“The Civil War’s Dirty Secret; It Was Always About Slavery”: Imposing Their Values On The Majority, It Was Never About States’ Rights
Seven score and ten years ago, Confederate General Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia surrendered to Union General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, and the great American Civil War ended, or so we’ve read in high school textbooks and on Wikipedia.
The chivalrous Lee, in countless hues of grey on his white horse, and the magnanimous Grant in muddy boots were icons that the reunited-by-force United States needed desperately a century and a half ago, and that we’ve cherished ever since.
But the war did not really end at Appomattox, just as it did not really begin four years before when South Carolina militias opened fire on the tiny Union garrison in the massive, unfinished fort called Sumter that dominated Charleston Harbor.
And if we want to stop and think today about what that war was about—what made it happen—then cannons, shot and shells, minié balls, muskets and swords do not, in the end, tell us very much. Brave men were called on to fight for their homes and their ideals, or because they didn’t have better sense, and, as in every war, they kept on fighting for their brothers in arms.
In the South, the spirit of camaraderie and defiance ran so hot and so deep that for generations afterwards, and to this day in some corners of the air-conditioned Sunbelt that was once the Confederacy, people will tell you about “The Lost Cause.”
But, let’s be clear. The cause of the South was not the cause of chivalry, nor was it about the revolutionary ideals of the Boston Tea Party, as many claimed at the time. “The tea has been thrown overboard; the revolution of 1860 has been initiated,” declared Charleston’s Robert Barnwell Rhett as the Carolinians prepared to secede from the Union and precipitate the war.
Rhett was one of the coterie of radicals in the South who came to be known as “fire-eaters,” and their cause was not the cause of freedom that the founding fathers fought for in the American Revolution. Their cause was slavery: holding slaves, working slaves, buying and selling slaves—black chattel considered less than human beings by custom, by the courts, and even by the Constitution, whose authors never mentioned slavery but weasel-worded it into the founding document of the Union.
According to the original U.S. Constitution, slaves, who had no rights whatsoever as citizens, would be counted as three-fifths of a person for the census that determined a state’s representation in Congress. This constitutional right—for such it was—was not one the slave-holding states were willing to give up, because they feared if they lost their disproportionate power in Washington, eventually their “right” to own other human beings to clear their land, grow their crops, and make their fortunes for them would be challenged.
The cry of “self-preservation” in the face of the federal government was “always on the lips of a Carolinian when he is about to justify an outrage connected with Slavery,” wrote the British consul in Charleston in the 1850s.
Every so often, rumors of a “servile insurrection” stirred hysterical emotions and ruthless reprisals. One plot for a slave rebellion stoked by a “free person of color” named Denmark Vesey was crushed before it even began in the 1820s, but 40 years later it still lingered like a nightmare and a prophecy in the minds of Southerners.
The notion that had existed in the early part of the century that the hideous “peculiar institution” would somehow atrophy and disappear had itself evanesced. The cotton gin, a machine separating seeds from fiber that was invented at the end of the 18th century, had made a marginal crop into a source of enormous revenues. But the cotton economy of the South was hugely rapacious. It burned out old land so that new acreage constantly had to be opened, and that was the job of slaves.
The hunger for that fresh territory and the slaves to work it was insatiable. The annexation of Texas and the subsequent war that took a huge part of Mexico in 1848 was not enough to satisfy them, because not all that territory would be slave-owning. The South and its friends in the North (like President James Buchanan) wanted Cuba, too, and many Southerners supported efforts to invade and conquer and annex more of Mexico and much of Central America.
More land, more slaves, meant more money and more power to dominate the federal government and make it support people who wanted more land, more slaves and more money. And in the 1850s a movement grew that was best defined as “rule or ruin”: if the slave-owning South could not control the federal government, then it would break away from it. The Union, as the famous headline in the Charleston Mercury declared in December 1860, would be “dissolved.”
One of the issues that the fire-eaters played on was the reopening of the slave trade with Africa that had been banned since 1808. (The Constitution had enshrined it up until that date.) By the mid-19th century, most Americans, including most Southerners, knew that the traffic had been horrific, and many understood that it was, in fact, a holocaust. It had continued to Cuba and Brazil, and stories often reached the American press of ships packed so tightly with human cargo that, as one horrified U.S. naval officer put it, there was “scarcely space to die in.”
