particularly in Africa, even before the Europeans arrived (though really consolidated after the regularization of the Atlantic slave trade). East Africa, in the Muslim world (well before Atlantic slave trade, actually).
BUT: the five "great" slave societies were the above. All were enormously profitable. Technological innovation was generally slow (cheap value of labor). High ratio of slaves to free-people. In those societies, slaves as an interest were both a political and great, economic institution--one which defined regular ways of life.
When exactly did the American South become a slave society. Circa 1820, perhaps. Or maybe even more the 1830s, when you have booming cotton crop. Or in the aftermath of the Mexican War. Prof is arguing, surely by the early part of this period.
One aspect of that slave society is that, as Americans ended the foreign slave trade (in 1808, remember, though it didn't entirely end--there were some people in Georgia, South Carolina, Louisiana still wanted to reopen it up until the 1850s). as the foreign trade was closed off, for a variety of reasons, the domestic American slave trade absolutely boomed. one of the reasons that the cotton boom could be the cotton boom, prof is arguing, was because one of the unique features of N. American slavery, it was the only slave society in the New World where the slaves naturally reproduced themselves (Brazil managed it, a bit)--this has to do with climate, sex ratio, diet, and movement. (prof emphasizing the latter--the "safety valve" of the West, to move to)
between 1810 and 1820 alone, 137,000 American slaves were forced from N. Carolina and Chesapeake States to move to Alabama, Missisippi.
from 1820 to 1860, roughly 2,000,000 American slaves were sold to satisfy the need of slave labor in the great cotton kingdom of the growing south-west. roughly 2/3 of those 2,000,000 slaves moved from the North/East to the south-west--outright sale. a massive, huge American business.
by the 1830s, there were over 100 men in Charleston, SC making their livings, full-time, as slave traders. many of them owned their own "shops." other cities became major ports--Richmond, Virginia, for example (2-3 major, full-time slave traders--slave, auction-house jail, and kept exact account books). One trader, Hector Davis, made about $120,000 in a week!
the South, in this sense, was part of a Western movement. for slave children, between 1820 and 1860, living in the Upper South or Eastern Seaboard, they had a 30% chance of being sold, outright, away from their parents, before the age of 10.
ads in newspaper would read: "Negros wanted... good front teeth" (book on this: Walter Johnson, "Soul by Soul"). amazing to read the language/letters of slave traders: the complacency, pure racism, business-language on the other.
-------
how was slavery defended, then? (and how did the pro-slavery argument develop? and who made them?)
best way to begin, prof is saying, whether in the early defenses of the 1820s, or later, is within the framework of a deeply conservative, organic world-view; a Burkean conservatism--a set of beliefs that says the world is ordered as it is, for reasons. and that human beings ought not to tinker with that order--a set of beliefs in the sustenance of the social order as it was. that people were conceived, by God/Evolution, in line with a certain order--some born to do this, others born to do that (it's "natural"). an obsession with "stability"--the threat of upsetting the social order. bound up with notions of "honor" and "duty"--respect for "tradition."
white, Southern defenders of slavery were, in some respects, products of the Enlightenment--some of them come to really believe in the intellect, in the "power of reason" to figure out the Universe (but, figure it out in different ways). you can be a product of Enlightenment, and still be profoundly conservative. deep, organic forms of conservatism are not antithetical to the Enlightenment, at least not entirely.
many of pro-slavery ideologues will argue that ideas of liberty/freedom, which they constantly referred to, were never absolute. many of them would directly reverse Thomas Jefferson's declaration will argue that "no one is born equal"--many of them would argue that "freedom" must always be balanced with "order and tradition." with the world as it is, not as it ought to be.
southern pro-slavery arguments were much more likely to stress "duty" than to discuss individual "liberty."
edward brown: "slavery" had been the stepping-ladder by which nations had passed from "barbarism" to "civilization"--that slavery was a way in which you built an economy, which would be propserous and benefit those who "mattered."
