After the Lincoln movie and all of the buzz about it I did some Lincoln reading. I've been reading about Abraham Lincoln all my life with my continuing interest in 19th Century American history.
Lincoln was stanchly anti-slavery. No one can deny his anti-slavery credentials. What you can say is that maybe his stance was mostly economic rather than moral and that his intent was to rid the country of African Americans believing that whites and blacks could not live together in peace. Like his mentor Henry Clay, Lincoln favored voluntary emigration or colonization of blacks from the country. He made his last public support of this idea in his message to Congress in December of 1862. Did Lincoln ever abandon his idea of colonization?
My conclusion is that it is impossible to know for sure. Historians can make a case either way.
Does is really matter one way or the other?This is a different question and one that I have not seen addressed by any historian that I have read.
Abraham Lincoln is a subject of endless fascination for 19th Century students of American history.
Monday, December 31, 2012
Sunday, December 30, 2012
End of the Year Book Catch-Up
Lincoln: A President for the Ages
Edited by Karl Weber
This is a collection of essays to accompany the movie.
Finished 10/24
The best essay is by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Gates is not a Lincoln scholar but that makes his opinions more valuable. Professor Gates rides the Lincoln grew and changed his racial views train due to the changes he experienced in the war. Eric Foner says that Lincoln's greatest trait was his capacity for change and growth. As Booth did his dastardly deed Lincoln was growing and changing. We will never know where he would have ended up.
I end the year reading We Have the War Upon Us by William J. Cooper.
Edited by Karl Weber
This is a collection of essays to accompany the movie.
Finished 10/24
The best essay is by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Gates is not a Lincoln scholar but that makes his opinions more valuable. Professor Gates rides the Lincoln grew and changed his racial views train due to the changes he experienced in the war. Eric Foner says that Lincoln's greatest trait was his capacity for change and growth. As Booth did his dastardly deed Lincoln was growing and changing. We will never know where he would have ended up.
I end the year reading We Have the War Upon Us by William J. Cooper.
Saturday, December 29, 2012
Stuff White People Like: The Definitive Guide to the Unique Taste of Millions by Christian Lander
I listened to the audiobook while driving to Pelham last Friday. I finished it today. It is a humorous, satirical examination of popular trends and practices among white people. White people are too diverse to accurately generalize about all of them, and this book focuses on things that fit a specific subset of white people: more affluent, liberal, artsy types. Conservative, poorer white people do not get any play in this book, but are instead referred to as "the wrong kind of white people." It was an entertaining, breezy book to listen to while driving for the holidays. The performer was perfect, capturing the satire and ridiculousness of the subject. However, I related to many of the items in this list of 150.
Sunday, December 23, 2012
NY Times Editorial on Guns
The N.R.A. Crawls From Its Hidey HolePublished: December 21, 2012
Wayne LaPierre, the executive vice president of the National Rifle Association, would have been better advised to remain wherever he had been hiding after the Newtown, Conn., massacre, rather than appear at a news conference on Friday. No one seriously believed the N.R.A. when it said it would contribute something “meaningful” to the discussion about gun violence. The organization’s very existence is predicated on the nation being torn in half over guns. Still, we were stunned by Mr. LaPierre’s mendacious, delusional, almost deranged rant.
For Op-Ed, follow @nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow @andyrNYT.
Mr. LaPierre looked wild-eyed at times as he said the killing was the fault of the media, songwriters and singers and the people who listen to them, movie and TV scriptwriters and the people who watch their work, advocates of gun control, video game makers and video game players.
The N.R.A., which devotes itself to destroying compromise on guns, is blameless. So are unscrupulous and unlicensed dealers who sell guns to criminals, and gun makers who bankroll Mr. LaPierre so he can help them peddle ever-more-lethal, ever-more-efficient products, and politicians who kill even modest controls over guns.
His solution to the proliferation of guns, including semiautomatic rifles designed to kill people as quickly as possible, is to put more guns in more places. Mr. LaPierre would put a police officer in every school and compel teachers and principals to become armed guards.
He wants volunteer and professional firefighters, who already risk their lives every day, to be charged with thwarting an assault by a deranged murderer. The same applies to paramedics, security guards, veterans, retired police officers. “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” Mr. LaPierre said.
We cannot imagine trying to turn the principals and teachers who care for our children every day into an armed mob. And let’s be clear, civilians bristling with guns to prevent the “next Newtown” are an armed mob even with training offered up by Mr. LaPierre. Any town officials or school principals who take up the N.R.A. on that offer should be fired.
Mr. LaPierre said the Newtown killing spree “might” have been averted if the killer had been confronted by an armed security guard. It’s far more likely that there would have been a dead armed security guard — just as there would have been even more carnage if civilians had started firing weapons in the Aurora movie theater.
In the 62 mass-murder cases over 30 years examined recently by the magazine Mother Jones, not one was stopped by an armed civilian. We have known for many years that a sheriff’s deputy was at Columbine High School in 1999 and fired at one of the two killers while 11 of their 13 victims were still alive. He missed four times.
People like Mr. LaPierre want us to believe that civilians can be trained to use lethal force with cold precision in moments of fear and crisis. That requires a willful ignorance about the facts. Police officers know that firing a weapon is a huge risk; that’s why they avoid doing it. In August, New York City police officers opened fire on a gunman outside the Empire State Building. They killed him and wounded nine bystanders.
Mr. LaPierre said the news media call the semiautomatic weapon used in Newtown a machine gun, claim that it’s a military weapon and that it fires the most powerful ammunition available. That’s not true. What is true is that there is a growing call in America for stricter gun control.
Wayne LaPierre, the executive vice president of the National Rifle Association, would have been better advised to remain wherever he had been hiding after the Newtown, Conn., massacre, rather than appear at a news conference on Friday. No one seriously believed the N.R.A. when it said it would contribute something “meaningful” to the discussion about gun violence. The organization’s very existence is predicated on the nation being torn in half over guns. Still, we were stunned by Mr. LaPierre’s mendacious, delusional, almost deranged rant.
For Op-Ed, follow @nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow @andyrNYT.
Mr. LaPierre looked wild-eyed at times as he said the killing was the fault of the media, songwriters and singers and the people who listen to them, movie and TV scriptwriters and the people who watch their work, advocates of gun control, video game makers and video game players.
The N.R.A., which devotes itself to destroying compromise on guns, is blameless. So are unscrupulous and unlicensed dealers who sell guns to criminals, and gun makers who bankroll Mr. LaPierre so he can help them peddle ever-more-lethal, ever-more-efficient products, and politicians who kill even modest controls over guns.
His solution to the proliferation of guns, including semiautomatic rifles designed to kill people as quickly as possible, is to put more guns in more places. Mr. LaPierre would put a police officer in every school and compel teachers and principals to become armed guards.
He wants volunteer and professional firefighters, who already risk their lives every day, to be charged with thwarting an assault by a deranged murderer. The same applies to paramedics, security guards, veterans, retired police officers. “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” Mr. LaPierre said.
We cannot imagine trying to turn the principals and teachers who care for our children every day into an armed mob. And let’s be clear, civilians bristling with guns to prevent the “next Newtown” are an armed mob even with training offered up by Mr. LaPierre. Any town officials or school principals who take up the N.R.A. on that offer should be fired.
Mr. LaPierre said the Newtown killing spree “might” have been averted if the killer had been confronted by an armed security guard. It’s far more likely that there would have been a dead armed security guard — just as there would have been even more carnage if civilians had started firing weapons in the Aurora movie theater.
In the 62 mass-murder cases over 30 years examined recently by the magazine Mother Jones, not one was stopped by an armed civilian. We have known for many years that a sheriff’s deputy was at Columbine High School in 1999 and fired at one of the two killers while 11 of their 13 victims were still alive. He missed four times.
People like Mr. LaPierre want us to believe that civilians can be trained to use lethal force with cold precision in moments of fear and crisis. That requires a willful ignorance about the facts. Police officers know that firing a weapon is a huge risk; that’s why they avoid doing it. In August, New York City police officers opened fire on a gunman outside the Empire State Building. They killed him and wounded nine bystanders.
Mr. LaPierre said the news media call the semiautomatic weapon used in Newtown a machine gun, claim that it’s a military weapon and that it fires the most powerful ammunition available. That’s not true. What is true is that there is a growing call in America for stricter gun control.
Tuesday, December 18, 2012
Right-Wing Hypocrisy on the Second Amendment
December 18, 2012
So You Think You Know the Second Amendment?
Posted by Jeffrey Toobin
Does the Second Amendment prevent Congress from passing gun-control laws? The question, which is suddenly pressing, in light of the reaction to the school massacre in Newtown, is rooted in politics as much as law.
For more than a hundred years, the answer was clear, even if the words of the amendment itself were not. The text of the amendment is divided into two clauses and is, as a whole, ungrammatical: “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” The courts had found that the first part, the “militia clause,” trumped the second part, the “bear arms” clause. In other words, according to the Supreme Court, and the lower courts as well, the amendment conferred on state militias a right to bear arms—but did not give individuals a right to own or carry a weapon.
Enter the modern National Rifle Association. Before the nineteen-seventies, the N.R.A. had been devoted mostly to non-political issues, like gun safety. But a coup d’état at the group’s annual convention in 1977 brought a group of committed political conservatives to power—as part of the leading edge of the new, more rightward-leaning Republican Party. (Jill Lepore recounted this history in a recent piece for The New Yorker.) The new group pushed for a novel interpretation of the Second Amendment, one that gave individuals, not just militias, the right to bear arms. It was an uphill struggle. At first, their views were widely scorned. Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, who was no liberal, mocked the individual-rights theory of the amendment as “a fraud.”
But the N.R.A. kept pushing—and there’s a lesson here. Conservatives often embrace “originalism,” the idea that the meaning of the Constitution was fixed when it was ratified, in 1787. They mock the so-called liberal idea of a “living” constitution, whose meaning changes with the values of the country at large. But there is no better example of the living Constitution than the conservative re-casting of the Second Amendment in the last few decades of the twentieth century. (Reva Siegel, of Yale Law School, elaborates on this point in a brilliant article.)
The re-interpretation of the Second Amendment was an elaborate and brilliantly executed political operation, inside and outside of government. Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 brought a gun-rights enthusiast to the White House. At the same time, Orrin Hatch, the Utah Republican, became chairman of an important subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and he commissioned a report that claimed to find “clear—and long lost—proof that the second amendment to our Constitution was intended as an individual right of the American citizen to keep and carry arms in a peaceful manner, for protection of himself, his family, and his freedoms.” The N.R.A. began commissioning academic studies aimed at proving the same conclusion. An outré constitutional theory, rejected even by the establishment of the Republican Party, evolved, through brute political force, into the conservative conventional wisdom.
And so, eventually, this theory became the law of the land. In District of Columbia v. Heller, decided in 2008, the Supreme Court embraced the individual-rights view of the Second Amendment. It was a triumph above all for Justice Antonin Scalia, the author of the opinion, but it required him to craft a thoroughly political compromise. In the eighteenth century, militias were proto-military operations, and their members had to obtain the best military hardware of the day. But Scalia could not create, in the twenty-first century, an individual right to contemporary military weapons—like tanks and Stinger missiles. In light of this, Scalia conjured a rule that said D.C. could not ban handguns because “handguns are the most popular weapon chosen by Americans for self-defense in the home, and a complete prohibition of their use is invalid.”
So the government cannot ban handguns, but it can ban other weapons—like, say, an assault rifle—or so it appears. The full meaning of the court’s Heller opinion is still up for grabs. But it is clear that the scope of the Second Amendment will be determined as much by politics as by the law. The courts will respond to public pressure—as they did by moving to the right on gun control in the last thirty years. And if legislators, responding to their constituents, sense a mandate for new restrictions on guns, the courts will find a way to uphold them. The battle over gun control is not just one of individual votes in Congress, but of a continuing clash of ideas, backed by political power. In other words, the law of the Second Amendment is not settled; no law, not even the Constitution, ever is.
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2012/12/jeffrey-toobin-second-amendment.html#ixzz2FPvQkhWq
So You Think You Know the Second Amendment?
Posted by Jeffrey Toobin
Does the Second Amendment prevent Congress from passing gun-control laws? The question, which is suddenly pressing, in light of the reaction to the school massacre in Newtown, is rooted in politics as much as law.
For more than a hundred years, the answer was clear, even if the words of the amendment itself were not. The text of the amendment is divided into two clauses and is, as a whole, ungrammatical: “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” The courts had found that the first part, the “militia clause,” trumped the second part, the “bear arms” clause. In other words, according to the Supreme Court, and the lower courts as well, the amendment conferred on state militias a right to bear arms—but did not give individuals a right to own or carry a weapon.
Enter the modern National Rifle Association. Before the nineteen-seventies, the N.R.A. had been devoted mostly to non-political issues, like gun safety. But a coup d’état at the group’s annual convention in 1977 brought a group of committed political conservatives to power—as part of the leading edge of the new, more rightward-leaning Republican Party. (Jill Lepore recounted this history in a recent piece for The New Yorker.) The new group pushed for a novel interpretation of the Second Amendment, one that gave individuals, not just militias, the right to bear arms. It was an uphill struggle. At first, their views were widely scorned. Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, who was no liberal, mocked the individual-rights theory of the amendment as “a fraud.”
But the N.R.A. kept pushing—and there’s a lesson here. Conservatives often embrace “originalism,” the idea that the meaning of the Constitution was fixed when it was ratified, in 1787. They mock the so-called liberal idea of a “living” constitution, whose meaning changes with the values of the country at large. But there is no better example of the living Constitution than the conservative re-casting of the Second Amendment in the last few decades of the twentieth century. (Reva Siegel, of Yale Law School, elaborates on this point in a brilliant article.)
The re-interpretation of the Second Amendment was an elaborate and brilliantly executed political operation, inside and outside of government. Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 brought a gun-rights enthusiast to the White House. At the same time, Orrin Hatch, the Utah Republican, became chairman of an important subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and he commissioned a report that claimed to find “clear—and long lost—proof that the second amendment to our Constitution was intended as an individual right of the American citizen to keep and carry arms in a peaceful manner, for protection of himself, his family, and his freedoms.” The N.R.A. began commissioning academic studies aimed at proving the same conclusion. An outré constitutional theory, rejected even by the establishment of the Republican Party, evolved, through brute political force, into the conservative conventional wisdom.
And so, eventually, this theory became the law of the land. In District of Columbia v. Heller, decided in 2008, the Supreme Court embraced the individual-rights view of the Second Amendment. It was a triumph above all for Justice Antonin Scalia, the author of the opinion, but it required him to craft a thoroughly political compromise. In the eighteenth century, militias were proto-military operations, and their members had to obtain the best military hardware of the day. But Scalia could not create, in the twenty-first century, an individual right to contemporary military weapons—like tanks and Stinger missiles. In light of this, Scalia conjured a rule that said D.C. could not ban handguns because “handguns are the most popular weapon chosen by Americans for self-defense in the home, and a complete prohibition of their use is invalid.”
So the government cannot ban handguns, but it can ban other weapons—like, say, an assault rifle—or so it appears. The full meaning of the court’s Heller opinion is still up for grabs. But it is clear that the scope of the Second Amendment will be determined as much by politics as by the law. The courts will respond to public pressure—as they did by moving to the right on gun control in the last thirty years. And if legislators, responding to their constituents, sense a mandate for new restrictions on guns, the courts will find a way to uphold them. The battle over gun control is not just one of individual votes in Congress, but of a continuing clash of ideas, backed by political power. In other words, the law of the Second Amendment is not settled; no law, not even the Constitution, ever is.
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2012/12/jeffrey-toobin-second-amendment.html#ixzz2FPvQkhWq
Speilberg the Historian?
Disunion November 29, 2012, 12:13 pm62 Comments
Steven Spielberg, Historian
By PHILIP ZELIKOW
Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.
Abraham Lincoln, Movies, Steven Spielberg, The Civil War
Having worked before at the intersection of Hollywood and history, helping a tiny bit with a respectable movie about the Cuban missile crisis called “Thirteen Days,” I approached the new movie “Lincoln” with measured expectations. I had seen how a film could immerse viewers in onscreen time travel without messing up the history too much. But that was the most I hoped for.
“Lincoln,” however, accomplishes a far more challenging objective: its speculations actually advance the way historians will consider this subject.
The movie, directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Daniel Day-Lewis as the 16th president, makes two especially interesting historical arguments.
The first is to explain why the passage of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery, was overwhelmingly important to Lincoln in January 1865. The issue is not why passage was important; the movie explains that clearly enough. Instead, the problem is to explain the frenzied work to pass it in that month. As the historian Michael Vorenberg has observed, “No piece of legislation during Lincoln’s presidency received more of his attention.” Why the all-out effort in January, in a lame-duck session before a newly empowered pro-Lincoln Congress began? If Lincoln had waited until March, he could have called a special session of the new Congress, confident of having enough votes for House passage.
The question has long vexed historians. The movie’s answer is that Lincoln and his right-hand man in this work, Secretary of State William H. Seward, realized that the war might end at any time and that, when it did, any prospect for passing the amendment as a means to win the war would end with it.
This is an intriguing argument. But the book the movie cites as its main evidentiary source, Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals,” does not make it. Like other standard accounts, like James McPherson’s renowned overview of the war, “Battle Cry of Freedom,” Ms. Goodwin repeats Lincoln’s own explanation, that he wanted prompt action because bipartisan approval would show national unity. But that’s a dubious claim: the nation already was united, as it had proved in the November 1864 elections. The filmmakers’ argument seems more convincing.
Moreover, their reading of this part of Lincoln’s political strategy provides the linchpin for another interpretive jump made in the film.
.In “Lincoln,” the story of the battle to pass the 13th Amendment is deeply intertwined with a parallel story, unfolding at the same time, of secret negotiations to end the war. With Lincoln’s consent and a note of safe passage, an influential conservative Republican, Preston Blair, went through the lines to the Confederate capital at Richmond, Va. Blair, on his own initiative, persuaded the Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, to send commissioners, including his vice president, back through the Union lines to discuss possible peace terms. The movie argues that at least one of Lincoln’s motives in this episode was to secure votes for the 13th Amendment from Blair’s conservative allies in Congress.
The movie goes on to argue that Lincoln calibrated the timing of this diplomacy, including delaying his own meeting with the Confederate envoys, to be sure that nothing from it would materialize in time to jeopardize passage of the amendment. Lincoln met with the envoys three days after the amendment had passed the Congress. The peace initiative came to nothing.
Historians have never been very clear on just why Lincoln entertained Blair’s project in the way he did. But there is, in fact, good evidence to support the filmmakers’ supposition of a deal linking the Blair peace initiative to the politics of the 13th Amendment.
Seward later acknowledged that a principal ally in the vote, perhaps the most important one, was a Democratic congressman from Ohio named Samuel Cox, known as Sunset. Cox was a lame duck; he had just been defeated in the 1864 election.
