Posted on 07/18/2020 9:11:23 AM PDT by robowombat
The Other Side of Union
By Clyde Wilson on Jul 9, 2014
The Northern onslaught upon slavery was no more than a piece of specious humbug designed to conceal its desire for economic control of the Southern States.
—Charles Dickens, 1862
Slavery is no more the cause of this war than gold is the cause of robbery.
—Governor Joel Parker of New Jersey, 1863
Sixteen years after publishing his classic of American poetry, Spoon River Anthology, and in the early stages of the Great Depression (1931), Edgar Lee Masters published a biography, Lincoln—The Man. In this work he wrote, commenting on the Gettysburg Address:
Lincoln carefully avoided one half of the American story . . . . The Gettysburg oration, therefore, remains a prose poem, but in the inferior sense that one must no inquire into its truth. One must read it apart from the facts. . . . Lincoln dared not face the facts of Gettysburg. . . . He was unable to deal realistically with the history of his country, even if the occasion had been one when the truth was acceptable to the audience. Thus we have in the Gettysburg Address that refusal of the truth which is written all over the American character and its expressions. The war then being waged was not glorious, it was brutal and hateful and mean minded. It had been initiated by radicals and fanatics.
Granting that gifted poets sometimes see things that the plodding rest of us miss, perhaps Masters’s words are worthy of our attention as we enter the sesquicentennial observance of the great war of 1861-1865, in many ways still the central, formative event of American history. A “refusal of the truth which is written all over the American character.” What can the poet mean?
Masters had grown up in Lewistown, Illinois, near Lincoln’s New Salem, and practiced law in Petersburg, not far from Lincoln’s Springfield, before moving on to Chicago, a place, as Masters wrote in his autobiography, that would either break your heart or harden it. His family had been Democrats of Virginian background, engaged for years as lawyers and local leaders in a losing battle with the Republican machine of Lincoln’s State. He knew first-hand how that machine operated by fraud, bribery, and slander, and manipulated the Protestant churches and the Grand Army of the Republic to maintain power and pursue its real agenda. It presided over a vast enterprise of political/financial corruption designed to support the savvy and incorporated bankers and industrialists enriched by government favouritism and subsidy. What Americans have long known as “capitalism.”
Masters hoped that the Bryan campaign of 1896 “would sweep the country, and it would be reclaimed from the banks and the syndicates who had robbed the people since 1861 and whose course had made it so impossible for a young man to get along in the world, save by allying himself with the financial oligarchs.” Bryan’s defeat by every dirty trick in the very dirty Republican playbook, followed by the brutal imperial war in the Philippines, led him to begin to doubt the “American character.”
Historians have been quick to point out and condemn the “Great Barbecue” of corruption that followed the Civil War, which somehow mysteriously appeared after the saintly Lincoln had left the scene. Masters would have known what the Catholic philosopher, Orestes Brownson, described, writing from Michigan shortly after the war.
Nothing was more striking during the late civil war than the very general absence of loyalty or feeling of duty, on the part of the adherents of the Union . . . . The administration never dared confide in the loyalty of the federal people. The appeals were made to interest, to the democracy of the North against the aristocracy of the South; to anti-slavery fanaticism; or to the value and utility of the Union, rarely to the obligation in conscience to support the legitimate or legal authority; prominent civilians were bribed by high military commissions; others, by advantageous contracts for themselves or their friends for supplies to the army; and the rank and file by large bounties and high wages. There were exceptions, but such was the rule.
Knowing many people who had known Lincoln, Masters would not have been impressed by the fairy tale of the noble but humble prairie saint who was sent by the Lord to save the holy Union and free the suffering slaves. That was a posthumous party propaganda creation designed to bolster the Republican regime that he despised. He knew of the Lincoln who was “penurious, grasping, and shrewd,” well remembered in home territory for his “cunning and his acting ability.” As for a glorious war, Masters had likely heard of the Yankee entrepreneur who had erected bleachers from which Chicagoans, for a small fee, could look over the wall at the freezing and deliberately starved Confederate prisoners at Camp Douglas, where the results of the daily death toll were thrown into the nearby swamp.