pro-slavery writers had, in many ways, a fundamentally different conception of how history happened than northern writers (even abraham lincoln--"never a real abolitionist, but at least grew up with anti-slavery in his heart").
categories of the pro-slavery argument:
(a) the biblical: almost all pro-slavery writers would dip into the Old or New Testament--every society has had it, it's always been around. you can read some prophets as justifiying it, thereby concluding that it was divinely sanctioned. (of course it can breath anti-slavery, as well)
(b) the historical: not just the venerability of slavery, but that it has been crucial to the development of all great civilizations. it has been the engine of wealth, of greatness, etc. how would you have had cicero? how would you have had the playrights of greece, etc.? at the base of all societies there has to be a labor system.
(c) natural rights: both part of and resistance to the "greatest product" of the Enlightenment--the idea of rights from birth, rights from God. being born with certain capacities. pro-slavery writers used this, stripping it of its universalism--the real rule of the world is not "natural equality", but "natural inequality."
(d) economic arguments: the cynic, of course, goes straight here--one of the greatest of these writers was James Henry Hammond, who had plenty of mixed-race children. he was the epitomy of pro-slavery activism--ultimately his argument was that it was amoral. a property defense of the institution: roughly, the means by which African-Americans have been made our property are irrelevant--they are our property, and our right to them is sacrosanct. this, in particular, was a "potent" argument, says prof--"it is what it is, deal with it."
(e) some would get guilty/worried, and defend it as a "necessary evil" (and some of these folk were deeply sincere). one man to his fiance: "i am undecided whether i ought to hold slaves... it is unjust... but the question is, in my present circumstances, would the general interest of the slaves be promoted best by emancipation?" (develops a theory of how he will emancipate blacks, within the institution itself).
(f) the racial defense: cf. Alexander Stevens' speech--but all of them went here, and one time or another. George Fitz-Hugh, of course, famously made this case: "the Negro is but a grown-up child... some men are born with saddles on their backs, and others with boots/spurs"
(g) utopian slavery: Henry Hughes, "one strange duck"--a loner who wrote an amazing diary. "Warrenteeism"--he argued that slaves were charges put into the world who were there for slaveholders to protect/take care of. he wanted a strong central state to perfect the slave into a perfect worker. he was also obsessed with racial purity--any intermixing would destroy the master race. he wasn't that widely read, prof admits; but it shows us how far pro-slavery could ultimate good. it wasn't only a positive good, but it was perfection.
--------
all of that is only to argue that there was a deep, abiding, well-rehearsed defense of slavery. and if you want to understand why so many white Southerners went to such great extents to save their society, you need look no further than these arguments and sentiments.
--------
a few final comments, which come at the beginning of lecture 4--when slaveholding politicians begin to organize toward some sort of secession, over this slave society they want to protect, they are writing hundreds and hundreds of pages in defense of their world. pro-slavery anthologies, etc. also, this wasn't all about "abstract" ideology--in 1857, francis ellen watkins harper, said, in the wake of the dred scott decision, "if men had not found out a fearful alchemy by which this blood can be transformed into gold..."
david blight
----------
in a speech before the Virginia secession convention in late-April 1861, the newly-elected, vice-president of the confederacy Alexander Stevens (a slave-holder) argues that the cornerstone of their movement/their freedom was "American Negro slavery." ("as a race, the African is inferior to the white man... he is not equal to the white man... and cannot be made so by the actions of humankind.")
you always have to worry, in history, when people begin to invoke "Nature"
but how do we get to 1861, and Alexander Stevens declaring that it's all about slavery?
today, then, the Southern defense of slavery (and its evolution).
(of course, what caused this war, remains a question--it cannot be "soundbyted" away.)
----------
professor is relating de Tocqueville's account of the "indolent" South. (the enervating effects of slavery on the society, etc. -- his own aristocratic complexes shining through.) "you see few churches and no schools." not accurate, in his estimations of Southern stagnation. but he did predict the Northern domination of the South. ("Man is not made for servitude").
