Just two years removed from slavery, Blacks were elected to state governments and Congress. All told, 600 Black Republicans joined state legislatures, 14 went to the U.S. House of Representatives, and 2 went to the U.S. Senate. Six African Americans became lieutenant governors, and thousands more held lesser offices, including judges and sheriffs.
(...) It highlights the complexity of the creation of the racial order that would dominate politics in the South for 100 years after the Civil War. Many people think that after the Civil War, Jim Crow became the law of the land. On the contrary, Jim Crow laws came into existence almost 30 years after the Civil War as a counterrevolution against the attempt at multiracial democratic rule across the South.
Showing posts with label slavery. Show all posts
Showing posts with label slavery. Show all posts
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Thursday, July 30, 2009
The important point is that liberalism emerged as part of the same historical moment as the development of capitalism, the rise of European colonialism, the Atlantic slave trade and race 'science'. Liberalism was always implicated in these processes, from Locke to Tocqueville. US liberals of the Progressive era were generally explicit imperialists and white supremacists, none less than the paladin of 'liberal internationalism', Woodrow Wilson. What you refer to as the "bombing Left" is part of the same history. Large parts of the developing left and labour movements in the 19th Century partook of the colonial triumphalism and associated doctrines such as 'social Darwinism'. The regnant view was that much of the human race was bound for extinction if it wasn't possible to civilize them. Thus Karl Kautsky argued in 1882 that: "In so far as they cannot be assimilated by modern culture, the wild peoples will have to disappear from the surface of the earth."
(...) Left-wing apologists for imperialism also borrowed a chauvinistic version of humanitarianism from the liberals, namely the idea that - as Eduard Bernstein put it - the "savages" under colonial rule were "without exception better off than they were before". The Fabians similarly believed that self-rule was as useless to non-white people as "a dynamo to a Caribbean" and that for their own benefit it was necessary to impose the "grandmotherly tyranny" of colonialism. Labour's 1919 manifesto, radical in so many other ways, continued to enjoin Britain's duty to the "non-adult races". The Russian Revolution, and ensuing national liberation struggles often fought under the impress of some kind of marxism, put those explicitly advocating empire on the back foot: they had to change the terms of their argument, and they did so with reference to the exigencies of containing communism. Even then, the racial and colonial aspects of American dominance took a while to be suppressed. The USSR was itself considered an "oriental despotism" resulting, according to George F Kennan, from "a century-long contact with the Asiatic hordes" whose effects had only been concealed by the "Westernised upper crust of the Tsarist elite". Of especial concern was the commie attempt to weaken the power of Western states in colonised nations, which produced a fear of "premature independence" for those not yet adequately schooled in the arts of government by whitey, who might prove easy meat for the Muscovite menace.
(...) Left-wing apologists for imperialism also borrowed a chauvinistic version of humanitarianism from the liberals, namely the idea that - as Eduard Bernstein put it - the "savages" under colonial rule were "without exception better off than they were before". The Fabians similarly believed that self-rule was as useless to non-white people as "a dynamo to a Caribbean" and that for their own benefit it was necessary to impose the "grandmotherly tyranny" of colonialism. Labour's 1919 manifesto, radical in so many other ways, continued to enjoin Britain's duty to the "non-adult races". The Russian Revolution, and ensuing national liberation struggles often fought under the impress of some kind of marxism, put those explicitly advocating empire on the back foot: they had to change the terms of their argument, and they did so with reference to the exigencies of containing communism. Even then, the racial and colonial aspects of American dominance took a while to be suppressed. The USSR was itself considered an "oriental despotism" resulting, according to George F Kennan, from "a century-long contact with the Asiatic hordes" whose effects had only been concealed by the "Westernised upper crust of the Tsarist elite". Of especial concern was the commie attempt to weaken the power of Western states in colonised nations, which produced a fear of "premature independence" for those not yet adequately schooled in the arts of government by whitey, who might prove easy meat for the Muscovite menace.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
marxism/resistance mp3's, part I
robin hood, judy cook (1993): judy cook tries to distinguish between three robin hood narratives: the ruling-class'/hollywood attempt to co-opt robin hood as a disenchanted noble who only wants a better king, the other attempt to portray him as a lawless and aimless bandit, and the third--the one she advocates--which is to put him in the context of the horribly oppressive world in which he matured (roughly by the 1200s you see the first references to robin hood in various literature)--a world in which armed banditry was a terribly attractive form of social entrepreneurship, if you like (freedom from serfdom, etc.). she makes the important, if somewhat stale point, that we couldn't have expected a lenin, insofar as there was no class ready to take over the administration of society (but that's all a bit formulaic, even if also obviously true).
bolivia, andy brown (2008): brown details the revolutionary insurrection from 2003-2005, which came on the back end of two decades of solidly neo-liberal policy ("bolivia as lab-rat for neo-liberalism"). it marked the decisive defeat of national and transnational elite. he asked the question of how to characterize the movement, whether indigenous or national-popular; settled on a developed conception of the former, i think, in the sense that the movement would have been impossible without the contribution of the indigenous campesinos--they were decisive (here some instructive history about how the traditional left in bolivia, in the 50s and 60s, neglected the indigenous movements; this created an opening for their co-option by the military, and thus the downfall of the first revolution). brown is relatively dismissive of what evo morales had accomplished thus far, identifying three key policy areas in which he has not been nearly as radical as the insurrection which took him to power (hydrocarbons--better terms, but not nationalization, land reform--only unused land, which does hurt elite interested in keeping land for speculative purposes, and the constituent assembly--quite insufficient, failing to transcend liberal logic of representation). in sum: the "first revolution of the 21st century," perhaps, but all that energy is, as of now, being only uneasily represented by evo morales in power.
simon bolivar, andy brown (2007): interesting observations about the man's thoroughly liberal commitments (which he "picked up" in Europe). some discussion over how representative he was of the elites' desires around him, which was torn between staying tied to the bourbon monarchy in spain and emulating revolutions on the mainland/to the north. bolivar's liberalism, brown argues, co-existed uneasily with his belief in the paramount importance of a highly centralized state (perhaps this was pragmatic, though), and the danger that he would be caught up in the military, almost bonapartist logic of his own rebellion. nonetheless, he was a believer in racial equality, though the new republics did not emancipate the slaves immediately. all in all, the way in which the contemporary bolivarian republics lay claim to his legacy is, of course, strategic, in the sense that he can only ever represent the bourgeois liberal in his revolutionary role.