Cox later returned to Congress, this time representing a New York district. In an 1872 debate on the floor of the House, Cox was pushed hard by Henry Dawes, a Republican from Massachusetts, about Cox’s past record on race matters, including Cox’s 1865 vote against the 13th Amendment. According to The Congressional Globe, Cox replied:
Mr. Seward, in an address at Auburn, said that I was one of the Democratic party … who carried the thirteenth amendment. It required two thirds. I did not vote for it. I promised Mr. Lincoln (and his partner, Mr. Stewart, from the Springfield district, Illinois, then a member of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, who was with me at the time of the interview) that I would vote for that amendment if the President would undertake to send somebody down to Richmond and endeavor to secure an agreement on the part of the leaders of the confederacy to come back on the basis of the Constitution and the Union. I did this, so help me God, to stop the shedding of human blood. Mr. Lincoln sent down, as will be remembered, Mr. Blair.
I intended to vote for the thirteenth amendment till I was advised that the condition failed. The vote was about coming off, when Mr. Ashley, of Ohio, who had charge of the bill, sent me word that there was an arrangement pending; that Messrs. Stephens, Hunter, and, I think, Judge Campbell, had arrived at General Grant’s headquarters. A treaty was in progress. Hearing this, I said, ‘Now I cannot vote for this amendment, because there is an agreement going on, and I prefer that the vote be postponed for the present. If the matter is pushed now I must vote against the amendment.’ I voted in the interest of human life, but, as the sequel showed, I did not forget human liberty.
Mr. Chairman, I did so want to stop the shedding of blood. After vindicating in debate our right to amend the Constitution (antagonizing Mr. Pendleton and agreeing with Mr. Dawes and others) according to the prescribed mode, I said in debate that slavery had already been killed by the Army; that it was riddled with bullets, and might as well be buried.
“Was that the reason the gentleman voted against the measure?” Dawes asked.
“I had persuaded certain gentlemen to vote for that bill — enough of them to carry it,” Cox replied,
But I could not vote for it myself under the circumstances. That is the whole of the story.
The gentleman knows that I speak veraciously. A fund of some seventy-five thousand dollars was raised, it was said, to buy up votes for that measure; and I understood that $10,000 was put up for my vote. Happily I escaped any reproach, for I did not vote for it, but against it.
This account is mighty close to the narrative portrayed in the film. (Incidentally, it appears that Ashley may have given his fellow congressman from Ohio some inside information about the status of the commissioners beyond what the House heard from President Lincoln.)
True, the movie takes some liberties for dramatic effect, particularly on the specific timing of the 13th Amendment vote and Lincoln’s efforts to delay the commissioners’ trip to Washington. (It also has a caption implying that the vote occurred on Jan. 27 instead of on Jan. 31.) The moviemakers rearranged, for example, the timing of a message from Gen. Ulysses S. Grant urging Lincoln to meet with the commissioners. Grant did send the message and Lincoln did go promptly to see the commissioners — “induced,” he wrote, by Grant’s request. But that exchange happened after the 13th Amendment vote.
Yet the filmmakers have held to some essential truth even in these particulars. The commissioners first sought to cross the Union lines for their meeting on Jan. 29. Their arrival was no surprise; Lincoln had just talked about the situation with Blair. They were held in place at Lincoln’s direction until he could ascertain their readiness to consider reunion “in a single common country” as a condition of negotiation. On the day of the amendment vote, the commissioners were still parked out of the way, at Grant’s headquarters in Virginia.
An unfolding history of the Civil War with photos and articles from the Times archive and ongoing commentary from Disunion contributors.
.Then, on Jan. 31, at the climax of the amendment debate, Lincoln answered an urgent question from the House about whether the Confederate commissioners had come to see him. He answered, correctly and literally, that as far as he knew no such commissioners had come to the capital city. The amendment passed later that day, just as Lincoln completed his instructions for what Seward should say to the commissioners in advance of Lincoln’s own journey to meet them.
The basic facts surrounding the Blair initiative and the amendment vote are well established. But the movie’s argument, connecting these two storylines, is not. Again, it does not appear in Ms. Goodwin’s book. Nor does it receive much notice even in other standard accounts, like that of Mr. Vorenberg (though David Donald alluded to the possibility briefly in his Lincoln biography, as did Eric Foner in his book “The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery”).
Yet here again it turns out that the filmmakers have made a persuasive case, and in a way that written history usually fails to pursue, let alone accomplish. Historians, driven by a focus and a thesis, rarely recognize that their chosen issue has to be seen in the context of all the other issues in play at the same time. But this is exactly what presidents do. And to their credit, this is also what these filmmakers have done in re-enacting a president’s world.
According to the movie’s production notes, Mr. Spielberg and the screenwriter, Tony Kushner, did significant research into this particular period, consulting various historians, including Ms. Goodwin. It appears that, puzzling over the coincidences and conjunctures, they developed their own original and plausible interpretation of what happened, peppering the script with lines drawn from documents and memoirs.
Their interpretation is of an idealistic yet very practical president, but not an unethical one. Even the disingenuous note to the House about the Confederate commissioners embodied an element of real truth. After all, Lincoln was still not sure the commissioners had accepted the premise for a productive negotiation: readiness to discuss terms for rejoining the Union. So if, instead of his blandly deflating reply, he had given a different answer to the House question, he might have done too much to inflate the distracting balloon while the House vote was still in doubt.
Because filmmakers can often devote far more resources to research than scholars can, because the sheer process of a painstaking reconstruction of a past world can itself yield insights about it, it has always been possible that filmmakers might add to our collective historical understanding, rather than either popularizing or debasing it. In Mr. Spielberg’s “Lincoln,” that possibility is happily realized.
Steven Spielberg, Historian
By PHILIP ZELIKOW
Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.
Abraham Lincoln, Movies, Steven Spielberg, The Civil War
Having worked before at the intersection of Hollywood and history, helping a tiny bit with a respectable movie about the Cuban missile crisis called “Thirteen Days,” I approached the new movie “Lincoln” with measured expectations. I had seen how a film could immerse viewers in onscreen time travel without messing up the history too much. But that was the most I hoped for.
“Lincoln,” however, accomplishes a far more challenging objective: its speculations actually advance the way historians will consider this subject.
The movie, directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Daniel Day-Lewis as the 16th president, makes two especially interesting historical arguments.
The first is to explain why the passage of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery, was overwhelmingly important to Lincoln in January 1865. The issue is not why passage was important; the movie explains that clearly enough. Instead, the problem is to explain the frenzied work to pass it in that month. As the historian Michael Vorenberg has observed, “No piece of legislation during Lincoln’s presidency received more of his attention.” Why the all-out effort in January, in a lame-duck session before a newly empowered pro-Lincoln Congress began? If Lincoln had waited until March, he could have called a special session of the new Congress, confident of having enough votes for House passage.
The question has long vexed historians. The movie’s answer is that Lincoln and his right-hand man in this work, Secretary of State William H. Seward, realized that the war might end at any time and that, when it did, any prospect for passing the amendment as a means to win the war would end with it.
This is an intriguing argument. But the book the movie cites as its main evidentiary source, Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals,” does not make it. Like other standard accounts, like James McPherson’s renowned overview of the war, “Battle Cry of Freedom,” Ms. Goodwin repeats Lincoln’s own explanation, that he wanted prompt action because bipartisan approval would show national unity. But that’s a dubious claim: the nation already was united, as it had proved in the November 1864 elections. The filmmakers’ argument seems more convincing.
Moreover, their reading of this part of Lincoln’s political strategy provides the linchpin for another interpretive jump made in the film.
.In “Lincoln,” the story of the battle to pass the 13th Amendment is deeply intertwined with a parallel story, unfolding at the same time, of secret negotiations to end the war. With Lincoln’s consent and a note of safe passage, an influential conservative Republican, Preston Blair, went through the lines to the Confederate capital at Richmond, Va. Blair, on his own initiative, persuaded the Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, to send commissioners, including his vice president, back through the Union lines to discuss possible peace terms. The movie argues that at least one of Lincoln’s motives in this episode was to secure votes for the 13th Amendment from Blair’s conservative allies in Congress.
The movie goes on to argue that Lincoln calibrated the timing of this diplomacy, including delaying his own meeting with the Confederate envoys, to be sure that nothing from it would materialize in time to jeopardize passage of the amendment. Lincoln met with the envoys three days after the amendment had passed the Congress. The peace initiative came to nothing.
Historians have never been very clear on just why Lincoln entertained Blair’s project in the way he did. But there is, in fact, good evidence to support the filmmakers’ supposition of a deal linking the Blair peace initiative to the politics of the 13th Amendment.
Seward later acknowledged that a principal ally in the vote, perhaps the most important one, was a Democratic congressman from Ohio named Samuel Cox, known as Sunset. Cox was a lame duck; he had just been defeated in the 1864 election.
Cox later returned to Congress, this time representing a New York district. In an 1872 debate on the floor of the House, Cox was pushed hard by Henry Dawes, a Republican from Massachusetts, about Cox’s past record on race matters, including Cox’s 1865 vote against the 13th Amendment. According to The Congressional Globe, Cox replied:
Mr. Seward, in an address at Auburn, said that I was one of the Democratic party … who carried the thirteenth amendment. It required two thirds. I did not vote for it. I promised Mr. Lincoln (and his partner, Mr. Stewart, from the Springfield district, Illinois, then a member of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, who was with me at the time of the interview) that I would vote for that amendment if the President would undertake to send somebody down to Richmond and endeavor to secure an agreement on the part of the leaders of the confederacy to come back on the basis of the Constitution and the Union. I did this, so help me God, to stop the shedding of human blood. Mr. Lincoln sent down, as will be remembered, Mr. Blair.
I intended to vote for the thirteenth amendment till I was advised that the condition failed. The vote was about coming off, when Mr. Ashley, of Ohio, who had charge of the bill, sent me word that there was an arrangement pending; that Messrs. Stephens, Hunter, and, I think, Judge Campbell, had arrived at General Grant’s headquarters. A treaty was in progress. Hearing this, I said, ‘Now I cannot vote for this amendment, because there is an agreement going on, and I prefer that the vote be postponed for the present. If the matter is pushed now I must vote against the amendment.’ I voted in the interest of human life, but, as the sequel showed, I did not forget human liberty.
Mr. Chairman, I did so want to stop the shedding of blood. After vindicating in debate our right to amend the Constitution (antagonizing Mr. Pendleton and agreeing with Mr. Dawes and others) according to the prescribed mode, I said in debate that slavery had already been killed by the Army; that it was riddled with bullets, and might as well be buried.
“Was that the reason the gentleman voted against the measure?” Dawes asked.
“I had persuaded certain gentlemen to vote for that bill — enough of them to carry it,” Cox replied,
But I could not vote for it myself under the circumstances. That is the whole of the story.
The gentleman knows that I speak veraciously. A fund of some seventy-five thousand dollars was raised, it was said, to buy up votes for that measure; and I understood that $10,000 was put up for my vote. Happily I escaped any reproach, for I did not vote for it, but against it.
This account is mighty close to the narrative portrayed in the film. (Incidentally, it appears that Ashley may have given his fellow congressman from Ohio some inside information about the status of the commissioners beyond what the House heard from President Lincoln.)
True, the movie takes some liberties for dramatic effect, particularly on the specific timing of the 13th Amendment vote and Lincoln’s efforts to delay the commissioners’ trip to Washington. (It also has a caption implying that the vote occurred on Jan. 27 instead of on Jan. 31.) The moviemakers rearranged, for example, the timing of a message from Gen. Ulysses S. Grant urging Lincoln to meet with the commissioners. Grant did send the message and Lincoln did go promptly to see the commissioners — “induced,” he wrote, by Grant’s request. But that exchange happened after the 13th Amendment vote.
Yet the filmmakers have held to some essential truth even in these particulars. The commissioners first sought to cross the Union lines for their meeting on Jan. 29. Their arrival was no surprise; Lincoln had just talked about the situation with Blair. They were held in place at Lincoln’s direction until he could ascertain their readiness to consider reunion “in a single common country” as a condition of negotiation. On the day of the amendment vote, the commissioners were still parked out of the way, at Grant’s headquarters in Virginia.
An unfolding history of the Civil War with photos and articles from the Times archive and ongoing commentary from Disunion contributors.
.Then, on Jan. 31, at the climax of the amendment debate, Lincoln answered an urgent question from the House about whether the Confederate commissioners had come to see him. He answered, correctly and literally, that as far as he knew no such commissioners had come to the capital city. The amendment passed later that day, just as Lincoln completed his instructions for what Seward should say to the commissioners in advance of Lincoln’s own journey to meet them.
The basic facts surrounding the Blair initiative and the amendment vote are well established. But the movie’s argument, connecting these two storylines, is not. Again, it does not appear in Ms. Goodwin’s book. Nor does it receive much notice even in other standard accounts, like that of Mr. Vorenberg (though David Donald alluded to the possibility briefly in his Lincoln biography, as did Eric Foner in his book “The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery”).
Yet here again it turns out that the filmmakers have made a persuasive case, and in a way that written history usually fails to pursue, let alone accomplish. Historians, driven by a focus and a thesis, rarely recognize that their chosen issue has to be seen in the context of all the other issues in play at the same time. But this is exactly what presidents do. And to their credit, this is also what these filmmakers have done in re-enacting a president’s world.
According to the movie’s production notes, Mr. Spielberg and the screenwriter, Tony Kushner, did significant research into this particular period, consulting various historians, including Ms. Goodwin. It appears that, puzzling over the coincidences and conjunctures, they developed their own original and plausible interpretation of what happened, peppering the script with lines drawn from documents and memoirs.
Their interpretation is of an idealistic yet very practical president, but not an unethical one. Even the disingenuous note to the House about the Confederate commissioners embodied an element of real truth. After all, Lincoln was still not sure the commissioners had accepted the premise for a productive negotiation: readiness to discuss terms for rejoining the Union. So if, instead of his blandly deflating reply, he had given a different answer to the House question, he might have done too much to inflate the distracting balloon while the House vote was still in doubt.
Because filmmakers can often devote far more resources to research than scholars can, because the sheer process of a painstaking reconstruction of a past world can itself yield insights about it, it has always been possible that filmmakers might add to our collective historical understanding, rather than either popularizing or debasing it. In Mr. Spielberg’s “Lincoln,” that possibility is happily realized.
Monday, December 17, 2012
Another Review of the Lincoln Movie
Monday, Dec 17, 2012 03:55 PM CST
Spielberg gets Lincoln wrong
But it's not his fault. History this nuanced and complex doesn't lend itself to a two-and-a-half hour feature film
By Kelly Candaele, LA Review of Books
ONE OF THE MOST gratifying aspects of Steven Spielberg’s movie Lincoln has been the debate that its release has generated among historians and journalists, a debate more important than the movie itself. What were the complex dilemmas that Lincoln faced as President? What were the political realities and conduct of the time? How should we interpret the decisions that Lincoln and others made? What role did slaves and free blacks play in their own liberation?
Despite the fact that the film focuses on a short period of time in Lincoln’s presidency and deals primarily with the political cut and thrust associated with the passage of the 13th Amendment, there is a real sense in which the film can be described as deeply philosophical. Lincoln is portrayed as a man of discipline, concentration, and energy, all characteristics that sociologist Max Weber defined as part of the serious politician’s vocation. By forging an effective and realized political character — one aspect of Weber’s definition of charismatic authority — an astute politician can change the nature of power in society. By controlling his all-too-human vanity, he can avoid the two deadly political sins of lack of objectivity and irresponsibility. For Weber, a certain “distance to things and men” was required to abide by an “ethic of responsibility” for the weighty decisions that leaders are often required to make.
Lincoln has always been a man for all political seasons. There is Lincoln the principled politician, who believed that war was a necessary and legitimate means to sustain the Union; Lincoln the timid compromiser, who as late as 16 months into the war declared that if he “could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it”; and Lincoln the reconciling healer of “With malice toward none, with charity for all,” of the Second Inaugural.
Conservative New York Times writer David Brooks argued in a November 22 column that it was Lincoln’s internal strength and ability to compromise that allowed for the possibility of public good. For Brooks, the temptations of fame and ideological rigidity are what undermine the average politician’s ability to compromise. Weber called the losers in that wrestling match with fame, political “windbags.”
But for liberal Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne, it was Lincoln’s principled stand on the 13th Amendment and the need to ban slavery that accounts for his iconic status as one of our greatest Presidents. In an October 19 piece, Dionne encouraged Obama to “follow Lincoln’s example” by refusing to compromise with current economic and financial injustice.
While most political journalists have viewed the film with an eye on the current political stalemate, our most prominent historians have looked for accuracy and context.
Columbia University Professor Eric Foner, one of the most eminent historians of the Civil War and Reconstruction, sees the film as an “inside the beltway” rendition of the period. In a recent interview on Jon Wiener’s KPFK radio show, Foner points out that during the period that the movie covers, General William Tecumseh Sherman’s Union Army was marching through South Carolina. Slaves, in full-scale rebellion, were seizing plantations and “occupying” the land that they had worked. Slavery was “dying on the ground,” Foner insisted, not just in the House of Representatives. In Lincoln, “We are back to the old idea of Lincoln freeing the slaves by himself,” Foner says, reinforcing a one-dimensional view of a complicated historical process. The problem is not what the movie shows but what it doesn’t show.
Additionally, as Foner points out in his Pulitzer Prize wining book, The Fiery Trial, Lincoln was “non-committal” during the failed 1864 attempt by Congress to pass the 13th Amendment. This was at a time when abolitionists, including the Women’s National Loyal League headed by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, were delivering “monster” petitions to congress urging them to pass the amendment. They had gathered 400,000 signatures by mid 1864, but Lincoln was pushing for state-enacted emancipation in the border-states and occupied south.
Lincoln was also a “passive observer” of Senator Charles Sumner’s “crusade” to pass legislation that would allow blacks to carry mail, ride on streetcars, and testify in Federal courts in the District of Columbia, although he signed the bills that managed to pass in Congress. It was not until John C. Fremont was nominated for President in May 1864 — as a challenge to Lincoln — that Lincoln encouraged his party to embrace a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery.
Foner also challenges the “race against time” plot of the movie, whereby recalcitrant Republicans and pro-slavery Democrats stall the work of Congress while a Confederate peace initiative threatens to undermine the amendment’s only chance at passage. In reality, Lincoln had told the lame-duck congress that if they did not pass the amendment he would call a special session of the new Congress in March of 1865, made up of enough Republicans (elected that November) to easily pass the amendment.
Historian James Oakes, in his book Freedom National — The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, published in early December, suggests that Lincoln screenwriter Tony Kushner might have that part of the history right. Oakes points out that a large number of Republicans felt that the amendment abolishing slavery was a “civil” rather than “military” measure, and that the basis for changing the constitution was thus linked to the winning of the war. As the war’s end drew closer, the justification for the 13th Amendment was potentially undermined.
In an email exchange with me about his book and the movie, Oakes speculates that Lincoln and his Republican allies were worried that public support for the passage of the amendment would dissipate as the exigencies of war diminished. “If abolition were imposed AFTER [Oakes’s caps] the South surrendered it might seem vindictive to northern voters, or voters might think Republicans were liars or were disingenuous for having claimed that abolition was a war measure,” Oakes wrote. Although this argument does not appear in the film, it was a central theme for New York Congressman Fernando Wood, the Democratic attack dog in Congress and in the film.
