The Internationalism of the American Civil War

“Gobineau also had an extensive correspondence with Tocqueville, who appointed the younger man to a position in the Foreign Ministry while he was serving as Foreign Minister.”

Although most of this correspondence seems to have been Tocqueville telling Gobineau his ideas were crazy.

I got some internationalization fer ya

The Age of Reactionary and Realist Revolutions Stirling Newberry 2011

British Empire: Indian Rebellion 1857-1858
United States of America: American Civil War 1860-1865
Germany: German Unfication 1860-1871
France: February Revolution 1858
Meiji Restoration/Boshin War 1867-1869
il Risorgimento 1858-1871
(Taiping? Crimea?)

“Each of these revolutions was a reactionary revolution, which simultaneously defeated the highly decentralized feudal and early aristocratic systems of complex tenure, and held at bay the forces of liberalism and socialism.”

Though crafted by Lincoln and Seward as a sop, in part, to international opinion, Doyle writes, …it cost them dearly

I am unclear on what “it” is. What was crafted as a “sop” to international opinion?

I’ve only read his published works, and know next to nothing about his private life — haven’t read letters to friends and relatives and so forth — but from those published works, Nietzsche seems such a complete ironist that I don’t think any statement in those works can be taken at all, even a little bit, straight.

Doesn’t causeless rebellion refer to the promise Lincoln was making that the fugitive slave law would be enforced as well as anyone could enforce it when the majority in the North was opposed to it, and that the southern states would not be asked to give up slavery on their own territory, but only to forego extending it beyond their borders? As he said near the end of his first inaugural address:

In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to “preserve, protect, and defend it.”

BW: What was crafted as a “sop” to international opinion?

This: “The promise of Lincoln, in his First Inaugural, not to interfere with slavery wherever it existed in the South”

geo

sop – a thing given or done as a concession of no great value to appease someone whose main concerns or demands are not being met.

I think it is generally agreed by historians that Lincoln was offering the promise not to interfere with slavery as a “sop” to certain strains of domestic American opinion, real or imagined. I’m not getting how it would be in any way a sop to international (European) opinion.

Europe generally, and Britain very strongly, was committed to an antislavery position and policy. So, though slavery was the supreme controversy of American politics at the mid-point of the 19th century, it was not a point of controversy at all in Britain or France.

What was controversial in Europe was electoral, representative democracy in a republic, without a privileged ruling class. This had been uncontroversial in the U.S. since the advent of Jacksonian Democracy.

Lincoln was legalistic in his first inaugural, because he was a lawyer facing a constitutional crisis. I cannot imagine that the constitutional crisis would be much understood in monarchical, aristocratic Europe.

re Bruce @ 14,

I would imagine, though, that Lincoln would have had concerns that the Confederacy might secure some degree of recognition from Britain or France, which would complicate Union policy immensely. So he was concerned to paint the issue as one of unjustified rebellion – which neither Power could countenance, rather than as an internal political issue about which opinions might be reasonably divided.

Bruce Wilder@14: Harry Flashman points out, somewhere in his memoirs, that Lincoln was committed to the interesting proposition that the American colonies were right to secede from the British Empire, because that was what most people in the colonies wanted: but the Confederate states were wrong to secede from the United States, even though that was what most people in the Confederacy wanted.

I don’t know how widely this paradox was perceived at the time.

but the Confederate states were wrong to secede from the United States, even though that was what most people in the Confederacy wanted.

I see no reason to accept slaveholders’ definition of “people.”

Malaclypse@20: black slaves were a minority even in the Confederacy, surely?

Harry Flashman points out, somewhere in his memoirs, that Lincoln was committed to the interesting proposition that the American colonies were right to secede from the British Empire, because that was what most people in the colonies wanted: but the Confederate states were wrong to secede from the United States, even though that was what most people in the Confederacy wanted.

See Lincoln’f First Inaugaural Address and Harry Jaffa’s A New Birth of Freedom. Lincoln argued that the British Empire was a tyranny, but the Union was a Compact freely entered into by the people (not the states) which could not be broken unilaterally. He could cite previous slaveowning Presidents like Madison and Jackson in support.

He could have also asked (but didn’t) if the Confederates demanded a Right of Secession for themselves, would the concede a Right of Revolution to the slaves?

black slaves were a minority even in the Confederacy

Wikipedia has a helpful demographic chart. Slaves were a majority in South Carolina and Mississippi; 39% of the Confederate population overall.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederate_States_of_America#Demographics

it is generally agreed by historians that Lincoln was offering the promise not to interfere with slavery as a “sop” to certain strains of domestic American opinion, real or imagined.

Way too simplistic. Lincoln did not have the constitutional authority or the votes to abolish slavery outright. The slavers, though, recognized that they were losing control of the veto-points in the federal system–they’d lost control of the Senate in 1850 with the admission of California as a free state, and the election of a Republican administration meant that they were not going to get Kansas. The Republican program included admission of new free states in the West, appointment of Supreme Court justices to overrule Dred Scott, repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act, managing foreign trade in favor of Northern industry at the expense of Southern slaver agriculture, and a refusal to engage in land-grabs in slaver-friendly locations like Cuba or Central America. The slaver leadership elected war, not because they thought Lincoln would abolish slavery, but because Republican policies meant that slavery was doomed in the long or even medium term.

Lincoln laid out his case clearly enough in the 1st inaugural. Although it appears to me to have been intended largely for domestic consumption, he may well have has an eye also on the interventionists in England, particularly given the importance of imported cotton to their ongoing industrial revolution. The historians I’m familiar with seem to think that anti-slavery sentiment in England was strong enough to prevail over commercial interests, but how certain Lincoln was of the balance of forces in the English parliament at the time, I have no idea.