----------
in the South, what developed was one of the world's true "slave societies." what does this mean?
essentially, any society where the relationship between ownership and labor is defined by slavery--where slavery affected everything about social relations in society (where people were socialized by it, married/reared children, and conceived of the idea of property around the institution). other slave societies in human history (controversial this), were Ancient Greece and Rome, Brazil (by 18th and 19th century), the whole of the Carribbean (the West Indies sugar-producing empires of the Dutch, French, British, Spanish, etc.), and the American South.
there were other, localized slave societies, to be sure. particularly in Africa, even before the Europeans arrived (though really consolidated after the regularization of the Atlantic slave trade). East Africa, in the Muslim world (well before Atlantic slave trade, actually).
BUT: the five "great" slave societies were the above. All were enormously profitable. Technological innovation was generally slow (cheap value of labor). High ratio of slaves to free-people. In those societies, slaves as an interest were both a political and great, economic institution--one which defined regular ways of life.
When exactly did the American South become a slave society. Circa 1820, perhaps. Or maybe even more the 1830s, when you have booming cotton crop. Or in the aftermath of the Mexican War. Prof is arguing, surely by the early part of this period.
One aspect of that slave society is that, as Americans ended the foreign slave trade (in 1808, remember, though it didn't entirely end--there were some people in Georgia, South Carolina, Louisiana still wanted to reopen it up until the 1850s). as the foreign trade was closed off, for a variety of reasons, the domestic American slave trade absolutely boomed. one of the reasons that the cotton boom could be the cotton boom, prof is arguing, was because one of the unique features of N. American slavery, it was the only slave society in the New World where the slaves naturally reproduced themselves (Brazil managed it, a bit)--this has to do with climate, sex ratio, diet, and movement. (prof emphasizing the latter--the "safety valve" of the West, to move to)
between 1810 and 1820 alone, 137,000 American slaves were forced from N. Carolina and Chesapeake States to move to Alabama, Missisippi.
from 1820 to 1860, roughly 2,000,000 American slaves were sold to satisfy the need of slave labor in the great cotton kingdom of the growing south-west. roughly 2/3 of those 2,000,000 slaves moved from the North/East to the south-west--outright sale. a massive, huge American business.
by the 1830s, there were over 100 men in Charleston, SC making their livings, full-time, as slave traders. many of them owned their own "shops." other cities became major ports--Richmond, Virginia, for example (2-3 major, full-time slave traders--slave, auction-house jail, and kept exact account books). One trader, Hector Davis, made about $120,000 in a week!
the South, in this sense, was part of a Western movement. for slave children, between 1820 and 1860, living in the Upper South or Eastern Seaboard, they had a 30% chance of being sold, outright, away from their parents, before the age of 10.
ads in newspaper would read: "Negros wanted... good front teeth" (book on this: Walter Johnson, "Soul by Soul"). amazing to read the language/letters of slave traders: the complacency, pure racism, business-language on the other.
-------
how was slavery defended, then? (and how did the pro-slavery argument develop? and who made them?)
best way to begin, prof is saying, whether in the early defenses of the 1820s, or later, is within the framework of a deeply conservative, organic world-view; a Burkean conservatism--a set of beliefs that says the world is ordered as it is, for reasons. and that human beings ought not to tinker with that order--a set of beliefs in the sustenance of the social order as it was. that people were conceived, by God/Evolution, in line with a certain order--some born to do this, others born to do that (it's "natural"). an obsession with "stability"--the threat of upsetting the social order. bound up with notions of "honor" and "duty"--respect for "tradition."
white, Southern defenders of slavery were, in some respects, products of the Enlightenment--some of them come to really believe in the intellect, in the "power of reason" to figure out the Universe (but, figure it out in different ways). you can be a product of Enlightenment, and still be profoundly conservative. deep, organic forms of conservatism are not antithetical to the Enlightenment, at least not entirely.