who really ended slavery, robin blackburn and weymann bennet (2007): excellent antidote to the official propagandizing around the 200th anniversary of abolition, which celebrates the role of william wilberforce without ever theorizing the context in which this legislation occurred. primarily, blackburn and bennet emphasize that the oligarchical elite in britain were assailed by the revolutionary specter of (a) slave rebellion and resistance in british colonies in the Caribbean, given the fact that in the 1790s slaves in haiti had successfully launched their rebellion; (b) the general rebellions in europe (french revolution, of course) and the american colonies, where a "social contract" was being pursued that exposed the british oligarchy for the reactionary form of government it was (excessively limited franchise, etc.); (c) the explicit anti-slavery agitation of quakers and even working-classes at home, who had launched one of the first mass campaigns against the slave trade. in sum, their hand was forced--they needed to stave off the specter that was haunting their lands (and then, don't forget, they re-wrote this history and deployed it in the civilizing mission--cue leopold and that rubbish).
a people's history of the british empire, john newsinger (2006): the thesis of the talk was simple--"brutality" was a central part of the civilizing mission, throughout. john insisted on the importance of understanding Empire not on the basis of the pretext it provides for its invasions and occupations, but on the objective basis of actual material causes that explain this intervention, the simple barbarity that has always ensued. there are a few examples of this, that are memorable in the worst way: prisoners in the revolting jamaican colonies in 1865 being used as target practice for the new enfield rifle, the obliteration of canton in the second opium war (the fallujah of that war), britain announcing its imminent withdrawal from its seventy-year occupation in egypt on some sixty occasions, the horrors of the suppression of the mau mau rebellion in kenya where some 130 people were hung from the same tree (this is the 1950s, remember).
robin hood, judy cook (1993): judy cook tries to distinguish between three robin hood narratives: the ruling-class'/hollywood attempt to co-opt robin hood as a disenchanted noble who only wants a better king, the other attempt to portray him as a lawless and aimless bandit, and the third--the one she advocates--which is to put him in the context of the horribly oppressive world in which he matured (roughly by the 1200s you see the first references to robin hood in various literature)--a world in which armed banditry was a terribly attractive form of social entrepreneurship, if you like (freedom from serfdom, etc.). she makes the important, if somewhat stale point, that we couldn't have expected a lenin, insofar as there was no class ready to take over the administration of society (but that's all a bit formulaic, even if also obviously true).
bolivia, andy brown (2008): brown details the revolutionary insurrection from 2003-2005, which came on the back end of two decades of solidly neo-liberal policy ("bolivia as lab-rat for neo-liberalism"). it marked the decisive defeat of national and transnational elite. he asked the question of how to characterize the movement, whether indigenous or national-popular; settled on a developed conception of the former, i think, in the sense that the movement would have been impossible without the contribution of the indigenous campesinos--they were decisive (here some instructive history about how the traditional left in bolivia, in the 50s and 60s, neglected the indigenous movements; this created an opening for their co-option by the military, and thus the downfall of the first revolution). brown is relatively dismissive of what evo morales had accomplished thus far, identifying three key policy areas in which he has not been nearly as radical as the insurrection which took him to power (hydrocarbons--better terms, but not nationalization, land reform--only unused land, which does hurt elite interested in keeping land for speculative purposes, and the constituent assembly--quite insufficient, failing to transcend liberal logic of representation). in sum: the "first revolution of the 21st century," perhaps, but all that energy is, as of now, being only uneasily represented by evo morales in power.
simon bolivar, andy brown (2007): interesting observations about the man's thoroughly liberal commitments (which he "picked up" in Europe). some discussion over how representative he was of the elites' desires around him, which was torn between staying tied to the bourbon monarchy in spain and emulating revolutions on the mainland/to the north. bolivar's liberalism, brown argues, co-existed uneasily with his belief in the paramount importance of a highly centralized state (perhaps this was pragmatic, though), and the danger that he would be caught up in the military, almost bonapartist logic of his own rebellion. nonetheless, he was a believer in racial equality, though the new republics did not emancipate the slaves immediately. all in all, the way in which the contemporary bolivarian republics lay claim to his legacy is, of course, strategic, in the sense that he can only ever represent the bourgeois liberal in his revolutionary role.
who really ended slavery, robin blackburn and weymann bennet (2007): excellent antidote to the official propagandizing around the 200th anniversary of abolition, which celebrates the role of william wilberforce without ever theorizing the context in which this legislation occurred. primarily, blackburn and bennet emphasize that the oligarchical elite in britain were assailed by the revolutionary specter of (a) slave rebellion and resistance in british colonies in the Caribbean, given the fact that in the 1790s slaves in haiti had successfully launched their rebellion; (b) the general rebellions in europe (french revolution, of course) and the american colonies, where a "social contract" was being pursued that exposed the british oligarchy for the reactionary form of government it was (excessively limited franchise, etc.); (c) the explicit anti-slavery agitation of quakers and even working-classes at home, who had launched one of the first mass campaigns against the slave trade. in sum, their hand was forced--they needed to stave off the specter that was haunting their lands (and then, don't forget, they re-wrote this history and deployed it in the civilizing mission--cue leopold and that rubbish).
a people's history of the british empire, john newsinger (2006): the thesis of the talk was simple--"brutality" was a central part of the civilizing mission, throughout. john insisted on the importance of understanding Empire not on the basis of the pretext it provides for its invasions and occupations, but on the objective basis of actual material causes that explain this intervention, the simple barbarity that has always ensued. there are a few examples of this, that are memorable in the worst way: prisoners in the revolting jamaican colonies in 1865 being used as target practice for the new enfield rifle, the obliteration of canton in the second opium war (the fallujah of that war), britain announcing its imminent withdrawal from its seventy-year occupation in egypt on some sixty occasions, the horrors of the suppression of the mau mau rebellion in kenya where some 130 people were hung from the same tree (this is the 1950s, remember).
Sunday, June 7, 2009
"the black man's burden," basil davidson
take-home: again, an interesting book that hints at the quirks of the man, one suspects. my initial reaction was less kind than my reaction, on reflection.
a first reading of the initial sections leads one to suspect that davidson's book will be far too kind to the precolonial. however, if you interrogate much of what he does say about the possibilities lost in africa's precolonial history, it is possible to argue, i think, that he is actually highlighting individual historical details (it doesn't help that he frames these in language that suggest the "blanket assertions" that they are perhaps not).
thus, the general merits--he makes a strong even if simple case that the failure of the "national question" to resolve the "social question" is at the root of the failures of the "nation-state." at the same time, he is clear that those who fought for the "social question" were an integral part of the "national struggle," as well. in other words, the struggle for nation-states always involved before it deceived the masses who made everything possible (1848 in Europe is obviously case-in-point).
he argues that the colonial encounter was disastrous, and decisively so, for the evolution of African institutions. here the contrast with Japanese history is introduced; Africa might very well have produced a merchant class (and, he implies, a bourgeois nationalism) had it not been so cruelly interrupted (his consistent anticolonialism on this point is great, of course.)