What Oakes finds more troubling in terms of historical accuracy is the scenario set up by Kushner, whereby conservative Republicans (represented in the film by Montgomery Blair) and Radical Republicans had to be brought in line to defeat the Democrats and pass the amendment. Oakes points out that the Republicans were united all along, as demonstrated by the House vote to pass the 13th Amendment that took place the previous July. There was only one Republican “no” vote at that time, cast by Ohio Republican James M. Ashley. Ashley was a strong supporter of the amendment, but realizing the amendment was about to lose, he voted no as a procedural maneuver that would allow him to call for reconsideration of the amendment when Congress returned in December.
Blair, who had represented Dred Scott in the famous Supreme Court case, was Lincoln’s Postmaster General until he was replaced in late 1864. Blair had influence in Maryland and Missouri and was called upon to secure Border State Unionist votes, not to cajole conservative Republicans. Between July 1864 — when Democrats and Border State congressman had defeated the amendment — and January 1865, both Maryland and Missouri had abolished slavery. So Congressmen who had represented slave states the previous July were representing free states in January. They were the Congressmen that Blair went after.
Historians and journalists will and should continue debating the historical accuracy and limited context of the film, especially the invisibility of blacks as central participants in their own liberation.
In his blog, Brooklyn College Professor Cory Robin quotes from the 1992 book Slaves No More (by Ira Berlin et.al.), making it clear that despite Lincoln’s great accomplishment, historians overturned long ago a Lincoln-centered view of emancipation. The destruction of slavery was:
[A] process by which slavery collapsed under the pressure of federal arms and the slaves’ determination to place their own liberty on the wartime agenda. In documenting the transformation of a war for the Union into a war against slavery, it shifts the focus from the halls of power in Washington and Richmond to the plantations, farms, and battlefields of the South and demonstrates how slaves accomplished their own liberation and shaped the destiny of a nation.
The relegating of African Americans to secondary roles, even in films where black civil rights is the central topic (2011’s The Help is a recent example) is unfortunately the rule rather than the exception. But on the positive side, Lincoln has accomplished something that historian and literary critic Irving Howe suggested is very rare for American artists: the ability to portray politics as “a distinctive mode of social existence with manners and values of its own.”
The history of slavery, its origins, extirpation, and consequences, becomes more fascinating and illuminating once the context is expanded. Robin Blackburn’s new book The American Crucible — Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights argues that the success of anti-slavery movements involved some combination of class struggle, war, and a re-casting of the state’s relationship to the claims of property — New York Congressman Fernando Wood, for instance, spoke against the 13th Amendment as a “tyrannical destruction of individual property.” Wood was pointing to the broader underpinnings of both the Constitution and state law.
For Blackburn, who writes in a Marxist vein, dominant economic interests, both North and South, needed a “different type of state.” In the South, slaves, who were legally property, could run away, while northern manufacturing demanded state regulation of finance, funding for internal transportation and communications infrastructure, and tariff protection. These Unionist and Confederate “rival nationalisms” were both expansionist, the Union looking to overtake the continent and the Confederacy eyeing new slave territory in the West, the South and in Cuba. The clash, according to Blackburn, “was thus one of rival empires, as well as competing nationalisms.”
Foner also places the state in the center of Civil War and Reconstruction history, focusing on how shifting political dynamics shaped the economic and social relations that followed the abolition of slavery. Slavery was a mode of racial domination but also a system of labor that a “distinctive ruling class” was fighting to retain. The “labor question,” and what role the state would play in re-constituting a disciplined and docile labor force after the Civil War became central to the battle between former master and former slave.
It was Radical Republican Thaddeus Stevens (portrayed by Tommy Lee Jones inLincoln), Foner points out, who recognized the “hollow victory” that liberation would bring unless accompanied by the “destruction of the land-based political power” of the agrarian ruling classes. In Nothing but Freedom — Emancipation and Its Legacy, Foner reveals some striking similarities between post-emancipation southern politics and similar developments in the Caribbean and Africa. Struggles over immigration, labor laws, taxation, fiscal policy and the definition of property rights “reveal how much of post-emancipation politics was defined by the ‘labor problem.’ In the southern United States, sharecropping became the common solution to an economic struggle whereby resilient planters and large landowners where eventually (after Radical Reconstruction) able to deny blacks access to productive land, capital, and political power.
If this seems a bit far afield from the central focus of Lincoln, it shows how difficult — how impossible — it is to present complex historical “moments” through film. History is not a series of “moments” but is, as the recently deceased historian E.J. Hobsbawn reminded us, something that surrounds us. “We swim in the past as fish do in water, and cannot escape from it,” Hobsbawm wrote in On History. The historian’s role — from Hobsbawn’s (and Marx’s) point of view — is the examination of how societies transform themselves and how social structures factor in that process.
Getting history wrong, as Ernest Renan noted over a century ago, is an essential element in the formation of a nation. Historians will continue to inform us about whether Spielberg and Kushner got Lincoln wrong in the service of polishing a national myth. Perhaps it is an unfair criticism to direct at a two and-a-half-hour movie on one of our most important political figures, but this story of emancipation is woefully incomplete. How could it be otherwise?
Tragedy very often accompanies politics practiced a high level. Has any American President avoided making decisions about the life and death of others? Lincoln was a man able to control his vanity by casting a cold eye upon both the virtues and the corruptions of human beings. He was able to reject cynicism, that reliable psychological shield for feelings of political impotence, and this the movie demonstrates clearly.
The film succeeds in portraying Lincoln as a political man in Weber’s sense, a man of ambition who was willing to be held responsible for the results of his decisions.
Moving away from the sterile debate over whether he was a “compromiser” or a man of “principle,” the film shows he accepted the fact that, in his political life at least, there would be a constant tension between the two.
Spielberg gets Lincoln wrong
But it's not his fault. History this nuanced and complex doesn't lend itself to a two-and-a-half hour feature film
By Kelly Candaele, LA Review of Books
ONE OF THE MOST gratifying aspects of Steven Spielberg’s movie Lincoln has been the debate that its release has generated among historians and journalists, a debate more important than the movie itself. What were the complex dilemmas that Lincoln faced as President? What were the political realities and conduct of the time? How should we interpret the decisions that Lincoln and others made? What role did slaves and free blacks play in their own liberation?
Despite the fact that the film focuses on a short period of time in Lincoln’s presidency and deals primarily with the political cut and thrust associated with the passage of the 13th Amendment, there is a real sense in which the film can be described as deeply philosophical. Lincoln is portrayed as a man of discipline, concentration, and energy, all characteristics that sociologist Max Weber defined as part of the serious politician’s vocation. By forging an effective and realized political character — one aspect of Weber’s definition of charismatic authority — an astute politician can change the nature of power in society. By controlling his all-too-human vanity, he can avoid the two deadly political sins of lack of objectivity and irresponsibility. For Weber, a certain “distance to things and men” was required to abide by an “ethic of responsibility” for the weighty decisions that leaders are often required to make.
Lincoln has always been a man for all political seasons. There is Lincoln the principled politician, who believed that war was a necessary and legitimate means to sustain the Union; Lincoln the timid compromiser, who as late as 16 months into the war declared that if he “could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it”; and Lincoln the reconciling healer of “With malice toward none, with charity for all,” of the Second Inaugural.
Conservative New York Times writer David Brooks argued in a November 22 column that it was Lincoln’s internal strength and ability to compromise that allowed for the possibility of public good. For Brooks, the temptations of fame and ideological rigidity are what undermine the average politician’s ability to compromise. Weber called the losers in that wrestling match with fame, political “windbags.”
But for liberal Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne, it was Lincoln’s principled stand on the 13th Amendment and the need to ban slavery that accounts for his iconic status as one of our greatest Presidents. In an October 19 piece, Dionne encouraged Obama to “follow Lincoln’s example” by refusing to compromise with current economic and financial injustice.
While most political journalists have viewed the film with an eye on the current political stalemate, our most prominent historians have looked for accuracy and context.
Columbia University Professor Eric Foner, one of the most eminent historians of the Civil War and Reconstruction, sees the film as an “inside the beltway” rendition of the period. In a recent interview on Jon Wiener’s KPFK radio show, Foner points out that during the period that the movie covers, General William Tecumseh Sherman’s Union Army was marching through South Carolina. Slaves, in full-scale rebellion, were seizing plantations and “occupying” the land that they had worked. Slavery was “dying on the ground,” Foner insisted, not just in the House of Representatives. In Lincoln, “We are back to the old idea of Lincoln freeing the slaves by himself,” Foner says, reinforcing a one-dimensional view of a complicated historical process. The problem is not what the movie shows but what it doesn’t show.
Additionally, as Foner points out in his Pulitzer Prize wining book, The Fiery Trial, Lincoln was “non-committal” during the failed 1864 attempt by Congress to pass the 13th Amendment. This was at a time when abolitionists, including the Women’s National Loyal League headed by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, were delivering “monster” petitions to congress urging them to pass the amendment. They had gathered 400,000 signatures by mid 1864, but Lincoln was pushing for state-enacted emancipation in the border-states and occupied south.
Lincoln was also a “passive observer” of Senator Charles Sumner’s “crusade” to pass legislation that would allow blacks to carry mail, ride on streetcars, and testify in Federal courts in the District of Columbia, although he signed the bills that managed to pass in Congress. It was not until John C. Fremont was nominated for President in May 1864 — as a challenge to Lincoln — that Lincoln encouraged his party to embrace a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery.
Foner also challenges the “race against time” plot of the movie, whereby recalcitrant Republicans and pro-slavery Democrats stall the work of Congress while a Confederate peace initiative threatens to undermine the amendment’s only chance at passage. In reality, Lincoln had told the lame-duck congress that if they did not pass the amendment he would call a special session of the new Congress in March of 1865, made up of enough Republicans (elected that November) to easily pass the amendment.
Historian James Oakes, in his book Freedom National — The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, published in early December, suggests that Lincoln screenwriter Tony Kushner might have that part of the history right. Oakes points out that a large number of Republicans felt that the amendment abolishing slavery was a “civil” rather than “military” measure, and that the basis for changing the constitution was thus linked to the winning of the war. As the war’s end drew closer, the justification for the 13th Amendment was potentially undermined.
In an email exchange with me about his book and the movie, Oakes speculates that Lincoln and his Republican allies were worried that public support for the passage of the amendment would dissipate as the exigencies of war diminished. “If abolition were imposed AFTER [Oakes’s caps] the South surrendered it might seem vindictive to northern voters, or voters might think Republicans were liars or were disingenuous for having claimed that abolition was a war measure,” Oakes wrote. Although this argument does not appear in the film, it was a central theme for New York Congressman Fernando Wood, the Democratic attack dog in Congress and in the film.
What Oakes finds more troubling in terms of historical accuracy is the scenario set up by Kushner, whereby conservative Republicans (represented in the film by Montgomery Blair) and Radical Republicans had to be brought in line to defeat the Democrats and pass the amendment. Oakes points out that the Republicans were united all along, as demonstrated by the House vote to pass the 13th Amendment that took place the previous July. There was only one Republican “no” vote at that time, cast by Ohio Republican James M. Ashley. Ashley was a strong supporter of the amendment, but realizing the amendment was about to lose, he voted no as a procedural maneuver that would allow him to call for reconsideration of the amendment when Congress returned in December.
Blair, who had represented Dred Scott in the famous Supreme Court case, was Lincoln’s Postmaster General until he was replaced in late 1864. Blair had influence in Maryland and Missouri and was called upon to secure Border State Unionist votes, not to cajole conservative Republicans. Between July 1864 — when Democrats and Border State congressman had defeated the amendment — and January 1865, both Maryland and Missouri had abolished slavery. So Congressmen who had represented slave states the previous July were representing free states in January. They were the Congressmen that Blair went after.
Historians and journalists will and should continue debating the historical accuracy and limited context of the film, especially the invisibility of blacks as central participants in their own liberation.
In his blog, Brooklyn College Professor Cory Robin quotes from the 1992 book Slaves No More (by Ira Berlin et.al.), making it clear that despite Lincoln’s great accomplishment, historians overturned long ago a Lincoln-centered view of emancipation. The destruction of slavery was:
[A] process by which slavery collapsed under the pressure of federal arms and the slaves’ determination to place their own liberty on the wartime agenda. In documenting the transformation of a war for the Union into a war against slavery, it shifts the focus from the halls of power in Washington and Richmond to the plantations, farms, and battlefields of the South and demonstrates how slaves accomplished their own liberation and shaped the destiny of a nation.
The relegating of African Americans to secondary roles, even in films where black civil rights is the central topic (2011’s The Help is a recent example) is unfortunately the rule rather than the exception. But on the positive side, Lincoln has accomplished something that historian and literary critic Irving Howe suggested is very rare for American artists: the ability to portray politics as “a distinctive mode of social existence with manners and values of its own.”
The history of slavery, its origins, extirpation, and consequences, becomes more fascinating and illuminating once the context is expanded. Robin Blackburn’s new book The American Crucible — Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights argues that the success of anti-slavery movements involved some combination of class struggle, war, and a re-casting of the state’s relationship to the claims of property — New York Congressman Fernando Wood, for instance, spoke against the 13th Amendment as a “tyrannical destruction of individual property.” Wood was pointing to the broader underpinnings of both the Constitution and state law.
For Blackburn, who writes in a Marxist vein, dominant economic interests, both North and South, needed a “different type of state.” In the South, slaves, who were legally property, could run away, while northern manufacturing demanded state regulation of finance, funding for internal transportation and communications infrastructure, and tariff protection. These Unionist and Confederate “rival nationalisms” were both expansionist, the Union looking to overtake the continent and the Confederacy eyeing new slave territory in the West, the South and in Cuba. The clash, according to Blackburn, “was thus one of rival empires, as well as competing nationalisms.”
Foner also places the state in the center of Civil War and Reconstruction history, focusing on how shifting political dynamics shaped the economic and social relations that followed the abolition of slavery. Slavery was a mode of racial domination but also a system of labor that a “distinctive ruling class” was fighting to retain. The “labor question,” and what role the state would play in re-constituting a disciplined and docile labor force after the Civil War became central to the battle between former master and former slave.
It was Radical Republican Thaddeus Stevens (portrayed by Tommy Lee Jones inLincoln), Foner points out, who recognized the “hollow victory” that liberation would bring unless accompanied by the “destruction of the land-based political power” of the agrarian ruling classes. In Nothing but Freedom — Emancipation and Its Legacy, Foner reveals some striking similarities between post-emancipation southern politics and similar developments in the Caribbean and Africa. Struggles over immigration, labor laws, taxation, fiscal policy and the definition of property rights “reveal how much of post-emancipation politics was defined by the ‘labor problem.’ In the southern United States, sharecropping became the common solution to an economic struggle whereby resilient planters and large landowners where eventually (after Radical Reconstruction) able to deny blacks access to productive land, capital, and political power.
If this seems a bit far afield from the central focus of Lincoln, it shows how difficult — how impossible — it is to present complex historical “moments” through film. History is not a series of “moments” but is, as the recently deceased historian E.J. Hobsbawn reminded us, something that surrounds us. “We swim in the past as fish do in water, and cannot escape from it,” Hobsbawm wrote in On History. The historian’s role — from Hobsbawn’s (and Marx’s) point of view — is the examination of how societies transform themselves and how social structures factor in that process.
Getting history wrong, as Ernest Renan noted over a century ago, is an essential element in the formation of a nation. Historians will continue to inform us about whether Spielberg and Kushner got Lincoln wrong in the service of polishing a national myth. Perhaps it is an unfair criticism to direct at a two and-a-half-hour movie on one of our most important political figures, but this story of emancipation is woefully incomplete. How could it be otherwise?
Tragedy very often accompanies politics practiced a high level. Has any American President avoided making decisions about the life and death of others? Lincoln was a man able to control his vanity by casting a cold eye upon both the virtues and the corruptions of human beings. He was able to reject cynicism, that reliable psychological shield for feelings of political impotence, and this the movie demonstrates clearly.
The film succeeds in portraying Lincoln as a political man in Weber’s sense, a man of ambition who was willing to be held responsible for the results of his decisions.
Moving away from the sterile debate over whether he was a “compromiser” or a man of “principle,” the film shows he accepted the fact that, in his political life at least, there would be a constant tension between the two.
Lincoln and Colonization
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Disunion December 4, 2012, 12:08 pm 56 Comments
Lincoln, Colonization and the Sound of Silence
By SEBASTIAN PAGE
On Dec. 1, 1862, a clerk delivered Abraham Lincoln’s second annual message to Congress. It appeared to be nothing special until halfway through, when, invoking an earlier promise to address Capitol Hill on compensated emancipation, Lincoln abruptly recommended three amendments to the Constitution. The first two were for federal compensation for any state that abolished slavery before 1900, and for those loyal masters whose slaves became free by the disruptions of war. The third was for an affirmation of Congress’s power to support the colonization of African-Americans.
The message was perplexing, a show of rhetorical fireworks – “we shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last, best hope of earth” – dampened by calculations of future population growth. While the president’s contemporaries focused their incredulity on his plans for gradual emancipation and compensation, scholars have struggled more with the third amendment: colonization.
That amendment, Lincoln argued, “Ought not to be regarded as objectionable,” because both Congress and would-be emigrants had to consent before the plan could work. Expressing his confidence in the eventual separation of the races, the president also criticized lurid fears that freedom would drive former slaves northward. Yet on Jan. 1, 1863, Lincoln issued an Emancipation Proclamation that dropped all reference to compensation and colonization. Indeed, the president’s message of Dec. 1 would be his last ever public appeal for either notion, ideas that had peppered his oratory since the 1850s and underpinned his recent appeals to the border states to quit slavery. What happened?
Lincoln signing the Emancipation Proclamation.Some argue the “lullaby thesis”: that Lincoln spoke of colonization merely to lull opponents of emancipation, who might punish the Republican Party at the polls. Accordingly, the president could go quiet on colonization in 1863, with the fall elections safely behind him and the emancipatory mission accomplished. Others acknowledge that Lincoln was sincere in his plan, but argue that the Proclamation represented a turning point in his thinking. Afterward, both sides argue, the president came to appreciate the impracticality, even immorality of expatriating African-Americans who could now fight for the Union.
The lullaby thesis is particularly appealing, since it helps excuse Lincoln, and since it is indisputably correct that the president appealed to the public for support. But isn’t that what politicians do, and mostly on behalf of measures in which they actually believe? Isn’t the problem that we can claim “it was a ruse” whenever a policy seems unsavory, even incomprehensible? Or that both a politically crafty and a perfectly sincere Lincoln would end up saying much the same thing? After all, Lincoln had advocated colonization long before confronting the issue of emancipation as president.
The case for Lincoln undergoing a change of heart is better, but it reads more like an explanation of why he should have dropped the idea of colonization, not an assessment of whether he actually did. It is questionable how much the temporary enlistment of a minority of African-Americans, or Lincoln’s growing estimation of black ability, soothed his doubts about the prospects of long-term, nationwide racial integration. And surely the president was not that taken aback by the results of his own Emancipation Proclamation, which he had planned for months, alongside a surge in colonization activity?
Clearly, it is easy to get bogged down in abstraction about the depth of Lincoln’s colonization convictions before and after Jan. 1, 1863. Fortunately, compelling evidence exists that he did not, in fact, stop thinking about or planning for colonization of African-Americans after signing the Emancipation Proclamation.