many of pro-slavery ideologues will argue that ideas of liberty/freedom, which they constantly referred to, were never absolute. many of them would directly reverse Thomas Jefferson's declaration will argue that "no one is born equal"--many of them would argue that "freedom" must always be balanced with "order and tradition." with the world as it is, not as it ought to be.
southern pro-slavery arguments were much more likely to stress "duty" than to discuss individual "liberty."
edward brown: "slavery" had been the stepping-ladder by which nations had passed from "barbarism" to "civilization"--that slavery was a way in which you built an economy, which would be propserous and benefit those who "mattered."
pro-slavery writers had, in many ways, a fundamentally different conception of how history happened than northern writers (even abraham lincoln--"never a real abolitionist, but at least grew up with anti-slavery in his heart").
categories of the pro-slavery argument:
(a) the biblical: almost all pro-slavery writers would dip into the Old or New Testament--every society has had it, it's always been around. you can read some prophets as justifiying it, thereby concluding that it was divinely sanctioned. (of course it can breath anti-slavery, as well)
(b) the historical: not just the venerability of slavery, but that it has been crucial to the development of all great civilizations. it has been the engine of wealth, of greatness, etc. how would you have had cicero? how would you have had the playrights of greece, etc.? at the base of all societies there has to be a labor system.
(c) natural rights: both part of and resistance to the "greatest product" of the Enlightenment--the idea of rights from birth, rights from God. being born with certain capacities. pro-slavery writers used this, stripping it of its universalism--the real rule of the world is not "natural equality", but "natural inequality."
(d) economic arguments: the cynic, of course, goes straight here--one of the greatest of these writers was James Henry Hammond, who had plenty of mixed-race children. he was the epitomy of pro-slavery activism--ultimately his argument was that it was amoral. a property defense of the institution: roughly, the means by which African-Americans have been made our property are irrelevant--they are our property, and our right to them is sacrosanct. this, in particular, was a "potent" argument, says prof--"it is what it is, deal with it."
(e) some would get guilty/worried, and defend it as a "necessary evil" (and some of these folk were deeply sincere). one man to his fiance: "i am undecided whether i ought to hold slaves... it is unjust... but the question is, in my present circumstances, would the general interest of the slaves be promoted best by emancipation?" (develops a theory of how he will emancipate blacks, within the institution itself).
(f) the racial defense: cf. Alexander Stevens' speech--but all of them went here, and one time or another. George Fitz-Hugh, of course, famously made this case: "the Negro is but a grown-up child... some men are born with saddles on their backs, and others with boots/spurs"
(g) utopian slavery: Henry Hughes, "one strange duck"--a loner who wrote an amazing diary. "Warrenteeism"--he argued that slaves were charges put into the world who were there for slaveholders to protect/take care of. he wanted a strong central state to perfect the slave into a perfect worker. he was also obsessed with racial purity--any intermixing would destroy the master race. he wasn't that widely read, prof admits; but it shows us how far pro-slavery could ultimate good. it wasn't only a positive good, but it was perfection.
--------
all of that is only to argue that there was a deep, abiding, well-rehearsed defense of slavery. and if you want to understand why so many white Southerners went to such great extents to save their society, you need look no further than these arguments and sentiments.
--------
a few final comments, which come at the beginning of lecture 4--when slaveholding politicians begin to organize toward some sort of secession, over this slave society they want to protect, they are writing hundreds and hundreds of pages in defense of their world. pro-slavery anthologies, etc. also, this wasn't all about "abstract" ideology--in 1857, francis ellen watkins harper, said, in the wake of the dred scott decision, "if men had not found out a fearful alchemy by which this blood can be transformed into gold..."
Sunday, March 29, 2009
lecture 1, "southern society: slavery, king cotton, and antebellum america's 'peculiar' region"
david blight
--------
question of how peculiar/distinctive/different is the American South? "the dixie difference"
the "South" of course, is many many things, many many people--this question, in some ways, is irrelevant, though of course, not. Presidential elections are won/lost in the South (name me a president who won without some success in the states of the Old Confederacy).
the question, of course, is fraught with stereotypes. and the idea of Southern stereotypes--the "South" as an idea--is a very old concept, definitely precedes the civil war, very salient through the colonial period.
