Save Your Confederate Money, Boys...

A word about my backup travel reading these past few days. It's something with the restrained and scholarly title of America Aflame, subtitled “How the Civil War Created a Nation,” by one David Goldfield, hitherto unknown to me. It's an imperfect book, starting with the subtitle. The fulcrum is indeed the Civil War but it would be better (if less pithily) described as an account of how white Americans in the 19^th Century understood what they might perhaps have called “the Negro problem.”

Here's a defining point: except for a gripping account of the mad zealotry of John Brown, Goldfield says next to nothing about abolitionism per se. His tenet, if I read him right, is that abolitionism really wasn't an important factor in northern opposition to slavery. Far more important, in this reading, is that northerners really didn't like blacks very much and would have been happy to see them and their attendant complications just fade away. They particularly didn't like the threat of competition from slave labor which, as they saw it, would have simply undercut the aspirations of honest white folks. This reading would explain why so much turned on the question of extending slavery to the territories—the Kansas-Nebraska act, and suchlike. Indeed, Goldfield doesn't spell out but one comes away that the matter of the territories probably drove the pre-war agenda as much as or more than any other issue.

This perspective helps to explain the other important strand in pre-Civil-War politics--“internal improvements,” as Henry Clay put it; more generally, the use of government resources to open up the country for settlers, particularly those with a purpose to become “yeoman farmers” on the opening frontier.

Goldfield is at his best in describing the swirls and eddies of politics in those pre-war years.   But he seems to hold to the belief that the Civil War was an avoidable war. I'd agree that it would have been nice for it to be avoided—I have heard, and tend to believe, that the sovereign could have paid off both the slaves and the slaveholders at less gross cost than the war exacted. But I don't find anything here by way of plausible roadmap as to just how that might have come about.

Goldfield is less impressive on the war itself, not least because he has such overwhelming competition. My guess is he might have been better off to say, “look, you all know the narrative, so I'll just skip it except insofar as it impinges on his particular concerns.”

His treatment of the postwar period is a more complicated issue. He feels obliged to give a narrative summary of the economic explosion—the railroads, the giant corporations, unions and union violence. Again this is an oft-told tale and it is one in which Goldfield seems a bit ill at ease. Yet its telling is essential to the other and perhaps most important part of his story—his account of the swift and dramatic sea change in northern white attitudes to the race issue in general and blacks in particular. Some northern whites seem to have been surprised and disappointed to discover that the new freedmen were not as enchanting as the northern whites had hoped they would be. Others remembered that they had never liked blacks that much in the first place. And many discovered how much blacks reminded them of new immigrants, particularly the Irish who quickly developed an aspect in the popular mind as ill-educated scoundrels and buffoons.

But perhaps most interesting is the way in which northern whites simply lost interest in the race issue—lost interest as they turned their attention to opening up the west, building railroads and such like, and, yes, destroying the Indians. For good or ill (or both) northern whites turned their face to the future. Southern whites, for no good reason at all, remained fixed on its disappointments and resentments from the past.

Which means that southern whites were at last free to relitigate the old battles—to strip away the protections that the War had won for blacks (had won with, it must be noted, the active participation of blacks themselves)--the “slow grinding of hard boards”--by which southern whites came at last, to win what they had lost.   The climax is, necessarily, the corrupt Hayes-Tilden election, the one in which the north laid down its arms just as surely as the south had done at Appomattox,   I don't think it ever occurred to me before that 1876 was the hundredth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. 

 

Slow boring of hard boards, relitigating dead issues, refighting and last winning the last war. Nice to know we don't have to live through all that again. Oh tee hee.

Slow boring of hard boards, relitigating dead issues, refighting and last winning the last war. Nice to know we don't have to live through all that again. Oh tee hee.

Update:  I see I wrote this post before.   But this is the  improved, expanded, updated version.

Loose Change on Human Capital

I've been reading a bit lately on the post-Civil War settlement and in particular, the question of how to redeploy the former slaves, now citizens, in control of their own (as we might have said) labor power.  In particular, about the celebrated mantra of "40 acres and a mule"--give 'em land, let 'em work it for themselves and stay out of their way.  

I've always had the vague sense that 40-acres was supposed to be undoable and last night I got to wondering--was it undoable?  What did it require?

