In praise of (three) modern Doughface Northerners

Has anyone else noticed that all three of our non-Romney Republican candidates for President grew up in Southern Pennsylvania?
Does anyone suppose this is a historical coincidence?
It's not.

Unless you are some kind of history nut, you've never even heard the term "doughface Northerner", since it hasn't been politically current in 150 years.
And if you have heard it, then you know it was an old term of mocking and scorn -- for Northerners who loved the ante-bellum South and supported the South's legal, ahem, "institutions".

Indeed, the term itself, "doughface" was derisively coined by Southerners to describe their northern allies, and may well have originally been intended to mean "doe face", a reference to a skittish, easily frightened deer.

Northern doughfaces were essential to making the great Southern Slave Power a dominant political force in all the decades before 1860.
And of all the doughfaces, perhaps the epitomy, the highest achievement of that art-form was Abraham Lincoln's predecessor: Democrat President James Buchanan from Chambersburg, in south-central Pennsylvania.

Buchanan loved the South, and staunchly supported its values, including the Supreme Court's 1857 Dred-Scott decision which made it more difficult to effectively outlaw slavery in non-slave states.
When the Deep South began to secede in late 1860, outgoing President Buchanan recommended against secession, but took no actions to stop it.

So, in the long arc or history, Doughface Northerners were essential to Southern Slave Power and thus to preserving the Union itself.
Indeed, it was precisely the moment in time when Doughfaces were overthrown in the North, with the election of Lincoln's Republicans, that the Deep South chose to begin seceding.

But remember, this happened in 1860, after the North's population and economy had grown overwhelmingly dominant.
Had the South seceded earlier in, say, 1830 and been lead by the likes of, say, Andrew Jackson, the North could not have defeated them militarily.
Of course, Jackson himself opposed secession, but then Jackson never imagined the government in Washington might subvert slavery.

So Doughface Northerners are the reason Southern Slave Power did not feel seriously threatened before the Republican election victory in 1860.
Historically, they served the vital function of keeping the South in the Union, until the North grew strong enough for military victory.

Now, for purposes of this analysis, I equate the old Democrat Slave Power with today's Democrat Progressive agenda -- yes an outrageous idea, until you think about it...
Both the Old and Modern Democrats used the force of law to grant special privileges to selected groups based on race, or some other group identifier -- gender, ethnicity, economic "class", sexual orientation, you name it.
Indeed, arguably, modern equivalents of "slaves" are the economically vigorous producers of wealth, and our Master Class are politicians who redistribute the wealth of others to their own favored supporters.
So we are becoming, in a sense, one big plantation with its great Plantation House in Washington, DC.

In today's upside down world, the Old South most strongly supports our traditional Christian values, devotion to constitutionally limited government, private enterprise and equal justice under the law as opposed to special privileges for the politically connected.
As such the Old South is today's heart and soul of Conservatism and essential to any Republican strategy for election victories.
But now, as always, the South needs allies they can trust, and who can they trust more than modern-day Doughface Northerners?
And where do you find real Doughfaces, who grew up in the North and love the South?

Why, just as in times past, in Southern Pennsylvania, of course.
And so today we have an abundance of non-Romney candidates who grew up in Southern Pennsylvania and are hoping to appeal to enough conservative Southerners to overturn the votes of more traditional Northern "establishment" Republicans.

Ron Paul: born and raised in Pittsburg, southwestern Pennsylvania.
Rick Santorum: born in Virginia, raised in Butler, near Pittsburg, represented southwestern Pennsylvania in Congress.
Newt Gingrich: born in Harrisburg, south central Pennsylvania, raised in nearby Hummelstown.

All modern-day Southern Pennsylvania "Doughface Northerners" who love the South, it's people and it's conservative values.

“Secession was a lie. Insurrection was a continuing problem. “

And where was the cradle of American secession? Well, it was among the Federalists of New England, especially those opposed to President Madison and the War of 1812:

” As early as 1804 some New England Federalists had discussed secession from the Union if the national government became too oppressive. “

“Secession was again mentioned in 1814–1815; all but one leading Federalist newspaper in New England supported a plan to expel the western states from the Union. Otis, the key leader of the Hartford Convention, blocked radical proposals like seizing the Federal customs house, impounding federal funds, or declaring neutrality. Otis thought the Madison administration was near collapse and that unless conservatives like himself and the other delegates took charge, the radical secessionists might take power. Indeed, Otis was unaware that Massachusetts Governor Caleb Strong had already sent a secret mission to discuss terms with the British for a separate peace.”