For starters, there are the impressions that Lincoln made on those who witnessed him in office. His secretary of the navy, Gideon Welles, and the Indiana congressman George Julian both later doubted that Lincoln would have issued the preliminary proclamation, in September 1862, had he known that colonization would fall through. The German-American politician Carl Schurz, meanwhile, remembered an “earnest” president who “continued to adhere to the impracticable colonization plan even after the Emancipation Proclamation had already been issued.” None of this sounds like someone coolly manipulating the electorate with set-piece messages, or even someone just months away from dropping longstanding beliefs.
In fact, Lincoln didn’t stop at Jan. 1, 1863; he continued to pursue colonization unabated. It is not hard to spot historians’ sidestep in deploying statements like “Lincoln stopped talking about colonization” as substitutes for “Lincoln abandoned colonization,” thus leaving open the possibility that he continued to pursue it out of the spotlight. Surely this quiet activity makes him more sincere, especially where he could no longer derive the public relations benefit that the lullaby thesis demands?
Other historians are more cautious, interpreting the president’s silence on colonization as more of a sign of fast-dwindling interest. But aren’t we still in thrall to a rather “rhetorical,” 1862-focused debate, treating Lincoln like some kind of coal mine canary that just could not stop itself singing about colonization activity? Might we not apply Occam’s razor and suggest that the president consciously stopped issuing pro-colonization messages, because to do otherwise seemed to offer no further benefit for the time being, and not because he stopped believing in them himself?
By the very end of 1862, the overall public response, including Congress’s evident failure to begin work on his constitutional amendments, provided Lincoln plenty of reason to go underground with colonization. The president would later describe Montgomery Blair, the postmaster general and fervent colonizationist, as his “only friend” respecting the message. And indeed, what more could Lincoln say once he had called to modify the very charter of the nation in favor of colonization, and been apparently rejected?
Instead, the president resumed colonization planning on his own initiative, even before Jan. 1. Around that time, a pensive Lincoln approached a Treasury official and asked him to arrange an interview with a contractor for black resettlement in Texas. More significantly, at 9 p.m. on Dec. 31, 1862, Bernard Kock, the leaseholder for a potential colonization site, Île à Vache in Haiti, presented Lincoln with a contract for the resettlement of 5,000 “contrabands.” Kock later revealed that the president actually approved it the next morning, Jan. 1, 1863, shortly before he issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Considered alongside an anecdote of Robert Todd Lincoln that his father had never retired that night, we have an impression of Lincoln’s tremendous personal misgivings about emancipation without colonization.
The Île à Vache expedition challenges the notion of an 1863 transformation, not least because it represented the first and only federal African-American colonization venture to proceed. Many historians gingerly acknowledge it as an unthinking holdover from the heyday of colonization planning, but they overlook the fact that Lincoln signed a revamped contract and dispatched the settlers in April 1863, learned of their distress by July and yet recalled them only in February 1864. For him, clearly, colonization remained a viable idea. But far from flaunting this experiment to a racist public, the president desperately tried to keep it under wraps.
Indeed, Lincoln was perfectly able to work on colonization in 1863 and afterward without constantly issuing public updates. Using the broad powers delegated him by Congress in 1862, in a second wave of activity in 1863 he granted colonization recruiters privileged access to “contraband” camps, consulted pro-emigration African-Americans and initiated diplomatic negotiations with European empires to accept black settlers as labor for their tropical American colonies. Had Lincoln enjoyed greater success, or entertained fewer misgivings about private contractors, he could also have drawn on sizable appropriations.
Although Lincoln undertook such measures with greater secrecy than during the previous year, we shouldn’t downplay these official actions as merely “private” efforts. Moreover , he always hoped to reinforce such colonization arrangements with treaties, as he said in his second annual message, which would have involved a highly public ratification by two-thirds of the Senate. In retrospect that looks optimistic, but the president had assured an ally in November 1862 that he relished the prospect of further congressional discussion so that colonization could get off on the right foot. That sentiment tallies with the tone of his Dec. 1 message, an appeal to his audience to see sense. It also serves as a reminder that the second wave of activity marked an attempted, although ultimately abortive, scaling-up of colonization after New Year 1863, not its diminution.
By early 1864, faced with bureaucratic dysfunction, inadequate support and diplomatic complications, the president had no choice but to acquiesce in colonization’s stagnation. Yet Secretary Welles recalled that Lincoln had still “by no means abandoned his policy of deportation and emancipation.” In conjunction with the loss of many of the wartime records, the paper trail for a stalled policy thins out for the last year of Lincoln’s life, but it does not disappear.
On the other hand, nothing has emerged to prove that Lincoln ever repudiated colonization, even as angry voices in Congress challenged him to do just that. They did not interpret his continued silence as a tacit show of nascent racial egalitarianism, but simply as a sign that he had not changed his views. The closest thing to proof of rejection is a diary entry by John Hay, one of the presidential secretaries, on July 1, 1864: “the President has sloughed off that idea of colonization.” Probably inspired by Congress’s decision to repeal the relevant appropriations, Hay’s full entry reads less forcefully than its common excerption, hinting less at a tell-all conversation with Lincoln than at Hay’s own inferences from the effects of corruption. Evidence exists that the president actually considered the repeal clause an “unfriendly” rider to an otherwise needful budget bill. The emigration commissioner James Mitchell.Lincoln’s colonization agent, James Mitchell of the Interior Department, reported at least one conversation with Lincoln in late 1864 about the future of the colonization policy, in which they agreed that the Confederacy’s mooted plan to enlist slaves provided reason enough to delay reviving it for now. Yet Mitchell alleged that Lincoln had also refused to accept his resignation pending a departmental shakeup and consultation with the attorney general, Edward Bates. That finds corroboration in a November 1864 communication from Bates, which also indicates that the president asked whether he could continue pursuing colonization even with the money gone.
Finally, Lincoln’s attachment to colonization resurfaces in Maj. Gen. Benjamin Butler’s recollections of two April 1865 meetings, in which the men resumed a similar conversation of early 1863 about the policy. In recent decades, historians have seized on the account’s off-notes to dismiss it as a fabrication, usually arguing that Butler intended a favorable personal contrast with Lincoln by what sound like suspiciously anachronistic standards of race relations. Yet Butler’s story contains details that a liar would have struggled to know, and it inspired no objections from Lincoln’s surviving contemporaries. Much of the case against Butler also relies on caricature of a man who was actually “a kind of favorite with the President,” according to a White House secretary.
.But stepping back a moment, the assumption that Lincoln must have shunned colonization by 1865, and that the debate revolves around identifying its time of death, betrays a misplaced burden of proof and an incredibly narrow argumentative scope.
We can be defense lawyers, or we can be historians. We can deem Lincoln on trial, even though we know that colonization enjoyed widespread support in his day. We can dismiss perfectly consistent evidence as untruthful, or claim that “Honest Abe” did not mean what he said – for this policy alone. We can demand the benefit of the doubt as to whether Lincoln ceased colonization activity because he had dispensed with a political lullaby, changed his beliefs or had just encountered too many setbacks to carry on during wartime. But historians ask why we are so keen to cross the line into advocacy, and why this need to absolve Lincoln of pro-colonization thinking took shape only in the mid- to late 20th century.
Curiously, the strongest argument for the defense and the most intriguing line of historical inquiry both arise from the voluntary nature of Lincoln’s proposal to African-Americans. Alongside the low initial numbers of settlers that he planned for each scheme, the president inadvertently built remarkable damage limitation into his administration’s policy from the outset, given most blacks’ unwillingness to leave. That provides an easy way to minimize colonization’s significance, although to do so conflates intent and outcome. After all, colonies start small, under a fostering hand, and then grow beyond all original estimates; only hindsight tells us that a few hundred pioneers started something durable at Jamestown and nothing on Île à Vache. The total effort that Lincoln put into colonization refutes any suggestion that he foresaw just how unsuccessful he would be.
Taken together, the precondition of black consent and the persistence that characterized Lincoln’s approach to colonization point to lifelong expectations that significant numbers of African-Americans would eventually choose to depart the United States. While many historians have interpreted the more upbeat parts of his second annual message as a coded attack on colonization, Lincoln really directed his fire at doom-laden prophecies about the domestic results of emancipation; partly, such concerns were hyperbolic, he said, because an “augmented, and considerable migration” would take African-Americans to more “congenial climes.” His overall argument was close, and it certainly covered the bases, but even a serious supporter of colonization had to adjust his message to the undeniable fact that the policy had not yet delivered.
As an assessment of seemingly intractable white prejudices, Lincoln’s supposition that African-Americans would simply want to go elsewhere might appear valid; his administration’s provisions to that end laudable. But as abolitionists charged, such resignation to others’ racism actually perpetuated, even validated, the effects of that prejudice, and allowed colonizationists to avoid political and ideological dilemmas about furthering the cause of racial integration.
The idea of colonization, and Lincoln’s long relationship to it, reminds us that abstract categories and distinctions sometimes break down in historical practice. Lincoln was relatively devoid of personal prejudice, but that doesn’t mean that he didn’t incorporate prejudice into his thinking. Likewise, colonization may well have been “unrealistic,” but that doesn’t mean that its enigmatic appeal didn’t impinge on other, down-to-earth policies.
Sources: Roy P. Basler, ed., “Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln”; Blair Family Papers, Library of Congress; Gabor S. Boritt, “Did He Dream of a Lily-White America?” in “The Lincoln Enigma: The Changing Faces of an American Icon”; “Statement of Facts … of a Colony under Bernard Kock”; Michael Burlingame, ed., “Inside Lincoln’s White House” and “Inside the White House in War Times”; Benjamin F. Butler, “Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences”; Lucius E. Chittenden, “Recollections of President Lincoln and His Administration”; Christian Science Monitor, Feb. 12, 1935; Eric Foner, “The Fiery Trial”; Abraham Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress; Phillip W. Magness, “Benjamin Butler’s Colonization Testimony Revaluated,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, Vol. 29, 2008, and “James Mitchell and the Mystery of the Emigration Office Papers,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, Vol. 32, 2011; Mark E. Neely Jr., “Colonization and the Myth That Lincoln Prepared the People for Emancipation” in “Lincoln’s Proclamation: Emancipation Reconsidered”; Phillip S. Paludan, “Lincoln and Colonization: Policy or Propaganda?”, Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, Vol. 25, 2004; Allen T. Rice, “Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln”; Carl Schurz, “Abraham Lincoln” and “Reminiscences”; Miscellaneous Letters of the Department of State, National Archives II; Miscellaneous Letters of the Department of the Treasury, National Archives II; Gideon Welles, “Administration of Abraham Lincoln.”
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Sebastian Page is a junior research fellow at the Rothermere American Institute, Oxford University, co-author of “Colonization after Emancipation,” and author of “Lincoln and Chiriquí Colonization Revisited.” He thanks Phillip Magness.
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Sunday, December 16, 2012
They Aren't Going to Vote Democratic Anyway
Whistling Past the Gun Lobby
by Paul Krugman
Almost five years ago Thomas Schaller published an important book titled Whistling Past Dixie, which basically argued that it was time for Democrats to stop running scared of the views of Southern whites — they weren’t going to get those votes anyway, and demographic change had proceeded to the point where they could win national elections without the South. Indeed, so it has come to pass: while Obama did win Virginia, he did it by appealing to the new Virginia of the DC suburbs, not the rural whites, and otherwise he had a totally non-Dixie victory.
So Nate Cohn argues that this same logic applies to gun control: the voters who care passionately about their semi-automatic weapons are rural whites who ain’t gonna vote Democratic in any case — and the new Democratic coalition doesn’t need them. David Atkins takes it further, saying the awful truth: the pro-gun fanatics are basically the kind of people who think that Obama is a Kenyan socialist atheistic Islamist, and the urban hordes are coming for their property any day now. People, in other words, who already vote 100 percent Republican — and lose elections.
As Cohn says, it’s not clear whether Democrats realize how things have changed. But maybe yesterday’s horror will provoke some fresh thought, and they’ll realize that this does not have to go on.
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Thursday, December 13, 2012
So What if Obama Were Punishing the Republicans?
Republicans are an amazing species of human being. Anthropologists from another culture would have a field day with these cretins.
by Jonathan Chait
.Is Obama Punishing the GOP Even as they grudgingly have come to accept that they can’t prevent the expiration of the Bush tax cuts for the rich, Republicans have increasingly started explaining this pitiable state of affairs to themselves as the product of President Obama’s unique malevolence. The operating theory here is that Obama is not demanding higher taxes on the rich because it advances his public policy goals. No, his goal, writes Karl Rove today, is to “kick off a Republican civil war.” This odd theory has likewise found expression from Charles Krauthammer (“Obama’s objective in these negotiations is not economic but political: not to solve the debt crisis but to fracture the Republican majority in the House,”) Peter Wehner, and other luminaries of the right.
The psychology on display here is familiar to anybody who has seen a petulant teenager, who assumes that any restriction that causes them to feel anger must have been intended to produce that emotion. Republicans are feeling humiliated and divided, so Obama’s goal must have been to humiliate and divide them.
But this odd, self-pitying belief is also the product of the party’s endemic difficulty at grasping budget math. Since many Republicans genuinely seem not to understand why Democrats insist on raising taxes on the rich, let me explain. Having observed the fiscal debate within the Democratic party quite closely for a long time, I can assure you that humiliating the GOP has nothing whatsoever to do with the Democrats’ goal of raising taxes on the rich.
The United States, in comparison with other advanced countries, has meager levels of social services, retirement benefits, and public infrastructure. It also has extremely high levels of income inequality. It is very hard to bring revenue and outlays closer into line without cutting programs that are already set at low levels and without also exacerbating income inequality. Raising taxes on the rich, within reason (and Democrats justifiably think that restoring a 39.6 percent top marginal tax rate is within reason) is the one way to avoid the basic conundrum. When your deficit-cutting options include grim choices like potentially raising the Medicare retirement age, or other things that could impose real pain to vulnerable people, every additional dollar that allows you to close the gap with less pain becomes precious.
A related and more subtle complaint, raised by Rove today, is that Obama should accept his revenue goals through tax reform rather than raising tax rates. But as Gene Sperling and Jason Furman, two of Obama’s policy advisers, have explained, there just isn’t as much revenue available this way as Republicans think. And even that limited amount of revenue represents a kind of theoretical ceiling — in reality, special interests are likely to prevail on Congress to carve out protections for themselves from any reform, lowering the revenue gain from its already low ceiling. There’s just no other way to get enough revenue without raising rates.
It’s certainly true that Republicans are undergoing some internal strife right now over the tax issue. Daniel Henninger, also on the Journal editorial page, mourns that the president is “dismantle[ing] their party by letting its most basic conservative principles disappear.” But how this is Obama’s fault, I can’t quite figure out. It was Republicans who elevated the unpopular cause of low income tax rates for the rich to a sacred principle, built an entire party theology around punishing even the slightest dissent from that principle, and then enacted the sacred agenda through a rickety budget mechanism that caused it all to expire after a decade. That was a bad idea. Since Republicans are at least considering how to rebuild their party at the moment, my advice would be to do something else next time.
by Jonathan Chait
.Is Obama Punishing the GOP Even as they grudgingly have come to accept that they can’t prevent the expiration of the Bush tax cuts for the rich, Republicans have increasingly started explaining this pitiable state of affairs to themselves as the product of President Obama’s unique malevolence. The operating theory here is that Obama is not demanding higher taxes on the rich because it advances his public policy goals. No, his goal, writes Karl Rove today, is to “kick off a Republican civil war.” This odd theory has likewise found expression from Charles Krauthammer (“Obama’s objective in these negotiations is not economic but political: not to solve the debt crisis but to fracture the Republican majority in the House,”) Peter Wehner, and other luminaries of the right.
The psychology on display here is familiar to anybody who has seen a petulant teenager, who assumes that any restriction that causes them to feel anger must have been intended to produce that emotion. Republicans are feeling humiliated and divided, so Obama’s goal must have been to humiliate and divide them.
But this odd, self-pitying belief is also the product of the party’s endemic difficulty at grasping budget math. Since many Republicans genuinely seem not to understand why Democrats insist on raising taxes on the rich, let me explain. Having observed the fiscal debate within the Democratic party quite closely for a long time, I can assure you that humiliating the GOP has nothing whatsoever to do with the Democrats’ goal of raising taxes on the rich.
The United States, in comparison with other advanced countries, has meager levels of social services, retirement benefits, and public infrastructure. It also has extremely high levels of income inequality. It is very hard to bring revenue and outlays closer into line without cutting programs that are already set at low levels and without also exacerbating income inequality. Raising taxes on the rich, within reason (and Democrats justifiably think that restoring a 39.6 percent top marginal tax rate is within reason) is the one way to avoid the basic conundrum. When your deficit-cutting options include grim choices like potentially raising the Medicare retirement age, or other things that could impose real pain to vulnerable people, every additional dollar that allows you to close the gap with less pain becomes precious.
A related and more subtle complaint, raised by Rove today, is that Obama should accept his revenue goals through tax reform rather than raising tax rates. But as Gene Sperling and Jason Furman, two of Obama’s policy advisers, have explained, there just isn’t as much revenue available this way as Republicans think. And even that limited amount of revenue represents a kind of theoretical ceiling — in reality, special interests are likely to prevail on Congress to carve out protections for themselves from any reform, lowering the revenue gain from its already low ceiling. There’s just no other way to get enough revenue without raising rates.
It’s certainly true that Republicans are undergoing some internal strife right now over the tax issue. Daniel Henninger, also on the Journal editorial page, mourns that the president is “dismantle[ing] their party by letting its most basic conservative principles disappear.” But how this is Obama’s fault, I can’t quite figure out. It was Republicans who elevated the unpopular cause of low income tax rates for the rich to a sacred principle, built an entire party theology around punishing even the slightest dissent from that principle, and then enacted the sacred agenda through a rickety budget mechanism that caused it all to expire after a decade. That was a bad idea. Since Republicans are at least considering how to rebuild their party at the moment, my advice would be to do something else next time.
Wednesday, December 12, 2012
Because There's Nothing to Cut
George W. Bush and the Republican Congress started two wars without paying for them, cut taxes mainly for the rich without paying for it, and implemented the greatest expansion of the welfare state since 1965 with Medicare Part D without paying for it, causing massive budget deficits, and now they want to pay for it all by cutting "entitlements" hurting the poor and middle class. It's amazing how they get away with this.
by Jonathan Chait
Today at 12:46 PM10CommentsWhy Republicans Can’t Propose Spending CutsBy Jonathan Chait
Math is hard.
“Where are the president’s spending cuts?” asks John Boehner. With Republicans coming to grips with their inability to stop taxes on the rich from rising, the center of the debate has turned to the expenditure side. In the short run, the two parties have run into an absurd standoff, where Republicans demand that President Obama produce an offer of higher spending cuts, and Obama replies that Republicans should say what spending cuts they want, and Republicans insist that Obama should try to guess what kind of spending cuts they would like.
Reporters are presenting this as a kind of negotiating problem, based on each side’s desire for the other to stick its neck out first. But it actually reflects a much more fundamental problem than that. Republicans think government spending is huge, but they can’t really identify ways they want to solve that problem, because government spending is not really huge. That is to say, on top of an ideological gulf between the two parties, we have an epistemological gulf. The Republican understanding of government spending is based on hazy, abstract notions that don’t match reality and can’t be translated into a workable program.