Thomas Jefferson in the 1780s: Northerners "cool", "sober", "persevering", "independent", "superstitious", "jealous of their own liberties", etc.; Southerners "fiery", "voluptuous", "indolent", "zealous of their own liberties", "generous", "candid", "without pretentions"
Note the refrain on "liberties" -- everyone in the civil war will say that they're fighting for liberty.
Wilburt Cash, 1940, "The Mind of the South" -- he did something similar to Jefferson, though he focuses only on Southerners; deeply critical of his beloved South. Argues in this book that the South has "no mind", in a sense. Chock-a-block of stereotypes, his characterizations--prof is reading them out.
Shelby Foot, on white Southerners and the South: unable to express themselves in Art.
Why does the South have such a long memory? "Because we lost the war." (Toni Morrison, though, in "Beloved"--"me and you Sethie, we got too much yesterday, we need more tomorrow")
David Girganus: "attempting the impossible at great cost, proudly celebrating the failure, and then getting admiration for the performance."
One could go on and on... Every major African-American poet and writer of the 20th Century was from the South--and has certainly always been reflecting on the South, in one way or another.
-------
Back to the Old South, though.
First of all, it's worth remembering, there are a lot of clear, undeniable similarities between South and North in the 40 years before the war.
(a) Roughly the same geographic size.
(b) Spoke the same language, though in different dialectics.
(c) a certain common heritage, of the American Revolution (John C. Calhoun, a key intellectual architect of the "South", was very much an American nationalist). And you can find a deep American nationalism in many of the young leaders of the Southern secessionists.
(d) shared the same Protestant Christianity.
(e) similar political ideologies, born of the American Revolution (when you hear about a slaveholder preach about political liberty, and individual liberties, you think "Come On"--but this was a history informed by the American Revolution, can't forget.)
(f) a strong localism. State's rights was not unique to the South--some of the most open demonstrations of State rights were in the North (Wisconsin refused, for example, to enforce the Fugitive Slaves' Act).
(g) Shared a belief in progress -- lingered in America's air of the 1840s and 1850s
(h) Both the South and the North shared the reality and spirit of the Western expansion.
(i) Both North and South and their political-economic leadership were comprised of hard-boiled, believing, practising capitalists (Southern slaveholders were not pre-capitalists). Both sides, in a sense, had the same kind of oligarchies, it could be argued: less than 1% of the real and personal property was held by 50% of free adult males. The richest 1% held 27% of the wealth (the North had budding oligarchies, even if they were based on different things--which is where the rub comes in, of course).
---------
Nevertheless, back to the notion of the distinctiveness of the South.
Travelers from Europe came to the South and remarked on the "indolence" and "drinking" of Southerners--the idea of the South as "exotic", "different", and "dangerous". The North as independent and free republicans, in contrast to what these travelers saw in the South.
Trying to understand how "difference" boils into "disunion" -- this does have some roots in these distinct caricatures. But, prof is saying, as one of my friends warned me, "don't leave out the politics."
---------
One kind of Southern distinctiveness, above all: if there were one distinct feature that eventually evolved in the South, in prof's opinion, it was what we might call its anti-modernism. A disdain for what was determined to be the corruption of modern commercialism--Southern slaveholders were skeptical of the democratization slowly beginning in the North (spreading literacy, etc.). Democracy was a threat to hierarchy, and the South became, quite distinctively, a very hierarchical society. Rooted very deeply in open conceptions of class and race; some were born to rule, in the opinions of the planter class of the 1840s and 1850s ("deal with it", was their attitude).