again, after an initial reading of the early parts, one cannot help but be struck by his emphasis on the possible virtues of this indigeneity--almost as if he is ignorant of the possibility that these polities were themselves racked by the definitional conflict over distribution of the surplus (the "class question," in other words). but as one reads further, one sees that he isn't blind to the class question, and that--indeed--it is at the core of his central thesis. so, in that sense, one is tempted to give him the benefit of the doubt--perhaps the "legitimacy" that he identifies in the precolonial was exceptional (in fairness, he establishes it in a confined way--the Asante and a couple of other examples, maybe). and if not that, perhaps it is enough to locate his reading in the anticolonial posture of his work--as a retort to the mission civilizatrice.
if one's not to give him this benefit of the doubt, then the weakness of his book is this--his failure to capture the spirit of marx on primitive accumulation, where a contempt for premodern elitisms co-exists with an indictment of bourgeois triumphalism. but, then again, it's also impossible to reject out-of-hand his unwillingness to resolve the tragedies he chronicles in orthodox marxist fashion-- with the promise of socialism. he is, after all, writing in the shadow of the USSR and the stalinist denial of national life. and in that sense he is right not to take refuge in the marxist promise.
there is, i will say, something infuriating about the way in which this theme of the "lost promise" does a disservice to the thinkers who imagined much more than the cooption of the "social question"--in other words, he seems to suggest that we can only see the loss of the "social question" with hindsight, a posture that allows his solution to suggest itself. but people understood the prominence of the "social question" and the importance of responsiveness to "spontaneity," but they still failed. that really is our burden.
nonetheless, even if the ending is somewhat trite and facile (that the answer to the perils of the nation-state lie in more and better democracy), the book is by no means just this--there is a lot in here worth remembering, particularly the emphasis on how the "social question" becomes the "national question," and these fragmentary reflections on the evolution of the concept of "tribalism."
a last note: he throughout stresses the "hardening" of colonial rule in late 1800s, which is an important sociological point.
--- important quotes/excerpts ---
(10): [GUIDING THESIS/QUESTION:] "Primarily, this is a crisis of institutions. Which institutions? To this the answer is easier. We ahve to be concerned here with the nationalism which produced the nation-states of newly indepdent Africa after the colonial period: with the nationalism that became nation-statism. This nation-statism looked like a liberation, and really began as one. But it did not continue as a liberation. In practice, it was not a restoration of Africa to African's own history, but the onset of a new peiod of indirect subjection to the history of Europe. The fifty or so states of the colonial partition, each formed and governed as though their peoples posessed no history of their own, became fifty or so nation-states formed and governed on European models, chiefly the models of Britain and France. Liberation thus produced its own denial. Liberation led to alienation."
(11): here he first draws the distinction that runs through the book--between "tribalism" of precolonial africa, which is more-or-less the nascent nationalism of the european experience, and the new "tribalism," which unfolds in genocides and "mindless" violence.
(12): [in a sense, this passage encapsulates the limitations of the book, i think] "Because, according to the British, there were no African models, these states would have to be built on European models. So these, being alien models, failed to achieve legitimacy in the eyes of a majority of African citizens, and soon proved unable to protect and promote the interests of those citizens..."
(21-22): "Privations had been bad in the "old days" of the Atlantic slave trade, before the trade began to be made illegal early in the nineteenth century: according to such statistics as may be found, about one in seven of all the captives shipped for the Americas were dead before the voyage was over. But now, in the middle years of the nineteenth century, the mortality was higher still, for the old "close packing" of the legal slave trade, horrible enough as that had been, had given way to the dense packing of the smuggling trade."
(24): the legal end to British involvement in the slave trade didn't do much to put an end to smuggling: "The task was simply too big for the scale of the measures used [i.e., the naval blockade]. In the 1840s each slow-moving warship had to patrol some forty miles of coastline."
(26): [re: Sierra Leone and Liberia] "Africa had sent them into slavery. Europe, but especially Britain, had rescued and set them free... And for a while, before the racist constrictions of a new age of imperialism struck at them in the 1890s, these men and women felt the winds of a liberating history in their sails; and they prospered."
(35): Basil Davidson is using the aspirations of these descendants of freed slaves to stand-in for the modernizers' arguments in the "modernizers" vs. "traditionalist," though he rightly complicates the terms of the encounter: "It was not really a battle between tradition and modernizatoin. Enterprising chiefs and kings were as eager as anyone else to assimilate the fruits of modernization, so long as these could be made digestible to accustomed ritual and historical custom; while the best of the modernizers well understood that there must be some accomodation with tradition."
(40): [the possibility for a Japan-like Meji restoration, he's arguing, was lost as...] "But in Africa--and the case became general--modernization had to mean precisely that [alienation]. In the 1870s Britain, and the French still more, turned sharply to military enclosure. Armies marched and colonies were defined, filling up the "empty map." And with this there came by the end of the century a stifling tide of Eurocentrism, of the racism that held that Europeans are naturally and inherently superior to Africans, with lesser codicils assuring that Englishmen are superior to Frenchmen..."
(41): "So it came about that by 1912 Africans in Sierra Leone, for example, held only one in six of the senior official posts, whereas as recently as 1892 they had still held nearly half of those posts."
(42): [though we might have qualms with his reading of the post-colonial fall, there can be no question that his politics are fierce and well-meant] "In retrospect, the whole great European project in Africa, stretching over more than a hundred years, can only seem a vast obstacle thrust across every reasonable avenue of African progress out of preliterate and prescientific societies into the "modern world."
(47): [the tragedy of imitation] "It was, in this large and decisive sense, the European response to African acceptance of colonial alienation. Yes, to become civilized Africans they must cease to be Africans, but in order to ensure that this should duly and completely happen, they should never be allowed to become Europeans. They should wander in some no-man's land of their own until the trumpet of destiny, at some unthinkable time in the future, should swing wide the doors of civilization and let them in."
(48): [this is important--colonialism allies itself with "backwardness," of a very specific sort] "The racism of imperial government went hand in hand with a growing reliance on the 'savage backwoods' for the purpose of colonial rule. Nothing, it seemed, was to change except that the 'acknowledged chiefs' were now the agents of foreign domination instead of being, as in the past, the guardians of African tradition"
(52): "the two faces of nationalism: its capacity for enlarging freedom, and its potential for destroying freedom."
(52-62): the Asante project, and what might have emerged
(65): again, Basil Davidson is contrasting the African and Japanese experiences to highlight the explanatory importance of colonial disposession
(68): [why no merchant class?] Thrusting African merchants along the western seaboard, men such as King Ja Ja of Opobo, who now soared to commercial power on the export of palm oil, began to induce the rise of a capital-owning and -investing group that might have hope, given time, of becoming a middle class of nation builders in the European sense of the term. But they were not given time.