The fire-eaters pushing for secession argued that this was not a crime at all. Slavery, as Mr. Rhett (the would-be heir to the Tea Party) put it, was “a blessing to the African race and a system of labor appointed by God.” Such men firmly believed that the world markets for the cotton that slaves produced—especially the great military powers of Britain and France—would put aside their moral qualms and support the South for the sake of its white gold.
In essence, they convinced themselves that King Cotton was the king of England. But that was not the case. The British government never did join the Confederates in their war with the Union. And without such support the agrarian Confederacy was all but doomed in its fight against the heavily industrialized and much more populous North. Only the genius of Robert E. Lee was able to keep the war going for as long as it went on.
The Ordinance of Secession and “Declaration of the Immediate Causes” drafted by South Carolina grandees intent not only on justifying their own state’s withdrawal from the Union in December 1860, but on persuading the other slave-holding states to join it, was concerned entirely and exclusively with the question of slavery. It quoted the Constitution. It cited the Declaration of Independence. But it was not about all men being created equal. And it was not about tariffs, as some have argued since. And it was not merely about the general principle of states’ rights. It was specifically about the states’ rights to enshrine slavery, pure and simple—and evil—as that was, and the obligation of the federal government to guarantee the rights of human-property owners. Since the Feds weren’t likely to do that under the new Lincoln administration in Washington, the Carolinians argued, “self-preservation” dictated secession. They were determined, come what may, to make their world safe for slavocracy.
So where did the Civil War begin and where did it end? One can pick many places, many times, but an illuminating version of the story can be built around one figure: a young red-haired fire-eater from Savannah, the heir to a huge banking and commercial fortune in the North as well as the South, named Charles Augustus Lafayette Lamar.
In 1858, Lamar backed the voyage of a sleek 118-foot yacht called the Wanderer that sailed to the coast of Africa, loaded 471 Negroes on board, according to contemporary accounts, and landed weeks later on Georgia’s Jekyll Island. Roughly 370 Africans were offloaded there. The other 101 had died at sea: acceptable attrition when Negroes could be sold in the South for six, eight, ten times what they cost in the baracoons of West Africa. Their bodies had simply been thrown overboard. (“The shark of the Atlantic is still, as he has ever been, the partner of the slave trader,” as one British editorialist put it.)
Lamar and his partners sent the Wanderer on its voyage not only to make money, but to flout the federal law. A whole generation of slave traders hauling their tortured cargo to Cuba under the American flag had proved, on the rare occasions when they were caught, that no U.S. court would convict them for what was supposed to be a capital crime. Indeed, Southern grand juries would not even indict them. And Lamar and his cronies proved that once again.
“They are rather amused at the idea of embarrassing the Federal Government, and perhaps, in a lesser degree, of annoying Great Britain,” the British consul in Charleston advised London in 1859, “but they will awake from their delusion.” He predicted that the Democratic Party, which the slave interests had dominated, would be torn apart by the fire-eaters pushing for ever greater power, and the anti-slavery Republicans, the party of Abraham Lincoln, would come to power. “When this shall happen, the days of Slavery are numbered,” wrote the consul. “The prestige and power of Slave holders will be gone, never to return.”
And so it was. Lamar got what he had wished for. Most of the slave-holding states seceded from the Union, and they fought long and hard for their independence. Through much of that time, as a skilled organizer of blockade runners, Lamar not only survived but thrived. But as the Union troops of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman marched through Georgia in 1864, Lamar took up arms—and he would not put them down.
By then, it should have been obvious to all that the war was over. So desperate had the Confederates become that they even started talking about emancipating the slaves if only Britain and France would, at long last, back them. But by 1864 it was far too late for that.
On April 9, 1865, Lee surrendered at Appomattox.
On April 14, 1865, Robert Anderson, who had surrendered Fort Sumter exactly four years before, raised the Union flag there once again in a ceremony intended to write a definitive end to the war. If he had had his wishes, he said, he would have done it in silence. In attendance were many former slaves who had enlisted as Union soldiers. One of the honored guests was the son of Denmark Vesey. But the event was forever overshadowed by the murder in Washington a few hours later of President Abraham Lincoln.