They became inflamed with their own peculiar sense of "honor." A set of values, or form of behavior--signed a particular kind of gentleman's behavior (property, class, rank, status that must be recognized). Reputation and recognition were critical. There must, indeed, be a ritual of that recognition. (James Henry Hammond, of SC: "Reputation is everything. Everything depends upon the estimation in which I'm held")
When they started encountering these Northerners, who spoke of a "politics of law", or "conscience", they're not always on the same page.
Then there's this issue of Conservatism--why is the US South a seat of modern American conservatism? There is this overall claim, of course, of anti-reform, anti-intellectual defense of a hierarchical civilization in white supremacy--and, indeed, in one of the biggest slave systems that had ever been created (there's the corollary issue of violence--why is cock-fighting more popular, etc.?)
South, though, eventually "liberated" from this burden of being the site of all of America's sins, by:
(1) the Civil Rights' Revolution
(2) the discovery of Northern racism
(3) the loss of the Vietnam War, in the sense that the Southerners were now not the only Americans who had ever "lost" a war.
(4) the last 20-25 years of political-economic history; the Sun-belt migration, massive immigration to the South (Vietnamese in Louisiana, Hispanics in N. Carolina/Texas), and the political culture will have to respond to that.
Yet America seems unable to forget the Confederate flag...
----------
There's another kind of burden, though, which is more directly historical (rather than "cultural")
Let's remember, the South had a distinctive history.
The antebellum Southern economy became, by the 1820s, a slave economy--it became the fifth/sixth slave society in human history. For a long time, in American scholarship, one of the deep mythologies about the Old South was that the plantation economy in the run-up to the Civil War was dying out (lots have argued it). But a generation of scholars have looked at the Southern economy and have discovered that the Southern economy was booming (greatest cotton crop in 1860). Slavery was extraordinarily profitable.
And, lo and behold, the idea of the Southern planter as a "backward-looking" "inward-looking" oligarch--completely false. The average American planter was a raging capitalist--they understood profits and markets (they were men of rational choice--and the way to wealth, even before the cotton gin but especially after Eli Whitney's cotton gin, was "slavery"). In Faulkner's words, "a house, land, and some niggers."
How powerful was the cotton boom once it took hold? By the 1820s, within a decade of the War of 1812, cotton's future seemed limitless--one of the best analogies is to the oil-rich regions of the world in the post-WWII era. If you're an oil rich country today, you have the world at your knees, in a sense. And that is how the Southern leadership began to see itself, as early as the 1820s and 1830s. For four decades in a row, the production of American cotton doubled every decade. Became, without question, the country's largest export. Already, by 1825, the South was the world's largest supplier of cotton--fueling the industrial revolution in textile production in Britain and elsewhere.
Southern political power by the 1850s and 1860s was no longer based in Virginia or even South Carolina, it's out in the Mississippi valley--this is the region Jefferson Davis, from Mississippi, becomes the President of the Confederacy.
Fortunes were made in an instant.
The slave-holding population was fluid, though, prof is arguing. There were about 400,000 slave-holders in the South in the 1860s. About 1/3 of white families, at one time or another, had at least a toe-hold in slave ownership. 2/3 remained yeoman farmers, poor whites, etc. (in many regions, these were 40-50% of the population). Jefferson Davis is an excellent example of the cotton boom planter; though born in humble circumstances, he made millions in cotton.
What is the relationship between the spread of cotton and the spread of power?
By 1860, there were roughly 4 million slaves in the US South (the second largest slave society in the world, only larger one was Russian serfdom, Brazil was close)--American slaves, as a financial asset, were worth approximately 3.5 billion dollars, just as property (in today's dolllars, that is roughly 75 billion dollars). In 1860, slaves, as an asset, worth more than all of the manufacturing, than all of the railroads--than all of the productive capacity of the US put together. The single largest financial asset in the American economy. The only thing more valuable than the slaves was the land itself.
