Neo-Con(servative) vs. Neo-Con(federate)
A new book called "The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History" is selling well, but getting slammed right, left, and center.
I haven't read it; I probably won't because the Amazon reviews, both positive and negative, have me conviced that this book, like "The South Was Right!" is more heat than light and is going to be embarrassingly simplistic, even where I agree with it. Life's too short.
But I find the critiques of Southern secession, as embodied in the criticisms of this book, themselves overly simplistic. Here's Glenn Reynolds':
The recipe here is a familiar one to people who have to deal with superficial studies of American Civil War issues. conflation of secession + CSA + slavery = racism, therefore we can write off the whole enterprise. It would be a great thing if people who can penetrate this sort of simplistic dismissal in current events (Bush is an oilman, Iraq has oil, therefore Blood For Oil) could apply that skill to the past.
Glenn usually is such a man. But he's bought into the world-view of a class of contemporary historians more concerned with modern civil rights than 19th century American realities, and little less biased than the editorial page of the "New York Times" (and with a certain degree of cross-over). While he does so more carefully and intelligently than usual, Glenn quickly default to "defender of CSA=racist" position as a convenient way to close the case before the inquiry. The alternative seems to be "defender of CSA=sophomoric troublemaker." You can almost hear the "Deliverance" banjos tinkling away in the distance.
This attitude conflates issues that a careful inquirer ought to keep separate. Secession was one matter. The American Civil War was another. The Deep South could have seceeded without a war resulting. The matter of slavery and abolition is yet a third thing. Lincoln didn't publicly go to war to free the slaves -- he took pains to deny that intention -- and the bulk of the North certainly did not do so. Many abolitionists also were secessionists; in fact, until about 1850, secession was a cause of the radicals in New England. It became an abolitionist war by default, two years into the war, a mutation of purpose brought on by exigencies of the battlefield.
The American Civil War was "about" slavery like the Boston Tea Party was "about" tea. Slavery became the symbol and character of all sectional differences. It was the emotional gasoline on the sectional fires. Its moral and social implications colored every issue in terms of right and rights. William Seward, the Republican leader whose party made so much of this, recognized the fact: "Every question, political, civil, or ecclesiastical, however foreign to the subject of slavery, brings up slavery as an incident, and the incident supplants the principal question."
I also find his hasty dismissal of the Southern bid for independence unfortunately unhistorical. The CSA was a bid to form an independent nation out of a region that had a common enemy and some collective regional identity. But the CSA comprised many sub-cultures (a few of them didn't want to be there), and it had a leadership that sometimes confused self-interest with public policy. It had its fair share of charlatans and profiteers and criminal opportunists. It had some brilliant generals and a great many men in uniform who would be the pride of any army in human history. It was committed to 18th century republican values that were incompatible with fighting a modern war, and it had internal social conflicts that the war aggravated.
In nearly all of this it was entirely like the American Revolutionaries. The colonists in 1776: one-third for independence, one-third against, one-third uncommitted. That must be the standard for legitimacy, or else our United States lacks it. The CSA fought a much larger enemy than George III, mostly on its own soil, without a Dutch loan or a French fleet to aid it, and the majority, in spite of internal divisions, put up a herculean effort, won spectacular victories, made shift with what little it had, and held out till the place was literally gutted and blood-drained by its foe.
The losses the South took would translate into, say, six million U.S. battle casualties in World War II (instead of 961,977, the actual figure); nearly a million in Vietnam, instead of 201,000. Yet they lost the war, and, to a lot of anti-Confederates, this fact alone makes the Confederacy a failed society. There's a danger of circular reasoning in this, and it sets the bar of "commitment to the cause" awfully high. Is total victory or total annihilation the only proof of "commitment"? Half of the Confederate soldiers were killed or wounded. How many more would have had to take a bullet to qualify as "commitment"? What if there had been a Confederate equivalent of Sherman's march? The response of my little corner of Pennsylvania to the rebel incursion of 1863 doesn't present much prospect of a glorious home front stand.
***
Secession as a legal option in 1860 is a historical footnote; no rational person argues that it would be right or proper now. It might not have been right or proper as pursued by South Carolina in 1860. But whether it was within the framework of the country and the Constitution as they then existed is a valid question that even a non-racist can ask today. Though having no Confederate blood in my veins, and no sympathy with paleo-racists, I have come to think that secession was legal. So do some other committed anti-Confederates I know and respect.
I got there not by reading neo-Confederate pamphlets, but by studying the generation that wrote the Constitution and commented on it. Consider the following as an insight into how the Founders would have regarded Lincoln's vision of a perpetual union of the American states, held together by the strong arm of the federal government.
