Neo-Confederate nonsense

As I've mentioned before, one of the themes that gets AOL Journalmeister John Scalzi the most worked up is when he's inspired to ponder the wit and wisdom of latter-day admirers of the Confederacy.  At his non-AOL Whatever blog, the spirit moved him again recently.  To get the full effect, you need to read both of the following two posts and the comments to them:

The Confederacy is Evil 10/28/02.  This one is two years old, but he returns to the theme in the next post linked below.

More Confederate Stupidity 01/04/05.

Scalzi does a good job of skewering the neo-Confederate nonsense, so I won't repeat all his points.  My main criticism of his previous discussions on this subject is that he sometimes shows too much of that admirable Yankee generosity to the advocates of the Jefferson Davis cause.  But in the Jan. 4 post he pretty much manages to keep that fault at bay.

I'll just add a couple of comments amplifying his case against the present-day admirers of the slaveowners' republic.  The endless theme of the neo-Confederates is to insist on the pseudohistorical notion that slavery had nothing to do with the secession of the South.  Some of the more fantasy-prone among them even try to portray the antebellum South as some kind of multicultural paradise.

But the core of the neo-Confederates' case that slavery was not involved in secession is that claim that "states rights" was the real cause.  As I recently recalled, the most able defender of the states rights argument for secession was John C. Calhoun, "the Karl Marx of the master class." (Richard Hofstadter)  As historian Richard Current wrote of him in his biography, John C. Calhoun (1963):

"The South! The poor South!"  Calhoun had exclaimed upon his deathbed.  Certainly he had meant well for his section, his homeland.  Yet by his very efforts to preserve the way of life he loved [i.e., ownership of black slaves by white masters], he had helped to prepare the way for its ultimate destruction.  No man had done more than he to arousethe North, divide the national political parties (the best bonds of union and also the best means of defense for Southern interests), justify state sovereignty (on which secession and the Confederacy were to be based), and persuade Southerns that extreme measures were peaceful and constitutional when, as events were to demonstrate, such measures could lead only to war.  In the desoltated Souther of 1865 it could aptly have been said of Calhoun: if you seek his monument, look about you.

But Calhoun's theory of states rights fell from favor among the defenders of slavery after Calhoun's death in 1850.  Because Southerners held effective control of the national government until the election of Lincoln in 1860.  And in the decade leading up to the Civil War, they used federal power to override the rights of states in order to defend slavery.  The Jefferson Davises and Alexander Stephenses of the South were always ready to lay aside any consider of states rights when it came to using the power of the federal government to protect their property in human flesh.

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was one of the most notorious of those actions.  That bill compelled residents of free Northern states to serve in posses to hunt down escaped slaves.  This particular imposition of the federal government was one of the most unpopular measures in the political battles over slavery, and did much to turn Northern opinion more against the South.  The Kansas-Nebraska Act was another such move, resulting in a mini-civil war in Kansas Territory.  The newly elected President James Buchanan in 1857 threw his support heavily on the side of pro-slavery forces in Kansas (the Lecompton government).  And there was the Dred Scott decision, of course. (See also here.)

After Lincoln's election, the Slave Power suddenly rediscovered its love for states rights, which were indeed invoked as a right of secession.  But the secessionists left no doubt about the core issue over which they were concerned.  And the notion that slavery had nothing to do with secssion would have been thought mad in the months just after Lincoln's election.  Charles Dew in Apostles of Disunion (2001) cites three examples (which countless others could be added):

South Carolina's "Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify Secession" included a list of long-standing constitutional violations by the free states, but it focused primarily on the Northern embrace of antislavery principles and the evil designs of the newly triumphant Republican Party.  The states of the North "have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection," the South Carolinians claimed. With Lincoln's inauguration on March 4, "this party will take possession of the government ..., the South shall be excluded from the common territory ..., and a war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States."

The Georgia Convention was equally outspoken on the subject of slavery.  "For twenty years past, the Abolitionists and their allies in the Northern states, have been engaged in constant efforts to subvert our insstitutions, and to excite insurrection and servile war among us," wrote Robert Toombs, the author of Georgia's declaration of causes.  Constituional protections would become nothing but "parchment rights" in the "treacherous hands" of Republican rulers, whose "avowed purpose is to subject our society, and subject us, not only to the loss of our property but the destruction of ourselves, our wives and our children, and the desolation of our homes, our altars, and our firesides."

The ideas in Mississippi's official statement closely paralleled those of the South Carolina and Georgia pronouncements.  "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery," Mississippi's "Declaration of Immediate Causes" freely acknowledged.  "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 our ruin."  The Mississippi document, after citing a number of hostile acts against slavery going back to the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, charged that a Northern abolitionist majority now "advocates negroe equality, socially and politically, and promotes insurrection and incendiarism in our midst." Under these circumstances there was only one choice left for their state.  "Utter subjugations awaits us in the Union, if we should consent longer to remain in it," the declaration concluded. "We must either submit to degradation and to the loss of property [slaves] worth four billions of money, or we must secede from the  Union."

All this ideological hoo-hah from the neo-Confederates today about how it was all about states rights or protecting some abstract concept of private property is just ridiculous.  After the war, when the conservative Southern "Redeemers" wanted to disenfranchise the former slaves without interference from the federal government, they began to remember in retrospect that the war had supposedly been about the constitutional dedication to states rights.  There was also the pragmatic political motive that slavery had been thoroughly discredited throughout the free states in the course of the war, and the former Confederates wanted to distance themselves from that stigma as much as possible.

Another issue discussed in the Scalzi posts and comments is the question of whether slavery was considered wrong at the time.  He's emphatic on his answer to that, and he's right.  But maybe a little of that Yankee generosity slipped in here.  The idological defense of slavery shifted dramatically from the time of the Revolution to the time of the Civil War.  Early Americans tended to justify slavery as a necessary evil that would one day go away, but had a beneficial civilizing function on the African slaves, training them for civilization someday. 

That was bad enough.  But the Southern Slave Power by the time of the Civil War was making a postive defense of slavery as an unqualified good - and one that should be eternal.  In other words, the attitudes of slave owners were also changing during that period, and for the worse.

Finally, I was struck by how the long neo-Confederate comment, the first comment on the 2002 post, is a good specimen of a bad thing, a crackpot rightwing argument.  That Confederate fan is actually making the following points, buried in the ideological mush the neo-Confederates crank out:

1. Southern secession was not about slavery.

2. His argument is mainly aimed at discrediting the Union cause, aka the American cause, the cause of democracy.

3. He argues that the American flag stands for slavery.  The is a sample of a kind of argument that gives you a clear warning signal you're dealing with extremist/crackpot reasoning.  On the face of it, the Confederate guy is accusing American critics of the Confederate flag of hyporcrisy.

Now, accusing your political opponents of hypocrisy is as common as dirt.  But the telltale clue is that when you start thinking just how he's accusing the Americans of hypocrisy, you find your thoughts weaving around weirdly  like when you look at an M.C. Escher painting.  Now, I really like Escher's artwork.  But when you get that feeling with an argument like this, it's a sign saying, "Crackpot thought at work."

The bottom line on this argument: the Confederate fans think the American flag is evil.  But not because they really think it represents slavery.  It's because it represents democracy.

4. Despite the "it wasn't about slavery" pitch, Scalzi's correspondent winds up defending slavery anyway - which anyone defending the Confederate cause winds up doing pretty quickly.