Still, Lamar continued to fight, stubborn and defiant as ever.
On April 16, 1865, Union and Confederate troops clashed on the outskirts of Columbus, Georgia. There are several different accounts of how Lamar died. In one that circulated among his relatives he was trying to surrender when he was shot almost by accident. But the one preferred by Erik Colonius, whose 2006 book The Wanderer is essentially a biography of Lamar, is far more dramatic:
“In a few minutes the fighting was hand to hand,” Confederate soldier Pope Barrow recalled later. “A Federal cavalryman, whose horse had been shot from under him, stepped in front of Black Cloud, the horse Col. Lamar was riding, seized the bit with his left hand, and threw up his carbine with his right, and called on Lamar to surrender. Quick as lightning, Lamar plunged his spurs into his horse’s sides and tried to run over his opponent. At that instant—as the horse reared and plunged above the soldier—he fired, and at the crack of the carbine Lamar fell lifeless to the ground.”
And so, Charlie Lamar’s war came to an end.
But there are times, and maybe today is one of those times, when one looks at the great questions of race and rights in the United States and realizes the spirit of the fire-eaters—their rationalization of racism, their contempt for the federal government, their penchant for violence, their self-deluding vision of their place in the world, and their desire to impose their values on the majority—all that, I am afraid, lives on.
By: Christopher Dickey, The Daily Beast, April 10, 2015
“The Security To Take Risks”: Secure Enough To Explore The Possibilities Of Our Ideals
In his interview with Tom Friedman, President Obama discussed how his foreign policy is guided by a principle I haven’t heard him articulate before.
What struck me most was what I’d call an “Obama doctrine” embedded in the president’s remarks. It emerged when I asked if there was a common denominator to his decisions to break free from longstanding United States policies isolating Burma, Cuba and now Iran. Obama said his view was that “engagement,” combined with meeting core strategic needs, could serve American interests vis-Ã -vis these three countries far better than endless sanctions and isolation. He added that America, with its overwhelming power, needs to have the self-confidence to take some calculated risks to open important new possibilities — like trying to forge a diplomatic deal with Iran that, while permitting it to keep some of its nuclear infrastructure, forestalls its ability to build a nuclear bomb for at least a decade, if not longer.
“We are powerful enough to be able to test these propositions without putting ourselves at risk. And that’s the thing … people don’t seem to understand,” the president said. “You take a country like Cuba. For us to test the possibility that engagement leads to a better outcome for the Cuban people, there aren’t that many risks for us. It’s a tiny little country. It’s not one that threatens our core security interests, and so [there’s no reason not] to test the proposition. And if it turns out that it doesn’t lead to better outcomes, we can adjust our policies. The same is true with respect to Iran, a larger country, a dangerous country, one that has engaged in activities that resulted in the death of U.S. citizens, but the truth of the matter is: Iran’s defense budget is $30 billion. Our defense budget is closer to $600 billion. Iran understands that they cannot fight us. … You asked about an Obama doctrine. The doctrine is: We will engage, but we preserve all our capabilities.”
The notion that Iran is undeterrable — “it’s simply not the case,” he added. “And so for us to say, ‘Let’s try’ — understanding that we’re preserving all our options, that we’re not naive — but if in fact we can resolve these issues diplomatically, we are more likely to be safe, more likely to be secure, in a better position to protect our allies, and who knows? Iran may change. If it doesn’t, our deterrence capabilities, our military superiority stays in place. … We’re not relinquishing our capacity to defend ourselves or our allies. In that situation, why wouldn’t we test it?”
I say that I haven’t heard him articulate this principle before – but that’s simply because I haven’t heard him apply it to foreign policy. But the minute I read this portion of the interview, I thought of something a young Barack Obama told Tammerlin Drummond back in 1990 not long after he’d been elected the first African American President of the Harvard Law Review.
The post, considered the highest honor a student can attain at Harvard Law School, almost always leads to a coveted clerkship with the U.S. Supreme Court after graduation and a lucrative offer from the law firm of one’s choice.
Yet Obama, who has gone deep into debt to meet the $25,000-a-year cost of a Harvard Law School education, has left many in disbelief by asserting that he wants neither.