Let’s unpack this a bit. We all know Republicans want to spend less money. So the construction of the debate appears, on the surface, to be a pretty simple continuum based on policy preferences. Republicans like Mitch McConnell say government spending is “out of control” and would, at least ideally, like to bring it into line with revenue entirely through spending cuts. Democrats like Obama endorse a “balanced” solution with revenue and taxes. Right-thinking centrists, like the CEO community and their publicists like Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei, think we should cut deeply into entitlement spending while also raising tax revenue. (VandeHei, in a video accompanying his execrable story, asserts, “There’s money to be cut everywhere.”)
There really isn’t money to be cut everywhere. The United States spends way less money on social services than do other advanced countries, and even that low figure is inflated by our sky-high health-care prices. The retirement benefits to programs like Social Security are quite meager. Public infrastructure is grossly underfunded.
The Bowles-Simpson “plan” was an earnest and badly needed attempt to reconcile the GOP’s hazy belief that government is enormous with reality. They did everything they could possibly do: They brought in representatives from all sides for long meetings with budget experts, going through all aspects of federal policy in detail, in the hope of reaching an agreement on the proper scope of government and how to pay for it. It failed. The Bowles-Simpson plan wound up punting on all the major questions because it simply couldn’t bridge that gulf between perception and reality. That’s why, in lieu of any ability to identify government functions to eliminate, the plan simply pretended the federal government could have everybody do a lot more work for less pay.
The real domestic savings in Bowles-Simpson came from building on Obamacare’s steps to save money by holding down the growth of health-care costs and to cut defense spending by pretty steep levels. But these turned out to be ideas that alienated rather than satisfied Republicans. So basically it turned out to be impossible to find real spending cuts that Republicans wanted.
It’s true that Paul Ryan’s budget plan had some deep cuts. But none of those cuts touched Medicare for the next decade or Social Security at all. Ryan just kicked the crap out of the poor. So, that provision aside, if you’re not willing to inflict epic levels of suffering on the very poor, there just aren’t a lot of cuts to be had out there.
Republicans and even many centrists like to endorse taking away Medicare benefits from people like Warren Buffett. But even defining “Warren Buffett” at a level way below Warren Buffett’s income level yields pathetically little money. (The very rich have a vastly disproportionate share of income but not a vastly disproportionate share of entitlement benefits, which means taxing them produces way, way more savings than reducing their social spending.) This is why the spending side of the fiscal cliff negotiation is so discouraging. The potential cuts on the table range from fairly painful steps like reducing the Social Security cost-of-living index to even more painful steps like raising the Medicare retirement age, and none of them would save all that much money — certainly not on the scale that Republicans want.
When the only cuts on the table would inflict real harm on people with modest incomes and save small amounts of money, that is a sign that there’s just not much money to save. It’s not just that Republicans disagree with this; they don’t seem to understand it. The absence of a Republican spending proposal is not just a negotiating tactic but a howling void where a specific grasp of the role of government ought to be. And negotiating around that void is extremely hard to do. The spending cuts aren’t there because they can’t be found
by Jonathan Chait
Today at 12:46 PM10CommentsWhy Republicans Can’t Propose Spending CutsBy Jonathan Chait
Math is hard.
“Where are the president’s spending cuts?” asks John Boehner. With Republicans coming to grips with their inability to stop taxes on the rich from rising, the center of the debate has turned to the expenditure side. In the short run, the two parties have run into an absurd standoff, where Republicans demand that President Obama produce an offer of higher spending cuts, and Obama replies that Republicans should say what spending cuts they want, and Republicans insist that Obama should try to guess what kind of spending cuts they would like.
Reporters are presenting this as a kind of negotiating problem, based on each side’s desire for the other to stick its neck out first. But it actually reflects a much more fundamental problem than that. Republicans think government spending is huge, but they can’t really identify ways they want to solve that problem, because government spending is not really huge. That is to say, on top of an ideological gulf between the two parties, we have an epistemological gulf. The Republican understanding of government spending is based on hazy, abstract notions that don’t match reality and can’t be translated into a workable program.
Let’s unpack this a bit. We all know Republicans want to spend less money. So the construction of the debate appears, on the surface, to be a pretty simple continuum based on policy preferences. Republicans like Mitch McConnell say government spending is “out of control” and would, at least ideally, like to bring it into line with revenue entirely through spending cuts. Democrats like Obama endorse a “balanced” solution with revenue and taxes. Right-thinking centrists, like the CEO community and their publicists like Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei, think we should cut deeply into entitlement spending while also raising tax revenue. (VandeHei, in a video accompanying his execrable story, asserts, “There’s money to be cut everywhere.”)
There really isn’t money to be cut everywhere. The United States spends way less money on social services than do other advanced countries, and even that low figure is inflated by our sky-high health-care prices. The retirement benefits to programs like Social Security are quite meager. Public infrastructure is grossly underfunded.
The Bowles-Simpson “plan” was an earnest and badly needed attempt to reconcile the GOP’s hazy belief that government is enormous with reality. They did everything they could possibly do: They brought in representatives from all sides for long meetings with budget experts, going through all aspects of federal policy in detail, in the hope of reaching an agreement on the proper scope of government and how to pay for it. It failed. The Bowles-Simpson plan wound up punting on all the major questions because it simply couldn’t bridge that gulf between perception and reality. That’s why, in lieu of any ability to identify government functions to eliminate, the plan simply pretended the federal government could have everybody do a lot more work for less pay.
The real domestic savings in Bowles-Simpson came from building on Obamacare’s steps to save money by holding down the growth of health-care costs and to cut defense spending by pretty steep levels. But these turned out to be ideas that alienated rather than satisfied Republicans. So basically it turned out to be impossible to find real spending cuts that Republicans wanted.
It’s true that Paul Ryan’s budget plan had some deep cuts. But none of those cuts touched Medicare for the next decade or Social Security at all. Ryan just kicked the crap out of the poor. So, that provision aside, if you’re not willing to inflict epic levels of suffering on the very poor, there just aren’t a lot of cuts to be had out there.
Republicans and even many centrists like to endorse taking away Medicare benefits from people like Warren Buffett. But even defining “Warren Buffett” at a level way below Warren Buffett’s income level yields pathetically little money. (The very rich have a vastly disproportionate share of income but not a vastly disproportionate share of entitlement benefits, which means taxing them produces way, way more savings than reducing their social spending.) This is why the spending side of the fiscal cliff negotiation is so discouraging. The potential cuts on the table range from fairly painful steps like reducing the Social Security cost-of-living index to even more painful steps like raising the Medicare retirement age, and none of them would save all that much money — certainly not on the scale that Republicans want.
When the only cuts on the table would inflict real harm on people with modest incomes and save small amounts of money, that is a sign that there’s just not much money to save. It’s not just that Republicans disagree with this; they don’t seem to understand it. The absence of a Republican spending proposal is not just a negotiating tactic but a howling void where a specific grasp of the role of government ought to be. And negotiating around that void is extremely hard to do. The spending cuts aren’t there because they can’t be found
The Republican Rationale for Trying to Crush Labor
The Republican Will to PowerBy Jonathan Chait
In November 1992, right before Bill Clinton defeated George H. W. Bush, Grover Norquist published a lengthy article in the American Spectator predicting the horrors a Clinton presidency would usher in. Norquist focused his attention not on the usual conservative bugbears — stagflation, big government, liberal judges — but rather on what he was certain would be a massive, sustained Democratic campaign to use the power of government in order to entrench Democratic control. Norquist rattled off a long list of actions he predicted Clinton would undertake: use the IRS to crack down on conservatives, unleash government organizations to engage in politicking, register legions of new voters (“not necessarily citizens”) at welfare offices and prison induction centers, grant Senate seats to the District of Columbia and perhaps Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, and, of course, unleash a wave of compulsory unionization.
Clinton never attempted any of these things, of course. But Norquist’s fever dream was a useful window into a poorly understood aspect of conservative thought, which is an obsession with the ways in which the power of government can be used to help the governing party maintain its own power. Norquist’s ill-founded suspicions of the Democrats was merely a failed attempt to mirror-image project his own operational mode, which is widely shared among movement conservatives. It was the driving force behind the Bush administration’s failed 2005 campaign to privatize Social Security, which conservatives widely and gleefully predicted would, if successful, bring tens of millions of Americans into the “investor class” and thus transmute them into allies of capital rather than labor.
This is the same mentality at work in numerous states where Republicans, having gained power in the 2010 off-year election wave, have invested their political capital in legal changes designed primarily to tilt the future playing field in their party’s favor. That is the basic purpose of the wave of laws to make voting less convenient (Democrats being more heavily represented among sporadic voters) and to crush unions. As much as Republicans detest unions as economic actors, they hate them far more as political actors, organizing significant minorities of voters as discrete voting blocs aligned with the Democrats.
This is the best way to understand the Republican party’s sudden attack on unions in Michigan. Last year, the Michigan director of Americans for Prosperity, the right-wing activist group, explained, “We fight these battles on taxes and regulation but really what we would like to see is to take the unions out at the knees so they don’t have the resources to fight these battles.” Republicans understand full well that Michigan leans Democratic, and the GOP has total power at the moment, so its best use of that power is to crush one of the largest bastions of support for the opposing party.
Obviously, one should always be suspicious of theories that attribute malicious will to power to the other side while absolving one's own allies of the same. I don’t think Democrats abstain from this behavior (to anything like the degree the GOP employs it) because it’s made of angels. Rather, the Democratic party comprises an economically diverse coalition, including not just labor but business as well. Even if Democrats could come up with a plan to crush the political power of business — which is hard because business is way larger and stronger than labor, even in Michigan — huge chunks of the party would object. Whereas nobody in the GOP cares about labor at all, so it’s easier to unify them behind the kind of political/class war strategy we’re seeing here.
In November 1992, right before Bill Clinton defeated George H. W. Bush, Grover Norquist published a lengthy article in the American Spectator predicting the horrors a Clinton presidency would usher in. Norquist focused his attention not on the usual conservative bugbears — stagflation, big government, liberal judges — but rather on what he was certain would be a massive, sustained Democratic campaign to use the power of government in order to entrench Democratic control. Norquist rattled off a long list of actions he predicted Clinton would undertake: use the IRS to crack down on conservatives, unleash government organizations to engage in politicking, register legions of new voters (“not necessarily citizens”) at welfare offices and prison induction centers, grant Senate seats to the District of Columbia and perhaps Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, and, of course, unleash a wave of compulsory unionization.
Clinton never attempted any of these things, of course. But Norquist’s fever dream was a useful window into a poorly understood aspect of conservative thought, which is an obsession with the ways in which the power of government can be used to help the governing party maintain its own power. Norquist’s ill-founded suspicions of the Democrats was merely a failed attempt to mirror-image project his own operational mode, which is widely shared among movement conservatives. It was the driving force behind the Bush administration’s failed 2005 campaign to privatize Social Security, which conservatives widely and gleefully predicted would, if successful, bring tens of millions of Americans into the “investor class” and thus transmute them into allies of capital rather than labor.
This is the same mentality at work in numerous states where Republicans, having gained power in the 2010 off-year election wave, have invested their political capital in legal changes designed primarily to tilt the future playing field in their party’s favor. That is the basic purpose of the wave of laws to make voting less convenient (Democrats being more heavily represented among sporadic voters) and to crush unions. As much as Republicans detest unions as economic actors, they hate them far more as political actors, organizing significant minorities of voters as discrete voting blocs aligned with the Democrats.
This is the best way to understand the Republican party’s sudden attack on unions in Michigan. Last year, the Michigan director of Americans for Prosperity, the right-wing activist group, explained, “We fight these battles on taxes and regulation but really what we would like to see is to take the unions out at the knees so they don’t have the resources to fight these battles.” Republicans understand full well that Michigan leans Democratic, and the GOP has total power at the moment, so its best use of that power is to crush one of the largest bastions of support for the opposing party.
Obviously, one should always be suspicious of theories that attribute malicious will to power to the other side while absolving one's own allies of the same. I don’t think Democrats abstain from this behavior (to anything like the degree the GOP employs it) because it’s made of angels. Rather, the Democratic party comprises an economically diverse coalition, including not just labor but business as well. Even if Democrats could come up with a plan to crush the political power of business — which is hard because business is way larger and stronger than labor, even in Michigan — huge chunks of the party would object. Whereas nobody in the GOP cares about labor at all, so it’s easier to unify them behind the kind of political/class war strategy we’re seeing here.
Monday, December 10, 2012
The Centrality of Lincoln
Since seeing the Lincoln movie, I've been rereading some of my material on Abraham Lincoln. I am amazed at how central this one man is in American history. My main conclusion is that people find in Lincoln what they want to find:: their own version of Lincoln that fits their personal political beliefs.
Saturday, December 8, 2012
I Feel Bad About My Neck by Nora Ephron
This collection of essays is boring and pointless. Ephron pontificates about various topics, including aging, food, and marriage. However, the book lacks depth. It is purely fluff, and bad at that. I kept hoping for an insight, a nugget into life, something to alter the course of my existence even if as simple as my discovery of chocolate and peanut butter once was, but nothing.
I could not relate to this book because I am not a woman, I am not past fifty, and I am not a New Yorker. The longest essay is about living in Apthorp in New York City. I think to understand the mentality of Ephron, you have to be a New Yorker. Or at least from the Northeast. I do not think that Ephron plays in the South or that she understands or speaks to the South. (Imagine Woody Allen remaking To Kill a Mockingbird in rural Alabama.)
I was anticipating more from the ex-wife of Carl Bernstein and the screenwriter of When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, and You've Got Mail. But none of those are favorite movies of mine, so I shouldn't be surprised this book is a disappointment too.
The best passage in the book is about needing reading glasses, since her eyesight has worsened with age. She is sad at this because of her love of reading, which we share and she eloquently describes:
I could not relate to this book because I am not a woman, I am not past fifty, and I am not a New Yorker. The longest essay is about living in Apthorp in New York City. I think to understand the mentality of Ephron, you have to be a New Yorker. Or at least from the Northeast. I do not think that Ephron plays in the South or that she understands or speaks to the South. (Imagine Woody Allen remaking To Kill a Mockingbird in rural Alabama.)
I was anticipating more from the ex-wife of Carl Bernstein and the screenwriter of When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, and You've Got Mail. But none of those are favorite movies of mine, so I shouldn't be surprised this book is a disappointment too.
The best passage in the book is about needing reading glasses, since her eyesight has worsened with age. She is sad at this because of her love of reading, which we share and she eloquently describes:
Mostly I'm sad about just plain reading. When I pass a bookshelf, I like to pick out a book from it and thumb through it. When I see a newspaper on the couch, I like to sit down with it. When the mail arrives, I like to rip it open. Reading is one of the main things I do. Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself... But my ability to pick something up and read it - which has gone unchecked all my life up until now - is now entirely dependent on the whereabouts of my reading glasses. I look around Why aren't they in this room? I bought six pair of them last week on sale and sprinkled them throughout the house, yet none of them is visible. Where are they?
Thursday, December 6, 2012
It's Been Interesting
It's been interesting to see all of the talk about Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson. The Lincoln talk is due to the movie, which has garnered numerous comments both pro and con, and the Jefferson talk starts with the two recently published biographies. As an American history minded person, this has been good to see for me. I am enjoying it.
Monday, December 3, 2012
The Jefferson Wars (2)
Monday, Dec 3, 2012 12:30 PM CST
Who is the real Thomas Jefferson?
A heated Op-Ed war among historians is picking up where two controversial new biographies left off this fall
By Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg
The firestorm over author Henry Wiencek’s unsparing portrait of Thomas Jefferson, “Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves,” has taken to the pages of the New York Times and other media outlets with a vengeance. Amid tepid praise for Jon Meacham’s folksy best-seller, ”Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power,” which skirts the complex world of slavery, it is Wiencek’s hubristic treatment that has returned Jefferson to center stage in historians’ long-standing war over whom to blame first and foremost for our racist underpinnings as a nation.
Wiencek seizes upon stray notes in Jefferson’s hand in which the Virginia planter performs cold calculations on the monetary value of slaves. A Scrooge-like Jefferson becomes cruel and uncivilized as he obsesses over the slave economy – which he comes to see as a “convenient engine” of American growth. You don’t remove the human face from slavery and come out ahead. But that is what Henry Wiencek has done to Thomas Jefferson.
Swayed as many of us were by Wiencek’s deft examination of George Washington and slavery, Jefferson scholars expected a hard-hitting sequel. But in its design to shock, “Master of the Mountain” rashly removes the conversation from the long-active scholarly community, by self-consciously claiming that Wiencek, as historical detective, has smoked out a criminal.
Here’s the irony: Nothing is new in the current debate. Jefferson and his fellow founders have been sensationalized in the press and in popular literature and academic monographs without cease for over 200 years. For the uninitiated reader who has not followed the long parade of books on Jefferson, every spin on the third president appears at first to have merit. Jefferson has been a political symbol since he first sought the presidency, and a piñata in America’s culture wars for nearly as long as that.
Matthew Livingston Davis, Aaron Burr’s first biographer, actually knew Jefferson. When Thomas Jefferson Randolph published four volumes of his grandfather’s papers in 1829, Davis went through the letters and was shocked to discover that the Virginian’s real talent lay in deception. His favorite term of derision for Jefferson was “Jesuitical.” But the award for the most entertaining portrait of a villainous, hypocritical Jefferson goes to the late Gore Vidal. In his fictional “Burr,” we get a president who violated the Constitution while seducing his foes at the dinner parties he threw (those gatherings Jon Meacham offers up as his model of bipartisanship). Vidal’s Jefferson is surrounded by mixed-race offspring; his concubine Sally Hemings is pretty, but unfalteringly stupid.
Meacham’s Jefferson is “attractive and virile,” a smooth operator, serenely philosophical about the criticism he regularly receives, and a man who swings gleefully from realism to idealism, blending republican politics with haute cuisine. Oh, and also a master compromiser (which he was decidedly not). These characterizations of the sensitive politico serve to reframe the Jefferson biography as a Bob Woodward-style, inside-the-White-House intimate drama. Making Jefferson recognizable to us as a practitioner of political hardball allows the biographer to go on Chris Matthews’ “Hardball” and delight the host with comparisons to whatever is happening in Washington this week.
A studious historian strives to contextualize evidence. The 4 percent annual profit on the births of slave children that Wiencek seizes on is not pretty; no one gives Jefferson high marks, because there is no such thing as a good master. Yet the evidence Wiencek plucks from the page belongs to a conversation, foreign to our time, that took place in general terms relating to the collective self-interest of Southern elites who had inherited feelings of racial superiority. The evidence should be viewed as well in the context of those pages Jefferson produced when he doodled daily with numbers and lines, sketching out his parquet floors. In designing Monticello, he saw his world as a mathematical puzzle and calculated to fractions of an inch when builders of his day couldn’t come anywhere close. He said he lulled himself to sleep by conjuring “diagrams and crotchets” (wooden building supports).
Jefferson marveled, with melancholic persuasion, at the sublime scenes that nature, day and night, produced on his mountaintop. And this same man, born into a world of slavery, saw human ownership in terms that he could convert into practical experiments – slaves were pawns in his experiments with fruit trees and rice cultivation, too. Yet he was not a monster. We must always try to assess the true boundaries of the moral universe that existed, as we seek greater insight into the social limitations he and they contended with. It’s hard to do this without making premature judgments, which is why historians continue to find employment.