For an answer, consider: there were something like 4 million slaves liberated by the war.  As a wild stab, let's figure five people per family.  So, 800,000 families.  Ill spare you the pencil work but this translates into land about equal to the state of Mississippi.  This would include, of course, the rich bottomland of the delta.  But it would also include the scrub in the Faulkner country up north, which is hardly worth anything to anybody.  So, throw in a second state.  Throw in Louisiana.  More scrub and more delta.

So, doable.  Didn't happen, of course.  My own take is that it was that ol' darlin' Andrew Johnson who made it his business to assure that no freed slave got anything except his freedom and sometimes maybe the pants he stood up in.  And FWIW, I'll bet he thought that free-the-slaves stuff was a dreadful mistake.

Fun to speculate on what the world might have looked like if he hadn't got in the way.

Wait a Minute, What? Department of Second-Class Citizens

Think Progress picks up on an excited appeal from a Christian group which promises that you'll  lose it all if you don't sign up with us right now.  Unless you act promptly, they warn, then by the end of  50 years all kinds of dreadful things will have come to pass.  As for example: "We will have, or have had, a Muslim president."  Italics added, and spend a moment parsing that one out--cute, eh?

But the one that catches my eye is:

Conservative Christians will be treated as second class citizens, much like African Americans were prior to civil rights legislation in the 1960s.

 Italics added again.  And what is so special here?  Ah, note that we have an implicit recognition that African Americans were treated as second class citizens prior to the civil rights legislation in the 1960s.

 Now, I don't want to go overboard here.    i recognize that there are conservative Christians who are advanced,sometimes even ahead of their time, on issues of race relations.  But can anyone identify any other case where a prominent conservative Christian organization flat-out asserted the proposition that African-Americans were in fact treated in so scandalous and immoral a manner.

Health Care Explained

There, that about gets it:

Much of the white population remains convinced that what BHO and the Democrats did in the ACA was to; divest most whites of their existing health care and force them into insurance pools that they do not want, cut the Medicare Advantage programs that whites love, cut the growth of Medicare by at least $500 billion, establish "taxes" for those who do not choose to have health insurance but who could afford it, subsidize "pool" membership for people who can pay part of health insurance but not all (read mostly minorities in white minds) and then axpand Medicaid for those who can't pay at all (more of the same in white minds).  Most white people believe that they will end up paying for all this.   One must remember that most low income people in the US pay no income tax at all.   This attitude does not apply in the minds of the "Morning Joe" crowd in New York City, LA, etc.  They are filled with righteous satisfaction for the poor and righteous indignation against the white middle class in flownover America.

So Turcopiler. Follow the link to let him show you how the NAACP let itself get gamed.  Oh, and there's this.

Ivan Unmans the Bull

My friend Ivan down in Alabama, warming his New Years' Eve with memories of  his youth in the newspaper business, recalls the infamous "Bull" Connor, the (elected) public safety chief who earned his 15 minutes of fame by toppling school schoolchildren with high-powered fire hoses.

During one of his campaigns for governor when I was political reporter on the Bham News.  I “castrated” Bull. His campaign giveaways were metal bulls about four inches long by three inches high on a bar with”Connor” on one side and “for governor” on the other. I had one on my desk in the Bham news newsroom but I’d taken it to the composing room, borrowed a file, and turned bull into a steer. Another reporter told bull about it and he was incensed and got the other reporter to steal it. I got hold of about a dozen of them, and replaced it, made into a steer with a handy rasp file. After a while it disappeared too, but I replaced it. I’ve got two of them on my desk right now. I left bull intact on those two.

 Always compassionate, that's Ivan.  I first thought "Bham" was "Alabama," but no, it's "Birmingham."    Ivan also remembers and endorses Diane McWhorter's superb Carry Me Home : Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution. one of the best books I ever read about the civil rights movement of the 60s.  

The X Word

In the kerfuffle over the bowdlerizing of Huckleberry Finn, count me as firmly ensconced in the camp of those who want to stick with the unbowdlerized,  no emendations (call us the "Latin Mass" party).  I do, however, join those who think this particular act of history-scrubbing has less to do with confused liberalism than it does with the campaign to sanitize the history of the south.  Count Professor Gribben among those who want to turn Southern history into a Disney movie, and with Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour who seems to believe that the White Citizens Councils were just a branch of the Kiwanis Club.