(70): instead of waking to find themselves outcompeted by these private merchants, in other words, the nascent African states were compelled to ally themselves with colonial crown and capital--one gets a sense that its not this simple, either in Davidson's book or in history, but this is a start (and it certainly parallels South Asia)
(72-73): these two pages encapsulate the flaws of Davidson's book. in brief there's an image of a "lost salvation" which is profoundly misleading, and hostile to any serious attempts at a materialist rendering of the colonial problem. he's giving space to subjectivity, but not in any dialectical, thoughtful way.
(75): [this, on the other hand, is critical--perhaps the take-away] "The history of precolonial tribalism (by no means necessarily the same thing as later forms of tribalism) was in every objective sense a history of nationalism: of sociopolitical categories, that is, corresponding to the origins and development of unifying community formation in one terminology or another."
(76): [THE THESIS, IN A SENSE] "However exotic Asante might appear in its African guise, it was manifestly a national state on its way toward becoming a nation-state with every attribute ascribed to a West European nation-state, even if some of these attributes had still to reach maturity. It possessed known boundaries, a central government with police and army, consequent law and order, an accepted national language; and beyond these it even possessed, by the 1880s, an emergent middle class capable of envisaging the role of capitalist entrepreneur. Thereupon its whole dynamic and potentials were suddenly dispossessed by colonial takeover, and all indigenous development stopped."
(76-81): informative pages--he's re-telling Africa's pre-history to emphasize the absurdity of the Hegelian reading.
(80): [travelers came to an Africa disrupted by the slave trade] "To most overseas travelers and chance observers, Africa seemed to live in a malevolent condition of chaos; and for this almost universal conclusion among Europeans and North Americans, we can now ascribe several reasons. One was that the impression was partly true. After about 1850 travelers and observers in East Africa began to enter lands ravaged by a relatively new slave trade; and they found, from the Swahili coast westward to the great lakes, or from the Southern Sudan southward through Mozambique, appalling evidence of death and devastation because of this slave trade."
(87-88): here he's arguing that pre-colonial African institutions were generally accepted as legitimate. the proof of that, of course, is that they endured, and were relatively stable. but while that goes some way towards refuting the colonial narrative, it's not infused with the urgency of a marxist analysis--for surely we're not going to fall into the rainbow lenses of the premoderns. history is always the history of class struggle, whether you're writing against the colonial narrative, or not.
(94): he understands this, of course, as he makes clear on this page--but doesn't do his understanding explicit justice throughout the book.
(95): "but what the core peoples of the regna did not favor was nationalism. They could not have the slightest interest in promoting or provoking ethnic self-assertion, including their own. they simply stretched their rule over many ethnic groups, extracted tax and tribute, and left it at that... When the African regna in due course fell apart and disappeared from history, pretty well by the beginning of the seventeenth century, their subject peoples--just as in Europe--by no means followed them into the void." [some key points here: he's making a distinction between the Asante and the pre-nationalism regna (the European and African forms being indistinguishable)--but this opens up his analysis of nationalism to a class critique; how can you justify subjecting only the feudal and thus "pre-national" to a class critique, in other words? there is plenty to despise about the bourgeois nationalism that Europe constructed, and Africa failed in constructing. what's lacking, really, is a spirit infused by the Marxist contempt for BOTH feudal elitism AND bourgeois triumphalism.]
(99): "The new nationalists of the 1950s would then embrace nation-statism as the only available escape from colonial domination. Striving to transform colonial territories, they would find Africa's wealth of ethnic cultures both distracting and hard to absorb into their schemes. They would fall back into the colonial mentality of regarding it as "tribalism," and, as such, retrogressive. This diversity, it seemed, had to be just another hangover from an unregenerate past."
(100): "tribes" both pre-existed the colonial encounter, and were constituted by its divide-and-rule aspirations
(102-103): an important point about the modernizers here--they recognized pre-colonial Africa in rhetoric, as a response to colonial racism. but they didn't integrate it into their activism or aspirations.
(104): and the British tried to combat the new appeal of the modernizers by handing authority to the chiefs
(106-108): there is--and this is perhaps another merit of Davidson's book--an honest critique here about the shallowness with which many of these new "nationalists" came to know their country. and in that sense one can understand Davidson's lamenting a "lost possibility" in the failure of precolonial authority and these elites to ally. but, at the same time, i find it hard to believe that the "masses" wouldn't have been written out of that picture, as well (and indeed, that's where his account is most deficient, is it not? in the contention that these pre-colonial elites had "legitimacy" in the eyes of the masses...)
(112): [here he starts to give his thesis some substance, i think]: "The competing interests of the "elites," as they began to be called by sociologists and others, took primacy over the combined interests of the "masses." The "social conflict," one may say, was subordinated to the "national conflict."
(113-114): [two principles that led to the "fall," even if Davdison overstates his case, here] "The first principle, universally accepted like the second, was that advancement toward the nation-state was the only feasible route of escape from the colonial condition... Any such large and constructive reorganization of frontiers could never suit the imperial powers, eager still to retain "neocolonialist" levers of interest and influence... The second principle, servant of the first, was that the 'national conflict,' embodied in the rivalries for executive power between contending groups or individuals among the 'elites,' must continue to take priority over a 'social conflict' concerned with the interests of most of the inhabitants of these new nation-states."
(127): [the Janus-face of nationalism. in essence a class critique, but articulated through this dichotomy between national/social]--"After the unification of Italy in 1861, the new Italian nation-state would turn quite shamelessly to colonial enterprises in Africa. The very steamship company whose boats had carried the Thousand to Sicily would be foremost in Italian colonialism; and Garibaldi himself would speak in favor of loading on Africans the chains of servitude that Italy had struck from itself. But in 1860, for a little while, the two aspects of nationalism--the 'national' and the 'social'--were in happy unison"
(134) [CRITICAL PASSAGE--it prefigures a critique of Davidson's overgenerous portrayal of the pre-national, even as it indicates his awareness of the importance of that same critique] "the rise of nationalism in its nineteenth-century context was the outcome of a combination of effort between rising 'middle classes,' few in numbers and weak in the power to impose themselves, and the multitudinous masses of the 'lower orders.' After gaining power, of course, the 'middle orders' would abandon the 'lower orders'--just as, in the Italian case, most of the survivors of Garibaldi's Thousand were demobilized into poverty or unemployment... But that would be later: meanwhile, nationalism could advance boldly under the banners of populist democracy. Indispensable to nation-statis success in all the many upheavals of the nineteenth century, as E.J. Hobsbawm has insisted, were the agitations and uprising of peasants and urban workers. These were 'lower orders' which had until now played no role on the widening stage of statist claims and conflicts. But now it was the 'laboring poor' who died on the democratic barricades of Europe's 'great year of revolutions,' in 1848, against aristocratic and tyrannical power."
(135): [can't fight the feudals without fire, after all] "... all the political revolutions which reduced Europe to nation-states were in fact or immediate anticipation, social revolutions of the labouring poor."
