Posted on 05/23/2002 8:52:25 AM PDT by stainlessbanner
The New York Review of Books
June 13, 2002
Look Away! A History of the Confederate States of America
by William C. Davis
The South vs. the South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War
by William W. Freehling
Lee and His Army in Confederate History
by Gary W. Gallagher
The War Hits Home: The Civil War in Southeastern Virginia
by Brian Steel Wills
The field of Civil War history has produced more interpretative disputes than most historical events. Next to debates about the causes of the war, arguments about why the North won, or why the Confederacy lost (the difference in phraseology is significant), have generated some of the most heated but also most enlightening recent scholarship. The titles of four books reveal just some of the central themes of this argument: Why the North Won the Civil War (1960); How the North Won (1983); Why the South Lost the Civil War (1986); Why the Confederacy Lost (1992).
Answers to these why and how questions fall into two general categories: external and internal. Exter-nal interpretations usually phrase the question as Why did the North win? They focus on a comparison of Northern and Southern population, resources, economic capacity, leadership, or strategy, and conclude that Northern superiority in one or more of these explains Union victory. Internal explanations tend to ask, Why did the South lose? They focus mainly or entirely on the Confederacy and argue that internal divisions, dissensions, or inadequacies account for Confederate defeat.
The most durable interpretation is an external one. It was offered by General Robert E. Lee himself in a farewell address to his army after its surrender at Appomattox: "The Army of Northern Virginia has been compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources."[1] This explanation enabled Southern whites to preserve their pride, to reconcile defeat with their sense of honor, even to maintain faith in the nobility of their cause while admitting that it had been lost. The Confederacy, in other words, was compelled to surrender not because its soldiers fought badly, or lacked courage, or suffered from poor leadership, or because its cause was wrong, but simply because the enemy had more men and guns. The South did not lose; Confederates wore themselves out whipping the Yankees and collapsed from glorious exhaustion. This interpretation became the mainstay of what has been called the Myth of the Lost Cause, which has sustained Southern pride in their Confederate forebears to this day. As one Virginian expressed it:
They never whipped us, Sir, unless they were four to one. If we had had anything like a fair chance, or less disparity of numbers, we should have won our cause and established our independence.[2]
In one form or another, this explanation has won support from scholars of Northern as well as Southern birth. In 1960 the historian Richard Current provided a succinct version of it. After reviewing the statistics of the North's "overwhelming numbers and resources" two and a half times the South's population, three times its railroad capacity, nine times its industrial production, and so on Current concluded that "surely, in view of the disparity of resources, it would have taken a miracle...to enable the South to win. As usual, God was on the side of the heaviest battalions."[3]
In 1990 Shelby Foote expressed this thesis in his inimitable fashion. Noting that many aspects of life in the North went on much as usual during the Civil War, Foote told Ken Burns on camera in the PBS documentary The Civil War that "the North fought that war with one hand behind its back." If necessary "the North simply would have brought that other arm out from behind its back. I don't think the South ever had a chance to win that war."[4]
At first glance, Current's and Foote's statements seem plausible. But upon reflection, a good many historians have questioned their explicit assertions that overwhelming numbers and resources made Northern victory inevitable. If that is true, the Confederate leaders who took their people to war in 1861 were guilty of criminal folly or colossal arrogance. They had read the census returns. They knew as much about the North's superiority in men, resources, and economic capacity as any modern historian. Yet they went to war confident of victory. Southern leaders were students of history. They could cite many examples of small nations that won or defended their independence against much more powerful enemies: Switzerland against the Hapsburg Empire; the Netherlands against Spain; Greece against the Ottomans. Their own ancestors had won independence from mighty Britain in 1783. The relative resources of the Confederacy vis-à-vis the Union in 1861 were greater than those of these other successful rebels.
The Confederacy waged a strategically defensive war to protect from conquest territory it already controlled and to preserve its armies from annihilation. To "win" that kind of war, the Confederacy did not need to invade and conquer the North or destroy its army and infrastructure; it needed only to hold out long enough to compel the North to the conclusion that the price of conquering the South and annihilating its armies was too great, as Britain had concluded with respect to the United States in 1781 or, for that matter, as the United States concluded with respect to Vietnam in 1972. Until 1865, cold-eyed military experts in Europe were almost unanimous in their conviction that Union armies could never conquer and subdue the 750,000 square miles of the Confederacy, as large as all of Western Europe. "No war of independence ever terminated unsuccessfully except where the disparity of force was far greater than it is in this case," pronounced the military analyst of the London Times in 1862. "Just as England during the revolution had to give up conquering the colonies so the North will have to give up conquering the South."[5]
Even after losing the war, many ex-Confederates stuck to this belief. General Joseph E. Johnston, one of the highest-ranking Confederate officers, insisted in 1874 that the Southern people had not been "guilty of the high crime of undertaking a war without the means of waging it successfully."[6] A decade later General Pierre G.T. Beauregard, who ranked just below Johnston, made the same point: "No people ever warred for independence with more relative advantages than the Confederates."[7]
If so, why did they lose the war? In thinly veiled terms, Johnston and Beauregard blamed the inept leadership of Jefferson Davis. That harried gentleman responded in kind; as far as he was concerned, the erratic and inadequate generalship of Beauregard and especially Johnston was responsible for Confederate defeat. In the eyes of many contemporaries and historians there was plenty of blame to go around. William C. Davis's Look Away! is the most recent "internal" study of the Confederacy that, by implication at least, attributes Confederate defeat to poor leadership at several levels, both military and civilian, as well as factionalism, dissension, and bickering between men with outsize egos and thin skins. In this version of Confederate history, only Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson remain unstained.
