A Frederick Douglass Collection

 

One of my Christmas presents this year was the Library of America’s collection of Frederick Douglass’s speeches and writings. I have enjoyed reading in it the last few days. I had admired his work before but had not read that much of it. (One really interesting piece I remember, not in this volume, was an introduction he gave of Robert Ingersoll at a political meeting where he quoted Robert Browning in his appreciation of Ingersoll. A person wouldn’t be seeing much of that sort of thing at meetings of Republicans or Democrats these days.) In a career of over fifty years from the 1840s to the 1890s, he gave a lot of speeches and wrote a lot of articles. The book contains dozens of them. I recommend it to people interested in the struggle to end slavery, the Civil War, and the success and later failures of reconstruction and also to anyone interesting in reading strong, well written, radical, uncompromising defenses of the liberal values of liberty and individual rights by an excellent author who also must have been a splendid orator.

There is one group of people I particularly wish would get it and read it. Many conservatives and even a few libertarians have an unfortunate tendency to romanticize the Confederacy and ignore or gloss over the facts and history of slavery, the Civil War, and reconstruction. Slavery was not just some regrettable unwise policy. It was a savage abomination that had to be abolished and a direct contradiction of the principles of liberty and the Declaration of Independence. The secessionists left the Union to preserve slavery - believing that Lincoln and his Republicans would create conditions for eventually abolishing it. They made that plain at the time. Claims about other motivations besides preserving slavery were later inventions by apologists for the “lost cause” of the Confederacy. The American army officers who joined the rebellion committed treason by doing so and were fortunate to have been dealt with so leniently after they lost. The slaveholders deserved what they got from the Union army during the war and reconstruction. The main thing wrong with reconstruction was that it ended too soon and left the ex-rebels in position to gain control of the governments of southern states and deny black citizens their rights for decades to come. Another few years of occupation by the Union army might have made a difference.

Those today who are soft on the Confederacy should know better, but since they don’t, reading this book might help them to learn. Something needs to.

Removing Lee's Statue

 

Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them,or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.

Article 3. Section 3, U.S. Constitution

 

Earlier this month officials in Richmond, Virginia removed a large statue of Robert E. Lee that had been on government property on Monument Avenue since 1890.  Trump and some conservative writers have denounced the removal with some calling it wokeness gone wild or an attempt to erase history. I think they are wrong. In evaluating the propriety of a statue commemorating someone being on public land, it is important to consider what it is about the person that is being commemorated. A statue of Henry Ford honoring him for helping put the nation on wheels would have a quite different meaning from one honoring him for his opinions about Jews. 

The statue of Lee in Richmond honored him for commanding the confederate Army of Northern Virginia in the Civil War. At the start of the war, he was a serving officer in the American army. He left it to participate in a violent rebellion against the United States, a rebellion for the purpose of preserving the institution of slavery in Virginia and other southern states.  He was a strong, serious, and personally honorable man. His enemies, including the man who finally beat him, admired his skill and tenacity. The army he led fought long and well. But he committed treason against his country in service of a vile cause. The statue in Richmond was meant to commemorate that treason and honor that cause. I see nothing wrong in removing it and others of confederate officers that went up throughout the former confederacy during the Jim Crow period  proclaiming a defiant support for the rebellion and its “glorious lost cause” from display on government property and moving  them to museums or selling them to collectors. 

Statues at battlefields intended to honor the courage or memorialize the deeds of confederate soldiers with little or no reference to their cause are different and probably should be left alone. Besides they and the ones of union regiments are good visual aids to who did what where at the battles.

 

Federal Holiday

Slavery ended legally in the confederate states on September 22, 1862 when Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation freed all slaves in the rebelling states effective January 1^st, 1863. Of course in practice the proclamation took effect in confederate territories only as the Union army occupied them and enforced it. Slavery was banned everywhere (there were a couple of hold out, non-confederate border states that had  not banned slavery on their own) when the 13^th Amendment was ratified by the last necessary state legislature on December 6th, 1865 after passing congress in January of that year. Either of these significant dates would have been a natural choice for a federal holiday commemorating the end of slavery.