“the Madison administration had reasons to be concerned about the consequences of the Hartford Convention. Federalists were already blocking efforts to finance the war and bring it to a successful conclusion that included an invasion of Canada. There were fears that New England would negotiate a separate peace with Great Britain, an action in many ways just as harmful to the nation as actual secession. In preparing for a worst case scenario, Madison moved troops from the New York- Canadian border to Albany where they could quickly be sent to Massachusetts or Connecticut if needed to reserve federal authority. Several New England regiments that had participated in the Niagara campaign were returned home where it was hoped that they could serve as a focal point for New Englanders opposed to disunion.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartford_Convention

“There had to be a war about slavery because, and only because the slave power wanted a war about slavery. No one else wanted a war about slavery.”

Sure, as long as you pretend that John Brown and his financiers and supporters in the North never existed.

“John Brown (May 9, 1800 – December 2, 1859) was an American revolutionary abolitionist, who in the 1850s advocated and practiced armed insurrection as a means to abolish slavery in the United States. He led the Pottawatomie Massacre, during which five men were killed, in 1856 in Bleeding Kansas, and made his name in the unsuccessful raid at Harpers Ferry in 1859. Later that year he was executed but his speeches at the trial captured national attention. Brown has been called “the most controversial of all 19th-century Americans” and “America’s first domestic terrorist.”

“Brown’s attempt in 1859 to start a liberation movement among enslaved African Americans in Harpers Ferry, Virginia electrified the nation. He was tried for treason against the Commonwealth of Virginia, the murder of five pro-slavery Southerners, and inciting a slave insurrection, found guilty on all counts, and was hanged. Southerners alleged that his rebellion was the tip of the abolitionist iceberg and represented the wishes of the Republican Party to end slavery. Historians agree that the Harpers Ferry raid in 1859 escalated tensions that, a year later, led to secession and the American Civil War.”

Aftermath of the raid

“The raid on Harpers Ferry is generally thought to have done much to set the nation on a course toward civil war. Southern slaveowners, hearing initial reports that hundreds of abolitionists were involved, were relieved the effort was so small. Yet they feared other abolitionists would emulate Brown and attempt to lead slave rebellions. Therefore the South reorganized the decrepit militia system. These militias, well-established by 1861, became a ready-made Confederate army, making the South better prepared for war.

“Southern Democrats charged that Brown’s raid was an inevitable consequence of the Republican Party’s political platform, which they associated with Abolitionism. In light of the upcoming elections in November 1860, the Republican political and editorial response to John Brown tried to distance themselves as much as possible from Brown, condemning the raid and dismissing Brown as an insane fanatic. As one historian explains, Brown was successful in polarizing politics:

“Brown’s raid succeeded brilliantly. It drove a wedge through the already tentative and fragile Opposition-Republican coalition and helped to intensify the sectional polarization that soon tore the Democratic party and the Union apart.”

“Many abolitionists in the North viewed John Brown as a martyr who had been sacrificed for the sins of the nation. Immediately after the raid, William Lloyd Garrison published a column in The Liberator, judging Brown’s raid as “well-intended but sadly misguided” and “an enterprise so wild and futile as this”. However, he defended Brown’s character from detractors in the Northern and Southern press, and argued that those who supported the principles of the American Revolution could not consistently oppose Brown’s raid. (Garrison reiterated the point, adding that “whenever commenced, I cannot but wish success to all slave insurrections”, in a speech in Boston on the day Brown was hanged).

“On December 22, 1859, John Greenleaf Whittier published a poem praising him, “Brown of Ossawatomie”.

After the Civil War, Black leader Frederick Douglass wrote, “His zeal in the cause of my race was far greater than mine—it was as the burning sun to my taper light—mine was bounded by time, his stretched away to the boundless shores of eternity. I could live for the slave, but he could die for him.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Brown_(abolitionist)

Seriously, if you're going to cite John Brown as evidence that the North wanted a war, I guess you'd have to cite Preston Brooks, who CANED a U.S. Senator in the Senate chamber over WORDS as an even greater evidence of "conspiracy." Hogwash.

I don't think either side "wanted" war, but the South---as did Imperial Japan in 1939 and Imperial Germany in 1914---had put itself on a "timetable for war" by its commitment to the Dred Scott decision saying that NO ONE could keep slavery out of the territories.

Again, if you have not read James Huston's astounding book, "Calculating the Value of the Union," to see that SLAVE WEALTH made up 1/3 of all wealth in Virginia in 1860, and MORE WEALTH than all the railroads and textile mills in the North put together, then you are being intellectually dishonest. The fact was, the South had to fight because it had insisted on keeping slavery and its entire economy---yes, even non-slaveholders---was inextricably dominated by slave wealth.