For any believer in the Myth of the Lost Cause, any admirer of heroic Confederate resistance to overwhelming odds, the story told by Davis (no relation to the Confederate president) makes depressing reading. It is a story of conflicts not on the battlefields of Manassas or Shiloh or Gettysburg or Chickamauga or the Wilderness they are here, but offstage, as it were but conflicts between state governors and the Confederate government in Richmond, between quarreling Cabinet officers, between Jefferson Davis and prominent generals or senators or newspaper editors and even his vice-president, Alexander Stephens. Davis chronicles different examples of internal breakdown under the stresses not only of enemy invasion but also of slave defections to the Yankees, of Unionist disloyalty in the upcountry, particularly in such states as Tennessee, of galloping inflation and the inability of an unbalanced agricultural society under siege to control it, of shortages and hunger and a growing bitterness and alienation among large elements of the population.
These problems seemed more than sufficient to ensure Confederate failure, but they were greatly exacerbated by the jealousies and rivalries of Confederate politicians, which remain Davis's principal focus. He does not explicitly address the question of why the Confederacy lost, but his implicit answer lies in the assertion that "the fundamental flaw in too many of the big men of the Confederacy... [was] 'big-man-me-ism.'"
There are, however, two problems with this interpretation. In two senses it is too "internal." First, by concentrating only on the Confederacy it tends to leave the reader with the impression that only the Confederacy suffered from these corrosive rivalries, jealousies, and dissensions. But a history of the North during the Civil War would reveal similar problems, mitigated only by Lincoln's skill in holding together a diverse coalition of Republicans and War Democrats, Yankees and border states, abolitionists and slaveholders which perhaps suggests that Lincoln was the principal reason for Union victory. In any event, Look Away! is also too "internal" because the author is too deeply dependent on his sources. It is the nature of newspaper editorials, private correspondence, congressional debates, partisan speeches, and the like to emphasize conflict, criticism, argument, complaint. It is the squeaky wheel that squeaks. The historian needs to step back and gain some perspective on these sources, to recognize that the well-greased wheel that turns smoothly also turns quietly, leaving less evidence of its existence available to the historian.
Look Away! falls within one tradition of internal explanations for Confederate defeat. More prevalent, especially in recent years, have been studies that emphasize divisions and conflicts of race, class, and even gender in the South. Two fifths of the Confederate population were slaves, and two thirds of the whites did not belong to slaveholding families. What stake did they have in an independent Confederate nation whose original raison d'être was the protection of slavery? Not much stake at all, according to many historians, especially for the slaves and, as the war took an increasing toll on non-slaveholding white families, very little stake for them either. Even among slaveholding families, the women who willingly subscribed to an ethic of sacrifice in the war's early years became disillusioned as the lengthening war robbed them of husbands, sons, lovers, and brothers. Many white women turned against the war and spread this disaffection among their menfolk in the army; in the end, according to Drew Gilpin Faust, "it may well have been because of its women that the South lost the Civil War."[8]
If all this is true if the slaves and some nonslaveholding whites opposed the Confederate war effort from the outset and others including women of slaveholding families eventually turned against it, one need look no further to explain Confederate defeat. In The South vs. the South, however, William W. Freehling does not go this far. He says almost nothing about women as a separate category, and he acknowledges that many nonslaveholding whites had a racial, cultural, and even economic stake in the preservation of slavery and remained loyal Confederates to the end. But he maintains that, properly defined, half of all Southerners opposed the Confederacy and that this fact provides a sufficient explanation for Confederate failure.
Freehling defines the South as all fifteen slave states and Southerners as all people slave as well as free who lived in those states. This distinction between "the South" and the eleven slave states that formed the Confederacy is important but too often disregarded by those who casually conflate the South and the Confederacy. Admittedly, some 90,000 white men from the four Union slave states (Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, and Delaware) fought for the Confederacy, but this number was offset by a similar number of whites from Confederate states (chiefly Tennessee and the part of Virginia that became West Virginia) who fought for the Union.
But Freehling's central thesis that "white Confederates were only half the Southerners" raises problems. This arithmetic works only if virtually all black Southerners are counted against the Confederacy. At times Freehling seems to argue that they should be so counted. At other times he is more cautious, maintaining that "the vast majority" of Southern blacks "either opposed the rebel cause or cared not whether it lived or died." Freehling does not make clear how important he considers that qualifying "or cared not." In any event, let us assume that all three million slaves who remained in the Confederacy (as well as the one million in the border states and in conquered Confederate regions) sympathized with the Union cause that would bring them freedom. Nevertheless, their unwilling labor as slaves was crucial to the Confederate economy and war effort, just as their unwilling labor and that of their forebears had been crucial to building the antebellum Southern economy. These Confederate slaves worked less efficiently than before the war because so many masters and overseers were absent at the front. Unwilling or not, however, they must be counted on the Confederate side of the equation, which significantly alters Freehling's 50/50 split of pro- and anti-Confederates in the South to something like 75/25.