“One of the luxuries of going to Harvard Law School is it means you can take risks in your life,” Obama said recently. “You can try to do things to improve society and still land on your feet. That’s what a Harvard education should buy – enough confidence and security to pursue your dreams and give something back.”
I believe that what the President is talking about is something we all know deep inside ourselves but rarely allow to take hold. Too often our fears feed our sense of insecurity and keep us from taking the kinds of risks that could improve things. We embark on a never-ending quest to find more (money, power, etc) and never recognize that the ground we are standing on is already secure enough to allow us to let go and explore the possibility of our ideals.
The damage that kind of cycle does to an individual is very similar to how the fear-mongering from Republicans is affecting our country right now. It is in this way that President Obama embodies what is truly exceptional about the United States. He knows that just as a young man with a degree from Harvard Law School could afford to take some risks with his career (and look where that got him!), the richest and most powerful nation on this earth is secure enough to be able to take some risks to promote engagement and the potential for peace.
By: Nancy LeTourneau, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, April 7, 2015
“Ted Cruz’s Imagined America”: A Detour Between His Biographical And Ideological Sections Into The Late Eighteenth Century
I just slogged through Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign announcement speech, and have to say it’s a formula composition: a combination of a Cruz family biography and a by-the-numbers recitation of conservative policy positions. To give it the requisite “lift,” the candidate and/or his brain trust chose a rather hackneyed “imagine” construction, and applied it mechanically to both parts of the speech:
Imagine a teenage boy, not much younger than many of you here today, growing up in Cuba. Jet black hair, skinny as a rail.
Involved in student council, and yet Cuba was not at a peaceful time. The dictator, Batista, was corrupt, he was oppressive. And this teenage boy joins a revolution. He joins a revolution against Batista, he begins fighting with other teenagers to free Cuba from the dictator. This boy at age 17 finds himself thrown in prison, finds himself tortured, beaten. And then at age 18, he flees Cuba, he comes to America.
Imagine for a second the hope that was in his heart as he rode that ferry boat across to Key West, and got on a Greyhound bus to head to Austin, Texas to begin working, washing dishes, making 50 cents an hour, coming to the one land on earth that has welcomed so many millions.
You get the idea.
And then later, this:
Imagine innovation thriving on the Internet as government regulators and tax collectors are kept at bay and more and more opportunity is created.
Imagine America finally becoming energy self-sufficient as millions and millions of high-paying jobs are created.
All this imagining gets very labored and tedious–particularly since Cruz takes a detour between his biographical and ideological sections into the late eighteenth century and the Holy Founders charged by God with forever limiting government (a staple of Con-Con revisionist history).
But in a way it’s appropriate, too, since Cruz is the self-designated champion for those who really don’t like America as it is and prefer an imagined version where the Calvin Coolidge administration is the wave of the future. He really, really wants these people to look to him as their first-choice candidate amidst a host of rivals, and he spares no rhetorical expense–and no opportunity cost in terms of appealing to anyone else–to make his pitch.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, March 23, 2015
“A Very Low Bar”: The Smart Brother? Why Jeb Bush Can’t Escape Dubya’s Dubious Legacy
Being singled out as “the smart brother” in an American political and financial dynasty like the Bush family must be a heavy load. But Jeb Bush went far to dispel that burdensome description with his debut address on foreign policy. With its mélange of mispronunciations, mistakes, and casually ignorant utterances, Bush’s speech before the Chicago Council on Global Affairs instantly reminded listeners of the not-so-smart brother — the one who already became the second Bush president.
Such moments of recognition and remembrance are not auspicious for brother Jeb, whose burgeoning presidential ambition depends on persuading voters that he is emphatically not his brother George W. – or as he put it in an ad-libbed line: “I am my own man.” But his Chicago outing offered little to reassure Americans wary of the ruinous foreign policy record of the Bush-Cheney administration (an electoral subset that includes almost everyone).