You can qualify and insert (red herring) language regarding “white male sufferage(sic)” and the “Jacksonian erea (sic)”, but that in no way negates the facts that all of that existed centuries before, and if you want to limit the concept, in the colonies and states scores of years earlier than the ratification of the Constitution.

But why the effort since the relevancy is questionable?

Then you insert your paragraph on what you think Calhoun's beliefs were (you channeling him here?) and try to make your definition the foundation of his 1848 speech, is of course “strange, bizarre” because your interpretations have nothing to do with what he was saying.

I can only suggest that you read it again, because it is the most cogent description of the pending failure of the Constitutional foundations in 1848.

You say: “...in no way is Calhoun a friend of human rights or liberty as most of us understand it today.”

Do you really have any idea how wrong you are?

Of course you don't.

Here again for you to try to understand:

“...government has no right to control individual liberty beyond what is necessary to the safety and well-being of society. Such is the boundary which separates the power of government and the liberty of the citizen or subject in the political state, which, as I have shown, is that natural state of man — the only one in which his race can exist, and the one in which he is born, lives, and dies.”

I think the statement that “few people today understand the relationship of the government to the people as proposed and codified by our forefathers” is quite clear here for all to see.

Here is what you said, and let's be very clear about it:

"Here is just a sample of the Marxist Calhoun's thoughts on the labor theory of value, the ESSENCE of all communism:

'Let those who are interested remember that labor is the only source of wealth, and how small a portion of it, in all old and civilized countries, even the best governed, is left to those by whose labor wealth is created' (Feb. 6, 1837).

"Marx himself didn't say it any better."

You apparently do not read or understand Marx. That would also be true of your thinking about Calhoun. Just to set the perspective, your quote of Calhoun in 1837 was well ahead of any Marx publications. Marx was about 20 years old at the time and still in college. There is very little that Marx could have said to impact Calhoun's thinking regarding that quote. And it did not reflect any Marxist principles

Even in Richard Hofstadter's book's chapter on Calhoun, which you seem to quote, he does not label him as a communist, although it has been widely misunderstood by some. Calhoun did often use language that would refer to the various "classes" of people, but as primarily a writer concerned with social structures, he was defining the difference between those who wished to live by the results of their own labor, and those who would live by the profits of others. He focused on the benefits of the social relationship rather than a Marx like struggle. That is the subject area that you missed.

He addressed the reality of the different classes and contributed to the understanding of the costs of labor and the benefits. He saw the struggle of the classes but not in a racial sense---moreover that of commercial and industrial classes and other interests, primarily commercial.

And here is the fallacy of your guilt by association correlation of Calhoun to Marx.

Marx tore away class analysis from classical European liberal thinking and transformed it from a libertarian view into a socialist one. He then transformed the labor/enterprise contract into his grand explanation of cultural clash:... the historically inevitable struggle between profiting capitalists and exploited workers.

Marx viewed the state as the capitalist's tool, Calhoun violently opposed the construct. Whereas Marx liked to expound on the notion that the most wealthy merchants tended to be aligned with the political class, Calhoun saw the relationship as serving the growth of the entire population.

Calhoun's various positions show that he was changing his mind, based on events. However, he never approached the characteriture that you are describing.

I really hate to address your little red herring nonsense, but the comment about Calhoun and the tariff issue should be exposed as nothing more than an attempt to insult or misdirect.

But in case you missed the class on tariffs, here is Calhoun's role in the matter:

In an elaborate scheme to prevent passage of still higher tariffs, while at the same time appealing to Andrew Jackson’s supporters in the North, John C. Calhoun and other southerners joined them in crafting a tariff bill that would also weigh heavily on materials imported by the New England states.

It was believed that President John Quincy Adams’s supporters in New England, the National Republicans, or as they would later be called, Whigs, would uniformly oppose the bill for this reason and that the southern legislators could then withdraw their support, killing the legislation while blaming the mercantilists.

“What that plan was, Calhoun explained very frankly nine years later, in a speech reviewing the events of 1828 and defending the course taken by himself and his southern fellow members. A high-tariff bill was to be laid before the House.

It was to contain not only a high general range of duties, but duties especially high on those raw materials on which New England wanted the duties to be low. It was to satisfy the protective demands of the Western and Middle States, and at the same time to be obnoxious to the New England members. The Jackson men of all shades, the protectionists from the North and the free-traders from the South, were to unite in preventing any amendments; that bill, and no other, was to be voted on. When the final vote came, the southern men were to turn around and vote against their own measure. The New England men, and the Adams men in general, would be unable to swallow it, and would also vote against it.