The Southern political class didn’t trust Lincoln — felt that they couldn’t afford to trust him no matter what he promised publicly — and in that they were probably right, as his assurances were conditioned to a large extent by the demonstrably volatile political forces in the North. In any event, they talked themselves into a war which in hindsight they had little chance of winning, much as the Japanese did in the late 1930s. As a private citizen, and therefore cannon-fodder, it always makes me nervous when the disease of conviction starts to spread among the upper classes. I wonder how many white southerners felt that way before 1st Manassas. I suspect there were more than Shelby Foote could ever allow himself to concede.

@22: Malaclypse@20: black slaves were a minority even in the Confederacy, surely?

I read somewhere just the other day that slaves made up perhaps as much as 40% of the population. That sounded high to me, so I remembered it. Ah. Here’s Wiki on it, which says 39%.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederate_States_of_America#Demographics

So it seems that there were lots of people who were neither slaves (39%) nor slaveholders (6% of “free” population). It’s not inconceivable that a majority of the residents of the confederacy would have preferred abolition…

#23 Toby

It is tantalising to think what might have happened if the Confederates emancipated their slaves first – but the war for them was to preserve slavery, and not primarily about national independence.

Yes. I think there would not have been time to do it right, even if they wanted to. (Which of course they didn’t.) Free the slaves, and they’d have a transition period that could get too disorganized.

But imagine, just for a completely ahistorical fantasy — they free the slaves and they somehow treat them well enough to get their loyalty. Then they don’t need garrisons to prevent slave revolt, so they have more troops and more supplies available for the fight. Plus black troops, their loyal population 60% bigger….

They still wouldn’t have the industrial strength to win the war. But without the slavery moral issue to keep them from getting allies and aid, with Britain slavering at the chance to shatter the USA and play the pieces off against each other, without the slavery issue to divide the people of the border states, they might have had a fighting chance.

#31 Adam Hammond

It is interesting to understand that Lincoln’s argument backfired. His support of contemporary slave law hurt him (apparently) more deeply on the left, than undercutting the South’s cause helped him with anybody.

I’m sure my reasoning is too simple, but Lincoln had already won his election when he gave the inaugural speech, 7 states had already seceded, and 6 weeks later the war started. People who were upset that his speech was too wimpy would still support the war effort.

Maybe it didn’t actually hurt him that much.

“It depends. The Yankees were doing economic colonialism, treating them as a place to get cotton and some other raw materials and then sell manufactured goods to. Mildly inhibiting slavery wasn’t the only way the US government was keeping them poor, and the other stuff didn’t stop until after WWII.”

You are really buying into a particular narrative of the causes of the civil war written by Southern apologists. When in fact the ONLY important reason for the war was Treason in Defence of Slavery.

The first paragraph of Virginia’s ordinance of secession:

The people of Virginia in their ratification of the Constitution of the United States of America, adopted by them in convention on the twenty-fifth day of June, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty-eight, having declared that the powers granted under said Constitition were derived from the people of the United States and might be resumed whensoever the same should be perverted to their injury and oppression, and the Federal Government having perverted said powers not only to the injury of the people of Virginia, but to the oppression of the Southern slave-holding States.

Also the Cornerstone Speech given by the Vice President of the Confederacy. Here is the money shot:
“Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition”

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

In 1860, the total value of slaves held in the South was almost half of the total value of all Southern wealth (see table 4 here). I have a hard time imagining what, short of warfare, would have inspired Southern aristocrats to effectively take half their money and set it on fire.

(Even compensating the slaveholders for the loss of their “property” would have been infeasible. In 1860, the national debt was about $65 million and the market value of the slaves was over $3 billion.)

#36 MPAV

“It depends. The Yankees were doing economic colonialism, treating them as a place to get cotton and some other raw materials and then sell manufactured goods to. Mildly inhibiting slavery wasn’t the only way the US government was keeping them poor, and the other stuff didn’t stop until after WWII.”

You are really buying into a particular narrative of the causes of the civil war written by Southern apologists.

No, not at all. I’m creating a fantasy. I do not claim that the stupid ignorant southerners understood anything about economics or realized what was being done to them. I merely point out that if we create a fantasy where they were smart enough to actually give up slavery, they might in that fantasy case still prefer not to be ruled by the Yankees, to the point that they would defend themselves if attacked.

In reality, their wealthiest people cooperated with the exploitation, and when they created their own government they did nothing to fix the problems. They made no attempt to set up a financial system that could begin meet their needs. They printed money without collecting taxes because the problems of tax collection were beyond their capabilities, and there was every reason to expect that confederate money would wind up like Continentals did — even if they had somehow not lost the war.

#41 MPAV

I mean we could fantasize about anything but why write it down as a blog comment and share it with the world?

I enjoyed it and hoped other people would too.

Imagine we somehow handled the slavery issue without a fight, and then it turned out that the result was a longer, more bitter, more devastating civil war. Apart from the idea that the south actually could get rid of slavery, which I can’t really imagine, the rest looks kind of plausible to me.

I merely point out that if we create a fantasy where they were smart enough to actually give up slavery, they might in that fantasy case still prefer not to be ruled by the Yankees, to the point that they would defend themselves if attacked.

In what sense were they ruled by Yankees? Southern whites were disproportionately represented in Congress because of the 3/5 Compromise. And where does the part about defending themselves if attacked come in? The Confederacy initiated aggression to start the Civil War.

Stephen @22,

Malaclypse@20: black slaves were a minority even in the Confederacy, surely?

In addition to the figures provided by rea you should note that reasonable numbers of white southerners opposed secession. I think it is hard to claim that the majority of southerners actually favored secession.

45: Two quotes from Wiki “Serfdom in Russia”

“The Russian state also continued to support serfdom due to military conscription. The conscripted serfs dramatically increased the size of the Russian military.[15] With a larger military Russia achieved victory in the Napoleonic Wars and Russo-Persian Wars; this did not change the disparity between Russia and the rest of Western Europe, who were experiencing agricultural and industrial revolutions. Compared to Western Europe it was clear that Russia was at an economic disadvantage. ”

“In 1861 Alexander II freed all serfs in a major agrarian reform, stimulated in part by his view that “it is better to liberate the peasants from above” than to wait until they won their freedom by risings “from below”.