If you're looking to understand why the South will look to defend this system, this social structure--look no further. What would you compare that to today?
david blight
--------
question of how peculiar/distinctive/different is the American South? "the dixie difference"
the "South" of course, is many many things, many many people--this question, in some ways, is irrelevant, though of course, not. Presidential elections are won/lost in the South (name me a president who won without some success in the states of the Old Confederacy).
the question, of course, is fraught with stereotypes. and the idea of Southern stereotypes--the "South" as an idea--is a very old concept, definitely precedes the civil war, very salient through the colonial period.
Thomas Jefferson in the 1780s: Northerners "cool", "sober", "persevering", "independent", "superstitious", "jealous of their own liberties", etc.; Southerners "fiery", "voluptuous", "indolent", "zealous of their own liberties", "generous", "candid", "without pretentions"
Note the refrain on "liberties" -- everyone in the civil war will say that they're fighting for liberty.
Wilburt Cash, 1940, "The Mind of the South" -- he did something similar to Jefferson, though he focuses only on Southerners; deeply critical of his beloved South. Argues in this book that the South has "no mind", in a sense. Chock-a-block of stereotypes, his characterizations--prof is reading them out.
Shelby Foot, on white Southerners and the South: unable to express themselves in Art.
Why does the South have such a long memory? "Because we lost the war." (Toni Morrison, though, in "Beloved"--"me and you Sethie, we got too much yesterday, we need more tomorrow")
David Girganus: "attempting the impossible at great cost, proudly celebrating the failure, and then getting admiration for the performance."
One could go on and on... Every major African-American poet and writer of the 20th Century was from the South--and has certainly always been reflecting on the South, in one way or another.
-------
Back to the Old South, though.
First of all, it's worth remembering, there are a lot of clear, undeniable similarities between South and North in the 40 years before the war.
(a) Roughly the same geographic size.
(b) Spoke the same language, though in different dialectics.
(c) a certain common heritage, of the American Revolution (John C. Calhoun, a key intellectual architect of the "South", was very much an American nationalist). And you can find a deep American nationalism in many of the young leaders of the Southern secessionists.
(d) shared the same Protestant Christianity.
(e) similar political ideologies, born of the American Revolution (when you hear about a slaveholder preach about political liberty, and individual liberties, you think "Come On"--but this was a history informed by the American Revolution, can't forget.)
(f) a strong localism. State's rights was not unique to the South--some of the most open demonstrations of State rights were in the North (Wisconsin refused, for example, to enforce the Fugitive Slaves' Act).
(g) Shared a belief in progress -- lingered in America's air of the 1840s and 1850s
(h) Both the South and the North shared the reality and spirit of the Western expansion.
(i) Both North and South and their political-economic leadership were comprised of hard-boiled, believing, practising capitalists (Southern slaveholders were not pre-capitalists). Both sides, in a sense, had the same kind of oligarchies, it could be argued: less than 1% of the real and personal property was held by 50% of free adult males. The richest 1% held 27% of the wealth (the North had budding oligarchies, even if they were based on different things--which is where the rub comes in, of course).
---------
Nevertheless, back to the notion of the distinctiveness of the South.
Travelers from Europe came to the South and remarked on the "indolence" and "drinking" of Southerners--the idea of the South as "exotic", "different", and "dangerous". The North as independent and free republicans, in contrast to what these travelers saw in the South.
Trying to understand how "difference" boils into "disunion" -- this does have some roots in these distinct caricatures. But, prof is saying, as one of my friends warned me, "don't leave out the politics."
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One kind of Southern distinctiveness, above all: if there were one distinct feature that eventually evolved in the South, in prof's opinion, it was what we might call its anti-modernism. A disdain for what was determined to be the corruption of modern commercialism--Southern slaveholders were skeptical of the democratization slowly beginning in the North (spreading literacy, etc.). Democracy was a threat to hierarchy, and the South became, quite distinctively, a very hierarchical society. Rooted very deeply in open conceptions of class and race; some were born to rule, in the opinions of the planter class of the 1840s and 1850s ("deal with it", was their attitude).