Freehling draws on previous scholarship to offer a succinct narrative of the political and military course of the war, organized around Lincoln's slow but inexorable steps toward emancipation, "hard war," and the eventual mobilization of 300,000 black laborers and soldiers to work and fight for the Union. This narrative is marred by several errors, including the repeated confusion of General Charles F. Smith with General William F. "Baldy" Smith, the conflation of combat casualties with combat mortality, the mislabeling of a photograph of Confederate trenches at Fredericksburg as Petersburg, and the acceptance at face value of Alexander Stephens's absurd claim, made five years after Lincoln's death, that the Union president had urged him in 1865 to persuade Southern states to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment "prospectively," thereby delaying the abolition of slavery five years. Nevertheless, Freehling has made a strong case for the vital contribution of the two million whites and one million blacks in the South who definitely did support the Union cause. Without them, "the North" could not have prevailed, as Lincoln readily acknowledged.
Freehling does not take a clear stand on the question of whether Union victory was inevitable. At times he seems to imply that it was, because the half of all Southerners whom he claims supported the Union (actively or passively) doomed the Confederacy. But at other times he suggests that this support was contingent on the outcome of military campaigns and political decisions. No such ambiguity characterizes the essays in Gary Gallagher's Lee and His Army in Confederate History. In this book and in his earlier The Confederate War, Gallagher has argued forcefully and convincingly that Confederate nationalism bound most Southern whites together in determined support for the Confederate cause, that the brilliant though costly victories of Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia reinforced this determination, and that morale even in the face of defeat and the destruction of resources in 1864 1865 remained high until almost the end.
Gallagher does not slight the problems of slave defections to the Yankees, class tensions among whites, personal rivalries and jealousies among Confederate leaders, and other internal divisions that have occupied historians who see these problems as preordaining defeat. But he emphasizes the degree of white unity and strength of purpose despite these faultlines. Plenty of evidence exists to support this emphasis. A Union officer who was captured at the Battle of Atlanta on July 22, 1864, and spent the rest of the war in Southern prisons wrote in his diary on October 4 that from what he had seen in the South "the End of the War...is some time hence as the Idea of the Rebs giving up until they are completely subdued is all Moonshine they submit to privatations that would not be believed unless seen."[9]
"Until they are completely subdued." That point came in April 1865, when the large and well-equipped Union armies finally brought the starving, barefoot, and decimated ranks of Confederates to bay. Gallagher revives the overwhelming numbers and resources explanation for Confederate defeat, shorn of its false aura of inevitability. Numbers and resources do not prevail in war without the will and skill to use them. The Northern will wavered several times, most notably in response to Lee's victories in the summer of 1862 and winter spring of 1863 and the success of Lee's resistance to Grant's offensives in the spring and summer of 1864. Yet Union leaders and armies were learning the skills needed to win, and each time the Confederacy seemed on the edge of triumph, Northern victories blunted the Southern momentum: at Sharpsburg, Maryland, and Perryville, Kentucky, in the fall of 1862; at Gettysburg and Vicksburg in July 1863; and at Atlanta and in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley in September 1864. Better than any other historian of the Confederacy, Gallagher understands the importance of these contingent turning points that eventually made it possible for superior numbers and resources to prevail. He understands as well that the Confederate story cannot be written except in counterpoint with the Union story, and that because of the multiple contingencies in these stories, Northern victory was anything but inevitable.
Much of the best scholarship on the Civil War during the past decade has concentrated on the local or regional impact of the war. A fine example is Brian Steel Wills's The War Hits Home, a fascinating account of the home front and battle front in southeastern Virginia, especially the town of Suffolk and its hinterland just inland from Norfolk. No great battles took place here, but there was plenty of skirmishing and raids by combatants on both sides. Confederates controlled this region until May 1862, when they were compelled to pull back their defenses to Richmond. Union forces occupied Suffolk for the next year, staving off a halfhearted Confederate effort to recapture it in the spring of 1863. The Yankees subsequently fell back to a more defensible line nearer Norfolk, leaving the Suffolk region a sort of no man's land subject to raids and plundering by the cavalry of both armies.
Through it all most white inhabitants remained committed Confederates, while many of the slaves who were not removed by their owners to safer territory absconded to the Yankees, adding their weight to the Union side of the scales in the balance of power discussed by Freehling. White men from this region fought in several of Lee's regiments, suffering casualties that left many a household bereft of sons, husbands, fathers. Yet their Confederate loyalties scarcely wavered.
Northern occupation forces at first tried a policy of conciliation, hoping to win the Southern whites back to the Union. When this failed, they moved toward a harsher policy here as they did elsewhere, confiscating the property and liberating the slaves of people they now perceived as enemies to be crushed rather than deluded victims of secession conspirators to be converted.