I’m looking at Italian Unification, which on the surface looks like nationalism.

Rule: If many similar things are happening in a short period of time, it is wise to look for a common cause.

Ruleset

1) The ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class. You find that class and those rules by looking at the “ground” and working from there. IOW, what is happening, structure processes, events, relations.
2) The ruling ideas are rarely to be found in what people say or even what people do. They are found in what happens and who it benefits.

The government in those days was funded by a tax on imports. Etc. Getting represented in Congress probably helped them some, but not enough.

Oh, it certainly helped them enough. The relevant tax on imports was the Tariff of 1857, authored by Virginia Senator Robert Hunter, which was a major tax reduction widely supported by the southern legislators in Congress. The Republicans took advantage of Southern secession to replace it with the the protectionist Morrill Tariff in 1861. If the South was really ruled by Yankees, they wouldn’t have had to wait.

Sure, but in my fantasy where they had what it took to give up slavery, they might easily avoid starting a shooting war until after they were attacked.

Usually the way these alternative history fantasies work is that you change one major premise but keep other things historically accurate to speculate how things would have gone except for whatever it is you’ve changed to generate the fantasy. Just changing things willy-nilly isn’t likely to provide captivating scenarios of what-might-have-been.

Theophylact@37: you are of course absolutely right that words and behavior of fictional characters are _evidence_ for absolutely nothing.

Arguments put into the mouths of fictional characters, though, are a different matter. In real life, evidence given by someone of bad character is worth very little: but the strength of an argument is quite independent of the weakness of the moral standing of whoever puts it forward. The argument has to be refuted, or not, on its own terms.

At least, that’s how I see it. You may not agree.

#53 mudman

So the question, doesn’t Rawlsian redistributionalism demand that the unpleasantness of the 1850’s be considered a power grab by the north? That is, the main, practical, or consequential goal was to preserve the Union in a way that should be condemned by the Society of Peoples?

That’s a valid way to think of it, but a lot of people at the time believed that main force was the only way slavery would end in the US south and they did not want to wait to try anything else.

Perhaps kind of similarly, the sanctions placed on Germany after WWI should be condemned, and without the violent expansionism practiced by the Germans after that it could be argued that …. But no, this was not an unpleasantness that many people to day believe should have been “helped”. The only acceptable course was to kill them until they surrendered.

mud man @53:
I haven’t read Rawls’ The Law of Peoples, but I rather doubt the CSA would qualify as a ‘decent’ regime as he uses that phrase. (Note: it has nothing to do w the recent use of “decent” in the post-9/11 debates/polemics.) I would also note that the link in mud man’s name goes to an apparently nonexistent Twitter account.

J Thomas
That’s a valid way to think of it

No it isn’t. See Matt @55.

#50 TTN

“The slaver leadership elected war, not because they thought Lincoln would abolish slavery, but because Republican policies meant that slavery was doomed in the long or even medium term.”

It’s still baffling to me that they did exactly what it would take to destroy themselves rather than face the winding-down of their enterprise. I’d think you have to have a sense of urgency to get a war accomplished: what were the leadership actually suffering? Not a rhetorical question.

I think they fundamentally had no concept of other ways to survive. I have the idea that for their upper classes, the society was organized around honor and mostly not around competence. They could not be themselves and go into trades.

Faced with a richer, more predatory upper class that intended to destroy them, honor called for the men to fight and if necessary die defending their society.

They had ideas for ways to survive. If those had worked they would be considered visionary. They failed, and in hindsight they were bound to fail. But if they had succeeded then in hindsight we would see reasons why it worked. They couldn’t really see ahead. People often can’t. I don’t know how much it’s that we come up with plausible but fictitious stories afterward to explain what happened, and how much it’s that we realize the truth about which factors were important afterward, when we couldn’t have known ahead of time.

They thought that King Cotton would bring them power like the spice in Dune. “The cotton must flow!” But they weren’t really that important to the rest of the world after all.

I’m not sure I can get it across and I might have it wrong anyway. But imagine that muslims were really on the way to taking over, and you knew that after they took over here they would require you to convert to Islam, and you must not be caught speaking anything but arabic, and they would ship you and your family to central africa where you would get a small subsistence farm and would not be allowed any gasoline, electricity, or shoes. Would you fight? Even knowing your side would probably lose?

Or would you peacefully watch them winding down your society?

Here’s something I bookmarked the other day, mainly because it was so entertaining, but the explanation given is that they were “stupid and deluded.”
http://pando.com/2014/11/20/the-war-nerd-why-sherman-was-right-to-burn-atlanta/

I also happened to read The March of Folly a couple of weeks ago, which basically had the thesis that these are not uncommon qualities.

“Faced with a richer, more predatory upper class that intended to destroy them, honor called for the men to fight and if necessary die defending their society.

More predatory…. You believe the northern elite was more predatory then the slave holding south? Because that is pretty fucked up. Or maybe just a poor choice of words on your part?

@59
A very good question and I’ve never seen a great answer.

There were efforts to ‘wind down’ the enterprise of slavery and they were proving ineffective. Banning importation served to increase the value of the existing stock and encourgage the more uncrupulous to impress free blacks. It also made owners more desperate to cling to their ‘property’ and ‘way of life.’

I’d note that the states which agitated earliest and most often for war were those most removed from the North such as South Carolina and Alabama who likely didn’t perceive the war would be fought on their turf and likely over estimated their ability to bring a conflict to a quick end with hopes of maintaining the status quo.

Notably Virginia, which rightly feared the battle would be waged in their literal backyard sought various means for compromise (with a range of views as to how serious or not these proposals really were). Early compromise proposals didn’t seem all that realistic, but later ones did seem to provide at least a basis for a ‘settlement’ but by then (in my view) War Hawks in Washington had become of the view that war was inevitable and stopped negotiating in good faith (i.e. war hawks weren’t confined to just the south, the north had them too).