Still, there is something seductive in Wiencek’s argument. We want to get inside the heads of people who came before, who left a paper trail, whom we can imagine still speaking to us. Salon’s book review editor, Laura Miller, does not pretend to be an archivist of early American sources, and in reviewing Wiencek’s book she positively responded to its stark provocations. It is perfectly reasonable that she would not have identified senior scholars who were missing from the endnotes. And that is what moved experts on Jefferson and slavery to go public in their denunciations of the book. Selective evidence, presented effectively, is how prosecutors stage an argument, and Wiencek is clearly prosecuting his case against Jefferson. His detractors are not “Jefferson defenders,” but scholars whose more nuanced perspectives are absent from his argument.
Over the last two weeks, Op-Eds have rolled and roiled. Legal historian Paul Finkelman, writing in the Times, said that Wiencek is wrong only in his timing, and that Jefferson was not suddenly roused to racism when he discovered his 4 percent solution–no, he was always “deeply committed” to slavery. Finkelman terms Jefferson “creepy,” fixing understandably on Jefferson’s words in calling free blacks “pests in society” and emotionally primitive. Finkelman targets Jefferson, but at the same time excuses Washington, whose slave-owning experience differed from Jefferson’s only in that Washington was not perpetually in debt as Jefferson was, and could therefore have lived quite well if he had freed his slaves while he was in his prime and set a standard for others to follow. (We should add that even the urbanite Benjamin Franklin was a slave owner, and only freed his slave in his will.)
Everyone seems to have an ax to grind. Professor Finkelman is correct to charge Wiencek with exaggeration. To reduce Jefferson’s views on slavery simply to profit misses all the other ways that he engaged with the institution. This is the problem when a writer takes a very complex man and makes him familiar; this is what scholars call reductionist, wherein one solitary trait stands in for an entire personality.
But to call Jefferson “creepy” reflects Finkelman’s long-held bias. His Jefferson is incorrigible, a morally deformed figure lurking in the bowels of historic memory. When we isolate Jefferson and see his actions apart from those of his fellow Southerners (and a clear majority of Northerners), we miss the larger picture. Of course, he wrote in “Notes on Virginia” that Africans were a “blot” on the American landscape, and it sounds horrifying to our ears; it should. But his language drew on the respected 17th-century travel writer George Best and the ethnographic science of the mid-18th century’s ingenious (if misguided) Comte de Buffon.
We cannot do without historical context. Jefferson’s obsession with blood lines and breeding reflected his reading on animal husbandry and population theories. That is how he came to argue that interbreeding between Africans and Europeans improved the black race. So Wiencek is wrong to limit Jefferson’s view on slavery to the cash nexus alone; and Finkelman, while a deep constitutional thinker, also tends to be single-minded when it comes to Jefferson. For the historical Jefferson, race and procreation were conditioned by forces of culture beyond the obvious–his evolved theory on the “fortuitous concourse of breeders” asserted that uncontrollable human passions made it impossible to breed superior offspring. So he wrote tauntingly to John Adams in 1813. Reading Jefferson’s “Notes,” Adams offered unconditional praise, not only overlooking its reprehensible racial arguments but calling Jefferson’s remarks on race “gems” of political expression. Is Adams creepy for not condemning Jefferson? When we make Jefferson the measure of all things, we simplify what came before and distort the contested nature of past ideas and practices.
Annette Gordon-Reed, the Harvard professor whose books have done more than any other modern scholar to reframe the conversation about Jefferson and slavery, wrote in Slate that Wiencek’s treatment was “bizarre” and obsessive and full of misreadings. Jan Ellen Lewis of Rutgers-Newark took apart the author’s claims in the Daily Beast, charging that Wiencek was “blinded by his loathing.” Wiencek responded by calling Professor Lewis’ arguments “petty twistifications” — a word Jefferson himself used in attacking Chief Justice John Marshall for interpreting the law so that it reflected his personal biases.
The scholar who should be most offended by Wiencek is Lucia (Cinder) Stanton. Her long career as a researcher at Monticello has been singularly devoted to comprehending the personal lives and limitations imposed on the slave families of Monticello. Stanton receives praise in Wiencek’s acknowledgments; then the author proceeds to obscure, if not undermine, all she has brought to light. We strongly recommend to readers her book “Those Who Labor for My Happiness.” Stanton has no ax to grind; her purpose is to humanize the past and bring it to life responsibly.
It’s fascinating that people still get angry about dueling portrayals of Jefferson. He wasn’t the only one who lacked political courage. The founders were clannish lawyers and land speculators who identified with the interests of their states and never entirely surrendered their will to an idealized Union. They had to deal with state jealousies, jurisdictional controversies over land and expansion. In the 1780s, Jefferson wanted slavery prohibited in the federal territories of the Northwest. And that’s how Congress voted. So, do we laud Jefferson for his progressive instincts? Tentatively. Does it rescue him from the collective judgment of scholars? Hardly.
For he was a timid abolitionist at best. His primary constituency was the Southern planter class, landed men of social privilege. Like him, they borrowed heavily. They owed bankers in England and elsewhere. They were constantly perched on a fiscal cliff. And they, like the majority of their Northern peers, bought into the convenient consensus that those millions of individuals brought in chains from Africa and the Caribbean were an inferior race of people. Political men constantly privileged their own collective self-interest. No surprise there. Even in manumitting certain individual slaves (most commonly upon the death of the master), they allowed slavery to fester. There were a few heroes who spoke out for racial justice, a relative few who turned their backs on slavery. But in the first 50 years of the republic, the vast majority of elected U.S. representatives invested their hearts in issues we’ve long since forgotten. No inheritance continues to affect the U.S. and point to its deficiencies so much as the brutal memory of ugly mistreatment of a people whose skin pigmentation offended some lily-white European-Americans.
Why Jefferson? He is a bellwether, a moral indicator. Though the superior democrat, he is still compared unfavorably to the intrepid Washington, who finally freed his slaves in his will. But Washington never attempted to legislate in the interest of the enslaved in any one of his 68 years. In fact, his will kept his human property enslaved until after his widow Martha’s death, which occurred a few years later. One of those he owned was Martha’s half-sister – we learned that fact in Henry Wiencek’s earlier, well-received book, “An Imperfect God.”
Jefferson cared deeply about how he would be remembered. In the final decades of his life, he made repeated attempts to find a political historian friendly to his perspective on post-Revolutionary partisanship, with whom he could share his trunkfuls of documents. But he did not exhibit any concern over his published views on black inferiority, because he did not anticipate the 21st century and its evaluation of him on the basis of his life as a sexually active slave owner. He though his credentials in that regard would shield him from attack where and when it mattered. Like the posthumous Washington image. Seeing black as inferior was, and would remain for quite some time, mainstream thinking.
Like us, that generation argued without reaching an epiphany. In Madison and Jefferson, we show that Madison’s racism did not descend to the level of Jefferson’s. In “Jefferson’s Secrets: Death and Desire at Monticello,” Andrew Burstein focuses on early American cultural understandings of the body and right living, to explain how the widower and man of privilege that Jefferson was could justify sex with any “healthy, fruitful female” as an acceptable, indeed prescribed, method for a man of letters to maintain his health. There remains much to learn about the conflicted culture that birthed this nation.
Slavery as an institution was defended by the Constitution — a document Jefferson did not have any hand in drafting. Slavery was protected by state and federal laws. History is the art of engagement with that distant country we call the past; it is about more than personalities. It is not enough to be repelled by Jefferson; you have to probe the political and social environment if you wish to explore the reasons why he did those things that we find so reprehensible.
It is we today who have outsize expectations from Thomas Jefferson, because his most uplifting words attest to American ideals. We want someone from the receding past to be transcendent, to warrant the superlatives collectively conferred on a “greatest” generation. Yet no generation ever lives up to its ideals. We are all rationalizers. We are all prioritizers. But here’s a great line, which Jefferson wrote to a fellow Virginian in 1816: “I wish to avoid all collisions of opinion with all mankind.” Good luck with that, Mr. Jefferson.
Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg are professors of History at LSU and coauthors of "Madison and Jefferson" (Random House),
Who is the real Thomas Jefferson?
A heated Op-Ed war among historians is picking up where two controversial new biographies left off this fall
By Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg
The firestorm over author Henry Wiencek’s unsparing portrait of Thomas Jefferson, “Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves,” has taken to the pages of the New York Times and other media outlets with a vengeance. Amid tepid praise for Jon Meacham’s folksy best-seller, ”Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power,” which skirts the complex world of slavery, it is Wiencek’s hubristic treatment that has returned Jefferson to center stage in historians’ long-standing war over whom to blame first and foremost for our racist underpinnings as a nation.
Wiencek seizes upon stray notes in Jefferson’s hand in which the Virginia planter performs cold calculations on the monetary value of slaves. A Scrooge-like Jefferson becomes cruel and uncivilized as he obsesses over the slave economy – which he comes to see as a “convenient engine” of American growth. You don’t remove the human face from slavery and come out ahead. But that is what Henry Wiencek has done to Thomas Jefferson.
Swayed as many of us were by Wiencek’s deft examination of George Washington and slavery, Jefferson scholars expected a hard-hitting sequel. But in its design to shock, “Master of the Mountain” rashly removes the conversation from the long-active scholarly community, by self-consciously claiming that Wiencek, as historical detective, has smoked out a criminal.
Here’s the irony: Nothing is new in the current debate. Jefferson and his fellow founders have been sensationalized in the press and in popular literature and academic monographs without cease for over 200 years. For the uninitiated reader who has not followed the long parade of books on Jefferson, every spin on the third president appears at first to have merit. Jefferson has been a political symbol since he first sought the presidency, and a piñata in America’s culture wars for nearly as long as that.
Matthew Livingston Davis, Aaron Burr’s first biographer, actually knew Jefferson. When Thomas Jefferson Randolph published four volumes of his grandfather’s papers in 1829, Davis went through the letters and was shocked to discover that the Virginian’s real talent lay in deception. His favorite term of derision for Jefferson was “Jesuitical.” But the award for the most entertaining portrait of a villainous, hypocritical Jefferson goes to the late Gore Vidal. In his fictional “Burr,” we get a president who violated the Constitution while seducing his foes at the dinner parties he threw (those gatherings Jon Meacham offers up as his model of bipartisanship). Vidal’s Jefferson is surrounded by mixed-race offspring; his concubine Sally Hemings is pretty, but unfalteringly stupid.
Meacham’s Jefferson is “attractive and virile,” a smooth operator, serenely philosophical about the criticism he regularly receives, and a man who swings gleefully from realism to idealism, blending republican politics with haute cuisine. Oh, and also a master compromiser (which he was decidedly not). These characterizations of the sensitive politico serve to reframe the Jefferson biography as a Bob Woodward-style, inside-the-White-House intimate drama. Making Jefferson recognizable to us as a practitioner of political hardball allows the biographer to go on Chris Matthews’ “Hardball” and delight the host with comparisons to whatever is happening in Washington this week.
A studious historian strives to contextualize evidence. The 4 percent annual profit on the births of slave children that Wiencek seizes on is not pretty; no one gives Jefferson high marks, because there is no such thing as a good master. Yet the evidence Wiencek plucks from the page belongs to a conversation, foreign to our time, that took place in general terms relating to the collective self-interest of Southern elites who had inherited feelings of racial superiority. The evidence should be viewed as well in the context of those pages Jefferson produced when he doodled daily with numbers and lines, sketching out his parquet floors. In designing Monticello, he saw his world as a mathematical puzzle and calculated to fractions of an inch when builders of his day couldn’t come anywhere close. He said he lulled himself to sleep by conjuring “diagrams and crotchets” (wooden building supports).
Jefferson marveled, with melancholic persuasion, at the sublime scenes that nature, day and night, produced on his mountaintop. And this same man, born into a world of slavery, saw human ownership in terms that he could convert into practical experiments – slaves were pawns in his experiments with fruit trees and rice cultivation, too. Yet he was not a monster. We must always try to assess the true boundaries of the moral universe that existed, as we seek greater insight into the social limitations he and they contended with. It’s hard to do this without making premature judgments, which is why historians continue to find employment.
Still, there is something seductive in Wiencek’s argument. We want to get inside the heads of people who came before, who left a paper trail, whom we can imagine still speaking to us. Salon’s book review editor, Laura Miller, does not pretend to be an archivist of early American sources, and in reviewing Wiencek’s book she positively responded to its stark provocations. It is perfectly reasonable that she would not have identified senior scholars who were missing from the endnotes. And that is what moved experts on Jefferson and slavery to go public in their denunciations of the book. Selective evidence, presented effectively, is how prosecutors stage an argument, and Wiencek is clearly prosecuting his case against Jefferson. His detractors are not “Jefferson defenders,” but scholars whose more nuanced perspectives are absent from his argument.
Over the last two weeks, Op-Eds have rolled and roiled. Legal historian Paul Finkelman, writing in the Times, said that Wiencek is wrong only in his timing, and that Jefferson was not suddenly roused to racism when he discovered his 4 percent solution–no, he was always “deeply committed” to slavery. Finkelman terms Jefferson “creepy,” fixing understandably on Jefferson’s words in calling free blacks “pests in society” and emotionally primitive. Finkelman targets Jefferson, but at the same time excuses Washington, whose slave-owning experience differed from Jefferson’s only in that Washington was not perpetually in debt as Jefferson was, and could therefore have lived quite well if he had freed his slaves while he was in his prime and set a standard for others to follow. (We should add that even the urbanite Benjamin Franklin was a slave owner, and only freed his slave in his will.)
Everyone seems to have an ax to grind. Professor Finkelman is correct to charge Wiencek with exaggeration. To reduce Jefferson’s views on slavery simply to profit misses all the other ways that he engaged with the institution. This is the problem when a writer takes a very complex man and makes him familiar; this is what scholars call reductionist, wherein one solitary trait stands in for an entire personality.
But to call Jefferson “creepy” reflects Finkelman’s long-held bias. His Jefferson is incorrigible, a morally deformed figure lurking in the bowels of historic memory. When we isolate Jefferson and see his actions apart from those of his fellow Southerners (and a clear majority of Northerners), we miss the larger picture. Of course, he wrote in “Notes on Virginia” that Africans were a “blot” on the American landscape, and it sounds horrifying to our ears; it should. But his language drew on the respected 17th-century travel writer George Best and the ethnographic science of the mid-18th century’s ingenious (if misguided) Comte de Buffon.
We cannot do without historical context. Jefferson’s obsession with blood lines and breeding reflected his reading on animal husbandry and population theories. That is how he came to argue that interbreeding between Africans and Europeans improved the black race. So Wiencek is wrong to limit Jefferson’s view on slavery to the cash nexus alone; and Finkelman, while a deep constitutional thinker, also tends to be single-minded when it comes to Jefferson. For the historical Jefferson, race and procreation were conditioned by forces of culture beyond the obvious–his evolved theory on the “fortuitous concourse of breeders” asserted that uncontrollable human passions made it impossible to breed superior offspring. So he wrote tauntingly to John Adams in 1813. Reading Jefferson’s “Notes,” Adams offered unconditional praise, not only overlooking its reprehensible racial arguments but calling Jefferson’s remarks on race “gems” of political expression. Is Adams creepy for not condemning Jefferson? When we make Jefferson the measure of all things, we simplify what came before and distort the contested nature of past ideas and practices.
Annette Gordon-Reed, the Harvard professor whose books have done more than any other modern scholar to reframe the conversation about Jefferson and slavery, wrote in Slate that Wiencek’s treatment was “bizarre” and obsessive and full of misreadings. Jan Ellen Lewis of Rutgers-Newark took apart the author’s claims in the Daily Beast, charging that Wiencek was “blinded by his loathing.” Wiencek responded by calling Professor Lewis’ arguments “petty twistifications” — a word Jefferson himself used in attacking Chief Justice John Marshall for interpreting the law so that it reflected his personal biases.
The scholar who should be most offended by Wiencek is Lucia (Cinder) Stanton. Her long career as a researcher at Monticello has been singularly devoted to comprehending the personal lives and limitations imposed on the slave families of Monticello. Stanton receives praise in Wiencek’s acknowledgments; then the author proceeds to obscure, if not undermine, all she has brought to light. We strongly recommend to readers her book “Those Who Labor for My Happiness.” Stanton has no ax to grind; her purpose is to humanize the past and bring it to life responsibly.
It’s fascinating that people still get angry about dueling portrayals of Jefferson. He wasn’t the only one who lacked political courage. The founders were clannish lawyers and land speculators who identified with the interests of their states and never entirely surrendered their will to an idealized Union. They had to deal with state jealousies, jurisdictional controversies over land and expansion. In the 1780s, Jefferson wanted slavery prohibited in the federal territories of the Northwest. And that’s how Congress voted. So, do we laud Jefferson for his progressive instincts? Tentatively. Does it rescue him from the collective judgment of scholars? Hardly.
For he was a timid abolitionist at best. His primary constituency was the Southern planter class, landed men of social privilege. Like him, they borrowed heavily. They owed bankers in England and elsewhere. They were constantly perched on a fiscal cliff. And they, like the majority of their Northern peers, bought into the convenient consensus that those millions of individuals brought in chains from Africa and the Caribbean were an inferior race of people. Political men constantly privileged their own collective self-interest. No surprise there. Even in manumitting certain individual slaves (most commonly upon the death of the master), they allowed slavery to fester. There were a few heroes who spoke out for racial justice, a relative few who turned their backs on slavery. But in the first 50 years of the republic, the vast majority of elected U.S. representatives invested their hearts in issues we’ve long since forgotten. No inheritance continues to affect the U.S. and point to its deficiencies so much as the brutal memory of ugly mistreatment of a people whose skin pigmentation offended some lily-white European-Americans.
Why Jefferson? He is a bellwether, a moral indicator. Though the superior democrat, he is still compared unfavorably to the intrepid Washington, who finally freed his slaves in his will. But Washington never attempted to legislate in the interest of the enslaved in any one of his 68 years. In fact, his will kept his human property enslaved until after his widow Martha’s death, which occurred a few years later. One of those he owned was Martha’s half-sister – we learned that fact in Henry Wiencek’s earlier, well-received book, “An Imperfect God.”
Jefferson cared deeply about how he would be remembered. In the final decades of his life, he made repeated attempts to find a political historian friendly to his perspective on post-Revolutionary partisanship, with whom he could share his trunkfuls of documents. But he did not exhibit any concern over his published views on black inferiority, because he did not anticipate the 21st century and its evaluation of him on the basis of his life as a sexually active slave owner. He though his credentials in that regard would shield him from attack where and when it mattered. Like the posthumous Washington image. Seeing black as inferior was, and would remain for quite some time, mainstream thinking.
Like us, that generation argued without reaching an epiphany. In Madison and Jefferson, we show that Madison’s racism did not descend to the level of Jefferson’s. In “Jefferson’s Secrets: Death and Desire at Monticello,” Andrew Burstein focuses on early American cultural understandings of the body and right living, to explain how the widower and man of privilege that Jefferson was could justify sex with any “healthy, fruitful female” as an acceptable, indeed prescribed, method for a man of letters to maintain his health. There remains much to learn about the conflicted culture that birthed this nation.