A people who would adopt as their greatest icon a corporation lawyer and crafty politician who had presided over a holocaust, well might be guilty of a “refusal of the truth.” Master’s position was not eccentric. In fact, he was part of a very large and continuous minority of Northern dissenters who historians have been zealous in ignoring or misrepresenting.
The sesquicentennial observance of the War between the States is not going to be anything like the Civil War Centennial observance. Fifty years ago, there was a broad consensus about American history. The War was viewed as a great national tragedy, with good and bad on both sides, from which a stronger nation had fortunately emerged. The War was furthermore a vast treasury of great people and great deeds, on both sides, a source of inexhaustible interest and celebration for all Americans. Southerners were glad that the Union had been preserved and slavery ended, and were eager to fight for the Union on all future occasions. Northerners agreed that Southerners, though misguided, had been honest and courageous in their fight for independence. This was about as healthy a way of accommodating the great bloodletting into the national consciousness as could be hoped for.
America in 2011 is a very different country than America in 1961. The long march of Cultural Marxism through American institutions, which began in the 1930s, has achieved most of its objectives. Schools at every level, media, clergy, government agencies, and politicians are now captive to a false dogma of history as conflict between an evil past and the forces of revolution struggling toward a glorious future. (This is exactly the way that Karl Marx, who knew less than nothing about America, described The War.) Genuine intellectual debate and deliberation over great issues are now virtually absent from public discourse.
In regard to the War between the States, the PC regime means that the demonisation of the South, chronic throughout American history, has re-emerged with a vengeance. The War is a morality play of good versus evil. Specifically of the progressive, freedom-loving forces of the North heroically and nobly vanquishing foolhardy Southern traitors fighting with no other motive than to preserve the evil institution of slavery. Whether they know it or not, many present-day commentators are following the program of V.I. Lenin: “We must write in language which sews among the masses, hate, revulsion, and scorn towards those who disagree with us.”
Gone are the days when Dwight Eisenhower and Winston Churchill could speak in praise of the honour and courage of the Confederacy, its leaders, soldiers, and people. When R.E. Lee was an exemplary hero for all Americans. Gone the days when Confederates were shown in movies and television as admirable characters and usually played by major stars. Gone the days when mainstream American historians had come to an understanding of the war as a complex event, the causes of which were multiple—economic, cultural, and politica—brought to crisis by “radicals and fanatics.”
It is now established with Soviet party-line rigour that The War was “caused by” and “about” slavery and nothing but slavery. This is not because the interpreters of history in 2011 are more knowledgeable and objective than those of 1961. Quite the reverse is true. The new orthodoxy does not result from new knowledge. Slavery has been elevated to the center place of the war because Americans are obsessed with race and devoted to the emotional and financial rewards of victimology. But slavery does not belong there. Black people had no role in Lincoln’s or Masters’s Illinois. The Union never did anything before, during, or after the war with the welfare of black Americans foremost in mind. As Frederick Douglass, the most important black American of the 19th century, put it: Lincoln “was preeminently the white man’s president, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men.” Ambrose Bierce, a hard fighting Union soldier throughout the war, said that he never met an abolitionist in the Union army and never saw any black people except the concubines and servants of Union officers. The status of black people is now a gargantuan presence in American consciousness. But neither side in the war of 1861-1865 thought that way.
While the race-obsessed multiculturalists dominate the public discourse, there are still plenty of old-fashioned Union partisans around to give them support. I know whereof I speak. Appear (as I have) in any public forum to say that there may be something to be said on the Southern side of the case. You will be inundated with e-mails, mostly unsigned, shrieking “Treason!” and threatening that you will be disposed of summarily and fatally like your evil forebears. Homegrown fascists of the type that have been around at least as long as “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Too dimwitted and bullying to perceive that love of country is not the same thing as worship of government power and that a cudgel is not an argument.
I have to give grudging credit to the anonymous gentleman from Portland, Maine, who took the trouble to package up and mail to me a chamber pot labeled “General Lee’s Soup Tureen.” (And they say Southerners should “get over” the war.) The prize among the dozens of nasty missives I have received: “You are the perfect moral argument for abortion. If you were black, you’d be the perfect moral argument for lynching, and if you were Jewish, you’d be the perfect moral argument for Auschwitz.” One might be tempted to ask why a cause, if righteous, need be defended in this way.