Wills does not make a big point of it, but his findings stand "in sharp rebuttal" to the arguments of historians who portray a weak or divided white commitment to the Confederate cause as the reason for defeat. "These people sought to secure victory until there was no victory left to win." In the end the North did have greater numbers and resources, wielded with a skill and determination that by 1864 1865 matched the Confederacy's skills and determination; and these explain why the North won the Civil War.
[1] The Wartime Papers of R.E. Lee, edited by Clifford Dowdey and Louis H. Manarin (Little, Brown, 1961), p. 934.
[2] Quoted in Why the North Won the Civil War, edited by David Donald (Louisiana State University Press, 1960), p. ix.
[3] Richard N. Current, "God and the Strongest Battalions," in Why the North Won the Civil War, p. 22.
[4] "Men at War: An Interview with Shelby Foote," in Geoffrey C. Ward with Ric Burns and Ken Burns, The Civil War (Knopf, 1990), p. 272.
[5] London Times, August 29, 1862.
[6] Joseph E. Johnston, Narrative of Military Operations (Appleton, 1874), p. 421.
[7] Pierre G.T. Beauregard, "The First Battle of Bull Run," in Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, 4 volumes, edited by Robert U. Johnson and Clarence C. Buel (Century, 1887), Vol. 1, p. 222.
[8] Drew Gilpin Faust, "Altars of Sacrifice: Confederate Women and the Narratives of War," The Journal of American History, Vol. 76, No. 4 (March 1990), p. 1228.
[9] "The Civil War Diary of Colonel John Henry Smith," edited by David M. Smith, Iowa Journal of History, Vol. 47 (April 1949), p. 164.
I'm disappointed that you keep posting this stuff after it has been confuted.
It wasn't a "rebellion": it is ontologically impossible to "rebel" against something of which one is no longer a member.
Southerners always had the right, as did every State in the Union, to withdraw from the Union either singly or en bloc. If Alaska were tomorrow designated the National Trash Dump and Parking Lot, I'd expect them to withdraw from the Union, too, and for good cause.
Southern States exercised their rights as sovereign (we've established that), free Peoples to dissolve the ties between themselves and the Union, just as our ancestors dissolved their tie to the British Crown.
The level on which the Southern States acted was as Peoples, as Sovereigns.......please get it through your held, N-S, that as among sovereigns, there is no Law!
Among sovereigns, the only law is treaty law, and treaties are only as good as agreement among the principals makes them. Capiche?
MY, my, my, such big words. Using $10 words to support a 10 cent position buys you nothing.
Southerners, or any other state for that matter, have never had the right to unilaterally withdraw from the Union. Nowhere does the Constitution give them that right or the right to act unilaterally when the interests of another state may be affected. All you have given is your opionin that that right exists. I, along with the Supreme Court, disagree.
You can continue to parrot soverign states and states rights all you want. It does not change the fact that all you are spouting are your opinions on the existence of such rights. The states were soverign so long as their actions did not violate the provisions of the Constitution. They themselves agreed that laws made under the Constitution overruled laws made under their state Constitutions. And the Supreme Court has ruled that the articles of secession which they passed in 1861 violated the Constitution and were therefore illegal. That made secession illegal and their actions were acts of rebellion. Lincoln's duty to the Constitution required that he put it down by any means necessary.
So go ahead and troll the dictionary for more words. Make all the claims that you want. You are welcome to your opinions. I just think that they are wrong. Capiche?
I don't share your conviction that an independent South would keep out or throw out Mexican immigrants. It looks like they're bound to end up where ever there is ill-paid menial labor or dangerous, poorly paid, non-union work, or a demand for servants. Or the work will be performed by other immigrants from Latin America or Asia. Tightening borders could stop or slow down the process, but it would be a mistake to assume that the kind of people who would rule the US's successor states would be the kind of people who would do that, if those successor states were to be of any size. The people who end up running things above the county level are the same sort of people wherever you live. And that would be true of an independent South. It won't be those who are propagandizing for it who will end up running things. And if the libertarian component is large in any of those new countries, they certainly wouldn't cotton to what it takes to keep borders under control.
In general, there's a tendency among some to view the South as more devoted to loyalty and solidarity, and the North as hostage to market forces and money making drives. The latter may be quite true, but the former is doubtful. Slavery itself grew as a response to market forces and the planters' desire for a cheap and secured source of labor. Some emotional ties may have grown up by living together with household servants, but one can't leave the economic calculations which were more important in managing the field hands out of the picture. Nor can one ignore the macroeconomic considerations that led to Southern expansionism.
After emancipation in Trinidad and Guyana, when the costs of labor increased and the willingness of Blacks to toil on plantations decreased, indentured servants were imported from Java, China, and especially India. This could have happened, and I believe on a very small scale did happen, in the American South after emancipation. Agriculture doesn't need the kind of large settled populations it once did, but one can expect, unless people radically change, that much of its labor requirements will be met by cheap, exploited immigrant labor.