Slavery as an institution was defended by the Constitution — a document Jefferson did not have any hand in drafting. Slavery was protected by state and federal laws. History is the art of engagement with that distant country we call the past; it is about more than personalities. It is not enough to be repelled by Jefferson; you have to probe the political and social environment if you wish to explore the reasons why he did those things that we find so reprehensible.
It is we today who have outsize expectations from Thomas Jefferson, because his most uplifting words attest to American ideals. We want someone from the receding past to be transcendent, to warrant the superlatives collectively conferred on a “greatest” generation. Yet no generation ever lives up to its ideals. We are all rationalizers. We are all prioritizers. But here’s a great line, which Jefferson wrote to a fellow Virginian in 1816: “I wish to avoid all collisions of opinion with all mankind.” Good luck with that, Mr. Jefferson.
Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg are professors of History at LSU and coauthors of "Madison and Jefferson" (Random House),
Sunday, December 2, 2012
Jefferson: American Fascist
by Corey Robin
Thomas Jefferson: American Fascist?1
It’s Old Home Week in the American media. First there was the welcome back of Abraham Lincoln (and the brouhaha over the Spielberg film). Now Thomas Jefferson is in the news. But where it was Lincoln the emancipator we were hailing earlier in the week, it’s Jefferson the slaveholder who’s now getting all the press.
Yesterday in the New York Times, legal historian Paul Finkelman wrote a bruising attack on Jefferson titled “The Monster of Monticello.” This was a followup to some of the controversy surrounding the publication of Henry Wiencek’s new book on Jefferson, which makes Jefferson’s slaveholding central to his legacy.
Finkelman’s essay has already prompted some pushback. David Post at The Volokh Conspiracy (h/t Samir Chopra) wrote:
Jefferson, Finkelman tells us, was not a “particularly kind” slave-master; he sometimes “punished slaves by selling them away from their families and friends, a retaliation that was incomprehensibly cruel even at the time.” And he believed that ”blacks’ ability to reason was ‘much inferior’ to whites’ and that they were “in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous.” So what? Really – so what? If you want to think that he was a bad guy — or even a really bad guy, with truly grievous personal faults — you’re free to do so. But to claim that that has something to do with Jefferson’s historical legacy is truly preposterous.
Jefferson’s real legacy, says Post, is not what he did or didn’t do to his slaves—that’s a strictly personal failing, I guess—but the glorious words he wrote in The Declaration of Independence. We hold these truths…you know the drill. (Various folks on Twitter have made similar claims to me.) Post also links to a short paper he wrote on Jefferson’s contributions to the cause of antislavery.
In that paper, Post liberally quotes from Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, “an extraordinary book” according to Post, in which Jefferson does voice some of his ambivalence over slavery. Curiously, Post never cites the lengthy and disturbing passages from Query XIV, where Jefferson offers his most considered views on the nature and status of black people and their fate in America. And it’s clear why. It makes for chilling reading. I’ll just cite some brief excerpts here:
The first difference which strikes us is that of colour. Whether the black of the negro resides in the reticular membrane between the skin and scarf-skin, or in the scarf-skin itself; whether it proceeds from the colour of the blood, the colour of the bile, or from that of some other secretion, the difference is fixed in nature, and is as real as if its seat and cause were better known to us. And is this difference of no importance? Is it not the foundation of a greater or less share of beauty in the two races? Are not the fine mixtures of red and white, the expressions of every passion by greater or less suffusions of colour in the one, preferable to that eternal monotony, which reigns in the countenances, that immoveable veil of black which covers all the emotions of the other race? Add to these, flowing hair, a more elegant symmetry of form, their own judgment in favour of the whites, declared by their preference of them, as uniformly as is the preference of the Oranootan for the black women over those of his own species. The circumstance of superior beauty, is thought worthy attention in the propagation of our horses, dogs, and other domestic animals; why not in that of man? Besides those of colour, figure, and hair, there are other physical distinctions proving a difference of race. They have less hair on the face and body. They secrete less by the kidnies, and more by the glands of the skin, which gives them a very strong and disagreeable odour. This greater degree of transpiration renders them more tolerant of heat, and less so of cold, than the whites. Perhaps too a difference of structure in the pulmonary apparatus, which a late ingenious experimentalist has discovered to be the principal regulator of animal heat, may have disabled them from extricating, in the act of inspiration, so much of that fluid from the outer air, or obliged them in expiration, to part with more of it. They seem to require less sleep. A black, after hard labour through the day, will be induced by the slightest amusements to sit up till midnight, or later, though knowing he must be out with the first dawn of the morning. They are at least as brave, and more adventuresome. But this may perhaps proceed from a want of forethought, which prevents their seeing a danger till it be present. When present, they do not go through it with more coolness or steadiness than the whites. They are more ardent after their female: but love seems with them to be more an eager desire, than a tender delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation. Their griefs are transient. Those numberless afflictions, which render it doubtful whether heaven has given life to us in mercy or in wrath, are less felt, and sooner forgotten with them. In general, their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection. To this must be ascribed their disposition to sleep when abstracted from their diversions, and unemployed in labour. An animal whose body is at rest, and who does not reflect, must be disposed to sleep of course. Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me, that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous. It would be unfair to follow them to Africa for this investigation.
…
The Indians, with no advantages of this kind [as that enjoyed by black slaves in America], will often carve figures on their pipes not destitute of design and merit. They will crayon out an animal, a plant, or a country, so as to prove the existence of a germ in their minds which only wants cultivation. They astonish you with strokes of the most sublime oratory; such as prove their reason and sentiment strong, their imagination glowing and elevated. But never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration; never see even an elementary trait of painting or sculpture. In music they are more generally gifted than the whites with accurate ears for tune and time, and they have been found capable of imagining a small catch. Whether they will be equal to the composition of a more extensive run of melody, or of complicated harmony, is yet to be proved. Misery is often the parent of the most affecting touches in poetry. — Among the blacks is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry. Love is the peculiar oestrum of the poet. Their love is ardent, but it kindles the senses only, not the imagination. Religion indeed has produced a Phyllis Whately; but it could not produce a poet. The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism. The heroes of the Dunciad are to her, as Hercules to the author of that poem. Ignatius Sancho has approached nearer to merit in composition…But his imagination is wild and extravagant, escapes incessantly from every restraint of reason and taste, and, in the course of its vagaries, leaves a tract of thought as incoherent and eccentric, as is the course of a meteor through the sky. His subjects should often have led him to a process of sober reasoning: yet we find him always substituting sentiment for demonstration. Upon the whole, though we admit him to the first place among those of his own colour who have presented themselves to the public judgment, yet when we compare him with the writers of the race among whom he lived, and particularly with the epistolary class, in which he has taken his own stand, we are compelled to enroll him at the bottom of the column.
…
With the Romans, the regular method of taking the evidence of their slaves was under torture. Here it has been thought better never to resort to their evidence. When a master was murdered, all his slaves, in the same house, or within hearing, were condemned to death. Here punishment falls on the guilty only, and as precise proof is required against him as against a freeman. Yet notwithstanding these and other discouraging circumstances among the Romans, their slaves were often their rarest artists. They excelled too in science, insomuch as to be usually employed as tutors to their master’s children. Epictetus, Terence, and Phaedrus, were slaves. But they were of the race of whites. It is not their condition then, but nature, which has produced the distinction.
…
To our reproach it must be said, that though for a century and a half we have had under our eyes the races of black and of red men, they have never yet been viewed by us as subjects of natural history. I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind. It is not against experience to suppose, that different species of the same genus, or varieties of the same species, may possess different qualifications. Will not a lover of natural history then, one who views the gradations in all the races of animals with the eye of philosophy, excuse an effort to keep those in the department of man as distinct as nature has formed them? This unfortunate difference of colour, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people. Many of their advocates, while they wish to vindicate the liberty of human nature, are anxious also to preserve its dignity and beauty. Some of these, embarrassed by the question `What further is to be done with them?’ join themselves in opposition with those who are actuated by sordid avarice only. Among the Romans emancipation required but one effort. The slave, when made free, might mix with, without staining the blood of his master. But with us a second is necessary, unknown to history. When freed, he is to be removed beyond the reach of mixture.
I bring up these passages less because I’m interested in Post’s omissions and his arguments than because of the general way the debate about Jefferson has been framed thus far. The basic idea seems to be that Jefferson had some fine ideas—and terrible practices. And whatever of his legacy that’s terrible, the argument goes, is entirely caught up with, and consumed by, the institution of slavery. So once we abolish slavery, thanks in part to the words of the Declaration that Jefferson wrote, we’re in the land of the good Jefferson.
But as this passage in Notes on the State of Virginia suggests, Jefferson’s real and lasting contribution to the American experiment is not exhausted either by the Declaration or by the institution of slavery. It is as a theorist of race domination—of white supremacy, of the perdurability of race (and specifically the black race), of the ineradicable shallowness of blackness as against the textured profundity of whiteness—that he stands out. And that is a legacy that persists to this day.
Jefferson was not a liberal hypocrite, a symptom of his time. He was the avant garde of a group of American theorists who were struggling to reconcile the ideals of the Declaration with the reality of chattel slavery. His resolution of that struggle took the form of one of the most vicious doctrines of racial supremacy the world had yet seen. That is his legacy, or at least part of his legacy. He was by no means the only one to take this route, but he was one of the earliest and easily the most famous. He is the tributary of what would become an American tradition.
And as I argue in what follows, which is an excerpt from a paper on Louis Hartz that I never published (though a passage or two of it may appear in The Reactionary Mind), Jefferson’s race theory—along with that of such men as Thomas Dew, James Henry Hammond, and William Harper, who feature prominently in my discussion—points not only to the eighteenth century (he was much more than a man of his times) and not only to the categories of liberalism and republicanism, which are so familiar to US intellectual historians. It also points, albeit only in a suggestive way, to the future, to the twentieth century and European doctrines of racialized fascism.
Jefferson, I would submit, should be remembered not only as the writer of the Declaration of Independence and owner of slaves, but also as a contributor, along with his successors, to a doctrine of race war and what Hannah Arendt would later call, in another context, “race imperialism”—which would find its ultimate fulfillment a century later, and a continent away.
In the interest of legibility and flow, I’ve eliminated all the footnotes
● ● ● ● ●
Racism was tailor made to the counterrevolutionary task of combating abolition, of reconciling the Declaration of Independence with the reality of chattel slavery. It combined ideas of equality and inequality, and fused the radical’s vision of political plasticity with the conservative’s notion of the stubbornness of history. It proved an ideology of extraordinary and protean—extraordinary because protean—resilience, precisely because it had something for everyone, save of course for the slaves themselves.
According to Josiah Nott, races are “marked by peculiarities of structure, which have always been constant and undeviating. Human races—as opposed to other species of animal or plant—are particularly immutable.” From these deep and enduring differences of physical structure, moral differences, equally enduring, followed. “Is it not a law of nature, that every permanent animal form…carries with its physical type a moral of its own, which cannot be obliterated, changed, or transferred to another, so long as the physique stands?”
More than classifying men and women into distinctive types, slavery’s racial theorists made the quite radical argument that humanity’s every attempt to rise above its physical nature was a misbegotten enterprise. We are, they claimed, beings of the utmost and comprehensive constraint. Our character, personality, individuality—none of these is self-fashioned or amenable to artifice. Each is an irrevocable and irreversible given.
If the intransigence of biology was the back-story of race, it followed that there was only one race, properly understood, in America: the black race. According to Nott, white people reason, imagine, and create—activities of transcendence that do not jibe with the liabilities of race. The white man “takes up the march of civilization and presses onward.” He frees himself of his inheritance, his circumstance, history itself. For that reason, “the Caucasian races have been the only truly progressive races of history,” which means nothing so much as that whites were not a race at all.
Among blacks, however, “one generation does not take up civilization where the last left it and carry it on as does the Caucasian—there it stands immovable; they go as far as instinct extends and no farther.” In the words of Thomas Cobb, the black man’s “mind is never inventive or suggestive. Improvement never enters into his imagination. A trodden path, he will travel for years, without the idea ever suggesting itself to his brain, that a nearer and better way is present before him.” Blacks can no more rise above their station than they can sink below it. They are what they are, have been and will be. As William Harper wrote, “A slave has no hope that by a course of integrity, he can materially elevate his condition in society, nor can his offence materially depress it…he has no character to establish or lose.” Even contempt or scorn, claimed Harper, would not spur the black race to do better.
Writing long before these theories of racial difference were fully formulated, Thomas Jefferson offered a glimpse of what it means to think of blacks as a race, as the race, and whites as individuals. Blacks are brave, he says, but this is due to “want of forethought.” The black man is “ardent,” but this is lust, not love. “In general,” he says, “their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection.” In “imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous.” One can see their brute incapacity for historical transcendence and moral or political freedom in the color of their skin. While whites sport “fine mixtures of red and white,” reflecting the diverse range of passions and sensibilities at their disposal, blacks suffer from the “eternal monotony” of blackness, that “immovable veil” that makes any subtlety or nuance, any gradation of feeling, any distinctiveness or idiosyncrasy of character and personality, impossible.
No mere contradiction or sleight of hand, this dual portrait of whites as individuals and blacks as a race was the perfect counterrevolutionary argument. It ascribed to whites all the virtues of a ruling class—capable of action, freedom, politics itself—and to blacks all the deficits of a class to be ruled. “This unfortunate difference of color, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people,” wrote Jefferson of black slaves. Even among free blacks in the North, Thomas Dew argued, “the animal part of the man gains the victory over the moral.” After the Civil War, Nott would write that “all the powers of the Freedmen’s Bureau, or ‘gates of hell cannot prevail against them’ [the inequalities between whites and blacks].”
But while race thinking prescribed the most vicious forms of domination, it also absorbed a mutant strain of the egalitarianism then roiling America and turned it into a justification for slavery. “Jack Cade, the English reformer, wished all mankind to be brought to one common level,” wrote Dew. “We believe slavery, in the United States, has accomplished this.” By freeing whites from “menial and low offices,” slavery had eliminated “the greatest cause of distinction and separation of the ranks of society.” Anticipating the writings of W.E.B. DuBois, Edmund Morgan, and David Roediger, the slaveholders openly acknowledged that slavery made white men feel equal. Equal and, more important, superior: under slavery, freedom became a scarce privilege, a prized distinction that just happened to be possessed by all white men. It thus discharged the egalitarian debts of America—not by paying them (Alexander Stephens would claim that the claim of equality in the Declaration of Independence was “fundamentally wrong”) but by democratizing feudalism.
However vigorous were these nods to a feudal—if democratized—past, the defenders of slavery remained firmly fixed upon the future. Refusing the identity of the staid traditionalist, they preferred the title of the heretic and the scientist, that fugitive intelligence who marched to his own drummer and thereby advanced the cause of progress and civilization. John C. Calhoun compared the criticisms he received for his positions to the “denunciation” that had fallen “upon Galileo and Bacon when they first unfolded the great discoveries which have immortalized their names.” Like all the great modern—William Harvey, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and James Mill were also among their other models—the slaveholders were guided, or claimed to be guided, by the light of truth and reason. Just as Galileo was initially persecuted and now revered, so would the South one day be hailed for its innovations. “May we not,” asked Stephens, “look with confidence to the ultimate universal acknowledgment of the truths upon which our system rests?” In 1837, Calhoun declared that the “experiment” of racialized slavery “was in progress, but had not been completed.” The “judgment” of society, he warned, “should be postponed for another ten years,” when the experiment would presumably be concluded.
But there was another side to this embrace of the fugitive intellect: the acute sense of wounded victimhood, which sounded like nothing so much as the grievances of a revolutionary class in the making. The master class performed that strange alchemy, so peculiar to privileged groups, by which the enjoyment of power—not just on the plantation or in the South but in national political institutions as well—is turned into the anxiety of persecution. Calhoun was the master of this transposition, borrowing directly from the abolitionist canon to make the case that it was the slaveholder that was the true slave. He compared the tariff to the exploitation and extraction of slavery and the federal government’s use of coercive power against the states to the “bond between master and slave—a union of exaction on one side and of unqualified obedience on the other.” Burke made a similar move in his account of the fate of Marie Antoinette during the French Revolution: his treatment of the hounded queen resembles those stories of feminine victimhood—think of Richardson’s Pamela—that Lynn Hunt has recently argued helped give rise to the popular discourse of human rights during the eighteenth century.
The slaveholders’ sense of being besieged was not imaginary: outside of Brazil and the Caribbean, they were a lonely outpost of domination; with the abolitionists beginning to gain traction in some northern circles, they were acutely aware—Calhoun earlier than most—of the writing on the wall. Even so, their perception of themselves as aggrieved subalterns subjugated by imperious elites reflects more than a prophetic realism. It testifies to the curious ways in which a revolutionary idiom can infiltrate the most exalted of classes. “We…are in a hopeless minority in our own confederated republic,” cried Harper. “We can have no hearing before the tribunal of the civilized world.”
With their orientation to the future and acute sense of victimhood, the southern writers adopted an ethos geared less to liberalism or conservatism—ideologies arising from previous centuries of European conflict—than to fascism, the one ism of the twentieth century that could and would make a legitimate claim to novelty. They beat the drums of race war. Like the Nazis ca. 1940, they offered deportation and extermination as final solutions to the Negro Question. If blacks were set free, Jefferson warned, it would “produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of one race or the other.” The only alternative was an “effort…unknown to history. When freed, he [the slave] is to be removed beyond the mixture.” Anticipating the writings of Robert Brassilach, the French fascist who argued that compassion meant that Jewish children should be deported from France with their parents, Dew claimed, “If our slaves are ever to be sent away in any systematic manner, humanity demands that they should be carried in families.” If the slaves were freed, Harper concluded, “one race must be driven out by the other, or exterminated, or again enslaved.”
Like the Nazis, the defenders of slavery spoke of lebensraum. We often forget that Hitler, in Mein Kampf, spurned Europe’s pursuit of overseas colonies, arguing instead that his countrymen should “direct [their] eyes toward the land in the East” where Germany could escape the industrial present and build an agrarian future. In Poland and Russia, the Germans could “finally put an end to the prewar colonial and trade policy and change over to the land policy of the future” based on the slave labor of the Slavic peoples. The slaveholders spoke of expanding to the west, where they too would create an alternative modernity, an agricultural utopia that would validate their new political economy of land and forced labor. They dreamed of vast empires, like the Roman or the Egyptian, but on the Mississippi. (Why Memphis, after all, or Cairo, Illinois?) “In our own country, look at the lower valley of the Mississippi,” wrote Harper, “which is capable of being made a far greater Egypt.” In “the great valley of the Mississippi” James Hammond thought he saw “the acknowledged seat of the empire of the world,” perhaps even “an empire that shall rule the world.”
Lurking beneath the South’s notions of race war and land empires was a vision of life as permanent struggle, of history as a ledger of agonistic conflict. Not for the slaveholders the pastorals of old Europe, where time stood still or moved forward at glacial pace. “Mutation and progress is the condition of human affairs,” wrote Harper. Like Nietzsche and the Social Darwinists, the master class believed that social friction and political contest made for passion and greatness. The problem with the abolitionist creed, Harper argued, was that it would create a society where “if there is little suffering, there is little high enjoyment. The even flow of the life forbids the high excitement which is necessary for it.” Only in struggle and domination could “the moral and intellectual faculties…be cultivated to their highest perfection.” Better the inequality of slavery, which allows for the highest cultivation of the few, than the mediocrity of equality. Only the “inequality of condition between the front and rear ranks,” wrote Calhoun, gives “so strong an impulse to the former to maintain their position, and to the latter to press forward into their files.” Only inequality, in other words, would guarantee “the march of progress.” Slavery, Dew concluded, would produce not only an efficient economy but also the most dynamic and expansive society the world had ever seen.