Another thought that occurs is that if the issue of slavery was ONLY economic, a settlement could have been brokered allowing a phase-out or other go-slow solutions. Unfortunately it wasn’t solely an economic issue for either the north or the south – moral and social issues don’t lend themselves to half measures. An abolitionist wouldn’t be inclined to view it as a victory that immoral laws were to be maintained for only say, 20 more years, nor would a plantation owner welcome a shot-clock on his wealth an influence for fear that you can’t really release a genie from a bottle slowly.

Good food for thought and a good “what if history” sort of question as a non-war solution may also have forestalled some of the greater abuses of the reconstruction.

““winding-down” = losses in the billions”

Is there a convincing calculation proving that converting chattel slavery into wage slavery (for the industry/conditions in question) would amount to losses in the billions? Or should it be immediately obvious?

In calling forth supporters, American slavery may well have given birth to or at least strengthened the idea that the hierarchy of groups was stable due not to any transcendental force, e.g. the Curse of Ham or a Creator making castes of out different parts of his body or various metals, but for purely naturalistic reasons, e.g. a natural polygenic process or the evolution of hard inheritable group differences over deep ethnological time despite a shared human origin (opposition to Nott’s theory polygenesis need not necessarily lead to a rejection of racism) .

While racism can be defined in various ways, I have long thought it best to understand it as a naturalistic and pseudo-scientific doctrine. American slavery may well have been the birthplace of racism in this sense; and European thinkers came to understand class and ethnic differences on the Continent with these ideas about American racial differences as a model.

I think you are right about N.

People want to read and teach and in many cases esteem him, so they are loathe to take him literally on this matter.

Andre Pichot has an interesting and controversial discussion of how far Gobineau’s biological ideas about racial inequality differ from evolutionary ones in which Africans were thought to be closer to apes than the evolved pure Aryans at the summit of the evolutionary process. Don’t have Pichot’s Pure Society with me, but I shall reread his discussion of Gobineau’s ideas about race. Gobineau’s ideas could be interpreted in such a way that every race had its genius of course as long as it was not too admixed with others (Leopold Senghor would disturbingly cite Gobineau approvingly–art is negré); at any rate, Pichot argues that Gobineau’s ideas did not point in the direction of negative eugenics but rather had an aristocratic feel to them.

Barbara Solow has argued that slavery was profitable because it increased the supply of labor, allowed for economies of scale and served as an asset against which credit could be extended. She also used to Domar to argue that you cannot have all three at once–free land, free labor and an aristocracy. Solow’s work (as well as Inikori’s) is older than the new work by Walter Johnson, Edward Baptist and Sven Beckert. Which I’ve haven’t yet read.

@74 & 75

These are right. The South was cash poor and slaves, rather than land, were frequently used as collateral for loans. As someone suggested above, owning slaves had some similarities to a declining value bond – they were purchased for say $1,000, you paid their upkeep but in theory benefitted from their labor sufficient to cover the upkeep cost plus the borrowed carry on the purchase and hopefully a spread. They would decline in value as they aged and were then traded or sold (or sometimes freed) as their utility declined relative to their value as an asset (a shameful way to think about human beings to be sure, but this was the calculus).

As a result, to reach a compromise on freeing current slaves over time, there needed to be a mechanism to repay or reduce the related debts which added a degree to which Northern money interests likewise weren’t eager to see the institution ended via war and produced in some respects a moral hazard as far as a Southerners willingness to wage war to defend his property.

When the war ended the landowners had debts accumulated related to the purchase of their slaves which banks then sought to collect which (among other factors) is what bankrupted large parts of the Southern aristocracy or forced them to sell their land holdings at pennies on the dollar to those with the ready cash to payoff debts.

the cotton gin (1870s) would likely have destroyed the value of slaves if it hadn’t already been destroyed by the war.

That can’t be right, as the cotton gin was invented in the late 1700s, and it’s pretty typically thought that it was responsible for making slavery _more_ profitable and useful. Until the development of the cotton gin, slavery was slowly declining, but after it was invented, using slaves in conjunction with the cotton gin became very profitable, leading to an increase in slavery. See here, for a short account:

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

This is a minor point, but my understanding is that workable cotton gins resulted in cotton becoming much more important than it had been before, and the patent came before 1800.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_gin

Thomas Jefferson expended a good deal of effort into finding profitable labor-intensive tasks for slaves, and was not all that successful. (His plantation was in hilly country and his river wasn’t navigable until after he put a lot of work into it. He tried making bricks and insulated his house with them when they didn’t sell well. He tried making indigo, which was quite labor-intensive but was too bad at poisoning the slaves. Etc.)

Slavers paid attention to labor-intensive low-tech work because it fit their comparative advantage. Han Fei in warring-states china had a slogan, “This plan is so robust not even a slave could jinx it!” Slaves were traditionally considered unreliable for working with things that were easy to sabotage. And when the economy slowed down, slaves could not be profitably sold. Their upkeep continued even when there was no work for them. Unlike wage labor they didn’t cost much more to work longer hours than shorter.

But in general wage slavery was more efficient.

@79
You’re right…not sure what I was thinking and made a hash of that point.

My point was simply that the key cash crops were cotton and tobacco and that these were very labor intensive. The cotton gin was a facilitator to the growth of cotton plantations, not a barrier.

Rakesh @ 70 That seems to me to be very plausible, but as to evidence…In addition, the whole notion of democracy as something for white men, where every white man is equal to another, and aristocratic notions of taste, style and class distinction rejected, where a Great Man like Andrew Jackson dispensing heroic guidance seems to be in many respects a political inspiration for fascism. The use of the state, including militias, to conquer Native American lands and redistribute them to the white citizenry, or the slave patrols that kept the white citizens safe, anticipates some of the alleged redistributive aspects of fascism, its so-called socialism.

The interesting thing is whether democracy needs to cement national identity by defining itself in distinction to the outsider. New democracies, like post-imperial Germany and Autstria, or Turkey under the Young Turks and later Ataturk, or the successor states to Yugoslavia, or Ukraine, seem to be accompanied by an array of phenomena commonly deemed to be fascistic, such as genocide and ethnic cleansing.