The scene is the ratification debate in New York state in the summer of 1788. Alexander Hamilton is defending, against anti-federalist objections, the power granted to the federal government, under the proposed system, to levy taxes directly on the citizens rather than making requisitions from the states. This is one of the Constitution's specially enumerated powers. It is a defined path for the federal government to override state authority. Hamilton points out the obvious necessity for a government to be able to pay its bills: "if we have national objects to pursue, we must have national revenues."
Remember, this is the arch-Federalist speaking, the man whose name is associated more than any other in the Constitutional Convention with the authority of the federal government. He paints the picture of the country without this power, and of a state refusing a federal requisition:
The Constitution enumerated the powers of the federal government, not those of the states or the people. It gave the federal government just such powers as, the Founders understood, would prevent this kind of conflict. The power to tax citizens directly was among them. It did not give the federal government broad, unspecified powers of coercion to do the very thing Hamilton abhorred here.
Anyway, it's too big an argument to unfurl in a blog post, but I wrote more about that here.
Glenn and others are starting to mention something I noticed a couple of years ago, that the behavior of George W. Bush as a crisis/wartime president and that of Abraham Lincoln in the same role cover a lot of the same ground. Their careers have broad similarities, too: Both men had checkered pasts and won disputed elections without a majority; both were blamed for starting a war unjustly when negotiated settlement was possible and for exploiting a national crisis to advance their private agendas and attain partisan goals.
The enemies of these two activist presidents were shaped in part by the policies the presidents pursued. It should ultimately not be surprising that those who cling to a visceral hatred of Lincoln's legacy, and those with the same reaction to Bush's administration, will find themselves on common ground.
I don't claim any insight in noticing that in 2001; I just happened to be standing a little closer to the neo-Confederates at that point, having been debating in ACW circles, and I noticed the tack of their comments.
I haven't read it; I probably won't because the Amazon reviews, both positive and negative, have me conviced that this book, like "The South Was Right!" is more heat than light and is going to be embarrassingly simplistic, even where I agree with it. Life's too short.
But I find the critiques of Southern secession, as embodied in the criticisms of this book, themselves overly simplistic. Here's Glenn Reynolds':
I have to say that while I understand, to a degree at least, people's fascination with the Civil War, I've never understood the romanticization of the Confederacy. It didn't last very long, it was horribly run and governed, it accomplished nothing but disaster and defeat, and it existed in the service of a horrible cause.
... One suspects that for a certain sort of infantile mind, pro-Confederacy statements provide the same sort of thrilling sense of nonconformity that Marxism has provided. This, I guess, explains the weird strain of pro-Confederate sympathy that one finds among a certain segment of libertarians. Or, of course, there's always racism as an explanation -- an explanation you'd rather believe didn't apply, but that clearly does sometimes.
... As a political force, neo-Confederate sentiment is pretty trivial at the moment, even compared to the decaying remnants of Marxism. But that's no reason not to smack it down when it appears.
The recipe here is a familiar one to people who have to deal with superficial studies of American Civil War issues. conflation of secession + CSA + slavery = racism, therefore we can write off the whole enterprise. It would be a great thing if people who can penetrate this sort of simplistic dismissal in current events (Bush is an oilman, Iraq has oil, therefore Blood For Oil) could apply that skill to the past.
Glenn usually is such a man. But he's bought into the world-view of a class of contemporary historians more concerned with modern civil rights than 19th century American realities, and little less biased than the editorial page of the "New York Times" (and with a certain degree of cross-over). While he does so more carefully and intelligently than usual, Glenn quickly default to "defender of CSA=racist" position as a convenient way to close the case before the inquiry. The alternative seems to be "defender of CSA=sophomoric troublemaker." You can almost hear the "Deliverance" banjos tinkling away in the distance.
This attitude conflates issues that a careful inquirer ought to keep separate. Secession was one matter. The American Civil War was another. The Deep South could have seceeded without a war resulting. The matter of slavery and abolition is yet a third thing. Lincoln didn't publicly go to war to free the slaves -- he took pains to deny that intention -- and the bulk of the North certainly did not do so. Many abolitionists also were secessionists; in fact, until about 1850, secession was a cause of the radicals in New England. It became an abolitionist war by default, two years into the war, a mutation of purpose brought on by exigencies of the battlefield.
The American Civil War was "about" slavery like the Boston Tea Party was "about" tea. Slavery became the symbol and character of all sectional differences. It was the emotional gasoline on the sectional fires. Its moral and social implications colored every issue in terms of right and rights. William Seward, the Republican leader whose party made so much of this, recognized the fact: "Every question, political, civil, or ecclesiastical, however foreign to the subject of slavery, brings up slavery as an incident, and the incident supplants the principal question."
I also find his hasty dismissal of the Southern bid for independence unfortunately unhistorical. The CSA was a bid to form an independent nation out of a region that had a common enemy and some collective regional identity. But the CSA comprised many sub-cultures (a few of them didn't want to be there), and it had a leadership that sometimes confused self-interest with public policy. It had its fair share of charlatans and profiteers and criminal opportunists. It had some brilliant generals and a great many men in uniform who would be the pride of any army in human history. It was committed to 18th century republican values that were incompatible with fighting a modern war, and it had internal social conflicts that the war aggravated.