Today, as in previous centuries and for good or ill, we are more one country than many have thought. First slavery, then defeat, poverty, and an enduring racial problem convinced many of a Southern uniqueness. To be sure, there are persisting regional differences, but our regions have more in common with each other than separatists will admit. For a century, poverty and racial conflict kept large-scale immigration out of the South, and indeed slavery discouraged free immigration to the South even before the war. But now those problems won't hold back immigration to the South any more than to other sections. Nor will political and economic elites in an independent South -- we are learning that they have far more power and are far more alike from country to country and party to party than people would have thought.
But then again, if immigration and other forces help to produce a more homogenous world we may find nothing to unite us together as a nation. A truly global free market will make national loyalties and nation states seem redundant or superfluous to some. I would call that a mistake -- even a tragedy -- but I'll get a big kick out of watching Rockwell paleo-libertarians and metaphysical Southern nationalists fighting each other over the size and role of the state in culture and society.
Southerners have a sense of "their own", and will insist that such jobs as are needful be filled at a fair wage, or that employers do without. Southerners know that it doesn't benefit the community when employers are able constantly to undercut wages (as they are doing now in Georgia and Texas with green-card and illegal aliens), and they know that employers will always attempt to reduce wages and employment, on any pretext, just because they want the money themselves. It doesn't take a rockets scientist to figure out that what the community needs isn't a transfusion of Yankee smarts and immigrant hands, but populist political leadership that won't collaborate and won't scalawag.
You underestimate Southern populism -- it's the home of Jacksonianism, remember, and of numerous farmers' movements to protect themselves against rent and crop-price exploitation. Anti-black sentiment was part of that: the sense of community broken by wage exploiters using the black worker to break wages, of livelihoods lost to the last starving man still able to raise his hand and bid the share, or the wage, lower. As much as the tradition of "great man" deference may persist, which we've discussed and which is epitomized by the glorification of Robert E. Lee, Southerners know who is The Problem when it comes to the ability to get a living: it's the Man in the Big White House. It's always been the Man.
Your depressing construction of it aside, the South's future will be better than its past, but for the South to have a future, Southerners have to reject the collaborationist sociopolitical apparatus that exists now (which you referred to), which consistently divides Southern constituencies, neutralizes them through race politics, and overrides the interests of the constituencies. The constituency, which votes, is beaten in policymaking daily as we discussed earlier by the "audience" of the national clerisy employing corporate influence, federal subsidies, federal strictures, racial politics, and federal court decrees to secure the cooperation of "decisionmakers" in the South. Operating through corporate, media, and political conduits, the Northern elites work to destroy the cultural attitudes of the South and to substitute for them the competing meme of their own urbanized and thoroughly domesticated Northern society with its themes not of personal freedom, but of social and opportunity inequality spuriously validated by meritocratic pretensions of fairness but driven in fact by avarice and classism.
But, as they say, that is a whole 'nother thread.
Not true. In Texas, the State School Board saw several strong cultural conservatives like Donna Ballard elected to the Board as a result of the repeated attempts of NEA allies to introduce liberal propaganda into Texas schoolbooks. The first to oppose NEA and its affiliate, the TEA, were Mel and Norma Gabler, a pair of peppery, religious people who raised powerful objections to the moral values being propagated in school, and were able to back up their moral claims with good examples of NEA moral pap that were reprinted in the newspapers and stirred up other conservatives. They attracted even more attention by reviewing the books closely and holding press conferences in which they drew attention to numerous errors of fact and other evidences of slovenliness in the writing of the books they reviewed, to which complaints they appended more examples of value choices being propounded which the Texas community wouldn't accept. They attracted enough attention to bring Norman Lear's People for the American Way to Texas to try to discredit them, but they also energized numbers of smart, dedicated conservatives to get involved with State School Board politics -- they ran, and several of them won.
Then the Bush Machine stepped into the picture, and drove the conservatives out by burying them in the primaries with money and patronage of Governor Bush himself, who explicitly endorsed business-wing RINO's against precedent in the primaries.
So your fatalistic, pessimistic-unto-suicide statement about the inevitable domination of Southern politics by the usual suspects holds water only if you assume that conservatives can't or won't organize against the RINO's and their double-dealing successfully. And yet you have against you the precedent of the 1964 Goldwater campaign and two Reagan campaigns for the nomination, in 1976 and 1980, that show that the East Coast topsiders can be unhorsed when the people's values are engaged. And both Goldwater and Reagan got their best boxes in the South, whether in primaries or in the general election.
Viewed against that background, your statement sounds more as if you wished I would believe it, and stop struggling, and just lie down and die peacefully -- what the North has always wanted from the South. It reminds me of the penultimate scene in American Me, in which the elder brother is ordered to garotte young Little Puppet, and he tells his younger brother whom he is betraying to death, "Don't look at me! Don't look at me!" even as he draws the noose.
In general, there's a tendency among some to view the South as more devoted to loyalty and solidarity, and the North as hostage to market forces and money making drives. The latter may be quite true, but the former is doubtful. Slavery itself grew as a response to market forces and the planters' desire for a cheap and secured source of labor. .... Nor can one ignore the macroeconomic considerations that led to Southern expansionism. [Emphasis supplied.]