After the Civil War ended in 1865, it took a while for units of the Union army to get to and control all areas of the confederacy.  By June 19^th there was a Union general in Galveston to command the military district of Texas, and on that date he issues a general order informing people in the state that that all former slaves in Texas were free, having been freed by the Emancipation Proclamation. The order was not an insignificant thing. Any former slaves in Texas who did not already know it needed to learn they were free, and the former slave owners surely needed to be told who was running things. But it was only a local order restricted to Texas and announcing an emancipation that in law had already happened.

Over time June 19^th  came to be celebrated as a festive holiday related to the end of slavery, and it is the one congress picked as a federal holiday, which is okay, though one of the other two would have made more sense in terms of historical significance. 

I do agree with the opinions I have heard – sometimes said seriously, sometimes jokingly – that new federal holidays are a good thing in themselves. Any day the employees of the federal bureaucracy are off is a day they cannot be harming and restricting the productive members and useful activities of society.

  

Gone with the Wind

Gone With the Wind is best known now as  the famous movie from 1939, but before being made into a movie, it was a very popular novel  by Margaret Mitchell. I picked the book up a few days ago after not having read it since I was in junior high.  Then, as well as I remember, I paid attention mainly to the colorful story of the two main characters. This time I noticed some of the ideas and opinions.

The book was published in 1936. Appomattox was nearer in time to that year than the end of World War II is to today.  Strong feelings and even passion about the events of the Civil War and reconstruction were common among people in the south. The author was a southerner, a Georgian, and she peppered  the book with propaganda and apologetics  for the old south and its “glorious cause”.

Some of it is plausible or accurate. The life of some plantation owners was elegant and genteel. There probably were some dashing cavaliers and charming ladies. Some of the northerners who came south during reconstruction were shifty crooks on the make.  Some freed slaves did become criminals.

However much of it is false and/or wrong and  often offensively so.  There is the old claim  that the southern states left the union over states’ rights. Andersonville is excused and even blamed on President Lincoln for ending the practice of exchanging prisoners of war in 1863 without mentioning that  the Union army  stopped exchanging prisoners because the confederates would not exchange black Union soldiers – seeing them as slave property rather than prisoners of war.  Slaves are almost uniformly presented as well treated, content,  and devoted to their owners, and the  liberated  black people during  reconstruction usually  presented as lost, shiftless, alienated, often dangerous, and generally worse off and less happy than when they were in bondage.  The author justifies the Ku Klux Klan as a beneficial force for law and decency, necessary to protect southerners and especially southern women from the depredations of black ex-slaves, carpetbaggers,  and Union soldiers.  The Georgia legislature’s refusal to ratify the 15^th Amendment is hailed as a gallant and bold  though futile act honorable defiance.  She bemoans the fact than many ex-confederate officers were not allowed to vote during reconstruction, ignoring that  these men were traitors and as such were handled leniently by victors who refrained from hanging or imprisoning them.  She treats the planters’ post war loss of wealth as sad and almost tragic rather than a  consequence of the war the confederates started and a natural  result of freeing the human beings who produced and made up much of that wealth.  

The author seems fine with the institution of slavery and definitely nostalgic for a society based on it.  The book was a bestseller (and won both the national book award and a Pulitzer Prize for fiction), and the ideas and opinions  it displays were  held by many people, both at the time of its publication and later. The story is  colorful, and Rhett and Scarlett are interesting  characters, but the pleading and propaganda do get in the way.  All in all it can make a person even more appreciative of William Tecumseh Sherman.

Reparations

An important principle in political and general social life is that one should never accept undeserved guilt or blame. Power seekers know that guilty and uncertain people are easier to manipulate and control and often try  to induce feelings of  guilt in those they wish to dominate.  Their attempts should be rejected, and usually emphatically. So it is with the recent nonsense coming from leftist politicians about collecting “reparations”  from other  Americans to give to black people for slavery and Jim  Crow.

There is no one alive today who had anything to do with promoting, supporting, or participating in slavery in America.  (There are a good number of people alive today on the American left who are complicit in supporting slavery in Cuba, the Soviet Empire, Mao’s China, and other communist hellholes, but that is a different story.)  Neither is there anyone alive who suffered from it.  The Civil Rights Act of 1964 abolished Jim Crow laws in the states that still had them. The voting age in 1964 was twenty one. So no one born after 1943 could have helped elect  the politicians who kept those laws on the books.  We are simply not guilty in the matter and owe nothing to anyone for it, and should not be bashful about making  that clear.  (It also would not hurt to point out that in the Civil War to end slavery, it cost about one union soldier dead  for each ten slaves liberated. Including the dead rebels, most of whom did not own slaves,  raises the cost to about one for six.)