John Thmoas: “That’s a valid way to think of it, but a lot of people at the time believed that main force was the only way slavery would end in the US south and they did not want to wait to try anything else.”

This is so wrong,…..

If I remember correctly, one of Thomas Jefferson’s initiatives was to abolish foreign importation of slaves. There was I believe widespread support for the measure in Virginia, which became an exporter of slaves to other slave states. That is, slaves were a cash crop.

What would the Koch brothers say if you told them that in a few years, no one will be able to buy or sell natural resources? Like that, but more so.

#88 mud man

@Matt: if you can just wave LofP away “not meant to apply” to the actual world, whatever would be the point?? Why would it get all the attention it does? Literary merit??

You get to take any ideas that LofP inspired in you, and apply them however you want.

Other people get to tell you that you are not using authentic LofP and that you have no right to express those ideas, because their understanding of LofP has priority.

If they bother you too much, agree with them that it isn’t LofP and discuss the same things with the serial numbers filed off.

The Temporary Name @ 59: It’s still baffling to me that they did exactly what it would take to destroy themselves rather than face the winding-down of their enterprise. I’d think you have to have a sense of urgency to get a war accomplished: what were the leadership actually suffering? Not a rhetorical question.

It’s a very good question.

Lincoln summarized the substance of the political dispute in his First Inaugural in a single sentence: “One section of our country believes slavery is right and ought to be extended, while the other believes it is wrong and ought not to be extended.”

This was a distillation of what Lincoln had said in the Lincoln – Douglas debates about what differentiated his politics from those of Douglas, with whom he agreed on many issues of policy. Lincoln was a conservative, denied knowing how to legally and peacefully end slavery in any finite period of time, denied wanting to end it when it was established, declaring himself open to compromise and committed to accepting and enforcing the law as it stood. But, on this one point, he insisted: slavery was morally wrong. Whatever he did on slavery as a matter of practical policy would be guided by a the conviction that slavery was wrong, and ought to be set on a course of ultimate extinction. Wrong. Morally wrong. Shameful.

Much is made, sometimes, about why slavery had to expand, to be viable. And, this is not entirely wrong-headed. Making a fortune by using slave gangs to develop a plantation in, say, the wilderness of Mississippi was a well-established method of making a fortune. It was how Jefferson Davis, among others, had made his fortune. Land and slaves. Buy cheap undeveloped land and use a gang of strong, young slaves to develop it. It was a brutal, risky method, as the work was difficult and the conditions unhealthy — many of the slaves would die from disease or overwork. Would-be aristocrats working alongside the slaves might well suffer themselves, as Jefferson Davis did, losing the sight of one eye.

The process was by no means near an end in 1860. There was still a lot of undeveloped land, with the necessary fertility. And, the South was still in the midst of a mania for land and slaves. Slaves had been bid up in value to remarkably high values, and there was sufficient surplus that slaves in the U.S. were able to more than reproduce their population. (This is not typical of slave regimes — usually slaves are so oppressed and deprived that they cannot reproduce their numbers. Slaves are literally used up at a high enough rate, that it is necessary to continually import new slaves. This is why ending the international slave trade was regarded in the 18th century as a strategic means to put slavery on the road to extinction: the number of slaves could be expected to dwindle, and slave holders forced to improve conditions.)

The seeking after economic rationales for the political demand to expand the realm of slavery overlooks the acute nature of the moral condemnation.

In the 18th century, there seems to have been a general acceptance among even elite slave owners that slavery was a bad thing, something the eventual end of which was to be dearly wished for. In Maryland and Virginia it was not uncommon for wealthy owners of slaves to manumit some or all of their slaves upon their own death. Robert E Lee’s father-in-law, George Washington Custis, the owner of the great plantation that is now Arlington National Cemetery, directed Lee to free his slaves, once the estate was settled. A fairly substantial population of free blacks, the result of these manumissions, resided in Maryland and Virginia. Societies were formed to finance the emigration of freed slaves back to Africa, and the benighted country of Liberia, the first at least nominally independent modern state in Africa, was founded with American help, alongside Sierra Leone, founded by British activists with similar ideas.

Slavery had ended in much of the U.S. in the years after the American Revolution, often in very short order. John Adams’ Constitution for Massachusetts used prefatory language echoing the Declaration of Independence’s fine words on the equality of men and in 1784 the state courts held that it made slavery illegal. Some states adopted schemes of gradual emancipation — it seemed to be a matter of just how large the economic interest in slaves loomed in State politics. New Jersey may still have had a handful of slaves on the eve of the Civil War.

The successive booms in cotton after 1820 created an economic demand for slaves, though, and, after 1830, that translated into a demand for moral rationales. “Slavery is good” emerged as an article of faith after 1830, in counterpoint to the emergence of an abolitionist movement, that took the evil of slavery to heart in a religion of moral conscience.

The economics were real and powerful, but I do not think you can understand the politics, without understanding that this was an issue of right and wrong, honor and dishonor, in a country that took both its founding ideology of democratic egalitarianism and its Christian religion very, very seriously. The most important Protestant denominations in the U.S. split geographically in the 1830s and 1840s over the morality of slavery.

On the economic side, the economic rationale of a slave plantation is schizophrenic, that is, involves a sharp split. The plantar is in the global money economy, trading for luxuries and manufactured goods with highly developed, industrialized and financialized societies far across the seas or at the other end of the continent. The plantar’s slaves are embedded in a primitive autarky of self-support: in addition to developing land and growing cash crops, they grow their own food and make their clothes, build their own homes. The plantar needs enough development to export his cotton and import his luxury, but not enough to threaten the autarky of his dependents. The plantar is in favor of improving river transport to the extent necessary to his purposes, but the plantar is opposed, otherwise, to public works, to railroads, to public education, to the rise of the money economy to encompass the needs of ordinary people, who might have other interests, other uses for the land.