(136): "But all the democratic revolutions of 1848 were crushed. The nation-states that came eventually to birth were to be the political work of 'middle strata' who prudently survived aristocratic reprisals, while the 'labouring poor' paid the price of defeat... Nation-state Europe began in the bloodshed would stay with nation-state Europe"
(138): [class consciousness dressed up as national consciousness--CRITICAL] "But the "middle strata," some of whom also did their fair share of fighting and dying, needed to seat their legitimacy as rulers on something more solid and respectable than class ambition... They presented their nation-state as the product of a national consciousness rather than a class consciousness. In this way the emergent state seemed to be the product of nationalism, whereas in truth it was nearly always the other way around. As it was going to be in AFrica in the twentieth century, it was the European state in the nineteenth century that demanded the nation."
(146): [in Romania, made independent through this kind of work, the national question didn't resolve the social question, and the peasants rose]: "This peasant revolt of 1907 was a vast and desperate affair; but it failed. True to the style and form of the nineteenth century, the "romantic nationalists" in power came smartly to earth and called out the truths... When good national order was restored, the toll of the peasant dead was found to be about 10,000 persons."
(166): [this is a timeless and critical story--struggle invariably prefigures more than the world it consolidates] "Like the European movements of the 1840s, it was always the 'labouring poor' whose involvement and effort in the 1950s gave the tribunes of the 'national struggle,' who were the educated elite in one manifestation or antother, their ground to stand on. Without...mass pressure, the educated elite would have remained upon the sidelines of everyday life..."
(173): notes on the depoliticization of the civil service
(178-179): the civil service was not anticipating independence--still obsessed with the African's inability to govern
(183): "Like it or not, the leading nationalists found themselves obliged by imperialist policies, fashioned in London and Paris, 'to seek independence within the existing power unit' of their colony, rather than in any more rational or historically logical territorial unit."
(190): suggestion, here, that the planet of the slums was born in the mass flight of peasantry to the cities in the wake of the great depression. "as many as one in six AFricans were already living in 1946 outside the rural areas that had produced them; by 1953 the proportion was one in four..." [the numbers are modest, relative to what we see today]
(192): "Yet Africa even in the 1980s, with some 450 million inhabitants, or at least triple the population of a century earlier, would still be relatively underpopulated when compared with other continents. What looked like a crisis of "overpopulation' was really a crisis of underproduction of food and maldistribution of goods."
(206): it is almost like he is saying that the only type of "class society" is bourgeois society--that is not what he is arguing, but almost
(208): "The systems that were 'taken over' might vary in detail and culture, but all of them--from the British and French through to the Belgian and Portuguese and Spanish--supposed that the actual work of government, and all the crucial decisions depending on it and from it, would be exercised by a bureaucracy trained and tested in authoritarian habits and practices."
(210-211): the well-known story of the modern country celebrating its city at the expense of its countryside; "Part of that price has had to be paid in a reliance on imports of foreign food into a continent which had always been self-sufficient in food."
(220): the continuing tragedy of the terms-of-trade
(225): important reflections on "tribalism," the new kind, and its evolution--argument that it represented a survival strategy in the absence of a viable state to protect individuals from slaving and colonial excess.
(232): [this will be Davidson's response to the critique of his presentation of bourgeois nationalism--and it is very apt]: "If the solutions of capitalism meant turning one's back on a nationalism centered on the social struggle for improvement, and were in any case hamstrung by the absence of a 'true economic bourgeoisie,' what about the solutions of socialism? The trouble with them, of course, was that a 'true economic working-class' had likewise failed to appear. Rural multitudes had become proletarians in the sense of posessing nothing. But this was not at all the same thing as saying that in doing this they acquired a proletarian consciousness of class and category, and would or could unite around that consciousness..."
(251): [nice re-statement of the argument, in short] "The colonizing process was invariably presented... as a 'modernizing process.' In fact, as we have seen, it induced in practice one after another form of moral and political disintegration. The decolonization process has repeated this downward slide. Once the force of the 'social struggle' of the colonized was spent, the drive against social inequalities and perceived injustices was supplanted by a 'national struggle' within the institutional 'containers' of an imported nation-statism. At this stage there ensued, and evidently could not but ensue, a dogfight scramble for state power by would-be ruling groups acting outside and against the rules and restraints of historical cultures and their compromises. To reach for the AK-47 was then a step both short and easy."
(261): important reflections on bourgeoisie-formation--if foreign aid fails, maybe banditry will succeed? (indeed, he adds, it has always been banditry)
(267): in Central and Eastern europe, he argues, the formations that emerged at independence matched better onto the precolonial past than in Africa.
(268-269): what's more, they possessed two characteristics further in parallel to the African experience: (1) the incapacity of the 'middle strata' to assert itself; (2) the structural, economic weakness that reduced all of the new states to "more or less complete submission to external controls."
(272): ecological catastrophe that was Stalinist model
(273): [BRILLIANT!]1953, in East Germany: "After the Berlin rising of that year, official leaflets of the government informed 'the people' that they had 'forfeited the confidence of the government'--in which case, asked Brecht, would it not be simpler 'for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?'
(287): towards an alternative nation-statism: "for was it after all so sure that newly clamorous nationalities in, for example, Soviet Asia were shouting for nation-statism; or were they not in revolt, rather, against being governed from afar, governed by a rigidly centralized system they could seldom influence, and therefore governed badly?"
(295): in Davidson's defence, when he speaks about the "stable" societies in pre-colonial Africa, he is employing his expertise and being selective. he identifies only select societies, which fulfill the criteria of being responsive to their people. insofar as we can only suspect him of over-reaching, it behooves us to be kinder to his analysis--because the rest of his book does demonstrate that he's alive to the "social question"
(300-305ish): interesting analysis of Angola and Mozambique where, he argues, admirable intentions went astray in their overemphasis on central authority vis-a-vis peasant spontaneity. failed to strike the balance between a strong state, on the one hand, and a responsive state, on the other.