As I said, The Man and his ambition have been the fountainhead of many miseries North and South, and in the South no less than in the North. But you project Northern cynicism on the South when you assert that the South can't stand up to money and power. In 1861, it did, and what's more, it was led by men who knew both, and who in your rationale should have been first for compromise and least willing to expose their country to the hazards of war. That's what browns Northerners off so royally about the South: Northerners happily sold out to the Machine, the "Age of Combinations" Rockefeller called it -- and the South didn't.
After emancipation in Trinidad and Guyana, when the costs of labor increased and the willingness of Blacks to toil on plantations decreased, indentured servants were imported from Java, China, and especially India. This could have happened, and I believe on a very small scale did happen, in the American South after emancipation.
What happened in the Texas sugar cane country is that the plantations were served for a little while by prison labor, and then the State took the plantations for taxes, in order to operate them directly as prison farms. The State screwed the planters, in other words. Elsewhere, sharecropping was common, but there was no mass importation of drudge labor. Until now, courtesy of the Bush family and the Clinton-Gore political machine.
indeed slavery discouraged free immigration to the South even before the war.
Is that true? It would be hard to prove, but I suppose you can back that statement up with census data or a study. Free migration after the War would have been net emigration, but then the South was a net prewar contributor to the Territories and Texas just like the North. Abraham Lincoln himself was born in Kentucky, as were many inhabitants of downstate Illinois and Indiana.
....Nor will political and economic elites in an independent South -- we are learning that they have far more power and are far more alike from country to country and party to party than people would have thought.
So far, it's been Northern money and Yankee ties that have kept people like the Bushes in the saddle in the South, and business ties to local leading firms and newspapers. The Houston Chronicle left the sidelines to become a player in the desegregation controversy of the early 1960's, working behind the scenes to spike stories in the local media -- all the media -- while negotiating a Downtown Deal with the local NAACP and the ministers of the largest black churches. The Chronicle and the Downtown Boys imposed a total blackout of news, just as if they were organizing a coup d'etat, and also worked to keep the idealistic young black protestors out of the news, too. And if I recall correctly, it was a Hearst paper at the time -- or was it Chicago's Tribune Corp.? At any rate, the paper reflected Northern values, like the Atlanta Constitution (whose editorial-page editor, Cynthia Tucker, follows a Crow Jim hiring policy of her own), and the Downtown Boys followed a Machine line on integration. Which, seen from the perspective of 40 years, and in view of even the black community's beginning to abandon integration as a nostrum, begins to look more and more like playing to the "audience" rather than to the "constituents", and a betrayal of the public by the local squirearchs.
But then again, if immigration and other forces help to produce a more homogenous world we may find nothing to unite us together as a nation. A truly global free market will make national loyalties and nation states seem redundant or superfluous to some.
You sound like my cousin's Canadian wife: who needs countries? We have everything we need. Let's be citizens of the World! We can have a World Government -- it'd be open-minded, tolerant, and liberal just like the Canadian government, right? Why would it not?
I would call that a mistake -- even a tragedy -- ...
Ah, so there is something to subsidiarity after all! I'll send a note to Bill Buckley at once -- he has preached it for years. Something to be said after all, for not micromanaging the South, the conquered province, directly from Washington after all. Thanks, I'll take that to the bank.
The South didn't weasel -- the States' acts were public and sovereign, taken in broad daylight. What's weaseling about that?
I don't assume the North broke the Constitution, although Lincoln may have a few times -- in pursuit of a higher good no doubt. What I've written several times is that the North rewrote the Constitution and inserted what we may happily call the unwritten Blood Clause, which I will summarize for you:
Amendment XIIIb
1. The States shall no longer be Sovereign, nor their Peoples have rights except those stipulated in the Constitution. They may not agree to any Thing unless the Congress or the President set it before them. The Congress may legislate at will on any subject whatsoever, and the Executive make Orders on discretion, and all shall have the force of law.
2. The subjugated people of the South shall be subordinate and their rights subject to modification or abrogation by public law, executive order, or the decree of any Federal Court.
stupidity doesn't run on my side of the argument.
Are you sure? You just made that post above about "weaseling".
Not so. (I'm going to imitate you for a while.)
Nowhere does the Constitution give them that right [Emphasis added.]
Wrong proof. Wrong word. Show me where the Constitution takes that right! Tenth Amendment, remember? Delegated powers, remember? Sovereign People, remember?
.....or the right to act unilaterally when the interests of another state may be affected.
Big words yourself. And all those weaselly conditions -- "unilaterally", "interests of another state". Gee, did Massachusetts ratify the Constitution unilaterally, or did they have to consult with North Carolina first? And where does the Constitution refer to "the interests of another state"? Oh, you mean Connecticut trying to muscle Rhode Island into ratifying -- that what you mean? Oh, wait, bad example.
All you have given is your opionin that that right exists.
Bzzzzzzztt!! Not so. 4Conservative Justices and I proved it, by disproving your claims about what the Constitution permits and what it doesn't. You are guilty of slothful induction and bad faith.
Which I, along with the Supreme Court, disagree.