However there might be one possible exception where an other than manifestly absurd case could be made for reparations. There is one large, wealthy, and powerful organization  still active in this country that supported and protected slavery with rebellion in the South and subversion in the North  when others were trying to end it. It is the same organization that deprived black citizens of their civil rights as soon after the  Civil War as union occupation forces left the South and enacted and maintained segregation and Jim Crow laws in the former confederate states for almost  a hundred years.  That organization is the Democratic Party.   If there is to be a tab,  they would be the bunch to pay it. I would pony up for pay TV to watch a debate among the 712 Democratic presidential candidates on that question.

Rebel Battle Flag

In the last few days there has been new controversy over the rebel battle flag with the governor of South Carolina suggesting it is time to remove it from the state’s capitol.  That seems to be a good idea since it should not have been flown there in the first place.  Individuals are of course free to display the flag as they choose, but one should question whether they should.

There are various reasons for displaying the flag.  Some people will say they do it only as  homage to the memory of brave and gallant soldiers of the South and not as any endorsement of the policies and goals of the Confederacy. It is certainly possible to respect the honor and character of men such as Lee and Jackson without in any ways wishing  they had won, just as many people respect certain things about Rommel or Yamamoto or Crazy Horse without wishing that the axis had won World War II or that bands of Indians were still raiding farms and ranches in the great plains.  

Others say they display the flag only as  an act of defiance against convention, conformity, and authority. Such defiance is a wholly admirable sentiment. In our present situation the more defiance of convention, conformity, and especially authority we have, the  better off we are. We surely  need more Americans standing up and telling our would be betters and civil masters where to get off.

The problem is that flying the Confederate battle flag conveys other things. It suggests approval of and nostalgia for the Confederacy and its cause of slavery. There are ways to honor ancestors and brave soldiers which do not send this message. There surely are other ways to show one’s disdain for convention and authority. Rejecting  the rebel battle flag in favor of the  jolly roger,  the Gadsden flag, or, for Texans, the Gonzales "come and take it" cannon flag is a solution which comes  to mind immediately.

For these reasons, I  believe people of good will should not fly or display the rebel battle flag, unless, of course, the government bans doing so. In that case we might all have to get one.

Un-ominous Parallels?

We are now in the fourth year of the sesquicentennial of the Civil War. Unlike the centennial in the early 1960’s, the sesquicentennial has gone largely unmentioned in the traditional media. I think there are several reasons for this. The most obvious is simple ignorance. There are many in the media who do not know or understand much history.  Beyond that, attitudes and prejudices common among people in  the media preclude a sense or appreciation of the idea of an epic struggle.  Then too the fact of a war where hundreds of thousands white Americans fought and died to free black slaves runs counter to the official  political myth of unrelenting and exceptionless evil behavior  of whites toward blacks at all times before 1964. Also, for some on the left,  reflecting on the outcome of  Civil War would produce mixed feeling  because besides freeing the slaves, it preserved the nation they hate most in the world.   

Of course many of us think about the war, and Lincoln, and Grant and Sherman and Lee and the rest. I have lately thought and written about the divisions in the country in the years leading up to the Civil War and some similarities between that time and ours.

Recently I noticed something  I had not thought of before. In the years before  the Civil War, many Southern slave holders underestimated the abolitionists, dismissing them as a fringe group funded by a few wealthy troublemakers  and excited by a passionate novel written by an opinionated woman.  They misjudged the strength, growth, and appeal of the movement and ideas opposing them until the rise of Lincoln and the Republicans made it obvious.  Replace some New England merchants with people like the Koch brothers and Harriet Beecher Stowe with Ayn Rand, and you would be pretty close  to the attitude of the American statist establishment toward the libertarian and anti-establishment agitation of the present time. We can hope that they too are missing something, that the parallelism holds,  the leftists continue to underestimate us, and  our ideas have a similar influence, though of course without a civil war. Seemingly stranger things have happened. In the early 1980’s few would have expected the Soviet Empire to collapse within ten years.  Perhaps we can see a new birth of freedom in this country. We surely need to try to get one.  