The Slavepower, as it was called, had come to be seen by the 1850s, as opposed to development of the country. They were reluctant to support homesteading in the West. They were lukewarm about a transcontinental railroad. They were ambivalent about land-grant colleges. They were skeptical about a national banking system and about tariffs to support industrialization. On a more prosaic level, at the boundaries between slave country and free country in the hill country of Appalachia and along the Ohio River, there was a strong sense of hostility against slaves and slavery among the small farmers, who saw their efforts to develop roads or public education or to secure land titles, or just to earn an occasional wage in competition with slaves for hire, frustrated by the machinations of wealthy plantars.

Lincoln received a lower percentage of the popular vote than any one else ever elected to the Presidency, but he represented an overwhelming consensus on key issues of the day, regarding the urgent need to develop the country. On a transcontinental railroad, on land-grant colleges, on homesteading the West, on developing public education, there was broad and urgent agreement. When Lincoln dismisses the need in his First Inaugural to address ordinary administrative issues, he’s referencing this consensus. He agreed with his principal northern opponent, Stephen Douglas — another Illinois corporate lawyer — on almost every economic issue.

There’s a profound shift going on, in Lincoln’s election. A new political consensus has been established under the noisy controversies over slavery, and the structures of power are yielding. The South has lost the balance of slave states and free states in the Senate forever. Lincoln will be able to change the composition of the Supreme Court. But, all of that will be gradual and slow in its effects. If slavery were to be extinguished in law eventually, its extinction appears a remote prospect, unclear in its timing or shape.

What’s in front of the country is the moral issue. And, the South is not able to accept the opprobrium of slavery.

Secession is a withdrawing from the common enterprise, taking one’s ball and going home in a grand huff. Up to that point, the Southern plantar class is secure enough with the Pareto Paralysis that gripped the governance of national policy in the 1850s, every one with a veto, no one organized enough to effect their will against opposition. Withdrawing, instead of settling for a forty or more years of staged political retreats, releases the consensus of political opinion that has formed in the North in favor of industrial and western development like a tightly wound spring, releases that latent energy in one of the most rapid and transformative periods of change in American history.

The sense that honor is at stake drives the dynamics for the would-be Confederates, causing them to overlook the practical reality. The dramatic events that unfolded at Ft Sumter, triggering the actual outbreak of hostilities, made the contrasting nationalist and state rights’ interpretation of the Constitution into a morality play. Lincoln’s passive stance — the refusal to assail — brought the fatal weakness of the states’ rights / state secession argument into sharp relief. Under the Constitution, the Federal government rested on its own bottom, its own taxes, its own possession of properties, its own administrative structures, its own Constitution. Nothing a State could do, would actually disestablish the Federal government in any territory it claimed.

Nor was there any way to compel the national administration to treat with the Confederate commissioners, come to Washington to negotiate a separation the Confederates claimed was a fait accompli.

The garrison at Ft Sumter had run out of food and this was known to all. An effort by Union forces to relieve the garrison had failed. Jefferson Davis could have simply waiting out the evacuation. He chose a dramatic, but practically pointless bombardment. A reasonable interpretation is that he felt he needed the dramatic event to galvanize a Confederate national identity. He needed a moral event, to motivate Virginia and other border states to join the Confederacy and make it viable.

Morally, the logic of Jefferson Davis’ position was that he had to compel the United States, the North, to accept Southern independence as a fiat of Southerners. He could not do what might well have been feasible, which would be to negotiate a mutually acceptable separation. He could not argue and persuade those Northerners, who might well have wanted the South to go, to grant Confederate independence, because what the Confederates wanted was an independence that did not require the leave or by-the-by of their erstwhile compatriots. The permission of those, who held their peculiar institution in contempt, was not something the Confederates could even conceive of seeking.

It put the Confederate grand strategy under a fatal handicap, this need to get others to cooperate only under terms of compulsion.

The Confederates were terrible at the task of encouraging the peace factions at the North. They could not seem to understand that Northerners, who wanted peace, were not good candidates for insurrection. And, the Confederates were also terrible at foreign diplomacy. (The first envoy they sent to antislavery Britain was a loud-mouthed advocate of re-opening the international slave trade.)

Early in the war, a strange mass movement took place in the South to embargo cotton. This was not a centrally directed policy, though Jefferson Davis’ government went along without much deliberation or consideration. It was a popular movement that just seemed to happen spontaneously. And, it reflected a common popular delusion that Britain and France would be compelled for the lack of cotton to intervene decisively to force the U.S. to recognize Confederate independence. Cotton was King, after all.

It was completely at odds with the kind of course the Confederates would have to pursue to win a war of attrition against an industrialized country. They should have exported all the cotton they could to warehouses in Europe, before the Union could make a blockade effective, and then use that stored cotton to bankroll their efforts. They did the opposite, making the Union blockade effective, before there were any Union ships to enforce it.

It was a grave strategic mistake, but not one made by a singular leader, but rather one driven by a shared popular delusion about how one goes about persuading other people and organizing common efforts. Like the omission of “general welfare” from the preface of the Confederate Constitution, it was telling about the moral qualities of an emergent people. It would be reflected in many other areas of economic policy and finance, as well as military policy, as the Confederates proved reluctant to tax themselves, and found it nearly impossible to run a railroad or provide something as basic as salt.

Militarily, even under the brilliant Robert E Lee, they continue to seek a Cannae, a dramatic victory that would have a moral effect in compelling the Union to accept Confederate claims of independence on Confederate terms. By contrast, the Union, following in outline the Anaconda Plan, sought progressively to undermine the economic capacity of the Confederates to continue the war. The Union, contrary to popular belief, did not have overwhelming superiority at outset, but applied the force systematically and progressively to change the odds, until, at the end, they did have overwhelming superiority. The Confederates were fighting with a romantic strategy of forlorn hope from the very beginning, seeking moral vindication for two of the most despicable ambitions in human history: to destroy a constitutional democracy and to keep slaves.