No honest student of history can accept a monocausal explanation for as vast and complex an event as that war, its causes, and its aftermath. Good history is an account of human acts and human acts are seldom that simple. And the motives of past generations are complicated and hard to know. “Slavery” cannot begin to account for the experience of Americans in what is still the bloodiest and most revolutionary event in our history. Yet that is the emphatically declared “expert” opinion of the great bulk of American historians. When all the “experts” agree about something, you can bet something unseemly is going on. In fact, many of the “experts” have no expertise at all in the history of 19th century America. A good historian, presented with an opposing interpretation, will debate and present evidence. But our scholarly discourse has now reached the stage where contrary views are merely frowned down as presented by people not as wise as the “experts.” Very much like being blackballed from an exclusive club.
It is near certain that the PC version of The War will dominate the public space in the observance to come. A “refusal of the truth which is written all over the American character and its expressions”?
SOURCE: From April 2011 Chronicles Magazine.
Anyone who excuses slavery is an evil worm.
Anyone who excuses slavery is an evil worm.
classic , if crude, expression of what is known as presentism in history. In passing, how do you rate George Mason, George Washington, Jefferson, George Madison, and Francis Scott Key?
I missed where he excused slavery.
Please point it out.
My understanding of his article is that then as now most politicians are hypocrites.
Whether or not we agree with his reasoning, we should understand that his intention is to make us aware that all is not what it seems.
Most here are already aware of that.
Maybe?
Mark Twain: “No man can stand success, another’s that is.”
All wars should be fought to make the enemy's stuff your stuff.
My Life Matters!
“I wonder if the export tax on Southern grown cotton had anything to do with the division.”
Prior to 1862 What Legislation passed by Congress and signed by the President placed an export tax on Southern grown cotton?
Saving this for re-reading later.
I’ve argued for decades that slavery was not the reason for the CW, but it was the economic superiority of the South over the North due to their lucrative export contracts.
Of course, I’ve received tons of disagreement from people who believe slavery was the issue, instead of economics.
bump
Slavery and economics are parts of the same whole. English speaking people are prone to cast past history into story/saga formats complete with soap opera good/bad narratives and turn real people into plaster savior saints, Lincoln and FDR are two who come to mind. Attempts to go behind the story narrative produce real discomfort for many Americans for whom events that produced great suffering and many deaths has to have some elevated supra rational and supra historical meaning. The intense reaction of certain posters here to questioning the ‘Lincoln as suffering savior/Battle Hymn of the Union narrative’ demonstrate this.
Staple agriculture by chattel slavery was the central economic mechanism that drove the functioning of much of the South. People in the South had an inherent understanding, whatever their social standing, of this basic truth.
The economic structure of the north was shifting towards finance capital and mechanisms to promote this form of capitalism (railway speculation and construction was the most dynamic of these circa 1860). The group of mostly ex-Whigs who formed the GOP were almost all heavily invested in this capitalistic mode. The GOP had to build a coalition as large as the Democrats to avoid the fate of the Whigs and be able to have the necessary Congressional clout to see key elements of their program enacted into law and subsidized by the national government. Majority GOP ‘anti-slavery’ attitudes were focused on thwarting the organization of any new slave states for the above reason and keeping ‘slavery where it is’, to quote Lincoln. As the slave states produced the only significant source of foreign exchange for the US and as long as the mass of blacks were enslaved and kept down South there would be no ‘threat’ of mass black immigration north.. The GOP coalition also embraced most of the militant abolition movement. It was not a majority within the party but was very important in certain areas in the north. The incessant and hysteria laden propagandizing of this group had a disproportionate effect on Southern opinion and convinced a majority of Southerners that abolitionism and the GOP were synonymous, which was in real terms not so.
As you can see I view the ‘drama’ of the 1850’s as the usual clash of regional and personal political interests. How this clash went from intense regional politics to a very big shooting war is the focus of this interest along with the truly fascinating manner in which the Southern economic base became tightly entwined with the subjective super structure of what can be loosely termed ‘the Old South culture’.
None of this is very satisfying to those giddy minds for whom every political question is framed as a struggle between the Children of Light and the Legions of Hell.
Thumbs Up!
That's the Million Dollar question...
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