Someone pointed out a website I linked had a bunch of pro-confederate kind of stuff.
In one sense, I don’t care much. I am confident the people involved are not remotely racist and I think the prominent public school version of the reasons for the civil war are mostly stupid and self-serving.
(I don’t have any problem, by the way, with “civil war” as a description. The United States, plural noun or not, was always regarded as one nation. We sent one ambassador to other nations, not one for each state, and we received one ambassador from other nations to cover all the states. “The War Between the States” is itself largely inaccurate since it implies that states decided one way or the other, when in fact some had their legislative processes interfered with my extra-legal means [I’m blogging from MO, remember].)
But I really don’t like to see too much effort spent on singling out the “Southern Cause” as some sort of great way to spend one’s time.
Here are some thoughts in no particular order.
It is true that anti-slavery stalwarts like Lord Acton wanted the South to preserve its independence. But it is just as true that he kept hoping that the South would start doing some serious work in freeing slaves so that the UK could become an ally. But the South wouldn’t do it. Winning wasn’t winning if the slaves got freed.
Just because England got rid of slavery peacefully, doesn’t mean the same could happen in the US. They had different governments and different economies. The presence of anti-slavery zealots who promoted violence cannot prove that the South had no culpability in preserving slavery. Maybe they were glad for those zealots to give them an excuse to justify their own refusal to change.
It is easily imaginable, despite a lot of feelings going the other way, that a victorious South might have perpetuated slavery into the twentieth century and changed the dynamic of the West in nightmarish ways.
Adding to the above, if God decided to let the South get decimated, shouldn’t we think he had good reason to do so? Apparently, when God looks at a war between some sort of humanist, unitarian, take-your-best-shot-here, regime and a regime of Christian slavery-defenders, he sides with the unitarians. Is this surprising? “My name is blasphemed among the nations because of you.”
Only a small minority owned slaves. Right. But these were the de facto rulers of the country. Rather than vindicate the South, this should indicated that the South was just as much under the thumb of the powers that be–a wealthy minority–as the North may have been under “the bankers” or “the industrialists.”
Constitutional arguments are nice, but if you try to leave a card game with your money in the center of the table after all the hands have been laid down and you are shown to be a loser, then common sense says you might get shot at. The Southern politicians had ever bit as much national ambition as the Northern ones. They hoped to win power over the country. The initial seceders were basically saying that, even though they voted for their guy to be president of the North, they weren’t willing for anyone else to be president over their State. Heads we win; tails you lose. While it may be have been legal to leave, one shouldn’t be too surprised at the reaction.
There are all sorts of lessons to learn by Federal atrocities, but celebrating the South isn’t one of them. No more than holding “Cherokee Balls” is something churches should do to remember the way Andrew Jackson and Georgia decimated Christian men, women, and children of that tribe. (Sure, Federal expansionism was grim and, post-1865 can all be laid at the feet of “the North”; but the South was just as expansionist before 1860.)
There is no reason to think that the problems of centralized authority v. the states would have gone any differently for a victorious South, then they have for the nation as a whole before or since.
Naturally, the Lincoln as Evil Tyrant and Radical thesis is pretty much an inevitable conclusion of any honest glance at history (And under “evil” I include racist, white-supremacist, who hated blacks so much he [see comment] wanted to send them all to Africa and never see them again). But, as offensive as the Lincoln hero worship is, I don’t think idealizing the South is the correct response. Saying that the average Southerner was better than Lincoln is almost like boasting that one is not a Nazi (which, come to think of it, is virtually all one hears from post-modernists today). It is simply too low a bar to jump over.
So I don’t endorse or wish to promote a bunch of Southern apologetics. Given the issues facing us today, it seems sort of quixotic and escapist.
“I include racist, white-supremacist, who hated blacks so much he wanted to send them all to Africa and never see them again”
Okay, I’m willing to entertain the possibility that Lincoln hated blacks so much that he wanted to send them all to Africa and never see them again. So I’m not starting by disbelieving your comment. But do we have evidence that he wanted to send them there so he could never see them again, or is it possible that he wanted to send them there because that’s where he thought they belonged? And if that’s the case, how is that different from modern people who believe that Jews, or Sudanese, or name your favorite group, really ought to be allowed to settle in the places they were driven (or in the case of American blacks, dragged) from originally, and ought to be given the means to do so? Even if you don’t agree with that mentality, is it really evidence of hatred?