(315): nonetheless it's clear where the solution lies, for davidson--"...the modern state can become stable and progressive only in the measure that it wins back for itself the popular legitimacy it has lost or never sufficiently posessed, and that it can do this only by processes of participatory democracy, no matter where the actual mechanisms may be found to be."
take-home: again, an interesting book that hints at the quirks of the man, one suspects. my initial reaction was less kind than my reaction, on reflection.
a first reading of the initial sections leads one to suspect that davidson's book will be far too kind to the precolonial. however, if you interrogate much of what he does say about the possibilities lost in africa's precolonial history, it is possible to argue, i think, that he is actually highlighting individual historical details (it doesn't help that he frames these in language that suggest the "blanket assertions" that they are perhaps not).
thus, the general merits--he makes a strong even if simple case that the failure of the "national question" to resolve the "social question" is at the root of the failures of the "nation-state." at the same time, he is clear that those who fought for the "social question" were an integral part of the "national struggle," as well. in other words, the struggle for nation-states always involved before it deceived the masses who made everything possible (1848 in Europe is obviously case-in-point).
he argues that the colonial encounter was disastrous, and decisively so, for the evolution of African institutions. here the contrast with Japanese history is introduced; Africa might very well have produced a merchant class (and, he implies, a bourgeois nationalism) had it not been so cruelly interrupted (his consistent anticolonialism on this point is great, of course.)
again, after an initial reading of the early parts, one cannot help but be struck by his emphasis on the possible virtues of this indigeneity--almost as if he is ignorant of the possibility that these polities were themselves racked by the definitional conflict over distribution of the surplus (the "class question," in other words). but as one reads further, one sees that he isn't blind to the class question, and that--indeed--it is at the core of his central thesis. so, in that sense, one is tempted to give him the benefit of the doubt--perhaps the "legitimacy" that he identifies in the precolonial was exceptional (in fairness, he establishes it in a confined way--the Asante and a couple of other examples, maybe). and if not that, perhaps it is enough to locate his reading in the anticolonial posture of his work--as a retort to the mission civilizatrice.
if one's not to give him this benefit of the doubt, then the weakness of his book is this--his failure to capture the spirit of marx on primitive accumulation, where a contempt for premodern elitisms co-exists with an indictment of bourgeois triumphalism. but, then again, it's also impossible to reject out-of-hand his unwillingness to resolve the tragedies he chronicles in orthodox marxist fashion-- with the promise of socialism. he is, after all, writing in the shadow of the USSR and the stalinist denial of national life. and in that sense he is right not to take refuge in the marxist promise.
there is, i will say, something infuriating about the way in which this theme of the "lost promise" does a disservice to the thinkers who imagined much more than the cooption of the "social question"--in other words, he seems to suggest that we can only see the loss of the "social question" with hindsight, a posture that allows his solution to suggest itself. but people understood the prominence of the "social question" and the importance of responsiveness to "spontaneity," but they still failed. that really is our burden.
nonetheless, even if the ending is somewhat trite and facile (that the answer to the perils of the nation-state lie in more and better democracy), the book is by no means just this--there is a lot in here worth remembering, particularly the emphasis on how the "social question" becomes the "national question," and these fragmentary reflections on the evolution of the concept of "tribalism."
a last note: he throughout stresses the "hardening" of colonial rule in late 1800s, which is an important sociological point.
--- important quotes/excerpts ---
(10): [GUIDING THESIS/QUESTION:] "Primarily, this is a crisis of institutions. Which institutions? To this the answer is easier. We ahve to be concerned here with the nationalism which produced the nation-states of newly indepdent Africa after the colonial period: with the nationalism that became nation-statism. This nation-statism looked like a liberation, and really began as one. But it did not continue as a liberation. In practice, it was not a restoration of Africa to African's own history, but the onset of a new peiod of indirect subjection to the history of Europe. The fifty or so states of the colonial partition, each formed and governed as though their peoples posessed no history of their own, became fifty or so nation-states formed and governed on European models, chiefly the models of Britain and France. Liberation thus produced its own denial. Liberation led to alienation."
(11): here he first draws the distinction that runs through the book--between "tribalism" of precolonial africa, which is more-or-less the nascent nationalism of the european experience, and the new "tribalism," which unfolds in genocides and "mindless" violence.
(12): [in a sense, this passage encapsulates the limitations of the book, i think] "Because, according to the British, there were no African models, these states would have to be built on European models. So these, being alien models, failed to achieve legitimacy in the eyes of a majority of African citizens, and soon proved unable to protect and promote the interests of those citizens..."
(21-22): "Privations had been bad in the "old days" of the Atlantic slave trade, before the trade began to be made illegal early in the nineteenth century: according to such statistics as may be found, about one in seven of all the captives shipped for the Americas were dead before the voyage was over. But now, in the middle years of the nineteenth century, the mortality was higher still, for the old "close packing" of the legal slave trade, horrible enough as that had been, had given way to the dense packing of the smuggling trade."
(24): the legal end to British involvement in the slave trade didn't do much to put an end to smuggling: "The task was simply too big for the scale of the measures used [i.e., the naval blockade]. In the 1840s each slow-moving warship had to patrol some forty miles of coastline."
(26): [re: Sierra Leone and Liberia] "Africa had sent them into slavery. Europe, but especially Britain, had rescued and set them free... And for a while, before the racist constrictions of a new age of imperialism struck at them in the 1890s, these men and women felt the winds of a liberating history in their sails; and they prospered."
(35): Basil Davidson is using the aspirations of these descendants of freed slaves to stand-in for the modernizers' arguments in the "modernizers" vs. "traditionalist," though he rightly complicates the terms of the encounter: "It was not really a battle between tradition and modernizatoin. Enterprising chiefs and kings were as eager as anyone else to assimilate the fruits of modernization, so long as these could be made digestible to accustomed ritual and historical custom; while the best of the modernizers well understood that there must be some accomodation with tradition."
(40): [the possibility for a Japan-like Meji restoration, he's arguing, was lost as...] "But in Africa--and the case became general--modernization had to mean precisely that [alienation]. In the 1870s Britain, and the French still more, turned sharply to military enclosure. Armies marched and colonies were defined, filling up the "empty map." And with this there came by the end of the century a stifling tide of Eurocentrism, of the racism that held that Europeans are naturally and inherently superior to Africans, with lesser codicils assuring that Englishmen are superior to Frenchmen..."
(41): "So it came about that by 1912 Africans in Sierra Leone, for example, held only one in six of the senior official posts, whereas as recently as 1892 they had still held nearly half of those posts."
(42): [though we might have qualms with his reading of the post-colonial fall, there can be no question that his politics are fierce and well-meant] "In retrospect, the whole great European project in Africa, stretching over more than a hundred years, can only seem a vast obstacle thrust across every reasonable avenue of African progress out of preliterate and prescientific societies into the "modern world."
(47): [the tragedy of imitation] "It was, in this large and decisive sense, the European response to African acceptance of colonial alienation. Yes, to become civilized Africans they must cease to be Africans, but in order to ensure that this should duly and completely happen, they should never be allowed to become Europeans. They should wander in some no-man's land of their own until the trumpet of destiny, at some unthinkable time in the future, should swing wide the doors of civilization and let them in."
(48): [this is important--colonialism allies itself with "backwardness," of a very specific sort] "The racism of imperial government went hand in hand with a growing reliance on the 'savage backwoods' for the purpose of colonial rule. Nothing, it seemed, was to change except that the 'acknowledged chiefs' were now the agents of foreign domination instead of being, as in the past, the guardians of African tradition"
(52): "the two faces of nationalism: its capacity for enlarging freedom, and its potential for destroying freedom."