Thomas Jefferson: American Fascist?1
It’s Old Home Week in the American media. First there was the welcome back of Abraham Lincoln (and the brouhaha over the Spielberg film). Now Thomas Jefferson is in the news. But where it was Lincoln the emancipator we were hailing earlier in the week, it’s Jefferson the slaveholder who’s now getting all the press.
Yesterday in the New York Times, legal historian Paul Finkelman wrote a bruising attack on Jefferson titled “The Monster of Monticello.” This was a followup to some of the controversy surrounding the publication of Henry Wiencek’s new book on Jefferson, which makes Jefferson’s slaveholding central to his legacy.
Finkelman’s essay has already prompted some pushback. David Post at The Volokh Conspiracy (h/t Samir Chopra) wrote:
Jefferson, Finkelman tells us, was not a “particularly kind” slave-master; he sometimes “punished slaves by selling them away from their families and friends, a retaliation that was incomprehensibly cruel even at the time.” And he believed that ”blacks’ ability to reason was ‘much inferior’ to whites’ and that they were “in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous.” So what? Really – so what? If you want to think that he was a bad guy — or even a really bad guy, with truly grievous personal faults — you’re free to do so. But to claim that that has something to do with Jefferson’s historical legacy is truly preposterous.
Jefferson’s real legacy, says Post, is not what he did or didn’t do to his slaves—that’s a strictly personal failing, I guess—but the glorious words he wrote in The Declaration of Independence. We hold these truths…you know the drill. (Various folks on Twitter have made similar claims to me.) Post also links to a short paper he wrote on Jefferson’s contributions to the cause of antislavery.
In that paper, Post liberally quotes from Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, “an extraordinary book” according to Post, in which Jefferson does voice some of his ambivalence over slavery. Curiously, Post never cites the lengthy and disturbing passages from Query XIV, where Jefferson offers his most considered views on the nature and status of black people and their fate in America. And it’s clear why. It makes for chilling reading. I’ll just cite some brief excerpts here:
The first difference which strikes us is that of colour. Whether the black of the negro resides in the reticular membrane between the skin and scarf-skin, or in the scarf-skin itself; whether it proceeds from the colour of the blood, the colour of the bile, or from that of some other secretion, the difference is fixed in nature, and is as real as if its seat and cause were better known to us. And is this difference of no importance? Is it not the foundation of a greater or less share of beauty in the two races? Are not the fine mixtures of red and white, the expressions of every passion by greater or less suffusions of colour in the one, preferable to that eternal monotony, which reigns in the countenances, that immoveable veil of black which covers all the emotions of the other race? Add to these, flowing hair, a more elegant symmetry of form, their own judgment in favour of the whites, declared by their preference of them, as uniformly as is the preference of the Oranootan for the black women over those of his own species. The circumstance of superior beauty, is thought worthy attention in the propagation of our horses, dogs, and other domestic animals; why not in that of man? Besides those of colour, figure, and hair, there are other physical distinctions proving a difference of race. They have less hair on the face and body. They secrete less by the kidnies, and more by the glands of the skin, which gives them a very strong and disagreeable odour. This greater degree of transpiration renders them more tolerant of heat, and less so of cold, than the whites. Perhaps too a difference of structure in the pulmonary apparatus, which a late ingenious experimentalist has discovered to be the principal regulator of animal heat, may have disabled them from extricating, in the act of inspiration, so much of that fluid from the outer air, or obliged them in expiration, to part with more of it. They seem to require less sleep. A black, after hard labour through the day, will be induced by the slightest amusements to sit up till midnight, or later, though knowing he must be out with the first dawn of the morning. They are at least as brave, and more adventuresome. But this may perhaps proceed from a want of forethought, which prevents their seeing a danger till it be present. When present, they do not go through it with more coolness or steadiness than the whites. They are more ardent after their female: but love seems with them to be more an eager desire, than a tender delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation. Their griefs are transient. Those numberless afflictions, which render it doubtful whether heaven has given life to us in mercy or in wrath, are less felt, and sooner forgotten with them. In general, their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection. To this must be ascribed their disposition to sleep when abstracted from their diversions, and unemployed in labour. An animal whose body is at rest, and who does not reflect, must be disposed to sleep of course. Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me, that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous. It would be unfair to follow them to Africa for this investigation.
…
The Indians, with no advantages of this kind [as that enjoyed by black slaves in America], will often carve figures on their pipes not destitute of design and merit. They will crayon out an animal, a plant, or a country, so as to prove the existence of a germ in their minds which only wants cultivation. They astonish you with strokes of the most sublime oratory; such as prove their reason and sentiment strong, their imagination glowing and elevated. But never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration; never see even an elementary trait of painting or sculpture. In music they are more generally gifted than the whites with accurate ears for tune and time, and they have been found capable of imagining a small catch. Whether they will be equal to the composition of a more extensive run of melody, or of complicated harmony, is yet to be proved. Misery is often the parent of the most affecting touches in poetry. — Among the blacks is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry. Love is the peculiar oestrum of the poet. Their love is ardent, but it kindles the senses only, not the imagination. Religion indeed has produced a Phyllis Whately; but it could not produce a poet. The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism. The heroes of the Dunciad are to her, as Hercules to the author of that poem. Ignatius Sancho has approached nearer to merit in composition…But his imagination is wild and extravagant, escapes incessantly from every restraint of reason and taste, and, in the course of its vagaries, leaves a tract of thought as incoherent and eccentric, as is the course of a meteor through the sky. His subjects should often have led him to a process of sober reasoning: yet we find him always substituting sentiment for demonstration. Upon the whole, though we admit him to the first place among those of his own colour who have presented themselves to the public judgment, yet when we compare him with the writers of the race among whom he lived, and particularly with the epistolary class, in which he has taken his own stand, we are compelled to enroll him at the bottom of the column.
…
With the Romans, the regular method of taking the evidence of their slaves was under torture. Here it has been thought better never to resort to their evidence. When a master was murdered, all his slaves, in the same house, or within hearing, were condemned to death. Here punishment falls on the guilty only, and as precise proof is required against him as against a freeman. Yet notwithstanding these and other discouraging circumstances among the Romans, their slaves were often their rarest artists. They excelled too in science, insomuch as to be usually employed as tutors to their master’s children. Epictetus, Terence, and Phaedrus, were slaves. But they were of the race of whites. It is not their condition then, but nature, which has produced the distinction.
…
To our reproach it must be said, that though for a century and a half we have had under our eyes the races of black and of red men, they have never yet been viewed by us as subjects of natural history. I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind. It is not against experience to suppose, that different species of the same genus, or varieties of the same species, may possess different qualifications. Will not a lover of natural history then, one who views the gradations in all the races of animals with the eye of philosophy, excuse an effort to keep those in the department of man as distinct as nature has formed them? This unfortunate difference of colour, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people. Many of their advocates, while they wish to vindicate the liberty of human nature, are anxious also to preserve its dignity and beauty. Some of these, embarrassed by the question `What further is to be done with them?’ join themselves in opposition with those who are actuated by sordid avarice only. Among the Romans emancipation required but one effort. The slave, when made free, might mix with, without staining the blood of his master. But with us a second is necessary, unknown to history. When freed, he is to be removed beyond the reach of mixture.
I bring up these passages less because I’m interested in Post’s omissions and his arguments than because of the general way the debate about Jefferson has been framed thus far. The basic idea seems to be that Jefferson had some fine ideas—and terrible practices. And whatever of his legacy that’s terrible, the argument goes, is entirely caught up with, and consumed by, the institution of slavery. So once we abolish slavery, thanks in part to the words of the Declaration that Jefferson wrote, we’re in the land of the good Jefferson.
But as this passage in Notes on the State of Virginia suggests, Jefferson’s real and lasting contribution to the American experiment is not exhausted either by the Declaration or by the institution of slavery. It is as a theorist of race domination—of white supremacy, of the perdurability of race (and specifically the black race), of the ineradicable shallowness of blackness as against the textured profundity of whiteness—that he stands out. And that is a legacy that persists to this day.
Jefferson was not a liberal hypocrite, a symptom of his time. He was the avant garde of a group of American theorists who were struggling to reconcile the ideals of the Declaration with the reality of chattel slavery. His resolution of that struggle took the form of one of the most vicious doctrines of racial supremacy the world had yet seen. That is his legacy, or at least part of his legacy. He was by no means the only one to take this route, but he was one of the earliest and easily the most famous. He is the tributary of what would become an American tradition.
And as I argue in what follows, which is an excerpt from a paper on Louis Hartz that I never published (though a passage or two of it may appear in The Reactionary Mind), Jefferson’s race theory—along with that of such men as Thomas Dew, James Henry Hammond, and William Harper, who feature prominently in my discussion—points not only to the eighteenth century (he was much more than a man of his times) and not only to the categories of liberalism and republicanism, which are so familiar to US intellectual historians. It also points, albeit only in a suggestive way, to the future, to the twentieth century and European doctrines of racialized fascism.
Jefferson, I would submit, should be remembered not only as the writer of the Declaration of Independence and owner of slaves, but also as a contributor, along with his successors, to a doctrine of race war and what Hannah Arendt would later call, in another context, “race imperialism”—which would find its ultimate fulfillment a century later, and a continent away.
In the interest of legibility and flow, I’ve eliminated all the footnotes
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Racism was tailor made to the counterrevolutionary task of combating abolition, of reconciling the Declaration of Independence with the reality of chattel slavery. It combined ideas of equality and inequality, and fused the radical’s vision of political plasticity with the conservative’s notion of the stubbornness of history. It proved an ideology of extraordinary and protean—extraordinary because protean—resilience, precisely because it had something for everyone, save of course for the slaves themselves.
According to Josiah Nott, races are “marked by peculiarities of structure, which have always been constant and undeviating. Human races—as opposed to other species of animal or plant—are particularly immutable.” From these deep and enduring differences of physical structure, moral differences, equally enduring, followed. “Is it not a law of nature, that every permanent animal form…carries with its physical type a moral of its own, which cannot be obliterated, changed, or transferred to another, so long as the physique stands?”
More than classifying men and women into distinctive types, slavery’s racial theorists made the quite radical argument that humanity’s every attempt to rise above its physical nature was a misbegotten enterprise. We are, they claimed, beings of the utmost and comprehensive constraint. Our character, personality, individuality—none of these is self-fashioned or amenable to artifice. Each is an irrevocable and irreversible given.
If the intransigence of biology was the back-story of race, it followed that there was only one race, properly understood, in America: the black race. According to Nott, white people reason, imagine, and create—activities of transcendence that do not jibe with the liabilities of race. The white man “takes up the march of civilization and presses onward.” He frees himself of his inheritance, his circumstance, history itself. For that reason, “the Caucasian races have been the only truly progressive races of history,” which means nothing so much as that whites were not a race at all.
Among blacks, however, “one generation does not take up civilization where the last left it and carry it on as does the Caucasian—there it stands immovable; they go as far as instinct extends and no farther.” In the words of Thomas Cobb, the black man’s “mind is never inventive or suggestive. Improvement never enters into his imagination. A trodden path, he will travel for years, without the idea ever suggesting itself to his brain, that a nearer and better way is present before him.” Blacks can no more rise above their station than they can sink below it. They are what they are, have been and will be. As William Harper wrote, “A slave has no hope that by a course of integrity, he can materially elevate his condition in society, nor can his offence materially depress it…he has no character to establish or lose.” Even contempt or scorn, claimed Harper, would not spur the black race to do better.
Writing long before these theories of racial difference were fully formulated, Thomas Jefferson offered a glimpse of what it means to think of blacks as a race, as the race, and whites as individuals. Blacks are brave, he says, but this is due to “want of forethought.” The black man is “ardent,” but this is lust, not love. “In general,” he says, “their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection.” In “imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous.” One can see their brute incapacity for historical transcendence and moral or political freedom in the color of their skin. While whites sport “fine mixtures of red and white,” reflecting the diverse range of passions and sensibilities at their disposal, blacks suffer from the “eternal monotony” of blackness, that “immovable veil” that makes any subtlety or nuance, any gradation of feeling, any distinctiveness or idiosyncrasy of character and personality, impossible.
No mere contradiction or sleight of hand, this dual portrait of whites as individuals and blacks as a race was the perfect counterrevolutionary argument. It ascribed to whites all the virtues of a ruling class—capable of action, freedom, politics itself—and to blacks all the deficits of a class to be ruled. “This unfortunate difference of color, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people,” wrote Jefferson of black slaves. Even among free blacks in the North, Thomas Dew argued, “the animal part of the man gains the victory over the moral.” After the Civil War, Nott would write that “all the powers of the Freedmen’s Bureau, or ‘gates of hell cannot prevail against them’ [the inequalities between whites and blacks].”
But while race thinking prescribed the most vicious forms of domination, it also absorbed a mutant strain of the egalitarianism then roiling America and turned it into a justification for slavery. “Jack Cade, the English reformer, wished all mankind to be brought to one common level,” wrote Dew. “We believe slavery, in the United States, has accomplished this.” By freeing whites from “menial and low offices,” slavery had eliminated “the greatest cause of distinction and separation of the ranks of society.” Anticipating the writings of W.E.B. DuBois, Edmund Morgan, and David Roediger, the slaveholders openly acknowledged that slavery made white men feel equal. Equal and, more important, superior: under slavery, freedom became a scarce privilege, a prized distinction that just happened to be possessed by all white men. It thus discharged the egalitarian debts of America—not by paying them (Alexander Stephens would claim that the claim of equality in the Declaration of Independence was “fundamentally wrong”) but by democratizing feudalism.
However vigorous were these nods to a feudal—if democratized—past, the defenders of slavery remained firmly fixed upon the future. Refusing the identity of the staid traditionalist, they preferred the title of the heretic and the scientist, that fugitive intelligence who marched to his own drummer and thereby advanced the cause of progress and civilization. John C. Calhoun compared the criticisms he received for his positions to the “denunciation” that had fallen “upon Galileo and Bacon when they first unfolded the great discoveries which have immortalized their names.” Like all the great modern—William Harvey, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and James Mill were also among their other models—the slaveholders were guided, or claimed to be guided, by the light of truth and reason. Just as Galileo was initially persecuted and now revered, so would the South one day be hailed for its innovations. “May we not,” asked Stephens, “look with confidence to the ultimate universal acknowledgment of the truths upon which our system rests?” In 1837, Calhoun declared that the “experiment” of racialized slavery “was in progress, but had not been completed.” The “judgment” of society, he warned, “should be postponed for another ten years,” when the experiment would presumably be concluded.
But there was another side to this embrace of the fugitive intellect: the acute sense of wounded victimhood, which sounded like nothing so much as the grievances of a revolutionary class in the making. The master class performed that strange alchemy, so peculiar to privileged groups, by which the enjoyment of power—not just on the plantation or in the South but in national political institutions as well—is turned into the anxiety of persecution. Calhoun was the master of this transposition, borrowing directly from the abolitionist canon to make the case that it was the slaveholder that was the true slave. He compared the tariff to the exploitation and extraction of slavery and the federal government’s use of coercive power against the states to the “bond between master and slave—a union of exaction on one side and of unqualified obedience on the other.” Burke made a similar move in his account of the fate of Marie Antoinette during the French Revolution: his treatment of the hounded queen resembles those stories of feminine victimhood—think of Richardson’s Pamela—that Lynn Hunt has recently argued helped give rise to the popular discourse of human rights during the eighteenth century.
The slaveholders’ sense of being besieged was not imaginary: outside of Brazil and the Caribbean, they were a lonely outpost of domination; with the abolitionists beginning to gain traction in some northern circles, they were acutely aware—Calhoun earlier than most—of the writing on the wall. Even so, their perception of themselves as aggrieved subalterns subjugated by imperious elites reflects more than a prophetic realism. It testifies to the curious ways in which a revolutionary idiom can infiltrate the most exalted of classes. “We…are in a hopeless minority in our own confederated republic,” cried Harper. “We can have no hearing before the tribunal of the civilized world.”
With their orientation to the future and acute sense of victimhood, the southern writers adopted an ethos geared less to liberalism or conservatism—ideologies arising from previous centuries of European conflict—than to fascism, the one ism of the twentieth century that could and would make a legitimate claim to novelty. They beat the drums of race war. Like the Nazis ca. 1940, they offered deportation and extermination as final solutions to the Negro Question. If blacks were set free, Jefferson warned, it would “produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of one race or the other.” The only alternative was an “effort…unknown to history. When freed, he [the slave] is to be removed beyond the mixture.” Anticipating the writings of Robert Brassilach, the French fascist who argued that compassion meant that Jewish children should be deported from France with their parents, Dew claimed, “If our slaves are ever to be sent away in any systematic manner, humanity demands that they should be carried in families.” If the slaves were freed, Harper concluded, “one race must be driven out by the other, or exterminated, or again enslaved.”
Like the Nazis, the defenders of slavery spoke of lebensraum. We often forget that Hitler, in Mein Kampf, spurned Europe’s pursuit of overseas colonies, arguing instead that his countrymen should “direct [their] eyes toward the land in the East” where Germany could escape the industrial present and build an agrarian future. In Poland and Russia, the Germans could “finally put an end to the prewar colonial and trade policy and change over to the land policy of the future” based on the slave labor of the Slavic peoples. The slaveholders spoke of expanding to the west, where they too would create an alternative modernity, an agricultural utopia that would validate their new political economy of land and forced labor. They dreamed of vast empires, like the Roman or the Egyptian, but on the Mississippi. (Why Memphis, after all, or Cairo, Illinois?) “In our own country, look at the lower valley of the Mississippi,” wrote Harper, “which is capable of being made a far greater Egypt.” In “the great valley of the Mississippi” James Hammond thought he saw “the acknowledged seat of the empire of the world,” perhaps even “an empire that shall rule the world.”
Lurking beneath the South’s notions of race war and land empires was a vision of life as permanent struggle, of history as a ledger of agonistic conflict. Not for the slaveholders the pastorals of old Europe, where time stood still or moved forward at glacial pace. “Mutation and progress is the condition of human affairs,” wrote Harper. Like Nietzsche and the Social Darwinists, the master class believed that social friction and political contest made for passion and greatness. The problem with the abolitionist creed, Harper argued, was that it would create a society where “if there is little suffering, there is little high enjoyment. The even flow of the life forbids the high excitement which is necessary for it.” Only in struggle and domination could “the moral and intellectual faculties…be cultivated to their highest perfection.” Better the inequality of slavery, which allows for the highest cultivation of the few, than the mediocrity of equality. Only the “inequality of condition between the front and rear ranks,” wrote Calhoun, gives “so strong an impulse to the former to maintain their position, and to the latter to press forward into their files.” Only inequality, in other words, would guarantee “the march of progress.” Slavery, Dew concluded, would produce not only an efficient economy but also the most dynamic and expansive society the world had ever seen.
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