They became inflamed with their own peculiar sense of "honor." A set of values, or form of behavior--signed a particular kind of gentleman's behavior (property, class, rank, status that must be recognized). Reputation and recognition were critical. There must, indeed, be a ritual of that recognition. (James Henry Hammond, of SC: "Reputation is everything. Everything depends upon the estimation in which I'm held")
When they started encountering these Northerners, who spoke of a "politics of law", or "conscience", they're not always on the same page.
Then there's this issue of Conservatism--why is the US South a seat of modern American conservatism? There is this overall claim, of course, of anti-reform, anti-intellectual defense of a hierarchical civilization in white supremacy--and, indeed, in one of the biggest slave systems that had ever been created (there's the corollary issue of violence--why is cock-fighting more popular, etc.?)
South, though, eventually "liberated" from this burden of being the site of all of America's sins, by:
(1) the Civil Rights' Revolution
(2) the discovery of Northern racism
(3) the loss of the Vietnam War, in the sense that the Southerners were now not the only Americans who had ever "lost" a war.
(4) the last 20-25 years of political-economic history; the Sun-belt migration, massive immigration to the South (Vietnamese in Louisiana, Hispanics in N. Carolina/Texas), and the political culture will have to respond to that.
Yet America seems unable to forget the Confederate flag...
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There's another kind of burden, though, which is more directly historical (rather than "cultural")
Let's remember, the South had a distinctive history.
The antebellum Southern economy became, by the 1820s, a slave economy--it became the fifth/sixth slave society in human history. For a long time, in American scholarship, one of the deep mythologies about the Old South was that the plantation economy in the run-up to the Civil War was dying out (lots have argued it). But a generation of scholars have looked at the Southern economy and have discovered that the Southern economy was booming (greatest cotton crop in 1860). Slavery was extraordinarily profitable.
And, lo and behold, the idea of the Southern planter as a "backward-looking" "inward-looking" oligarch--completely false. The average American planter was a raging capitalist--they understood profits and markets (they were men of rational choice--and the way to wealth, even before the cotton gin but especially after Eli Whitney's cotton gin, was "slavery"). In Faulkner's words, "a house, land, and some niggers."
How powerful was the cotton boom once it took hold? By the 1820s, within a decade of the War of 1812, cotton's future seemed limitless--one of the best analogies is to the oil-rich regions of the world in the post-WWII era. If you're an oil rich country today, you have the world at your knees, in a sense. And that is how the Southern leadership began to see itself, as early as the 1820s and 1830s. For four decades in a row, the production of American cotton doubled every decade. Became, without question, the country's largest export. Already, by 1825, the South was the world's largest supplier of cotton--fueling the industrial revolution in textile production in Britain and elsewhere.
Southern political power by the 1850s and 1860s was no longer based in Virginia or even South Carolina, it's out in the Mississippi valley--this is the region Jefferson Davis, from Mississippi, becomes the President of the Confederacy.
Fortunes were made in an instant.
The slave-holding population was fluid, though, prof is arguing. There were about 400,000 slave-holders in the South in the 1860s. About 1/3 of white families, at one time or another, had at least a toe-hold in slave ownership. 2/3 remained yeoman farmers, poor whites, etc. (in many regions, these were 40-50% of the population). Jefferson Davis is an excellent example of the cotton boom planter; though born in humble circumstances, he made millions in cotton.
What is the relationship between the spread of cotton and the spread of power?
By 1860, there were roughly 4 million slaves in the US South (the second largest slave society in the world, only larger one was Russian serfdom, Brazil was close)--American slaves, as a financial asset, were worth approximately 3.5 billion dollars, just as property (in today's dolllars, that is roughly 75 billion dollars). In 1860, slaves, as an asset, worth more than all of the manufacturing, than all of the railroads--than all of the productive capacity of the US put together. The single largest financial asset in the American economy. The only thing more valuable than the slaves was the land itself.
If you're looking to understand why the South will look to defend this system, this social structure--look no further. What would you compare that to today?
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