(52-62): the Asante project, and what might have emerged
(65): again, Basil Davidson is contrasting the African and Japanese experiences to highlight the explanatory importance of colonial disposession
(68): [why no merchant class?] Thrusting African merchants along the western seaboard, men such as King Ja Ja of Opobo, who now soared to commercial power on the export of palm oil, began to induce the rise of a capital-owning and -investing group that might have hope, given time, of becoming a middle class of nation builders in the European sense of the term. But they were not given time.
(70): instead of waking to find themselves outcompeted by these private merchants, in other words, the nascent African states were compelled to ally themselves with colonial crown and capital--one gets a sense that its not this simple, either in Davidson's book or in history, but this is a start (and it certainly parallels South Asia)
(72-73): these two pages encapsulate the flaws of Davidson's book. in brief there's an image of a "lost salvation" which is profoundly misleading, and hostile to any serious attempts at a materialist rendering of the colonial problem. he's giving space to subjectivity, but not in any dialectical, thoughtful way.
(75): [this, on the other hand, is critical--perhaps the take-away] "The history of precolonial tribalism (by no means necessarily the same thing as later forms of tribalism) was in every objective sense a history of nationalism: of sociopolitical categories, that is, corresponding to the origins and development of unifying community formation in one terminology or another."
(76): [THE THESIS, IN A SENSE] "However exotic Asante might appear in its African guise, it was manifestly a national state on its way toward becoming a nation-state with every attribute ascribed to a West European nation-state, even if some of these attributes had still to reach maturity. It possessed known boundaries, a central government with police and army, consequent law and order, an accepted national language; and beyond these it even possessed, by the 1880s, an emergent middle class capable of envisaging the role of capitalist entrepreneur. Thereupon its whole dynamic and potentials were suddenly dispossessed by colonial takeover, and all indigenous development stopped."
(76-81): informative pages--he's re-telling Africa's pre-history to emphasize the absurdity of the Hegelian reading.
(80): [travelers came to an Africa disrupted by the slave trade] "To most overseas travelers and chance observers, Africa seemed to live in a malevolent condition of chaos; and for this almost universal conclusion among Europeans and North Americans, we can now ascribe several reasons. One was that the impression was partly true. After about 1850 travelers and observers in East Africa began to enter lands ravaged by a relatively new slave trade; and they found, from the Swahili coast westward to the great lakes, or from the Southern Sudan southward through Mozambique, appalling evidence of death and devastation because of this slave trade."
(87-88): here he's arguing that pre-colonial African institutions were generally accepted as legitimate. the proof of that, of course, is that they endured, and were relatively stable. but while that goes some way towards refuting the colonial narrative, it's not infused with the urgency of a marxist analysis--for surely we're not going to fall into the rainbow lenses of the premoderns. history is always the history of class struggle, whether you're writing against the colonial narrative, or not.
(94): he understands this, of course, as he makes clear on this page--but doesn't do his understanding explicit justice throughout the book.
(95): "but what the core peoples of the regna did not favor was nationalism. They could not have the slightest interest in promoting or provoking ethnic self-assertion, including their own. they simply stretched their rule over many ethnic groups, extracted tax and tribute, and left it at that... When the African regna in due course fell apart and disappeared from history, pretty well by the beginning of the seventeenth century, their subject peoples--just as in Europe--by no means followed them into the void." [some key points here: he's making a distinction between the Asante and the pre-nationalism regna (the European and African forms being indistinguishable)--but this opens up his analysis of nationalism to a class critique; how can you justify subjecting only the feudal and thus "pre-national" to a class critique, in other words? there is plenty to despise about the bourgeois nationalism that Europe constructed, and Africa failed in constructing. what's lacking, really, is a spirit infused by the Marxist contempt for BOTH feudal elitism AND bourgeois triumphalism.]
(99): "The new nationalists of the 1950s would then embrace nation-statism as the only available escape from colonial domination. Striving to transform colonial territories, they would find Africa's wealth of ethnic cultures both distracting and hard to absorb into their schemes. They would fall back into the colonial mentality of regarding it as "tribalism," and, as such, retrogressive. This diversity, it seemed, had to be just another hangover from an unregenerate past."
(100): "tribes" both pre-existed the colonial encounter, and were constituted by its divide-and-rule aspirations
(102-103): an important point about the modernizers here--they recognized pre-colonial Africa in rhetoric, as a response to colonial racism. but they didn't integrate it into their activism or aspirations.
(104): and the British tried to combat the new appeal of the modernizers by handing authority to the chiefs
(106-108): there is--and this is perhaps another merit of Davidson's book--an honest critique here about the shallowness with which many of these new "nationalists" came to know their country. and in that sense one can understand Davidson's lamenting a "lost possibility" in the failure of precolonial authority and these elites to ally. but, at the same time, i find it hard to believe that the "masses" wouldn't have been written out of that picture, as well (and indeed, that's where his account is most deficient, is it not? in the contention that these pre-colonial elites had "legitimacy" in the eyes of the masses...)
(112): [here he starts to give his thesis some substance, i think]: "The competing interests of the "elites," as they began to be called by sociologists and others, took primacy over the combined interests of the "masses." The "social conflict," one may say, was subordinated to the "national conflict."
(113-114): [two principles that led to the "fall," even if Davdison overstates his case, here] "The first principle, universally accepted like the second, was that advancement toward the nation-state was the only feasible route of escape from the colonial condition... Any such large and constructive reorganization of frontiers could never suit the imperial powers, eager still to retain "neocolonialist" levers of interest and influence... The second principle, servant of the first, was that the 'national conflict,' embodied in the rivalries for executive power between contending groups or individuals among the 'elites,' must continue to take priority over a 'social conflict' concerned with the interests of most of the inhabitants of these new nation-states."
(127): [the Janus-face of nationalism. in essence a class critique, but articulated through this dichotomy between national/social]--"After the unification of Italy in 1861, the new Italian nation-state would turn quite shamelessly to colonial enterprises in Africa. The very steamship company whose boats had carried the Thousand to Sicily would be foremost in Italian colonialism; and Garibaldi himself would speak in favor of loading on Africans the chains of servitude that Italy had struck from itself. But in 1860, for a little while, the two aspects of nationalism--the 'national' and the 'social'--were in happy unison"
(134) [CRITICAL PASSAGE--it prefigures a critique of Davidson's overgenerous portrayal of the pre-national, even as it indicates his awareness of the importance of that same critique] "the rise of nationalism in its nineteenth-century context was the outcome of a combination of effort between rising 'middle classes,' few in numbers and weak in the power to impose themselves, and the multitudinous masses of the 'lower orders.' After gaining power, of course, the 'middle orders' would abandon the 'lower orders'--just as, in the Italian case, most of the survivors of Garibaldi's Thousand were demobilized into poverty or unemployment... But that would be later: meanwhile, nationalism could advance boldly under the banners of populist democracy. Indispensable to nation-statis success in all the many upheavals of the nineteenth century, as E.J. Hobsbawm has insisted, were the agitations and uprising of peasants and urban workers. These were 'lower orders' which had until now played no role on the widening stage of statist claims and conflicts. But now it was the 'laboring poor' who died on the democratic barricades of Europe's 'great year of revolutions,' in 1848, against aristocratic and tyrannical power."