In nearly all of this it was entirely like the American Revolutionaries. The colonists in 1776: one-third for independence, one-third against, one-third uncommitted. That must be the standard for legitimacy, or else our United States lacks it. The CSA fought a much larger enemy than George III, mostly on its own soil, without a Dutch loan or a French fleet to aid it, and the majority, in spite of internal divisions, put up a herculean effort, won spectacular victories, made shift with what little it had, and held out till the place was literally gutted and blood-drained by its foe.
The losses the South took would translate into, say, six million U.S. battle casualties in World War II (instead of 961,977, the actual figure); nearly a million in Vietnam, instead of 201,000. Yet they lost the war, and, to a lot of anti-Confederates, this fact alone makes the Confederacy a failed society. There's a danger of circular reasoning in this, and it sets the bar of "commitment to the cause" awfully high. Is total victory or total annihilation the only proof of "commitment"? Half of the Confederate soldiers were killed or wounded. How many more would have had to take a bullet to qualify as "commitment"? What if there had been a Confederate equivalent of Sherman's march? The response of my little corner of Pennsylvania to the rebel incursion of 1863 doesn't present much prospect of a glorious home front stand.
***
Secession as a legal option in 1860 is a historical footnote; no rational person argues that it would be right or proper now. It might not have been right or proper as pursued by South Carolina in 1860. But whether it was within the framework of the country and the Constitution as they then existed is a valid question that even a non-racist can ask today. Though having no Confederate blood in my veins, and no sympathy with paleo-racists, I have come to think that secession was legal. So do some other committed anti-Confederates I know and respect.
I got there not by reading neo-Confederate pamphlets, but by studying the generation that wrote the Constitution and commented on it. Consider the following as an insight into how the Founders would have regarded Lincoln's vision of a perpetual union of the American states, held together by the strong arm of the federal government.
The scene is the ratification debate in New York state in the summer of 1788. Alexander Hamilton is defending, against anti-federalist objections, the power granted to the federal government, under the proposed system, to levy taxes directly on the citizens rather than making requisitions from the states. This is one of the Constitution's specially enumerated powers. It is a defined path for the federal government to override state authority. Hamilton points out the obvious necessity for a government to be able to pay its bills: "if we have national objects to pursue, we must have national revenues."
Remember, this is the arch-Federalist speaking, the man whose name is associated more than any other in the Constitutional Convention with the authority of the federal government. He paints the picture of the country without this power, and of a state refusing a federal requisition:
"It has been observed, to coerce the states is one of the maddest projects that was ever devised. A failure of compliance will never be confined to a single state. This being the case, can we suppose it wise to hazard a civil war?
"Suppose Massachusetts, or any large state, should refuse, and Congress should attempt to compel them, would they not have influence to procure assistance, especially from those states which are in the same situation as themselves? What picture does this idea present to our view? A complying state at war with a non-complying state; Congress marching the troops of one state into the bosom of another; this state collecting auxiliaries, and forming, perhaps, a majority against the federal head.
"Here is a nation at war with itself. Can any reasonable man be well disposed towards a government which makes war and carnage the only means of supporting itself -- a government that can exist only by the sword? Every such war must involve the innocent with the guilty. This single consideration should be sufficient to dispose every peaceable citizen against such a government. But can we believe that one state will ever suffer itself to be used as an instrument of coercion? The thing is a dream; it is impossible."
The Constitution enumerated the powers of the federal government, not those of the states or the people. It gave the federal government just such powers as, the Founders understood, would prevent this kind of conflict. The power to tax citizens directly was among them. It did not give the federal government broad, unspecified powers of coercion to do the very thing Hamilton abhorred here.
Anyway, it's too big an argument to unfurl in a blog post, but I wrote more about that here.
Glenn and others are starting to mention something I noticed a couple of years ago, that the behavior of George W. Bush as a crisis/wartime president and that of Abraham Lincoln in the same role cover a lot of the same ground. Their careers have broad similarities, too: Both men had checkered pasts and won disputed elections without a majority; both were blamed for starting a war unjustly when negotiated settlement was possible and for exploiting a national crisis to advance their private agendas and attain partisan goals.
The enemies of these two activist presidents were shaped in part by the policies the presidents pursued. It should ultimately not be surprising that those who cling to a visceral hatred of Lincoln's legacy, and those with the same reaction to Bush's administration, will find themselves on common ground.
I don't claim any insight in noticing that in 2001; I just happened to be standing a little closer to the neo-Confederates at that point, having been debating in ACW circles, and I noticed the tack of their comments.
Labels: Civil War, Confederacy