Or is there a statement by Lincoln somewhere out there that I need to be shown, that demonstrates that hatred actually was the motivation for that particular aspect of his views? I do know that he was no ardent lover of the black race, but there’s a “so much…that…” in your statement that applies a causal relationship that I have a question about.
Good point. I guess I’m so used to all sorts of feelings attributed to the slaveholders.
My edited point would simply be that kidnapping African Americans from their homes and sending them to another continent that no longer has anything to do with them or their family is not obviously superior to some forms of enslavement.
By the way, the difference would be I know of no evidence of a longing to live anywhere else on the part of the slaves, except perhaps in the North as freemen–a privilege which I understand was not permitted in much of the North.
Right, and I can accept that part of it — that it was definitely self-serving to some degree, and probably not fundamentally based on wanting to satisfy an expressed desire on the part of blacks. Still, I think you could possibly attribute sending people to where you think they want to go, to something other than hatred, even if it is not exactly charitable in the sense that you care enough about them to care about what they actually want, rather than your own assumptions about what they ought to want. Call it ignorance, or paternalism, which are not virtues, but not precisely hateful either.
And I wasn’t aware that “kidnapping” was part of it — I had thought it was intended as a voluntary opportunity for freed blacks after slavery was ended. But I admit I’m not very informed on that part of it.
At any rate, I generally agree with most of the points of youru post.
I find these types of discussions very interesting. I remember when I was in college, being shocked when reading for the first time “The Life of Frederick Douglas”, the autobiography of a freed slave that had gone North. The picture he painted of how he was treated in the North as a freed slave was completely astonishing. If I remember correctly (it has been awhile) sometimes it seemed that he painted a picture that was worse than how he was treated in the south.
Conclusion: There is never any black or white, just a whole lot of gray.
Interesting disussion.
Guess what? It gets even more complex…there were many African-Americans who DID want to return to Africa. In fact Marcus Garvey, arguably one of the most influential African-American leaders in history, purchased a cruise ship and made plans to return with a significant number of African-Americans to Liberia. For various reasons, the ship never sailed. IIRC, there is some speculation (maybe it’s more than that, I don’t remember) that Garvey’s organization actually cut a deal with the KKK to get money to do achieve what both groups were interested in–sending African-Americans back to Africa–albeit with very different motivations. This would have been in the first quarter of the 20th cent, can’t remember any more precisely than that…but it’s *possible* that Lincoln’s motivations may have been closer to those of Garvey’s than the KKK’s. Something to think about. P&R has a book on the Nation of Islam that contains a good bit about this — good book by the way.
Unless you think I glance history dishonestly — and I’ve done more than glance — then I’d have to disagree that concluding that Lincoln is an “Evil Tyrant” is “an inevitable conclusion of any honest glance at history.” Lincoln was a politician, so has clay feet like every other politician.
I don’t truck with Lincoln hagiography, but I get pretty tired of the “Lincoln wasn’t an angel so therefore he was a demon” sort of arguments. It seems to me that some people react so negatively to learning that the marble-statue portrait they learned in elementary school isn’t true that they err by embracing the opposite extreme.
I’ve actually read a lot of what Lincoln said about freeing slaves and “sending them back to Africa,” as you put it.
Abolitionists excoriated Lincoln before the Civil War because Lincoln wanted “only” to keep slavery gradually on the path to ultimate extinction. They excoriated him because he was “moderate” (if not downright conservative).
He said that even if he could, as president, he would not immediately free the slaves. He said he wouldn’t do that because he wouldn’t know what to do with freed slaves if they were all freed at once. He said that he thought that the sentiments of the American white majority would not admit freed slaves to a social and political equality with whites. “Maybe” repatriation to Africa might be a possibility, he said repeatedly. But, presumably, the gradual extinction of slavery would avoid the need to solve a huge problem that immediate abolition would create. (Ultimately, slaves were freed as a war measure — emanicipation initially limited to the states in rebellion.)
The thing is, however me might have felt personally about blacks, the principle he pushed for, in as non-revolutionary method as possible (before the war), was that black people should be allowed to keep the fruit of their own labor just like white people. He argued: That we think a race of people is inferior to us is not a reason to deny them the right to eat their own bread.