(135): [can't fight the feudals without fire, after all] "... all the political revolutions which reduced Europe to nation-states were in fact or immediate anticipation, social revolutions of the labouring poor."
(136): "But all the democratic revolutions of 1848 were crushed. The nation-states that came eventually to birth were to be the political work of 'middle strata' who prudently survived aristocratic reprisals, while the 'labouring poor' paid the price of defeat... Nation-state Europe began in the bloodshed would stay with nation-state Europe"
(138): [class consciousness dressed up as national consciousness--CRITICAL] "But the "middle strata," some of whom also did their fair share of fighting and dying, needed to seat their legitimacy as rulers on something more solid and respectable than class ambition... They presented their nation-state as the product of a national consciousness rather than a class consciousness. In this way the emergent state seemed to be the product of nationalism, whereas in truth it was nearly always the other way around. As it was going to be in AFrica in the twentieth century, it was the European state in the nineteenth century that demanded the nation."
(146): [in Romania, made independent through this kind of work, the national question didn't resolve the social question, and the peasants rose]: "This peasant revolt of 1907 was a vast and desperate affair; but it failed. True to the style and form of the nineteenth century, the "romantic nationalists" in power came smartly to earth and called out the truths... When good national order was restored, the toll of the peasant dead was found to be about 10,000 persons."
(166): [this is a timeless and critical story--struggle invariably prefigures more than the world it consolidates] "Like the European movements of the 1840s, it was always the 'labouring poor' whose involvement and effort in the 1950s gave the tribunes of the 'national struggle,' who were the educated elite in one manifestation or antother, their ground to stand on. Without...mass pressure, the educated elite would have remained upon the sidelines of everyday life..."
(173): notes on the depoliticization of the civil service
(178-179): the civil service was not anticipating independence--still obsessed with the African's inability to govern
(183): "Like it or not, the leading nationalists found themselves obliged by imperialist policies, fashioned in London and Paris, 'to seek independence within the existing power unit' of their colony, rather than in any more rational or historically logical territorial unit."
(190): suggestion, here, that the planet of the slums was born in the mass flight of peasantry to the cities in the wake of the great depression. "as many as one in six AFricans were already living in 1946 outside the rural areas that had produced them; by 1953 the proportion was one in four..." [the numbers are modest, relative to what we see today]
(192): "Yet Africa even in the 1980s, with some 450 million inhabitants, or at least triple the population of a century earlier, would still be relatively underpopulated when compared with other continents. What looked like a crisis of "overpopulation' was really a crisis of underproduction of food and maldistribution of goods."
(206): it is almost like he is saying that the only type of "class society" is bourgeois society--that is not what he is arguing, but almost
(208): "The systems that were 'taken over' might vary in detail and culture, but all of them--from the British and French through to the Belgian and Portuguese and Spanish--supposed that the actual work of government, and all the crucial decisions depending on it and from it, would be exercised by a bureaucracy trained and tested in authoritarian habits and practices."
(210-211): the well-known story of the modern country celebrating its city at the expense of its countryside; "Part of that price has had to be paid in a reliance on imports of foreign food into a continent which had always been self-sufficient in food."
(220): the continuing tragedy of the terms-of-trade
(225): important reflections on "tribalism," the new kind, and its evolution--argument that it represented a survival strategy in the absence of a viable state to protect individuals from slaving and colonial excess.
(232): [this will be Davidson's response to the critique of his presentation of bourgeois nationalism--and it is very apt]: "If the solutions of capitalism meant turning one's back on a nationalism centered on the social struggle for improvement, and were in any case hamstrung by the absence of a 'true economic bourgeoisie,' what about the solutions of socialism? The trouble with them, of course, was that a 'true economic working-class' had likewise failed to appear. Rural multitudes had become proletarians in the sense of posessing nothing. But this was not at all the same thing as saying that in doing this they acquired a proletarian consciousness of class and category, and would or could unite around that consciousness..."
(251): [nice re-statement of the argument, in short] "The colonizing process was invariably presented... as a 'modernizing process.' In fact, as we have seen, it induced in practice one after another form of moral and political disintegration. The decolonization process has repeated this downward slide. Once the force of the 'social struggle' of the colonized was spent, the drive against social inequalities and perceived injustices was supplanted by a 'national struggle' within the institutional 'containers' of an imported nation-statism. At this stage there ensued, and evidently could not but ensue, a dogfight scramble for state power by would-be ruling groups acting outside and against the rules and restraints of historical cultures and their compromises. To reach for the AK-47 was then a step both short and easy."
(261): important reflections on bourgeoisie-formation--if foreign aid fails, maybe banditry will succeed? (indeed, he adds, it has always been banditry)
(267): in Central and Eastern europe, he argues, the formations that emerged at independence matched better onto the precolonial past than in Africa.
(268-269): what's more, they possessed two characteristics further in parallel to the African experience: (1) the incapacity of the 'middle strata' to assert itself; (2) the structural, economic weakness that reduced all of the new states to "more or less complete submission to external controls."
(272): ecological catastrophe that was Stalinist model
(273): [BRILLIANT!]1953, in East Germany: "After the Berlin rising of that year, official leaflets of the government informed 'the people' that they had 'forfeited the confidence of the government'--in which case, asked Brecht, would it not be simpler 'for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?'
(287): towards an alternative nation-statism: "for was it after all so sure that newly clamorous nationalities in, for example, Soviet Asia were shouting for nation-statism; or were they not in revolt, rather, against being governed from afar, governed by a rigidly centralized system they could seldom influence, and therefore governed badly?"
(295): in Davidson's defence, when he speaks about the "stable" societies in pre-colonial Africa, he is employing his expertise and being selective. he identifies only select societies, which fulfill the criteria of being responsive to their people. insofar as we can only suspect him of over-reaching, it behooves us to be kinder to his analysis--because the rest of his book does demonstrate that he's alive to the "social question"
(300-305ish): interesting analysis of Angola and Mozambique where, he argues, admirable intentions went astray in their overemphasis on central authority vis-a-vis peasant spontaneity. failed to strike the balance between a strong state, on the one hand, and a responsive state, on the other.
(315): nonetheless it's clear where the solution lies, for davidson--"...the modern state can become stable and progressive only in the measure that it wins back for itself the popular legitimacy it has lost or never sufficiently posessed, and that it can do this only by processes of participatory democracy, no matter where the actual mechanisms may be found to be."
Thursday, April 2, 2009
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).
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).
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."
---------
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?
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