Conflicts

“I John Brown an now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think, vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done.”

In 1859 John Brown and a score or so of followers seized the armory at Harper’s Ferry with the idea of starting a revolt among  slaves in Virginia. It was a foolhardy and pointless venture from the first. It had almost no chance of success, and if it had succeeded, it would have led to a brutal suppression of the slaves Brown wanted to help and a hardening  of the opinions of those in the slave states against any thought of ending slavery.  Yet, so inflamed were passions in the country that many sensible people supported Brown’s attempt without regard to any concern for its practicality, and various mature and serious abolitionists helped fund it. Many people seemingly were ready for something to be done about slavery, even something hopeless and quixotic. Less than two years later Brown’s prophecy came true with the divided nation at war with itself in the bloodiest conflict in American history.

A few weeks ago, a crusty old rancher in Nevada defied federal bureaucrats who wanted to remove his cattle from a piece of federal land. He was in arrears on his rent and legally had no leg to stand on. Yet people all around the country rallied behind the old man, seemingly ready for someone to do something about the federal authorities’ encroachment on people and their rights, even if he was in the wrong in his particular fight. That tells us something important.

We are nowhere near the conditions of the 1850’s, and there is no present danger of armed conflict  within our society. There are reasons  to be concerned however. The divisions within the country are deep and raw, and the Obama administration has made them worse by its actions. Many of those who oppose his administration do so fundamentally and with deep concern for what is being done to their country and their freedoms. More and more people are calling the present political situation a war,  only metaphorically to be sure, but a war. And one can hear serious, sober people musing about the possibility of citizens someday having to resort to armed resistance against the government, not yet in any concrete way but not in a purely fanciful one either.

People on the left should be especially concerned. The present conflict in the country is nothing like the old disputes between labor and management where reasonable people on both sides knew they needed each other. Now many in the opposition view the welfare and bureaucratic constituencies of those now in power as a pure burden they would be better off without, and as a pragmatic matter are mainly correct to do so.  They don’t need those in those constituencies in any important way while those in those constituencies need the productive people  (a  majority of whom are in the opposition) to survive.

Prudent leftists would at all costs want to keep this from dawning on too many of those being fleeced and herded -   taking their victims for what they can and kicking them around as much as they can without making them disturbed enough to do something about it. The great risk at present for the left is that a large number of the victims are starting to notice and are becoming significantly bothered.  So such prudent leftists might  suggest to  Obama to call off the regulators, tell all the  commissars and commandos manqué in the various agencies to stand down and disband, and ease off in general.  They might  hope for the election of a Republican of the moderate sort in 2016 to help things simmer down.  Of course one cannot know how many leftists are prudent. Prudence seems to be in short supply among our present rulers.

We should all hope things can simmer down. The problems of this nation are real and serious,  but they need to be settled peaceably. Even whiffs of other possibilities are worrisome.  

We Should Be Lincoln Men (and Women)

Over the last few years a number of people on the “right”, mainly conservatives but a few libertarians too, have reflected on the Civil War and decided to come out against Abraham Lincoln and, at least by implication, somewhat for the southern Confederacy. There were several articles taking this revisionistic position on the occasion of the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth. Without claiming perfection for Lincoln or any other president, I find even an implicit embracing of the Lost Cause to be wrong and, at least when coming from libertarians, perverse and bizarre.

The attacks on Lincoln generally focus on one or more of three broad claims – that the South left the Union not because of slavery but rather over questions of free trade and states’ rights, that Lincoln behaved despotically and hypocritically during the war, and that the Union’s victory somehow led to the federal government’s becoming the grotesque thing it is today.

The first is by far the most important and also the easiest to refute. Any notion that the South seceded over something other than slavery would have seemed strange to both Unionists and Confederates at the time. The Republican Party was founded in 1854. It held its first presidential nominating convention in 1856. Its first platform called slavery a relic of barbarism, demanded admission of Kansas into the Union as a free state, and called for banning slavery in the territories (and by extension new states as they joined the Union). The platform of 1860 repeated those planks. The southern secessionists took the Republicans at their word. The rebels left the Union over slavery. They often said so formally and explicitly as the exited. The declaration of secession of South Carolina states the following:

“On the 4th day of March next, this party will take possession of the Government. It has announced that the South shall be excluded from the common territory, that the judicial tribunals shall be made sectional, and that a war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States.
The guaranties of the Constitution will then no longer exist; the equal rights of the States will be lost. The slaveholding States will no longer have the power of self-government, or self-protection, and the Federal Government will have become their enemy. “

The declaration of Mississippi begins

“In the momentous step which our State has taken of dissolving its connection with the government of which we so long formed a part, it is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course.
Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.”