95 Bruce Wilder

Thank you! That was superbly done. A variety of things that to me were vague fuzzy impressions, you stated clearly.

One utterly almost-microscopic question — why do you call them plantars? I had always thought it had something to do with planting, like people who planted corn barefoot got plantar’s warts, but it turns out that plantar is about the sole of the foot. Is this a spelling that’s fallen out of fashion?

How come a secession by itself, the desire for independence, is among “the most despicable ambitions in human history”? Scotland, Catalonia. A community wants independence, I feel like: even though it’ll probably be a mess politically – more power to them, let a thousand flowers bloom.

#99 Ze Kraggash

How come a secession by itself, the desire for independence, is among “the most despicable ambitions in human history”? Scotland, Catalonia. A community wants independence, I feel like: even though it’ll probably be a mess politically – more power to them, let a thousand flowers bloom.

Destroying a constitutional democracy might be good or bad — perhaps it might involve creating a better constitutional democracy.

I can’t see doing it for slavery as acceptable at all. Or to protect any of the more ruthless versions of capitalism.

In the case of the Confederacy, I have the strong impression they were not very competent. They insisted that the confederate states have more independence from each other than they could afford given a rapacious enemy. They just plain did not organize very well.

To my way of thinking, wanting independence is not in itself a bad thing. But if a whole lot of people are going to be depending on you, then at least make a solid effort to be dependable. If it looks like you’re going to get into a war, try to arrange at least a 2/3 chance that you’ll win. If you can’t do that then better to put off independence until you can actually make a go of it.

One may fancy that a free labourer at subsistence would cost about as much as a slave, but thinking it does not make it true; we know for a fact that American wages were high.
Also, there is subsistence and subsistence: in the early 1850s, infant mortality for whites stood at 220 per thousand during the first year of life (ie: British levels), while that of black slaves was around 340: easily as high as infant mortality can ever be. For comparison, that rate is higher than any country in the world had in the early 1950s: even the worst placed, Burkina Faso, was in the low 300s, and improved quickly.

@ZK: all affairs are human affairs. I can totally get behind giving local government more authority over petty administrative matters.
But what secessionism means in practice is that inhabitants of a part of the world will now mind their own business without regardless of how it affects others, stop foreigners from travelling, living and working in their turf, refuse to share resources for the common good and behave antagonistically in international relations, including war.
If our purpose is for state arrangements to benefit people and attempt tp guarantee their rights, then “I got mine” secessionism is despicable, and, in Europe, unsurprisingly popular in rich regions.
I also find no value in the principle of national sovereignty, which, stripped to the bone, means that a given ethno-cultural group should be able to form its own club and shut everybody else out – indefensible and impracticable.

@BW, great post(s). For some reason I reminded of Geoff Paige’s Agrarian Revolution discussing the dynamics of export agriculture in Vietnam (and Angola), though I do think you are right concerning the religious/moral intensity of the conflict. Maybe that is because there was something about the inherently sadistic economics of slave production that required the planter class to internalize some mix of brutality and rationalizations in order to flourish.
I do think there is also something to Daniel Lazare’s point in Frozen Republic that, because the Constitution basically enshrined slavery, there was no incentive for the Southern political elites to embrace compromise, instead coming to regard their Constitutionally mandated veto powers as god-given (why does that seem so familiar?).

I’m kind of intruiged by the notion that the whole we-are-slaveowners identity thing was basically only there for a generation, generation-and-a-half; it makes a lot of sense that under those circumstances the outcome would have been as it was, “second generation takes the rhetoric seriously” isn’t an uncommon phenomenon and all.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rawls/#LawPeoLibForPol

Speaking of tracking down connections from what was happening in the US to the pages of our European philosophers, I came across in Debating Democracy Bruce Johansen quoting Johnny P. Flynn saying in the LA Times “Friedrich Engels wrote in 1879 that The Communist Manifesto ‘would have been far different’ had he and Marx known what they later learned about Indian forms of government.” Can anyone track down where Engels does say this?

Wouldn’t it be interesting to know what exactly fits the description in “what they later learned” and how far different it could be?

The book’s great, and I’m fascinated with how little I hear anyone talk about the influences the Haudenosaunee had upon Franklin and Jefferson, or any number of the white people who saw how the various nations interacted with each other that the white people simply could not match in their own histories. These were nations who had been interacting with each other and keeping their distance from one another, for hundreds of years prior to the ‘settlers’ landing. They fought and killed one another, sure, and it wasn’t eutopic paradise, neither. But it was something else. Something very different in the thinking, the reasoning, the educating, the contesting, the discussing, across so many varied and distinct cultures. An entirely different world with different pasts, myths, and possibilities.

Is it okay to also talk about this here, too?

It must have been terrifying and amazing for a young Franklin to watch a diplomatic discussion between the Six Nations. It probably changed his life, maybe. We all cut a little wide in the 20s, right?

bob mcmanus, I hear you loud and clear.

Stephen 01.12.15 at 3:40 pm:

…as far as I know, the only people to have taken Harry Flashman for a real, Victorian person have been professional American historians. His fictional nature does not affect the paradox.

I am wondering if this fictional character based his conclusion “…that Lincoln was committed to the…proposition that the American colonies were right to secede from the British Empire” on some fictional source.

When I searched for “Lincoln British Empire”, the first result uses Lyndon LaRouche as a source. That’s even stranger than a fictional source.

The website Occidental Enclave shows the/a LaRouche claim. Among other things.

LFC

No – intercontinental, yes. Transcontintental, no.

Robespierre 106 “I also find no value in the principle of national sovereignty, which, stripped to the bone, means that a given ethno-cultural group should be able to form its own club and shut everybody else out – indefensible and impracticable.”

I’m happy to acknowledge a softer version of this argument, without “indefensible and impracticable” in it. However, I see a serious mismatch between the near worship of privacy and autonomy rights for individuals, and almost outright hostility to the idea of sovereignty for a collective.

In any case, “the most despicable ambitions in human history”? Please.