I do grant that there are some operational issues here. Recall that the dreaded n-word does occur not just once but (it says here) 219 times in the course of a not-very-long novel.  Here's one reason I know: a few years back Mrs. Buce spent a few days cooped up in a hospital bed, conscious and lucid but immobile.  Her condition mandated a lot of distraction which, in our house,usually means a lot of reading aloud.  Heaven knows why but for some reason we chose this occasion to tackle Twain's classic.

Work on this picture.  Palookaville is just like any place else in America these days which means that the hospital staff is an authentic rainbow coalition.  You've got Caribbean attendants, Pilipino nurses, Indian doctors, Amerind orderlies, even the occasional bewildered white guy pushing a mop.  They're in and out of the room at all hours, with or (usually) without announcement.  Anyway, it took us about two swallowed sentences to realize we'd better talk in code.

Here's another person who knows how to be economical with the N word:

"We's safe, Huck, we's safe! Jump up and crack yo' heels, dat's de good ole Cairo at las', I jis knows it!"
I says:
"I'll take the canoe and go see, Jim. It mightn't be, you know."
He jumped and got the canoe ready, and put his old coat in the bottom for me to set on, and give me the paddle; and as I shoved off, he says:
"Pooty soon I'll be a-shout'n for joy, en I'll say, it's all on accounts o' Huck; I's a free man, en I couldn't ever ben free ef it hadn't ben for Huck; Huck done it. Jim won't ever forgit you, Huck; you's de bes' fren' Jim's ever had; en you's de only fren' ole Jim's got now."
I was paddling off, all in a sweat to tell on him; but when he says this, it seemed to kind of take the tuck all out of me. I went along slow then, and I warn't right down certain whether I was glad I started or whether I warn't. When I was fifty yards off, Jim says:
"Dah you goes, de ole true Huck; de on'y white genlman dat ever kep' his promise to ole Jim."
Well, I just felt sick. But I says, I got to do it- I can't get out of it. Right then, along comes a skiff with two men in it, with guns, and they stopped and I stopped. One of them says: "What's that, yonder?"
"A piece of a raft," I says.
"So you belong on it?"
"Yes, sir."
"Any men on it?"
"Only one, sir."
"Well, there's five niggers run off to-night, up yonder above the head of the bend. Is your man white or black?"
I didn't answer up prompt. I tried to, but the words wouldn't come. I tried, for a second or two, to brace up and out with it, but I warn't man enough- hadn't the spunk of a rabbit. I see I was weakening; so I just give up trying, and up and says-
"He's white."

From Huckleberry Finn, Chapter 16.   

The 25 Percent Rule

I assume ten thousand bloggers will weigh in this morning on Joe Moroszcz, president of the College Republicans at Boston University, and his proposal for a scholarship available to students who are "at least one-quarter Caucasian" (link). I assume that a fair chunk of these bloggers will point out that almost any American black could pass that 25 percent test, unless he came here last week from, say, Gabon, and maybe then.

I wonder how many will remember how this "percent" stuff became an issue back in the racial-restrictive covenant cases that preceded Brown v. Board of Education. Recall: Homer buys a home with a deed providing that he shall not sell to members "of the Negro race." Homer sells to Byron and the neighbors challenge the sale as violating the covenant. In defense, Byron denies that he is "of the Negro race," and puts the plaintiff to his proof.

It was cute and calculated, but it was not quite as frivolous or obstructive as it might appear at first blush. Think about it: what a way to provoke a full-scale discussion of what it meant to be a "Negro"--to challenge the whole range of social and cultural assumptions that underlie the assertion. It's clear from the record that the proponents understood the cases not least as part of a process of education about race and society.

Moroszcz this morning must feel like the guy at Knott's Berry Farm with his head sticking through a hole in the wall--while a gleeful multitude pelts him with dead cats and rotten cabbages. I wouldn't worry about him: speaking of "a process of education," one of the functions of `campus politics is to bring home to the kinder that if you stir up a hornet's nest, then sometimes you get stung. A satisfying, if ironic, conclusion, might be to see the episode morph into a brand new public dialogue on an old and persistent issue.

[Fn.: I wonder if the "put to their proof" denial these days would pass the Rule 11 threshold condition of good-faith pleading? We're talking "process of education" here, but is that a legitimate function of a private lawsuit? Aside from the racial restrictive covenant cases, I once knew a guy who used the same tactic in a sex-discrimination case--denied that the plaintiff was a woman and put her to her proof. Same case? Different? Ooh, this is beginning to sound like a law school exam.

Oh, and thanks again, Ivan.]