The complete documents of these declarations and those of other confederate states as well as the statements of Southern leaders and politicians at the time leave no reasonable doubt about the true reason for secession.

(An interesting example of the popular sentiment in the South is given by the original opening lyrics of the popular confederate war song “The Bonnie Blue Flag”:

“We are a band of brothers and native to the soil
Fighting for the property we gained by honest toil.”

Of course, the only “property” that Lincoln and his Republicans threatened was property in slaves. )

The notion that the confederates left the union not to preserve slavery but rather for some combination of the various tangential issues that existed between north and south (tariffs, subsidies for industries and transportation interests in the north, and other relatively minor questions) is a later day invention of apologists for the Confederacy.

Complaints of Lincoln’s supposed despotism focus most frequently on his allegedly unconstitutional suspension of habeas corpus during the war. The actual statement in the Constitution forbids suspension of habeas corpus except “when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.” Lincoln faced both rebellion and invasion during his term in office. In considering the various harsh measures the Union took, it is important to remember the situation. The eleven states of the Confederacy were in open rebellion with powerful armies within a short march of Washington and Philadelphia. The four slave states that remained (sometimes tenuously) in the Union were full of Southern sympathizers and supporters of the rebellion. Copperhead Democrats in states such as New York opposed the war with schemes that approached and sometimes reached the level of treason. Lincoln may have gone too far in some cases, but seen in this context, his actions were far from despotic. The charge of hypocrisy is usually tied to claims that Lincoln was not consistent in opposing slavery and usually based on statements he made before the South fired on Fort Sumter that if he could preserve the Union with slavery still in it, he would and on the fact that the Emancipation Proclamation did not free slaves in the four border states that remained in the Union. However Lincoln’s record in both opposing slavery and desiring that the nation become wholly free is clear. The conciliatory remarks he made in early 1861 are best understood as a combination of political expediency and an honest effort to avoid war and to follow the Republicans’ notion of gradually and peacefully strangling slavery out of existence through blocking its spread and making all the new states and territories free. In the light of the rest of Lincoln’s life and opinions and of the principles of his party, it does not make sense to interpret them as indicating a willingness to tolerate slavery for the long term. As to the Emancipation Proclamation, it is again necessary to consider the context. At the time he issued the proclamation, the war was very much in doubt. The Union had just won its first important victory in the east, and a marginal one at that, at Antietam. The border states remained both shaky in their loyalty and important for victory. So he first freed only the slaves in the states of the Confederacy. However, it would not have taken a Machiavelli to figure out that, once that was done, maintaining slavery post-war in the border states alone would be impossible and that winning the war would have to lead to the end of slavery everywhere. It was not hypocrisy but strategy that led Lincoln to do as he did, and the course of action he selected worked. Slavery was abolished throughout the nation immediately after the war. It would take a real purist to argue that the only honest thing for him to have done would have been to move faster in the border states at the cost of possibly losing the war and leaving slavery solidly in place throughout the South.

The final charge is almost silly. Lincoln did not have a time machine. The Union he preserved was a constitutional republic with a very limited national government. It is not his fault that people who came after him transformed it into the monstrosity under which we labor today. He could not have foreseen it, and he had nothing to do with it.

The Confederates began the war to preserve slavery. In leading a divided and sometimes wavering Union to victory, Lincoln both showed greatness and advanced the cause of liberty. Libertarians (and conservatives who care about freedom and individual rights) should be Lincoln men. We can abhor the slaughter and wish there could have been a peaceful solution. We can agree that Jackson, Stuart, Mosby, the Army of Northern Virginia, and above all Lee were romantic figures both in their struggle and defeat (as were Rommel, Geronimo, and Napoleon in other times and at other places). We can admire the Confederates’ skill, daring, honor, and valor without accepting or excusing their beliefs and without becoming confused about who was right and who was wrong in 1861-1865.