Appeal to force, disguised as appeal to the authority of a corrupt decision.
You can continue to parrot soverign states and states rights all you want. It does not change the fact that all you are spouting are your opinions on the existence of such rights.
Not at all: 4CJ and I have backed them up with quotations and discussion of relevant passages from the Constitutional Convention debates, the ratification debates, and books about both. Low blow.
The states were soverign so long as their actions did not violate the provisions of the Constitution.
Says you. Sovereign means sovereign -- words mean something! And sovereign means what it means. The States shared their sovereignty, which alone is self-sourcing in the Revolution, and that which was reserved, they continued to enjoy. YOU JUST DON'T WANT THEM TO BE -- that is the problem in a nutshell!
They themselves agreed that laws made under the Constitution overruled laws made under their state Constitutions.
Irrelevant to the question at hand. Secession isn't a law. It's a sovereign act that only God Himself can overrule.
And the Supreme Court has ruled that the articles of secession which they passed in 1861 violated the Constitution and were therefore illegal.
Corrupt, political decision. Like Plessey, like Roe vs. Wade, like Bakke. No way they were going to confirm the States in their rights. Which, by the way, SCOTUS had no right to review, beyond denying the federal government's claims.
You about done on this subject? You were confuted, refuted, and done like a Christmas turkey quite a while ago.
You didn't answer the question, but it isn't going away.
Do you think ratification made the States the prey of the Supreme Court and whatever SCOTUS decided to rule, and whatever Congress decided to legislate? That the federal government can do to any State any thing it pleases, and to all the people that live in it?
The people who run things in the world today are more and more similar. A crank, eccentric or original can be elected to the state legislature, perhaps to Congress and very rarely to the Senate. But governors are almost always solid, conformist types. Nations, states and cities are all in competition with each other for investment. Those who win are those who make the best appeal to bankers and CEOs, and the culture of bankers and CEOs today is very different from what it was fifty or a hundred years ago. It is much more of a "liberal," permissive culture. The media and technology also play a role here.
So I don't think that an independent South would be that much different or more conservative. For a time, perhaps, there might be a more conservative mood, but look at Ireland and Scotland. Once people attain independence or autonomy, the new "national elite" takes over, and these elites are pretty much the same. To be sure, business, technological, political and artistic elites differ from each other, but those in each group are pretty interchangable from country to country.
Your Bush example seems to support my point better than yours. Popular movements spring up on the fringe and owe little to established elites. In the end, either they are co-opted and taken over by those elites, or they wither.
In Jefferson's day, you had to be able to appear at ease in a drawing room to succeed in politics. Today, you need to master all the arts of media and economics. An outsider can make a splash. Look at Le Pen in France, or at the various taxpayer revolts here. But those outsiders don't have sticking power at the top. Your comrades act as though they are creating a new order or restoring an old one. In fact, the new order is here. It's quite different, capitalistic and liberal or libertarian. Populist rebels are the system's way of purging itself, temporary corrections, rather than new beginnings.
You're right that I don't know Southern populism first-hand. But every ten years or so Time Magazine brings me the "Face of the New South," Carter, Clinton, now Edwards. If you ever do get a separate country and are no longer kicking at New England or the North, that whole North-South opposition is neutralized, and the passion dies. Maybe not immediately, but after a generation, the slick technocrats take over from the less polished populists.
Indeed, if you look at what sustained Southern populism from the 1890s to the day before yesterday, it was that the South was poor and the North rich. For the past thirty years the culture wars and the struggle against the sophisticated or decadent Northern urban elites have also contributed to Southern populist sentiments. But if you really are to be an independent and prosperous state, what political base is there for the Tillmans, or Watsons, or Wallaces?
If the door to fortune lies in Atlanta or Houston and not in New York, Chicago or Los Angeles, if your own powerful corporate elites are given a nation of their own, what remains of all the League of the South agitation and propaganda? There may be a generation's delay, a tumultous interregnum, but by pursuing the goals that all free capitalist states do, you become more like them. An independent South would be less multicultural than the nation as a whole, but it would probably be moving in the same direction.
When Ireland was poor, there was much talk about an Irish national essence or culture that had to be defended against the English. When wealth stood within reach, all that was abandoned. It was regarded by individuals as too much of a burden.
And consider the decline in the Irish birthrate that's led this people which once sent emigrants out in drove to take in immigration from other countries. If you take the capitalist road, that will be your fate. The other option -- to chose poverty voluntarily in the interests of culture or morality -- isn't likely to make much headway. There are doubts about whether it works, and no doubt that it doesn't satisfy the public.
"It's ours" is the reaction of successful nationalisms. In the beginning one thinks that the new government will reflect some national essence or enduring national character. But most often in the end, one simply comes to accept that government as one's own and to take whatever it decides as a reflection of what the nation is.
And this is what's most infuriating about the Rockwellites. They toy with all of this Southern kitsch. But the principle of individual freedom and personal fulfillment that one supposes they espouse as libertarians, is one that will make short shrift of Southern nationalism and "metaphysical" Southronism. "Nationalisms" as political philosophies only make sense when there is a strong enemy to be dethroned. Once one is master in one's own house and at ease, there's no binding power in nationalism, so people begin to adopt other ideologies.