Also, in this case (a secession) “ethno-cultural” simply reflects the fact that the group, the collective, has been inhibiting territory for a long time. It’s not like it’s a requirement for joining the club. I checked: in Catalonia only 37% declare Catalan their native language.

@121, to be fair, it appears that he (or could it be Madam Robespierre?) is expressing hostility towards national sovereignty in general, including the already existing big clubs.

On the other hand, if big clubs’ sovereignty is illegitimate in the first place, what’s the basis for objecting to a secession?

Ogden Wernstrom@116: are you suggesting that Lincoln did not believe the American colonies were right to secede from the British Empire?

No. Is your universe composed of only polar opposites?

I do not think that Lincoln found it a pressing or pertinent issue at the time. I question whether “committed to the proposition” is really in evidence, but I am no scholar of Lincoln. To me, it sounds like hyperbole, created to form the puerile “paradox” posited by a fictional character.

I have not searched much, but the source I find claiming that Lincoln felt so binarily that revolution-is-good is Lyndon LaRouche. The link to Occidental Enclave (a “Community for Ethnic Westerners”) has some source material.

One phrase Lincoln did use repeatedly, regarding America’s independence, was that the revolution had been “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal”. It appears that the seceding states left that part out of their declarations of secession, though they tried (and many still try) to draw parallels between the secession of colonies that lacked political representation and the secession of states that saw the balance of power tipping away from them.

The US Constitution – which was ratified by the states – does outline how a state may leave The Union, and the CSA states did not choose that method. Lincoln was a law-and-order guy.

#124 Ogden Wernstrom

The US Constitution – which was ratified by the states – does outline how a state may leave The Union, and the CSA states did not choose that method.

What method is that?

J Thomas, I suppose that I must have been fantasizing that it was clearly stated in The Constitution. It does state that

It is only implied that a state could secede if it obtained the consent of the other states. I think the Supreme Court backs me up on that, in the ironically-named Texas v. White, 74 US 700 (1869), the majority opinion includes:

The union between Texas and the other States was as complete, as perpetual, and as indissoluble as the union between the original States. There was no place for reconsideration or revocation, except through revolution or through consent of the States.

I just learned that, in the majority opinion of the Supreme Court, the secession movement was not a revolution.

States could have asked for consent to leave The Union. I probably got the idea that it is spelled-out by Article. IV., Section. 3., but I suppose that my interpretation is based on a definition of the word “state” which also refers to any nation as a state.

Agree with mcmanus, et al, on BW’s 96. Excellent work. (And I take BW’s “plantar” spelling, along with his comma placement, to be one of his endearing idiosyncrasies!)

Bruce’s discussion of the necessity for some sort of moral justification for slavery with the rise of cotton made me think of John C. Calhoun. JCC was a brilliant, violent polemicist who proved more than capable of providing the requisite racial ideology, an ideology largely taken from Gobineau and tailored to suit local conditions. I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say that JCC, more than any other one person, deserves an out-size share of the blame for the slaughter to come, and for the more than 100 years of Jim Crow racism that followed.

Calhoun has been described by [some historian] as the “Marx of the master class”. But considered as a radical reactionary, I think of JCC as more of an American, secular version of Joseph de Maistre, with deM’s ultra-montanism analogous to JCC’s conception of the moral responsibility to rule of a master-class, planter aristocracy.

Stephen,
1. Lyndon LaRouche was born in 1922, and I think I first heard his name in the 1960s, maybe early 1970s, due to his involvement in national politics of the time. I do not claim that he posted anything to that blog. I said that he appears to be the source of the claim that Lincoln was “committed to the proposition that the American colonies were right to secede from the British Empire”. If there is a more-reliable non-fictional source that documents this commitment of Lincoln’s, in word or in deed, that would work much better that countering arguments I am not making.

2. I think LaRouche is not a reliable source of historical data. Even his allies/cohorts/fellows-in-arms thought that he was reality-challenged. (“…lacking factual detail and depth”) What does affect the consistency of an argument that Lincoln contradicted himself is that he must have actually taken the two positions that are presented as opposites. Yes, I know that LaRouche did not fabricate everything, so his statement might be true. Surely there would be a better source, since LaRouche had to get his (non-fictional) information from some source. If there is a more-reliable non-fictional source that documents this commitment of Lincoln’s, in word or in deed, that would work much better than countering arguments I am not making.

3. My mention of polar opposites was a snarky retort to your jumped-to conclusion. Perhaps you could point me to a source of history that shows Lincoln’s specific reasons for thinking the American revolution justified. If there is a more-reliable non-fictional source that documents this commitment of Lincoln’s, in word or in deed, that would work much better than countering arguments I am not making.

4. It depends on what the meaning of the word “men” is. (Note: I can’t find that word in The Constitution, either. When reading The Constitution, it depends on what the meaning of the word “person” is.)

#128 Ogden Wernstrom

I suppose that I must have been fantasizing that it was clearly stated in The Constitution.

Yes, that was one of the things that got glossed over. I expect there are people who argue that it is clear and that no reasonable person could disagree with their interpretation.

The previous organization was clearly intended to be indissoluble, and some people argued that when they dissolved it to form the USA that property carried over.

There’s certainly no mechanism specified. I suppose if a majority of the 50 states wanted to secede, they could each vote to let all the others out. Or should it take 2/3?

BW @132:

Right. He was the principal architect of the theory of “nullification” and a central figure in the nullification crisis of the 1830s.

His racial ideology was simple and brutal: white supremacy made slavery a positive good. It was the duty of the white aristocrat to be a stern but “loving” father to the negro slave.

In actual fact, he was a Simon Legreeish SOB. I recall reading somewhere that the Calhoun archives contain a note ordering an overseer to brutally whip one of his slaves for some minor “infraction”.

Re: Lincoln’s views on the Revolution there is this non-fiction article that sums it up : Jefferson Davis, Abraham Lincoln, and the American Revolution (1994) Greg Ruttan

http://www.tcr.org/tcr/essays/CB_Lincoln-Davis.pdf