Combined, they would prevent its passage, even though the Jackson men from the North voted for it.

The result expected was that no tariff bill at all would be passed during the session, which was the object of the southern wing of the opposition. On the other hand, the obloquy of defeating it would be cast on the Adams party, which was the object of the Jacksonians of the North. The tariff bill would be defeated, and yet the Jackson men would be able to parade as the true “friends.”

From Wikipedia in case you have interest.

That (sic) thing is annoying when anybody does it, but you do it when I spelled those words correctly. What is wrong with you? Is English not your native language? Are you a moron? Or are you just trying to irritate people.

Read Calhoun's whole speech. He explicitly repudiates the idea that all people are born free and with equal civil rights, attacking Jefferson and the Northwest Ordinance. It's hard to find a political actor of his era who was less in tune with the thinking of the Founders than Calhoun was.

... government has no right to control individual liberty beyond what is necessary to the safety and well-being of society.

That is vague enough to mean anything, everything, and nothing. Every tyrant claims restrictions on liberty are justified to maintain public safety and the "well-being of society" (phrases vague enough to cover anything). Heck, every government believes what it does is justified on those grounds, even when it is oppressive.

For Calhoun, slavery and restrictions on the slave population were more than justified by the demands of public safety and well-being. Forms of slavery weren't objectionable to him so long as he numbered among the free, rather than the enslaved.

First, to say someone is a “marxist” or “socialist” is a categorization that fits regardless of chronology. Robert Owen, who preceded Calhoun and Marx, and whose ideas were stolen from Marx, conceived of the term of “socialism” and the “labor theory of value,” the latter of which Calhoun accepted.

What is important is not his evolution (in your view) but rather a fundamental principle that he rejected the market theory of value in favor of the communist (small c) labor theory of value-—again, the essence of all socialism. And, again, it is not surprising that he found an ally in this in George Fitzhugh, who saw slavery as the purest form of communism.

No, all your wiggling-—and “let’s be very clear about it”-—cannot make Calhoun into a free-marketeer, because he believed fervently in both slavery and socialism (i.e., the same thing).

Neither can your rather silly defense of Calhoun’s authorship of the tariff extricate him from the absurdity that he found himself arguing against the very bill he authored.

LS: "You have to look at James Huston's book "Calculating the Value of the Union" to see specifically how the definitioni of property as property rights in people..."

Thanks for the recommendation.
Along with several others recommended on these threads, I've added yours to my laptop's e-library.

Another interesting book on this subject is William W. Freehling (2001-02-15). The South Vs. The South : How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War.

"Statistics indicate other Southerners’ ability to cool white Confederates’ ardor; and the numbers illuminate but the tip of the iceberg.
Southern blacks supplied close to 150,000 Union soldiers and sailors (northern free blacks provided another 50,000).
Border South whites added 200,000 and Confederate state whites 100,000 soldiers to Union troop strength.
The resulting total of 450,000 Southerners who wore Union blue, half as many as the 900,000 Southerners who wore Confederate gray, replaced every one of the Federals’ 350,000 slain men and supplied 100,000 more men besides -- a number greater than the usual size of Robert E. Lee’s main Confederate army.
White Confederates developed no such replacements for their mounting casualties; and in addition, anti-Confederate Southerners piled on psychological, economic, and geographic burdens that ultimately helped flatten white Confederates’ resiliency."

A large part of my family comes from Southern areas which remained loyal to the Union.
They are the direct Southern equivalents of Northern Dough Face / Copperheads.

You said:

You either cut and pasted without looking or you misspelled two words on your own. You might want to see if you are right before you start your insults.

Let's save the time of having to refer back to your post....here is your quote.....“white male sufferage(sic)” and the “Jacksonian erea (sic)”, (my sic added).

Look carefully now.

But to the issue of Calhoun's work, I have both read and studied that speech, which I do think most clearly and succinctly expresses his dissatisfaction with the political climate of the late 1840s.

But it is indeed you that misunderstands his writings. He says what you say to prove his argument by simple comparison--which seemed to stump you. Only bias or superficial thinking would cause you to arrive at a conclusion other than his.

He, AND I MIGHT ADD, VERY CLEARLY, argues the problem of protecting the rights of a minority against a persistent majority, (and in the case at hand it was the Northern and Western politicians attempting to legislate against the rights of the South) and how the problem might be solved constitutionally.

It is very clear that at that time special interests were combining to exceed the constitutional limits on powers originally intended by the Founders, while seeking benefits for themselves, and operating to infringe the rights of others.

But, since you are preoccupied with issues other than this message, I know you will want to argue this from now on. So, go ahead.

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