I can see why so many Southernists say that they didn't sell out to capitalist development as much as Northerners did. There is that puritan strain in the North that wants everything to be useful and profitable. But the capitalist strain was also present in the South, though slavery and the plantation system diverted it and repressed some of its manifestations.
I wouldn't argue that the postbellum South didn't sell out to the corporations. Some people very surely did. They just got less for it than successful Northerners did. Many others didn't get the offer. So much of what one reads about Southern culture has to do with circumstances that no longer exist. Poverty, most recently. That doesn't mean that the post-bellum South didn't have virtues and a rich culture, but it does suggest that it will be hard to maintain those virtues or that culture in an age of affluence.
I suppose you could argue that the South was less materialistic than the North, but only in comparison. It's the opposition that hightened the characteristics of both sides. Separate the two sides completely, and you may find Yankees less ambitious and Southerners more acquisitive. Southerners played a Yankee role with regard to Latin Americans and would have done so on a larger scale had the Confederacy won the war. More than a century of practice has made the South as capitalist as the North, it's only in comparison that the cultural survivals bulk large. Ambition and activity aren't anything to be sneezed at, though.
I do read in the papers this week that American nationalism, patriotism and identification with the nation have greatly increased since 9/11. With the nation threatened, "hyphenation" is supposedly becoming more unpopular, and with it, perhaps, separatism.
They were not withheld from the States. Your persistently saying so stands Constitutional history on its head. Those powers belonged to the States, which otherwise would not have had any authority to delegate them to the United States of America under the Constitution.
Read the specific language of the first sentence of Articles I, II, and III: it speaks of Powers that shall be vested. But by whom? Look at Article VII (emphases mine):
"The Ratification of the Conventions of nine States, shall be sufficient for the Establishment of this Constitution between the States so ratifying the Same."
Whoop! There it IS!! It is not a self-sourcing, self-originating, self-creating document, but a created Thing, which names its creators in that sentence. The clincher is the second clause of the same Article:
"done in Convention by the Unanimous Consent of the States present the Seventeenth Day of September ....."
Quod erat demonstrandum.
I repeat: If these sovereign powers had not inured to the States from the outset, the Constitution would not have enumerated them at all, since it would have been obvious to all observers that the States did not dispose of these powers to begin with.
Your interesting rewriting of the XIII is typical and totally FUD.
I'm sorry, I don't know what you mean by that. I merely attempted to state, as part "b", in additional clauses of the XIIIth, the unwritten but nevertheless operative changes which I believe Abraham Lincoln made to the Constitution by victoriously warring on the South. The English Constitution has been occasionally modified by acts rather than writs or laws over the centuries; and without passing on their way of amendment as distinct from ours, I wanted merely to point out that Lincoln had, in fact, effectuated such unwritten amendments to our own Constitution -- such as the implosion of the Tenth Amendment under cooperative assaults by Congress and the Courts asserting the Commerce Clause power in the teeth of the Tenth.
Because of the fact that slavery existed at the start of the Union, an amendment was needed to end it, because of the 10th amendment and the fact that slavery was one of those "reserved rights" that you are so proud of. You might note that the XIII was ratified with the help of the *real* legislatures of many of the southern states - unlike the [XIVth], which was only ratified after these same legislatures were removed by the federal government.
If the ex-Confederate state legislatures met and ratified the XIIIth Amendment, that is currently news to me (I can't swear I never heard of it), and of course raises questions of compulsion (1,000,000 troops). But I can see numbers of ex-Confederate legislators taking the conciliatory view Longstreet took, even though I believe that view was in the minority in the South.
Let me see if I can reprise your arguments.
1. The South isn't really different.
2. If the South is different, it really doesn't matter, because class is determinative, and upper classes are uniform in their interests and policies. They will pursue the same outcomes as Northern Liberals, because....(unspecified)....and then the South won't be different.
3. If the South is different, and if class momentarily isn't determinative in Southern politics, never mind, because it inevitably will be, and so the South really won't be different in the end.
4. If the South is ethnographically different, it won't be, because the inevitable machinations of the inevitable upper class will inevitably drown the South and its people in swarms of dark, cheap, starving inevitable people who speak no English -- and so the South won't be different after all.
5. If the South is different in its value set, the difference is illusory, because upper class will emerge, and its upperness will determine future values, driven by the same ambitions as Northern Liberal elites, and so the South really won't be different.
6. After 9/11, the elites won't let the South be different because they're threatened, and so the South won't really be different.
Gee, x, is there a tendency here, or is it just my imagination? ;^) It's beginning to sound a lot like,
The ultimate triumph of Northern Liberalism is inevitable. All your countries are belong to us. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.
Well, pardon me if I say that honor requires us all to demur, and to resist the proffered dram of liquid oblivion. Conformism and other forms of supinity and surrender are never honorable, and one of the quirks of Southerners, even the educated ones that you think have all been coopted by Ivy League admissions offices, is that they still remember the idea of honor, and they still know what shame is. Thanks, but we'll pass.
Lentulus Gracchus
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