Let’s start with the funny parts: Hoping presumably to move briskly past a certain disastrous trillion-dollar war, Jeb allowed that “mistakes were made in Iraq, for sure,” a remark so vague that even his brother, who once used a similar dodge in discussing torture at Abu Ghraib, would have to agree. Striving to demonstrate his familiarity with the new terror threats encircling the globe, he mentioned the Nigerian Islamist militants who call themselves “Boko Haram,” except he called them something that sounded a lot like “Beaucoup Haram.” Speaking of ISIS, the Syrian terrorist movement, he referred to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as “the guy that’s the supreme leader or whatever his new title is — head of the caliphate.” Overstating the military manpower of ISIS by a factor of 10, he said the group has 200,000 men under arms, when U.S. intelligence estimates no more than 20,000. (Before his spokesperson corrected that gaffe, it sounded as if he meant to instill fear with a mythical intelligence estimate – yet another déjà vu moment.)
At another point, he confused Iraq with Iran, a mistake anybody can make – and in this instance, a metaphor for his brother’s failed war, which vastly increased Iranian political, economic and military influence over Iraq.
What Bush failed to provide were specific policy ideas, sticking instead with platitudes about “strength” and “leadership.” Explaining how he would deal with ISIS, the former Florida governor kept it very simple: “We have to develop a strategy, that’s global, that takes them out. First, the strategy, you know, needs to be restrain them, tighten the noose, and then taking them out is the strategy.” Not much there for the Pentagon or the State Department, but at least he didn’t call it “strategery.”
The problem facing Jeb Bush is that to prove he is his own man in full, he must somehow erase many of his own previous positions and remarks.
Appearing on CNN in 2010, Jeb said of Dubya, “I have never disagreed with him…till death do us part.” Speaking about Iraq three years later, he claimed, “The war has wound down now and it’s still way too early to judge what successes it had in providing some degree of stability in the region” (a statement that can only provoke bitter laughter today). “During incredibly challenging times, he kept us safe,” he said in praise of Dubya at the 2012 Republican convention, as if 9/11 and that fateful Presidential Daily Briefing had never happened.
There are other clues to his policy predilections. For his entire career, Jeb has blindly advocated the Cuba sanctions policy that we have finally abandoned after 50 years of failure. That advocacy included a disgraceful episode in which he sought clemency from his presidential father for a bloody anti-Castro terrorist pursued by the U.S. Justice Department.
In keeping with that same foolishness was his early backing of the Project for the New American Century, or PNAC, pulled together in 1997 by William Kristol, the Washington pundit best known for being wrong about everything – in particular the costs, difficulties, and results of invading Iraq. As the chief publicist for that war, Kristol told us it would be easy, cheap, and hugely successful. Dubya believed him and evidently so did Jeb.
That is an old story — but the putative Republican frontrunner recently released a list of his foreign policy advisors, which bizarrely features Paul Wolfowitz, Dubya’s deputy defense secretary and another PNAC enthusiast. Jeb’s campaign is proudly displaying the same old gang of advisors who turned the last Republican administration into wreckage.
Maybe Jeb really is the smart brother. So far, however, he shows no sign of being smart enough to avoid that other brother’s devastating mistakes.
By: Joe Conason, Editor in Chief, The National Memo, February 20, 2015
“Bold Moves”: Obama’s State Of The Union Address Offered An Ambitious Vision To Address Income Inequality
I don’t know what President Barack Obama is eating, drinking or smoking these days but someone should give some of it to every Democrat in Congress. Since the midterm election debacle, the president has unleashed enough bold policy initiatives to choke a horse. Some progressives wonder why it took so long for the president to push a populist agenda. My take is that late is better than never.
Last night in his State of the Union speech, the chief executive proposed a version of the “Robin Hood” tax which would provide tax credits and tax cuts to struggling middle-class families at the expense of the wealthy Americans who have reaped most of the benefits of the economic recovery. Previously the president signed a presidential memorandum that would provide federal employees access to paid sick leave to care for a new child and proposed a program that would allow students to attend two years of community college, tuition free.
In addition to his initiatives to combat income inequality, the president took executive action that eased deportation for undocumented immigrants and opened the door for diplomatic and economic relations with Cuba.
But Obama’s tax proposal is a turning point in recent American political history. He has boldly gone where no Democratic president of this generation has gone before. Since the days of Ronald Reagan, Democrats have been on the defensive on tax issues. Republican presidents have proposed tax cuts for wealthy Americans, and Democrats simply reacted and tried to mitigate the damage to working families. Last night the president played offense and proposed tax credits and tax cuts that will help hard-working, middle-class families finally get a piece of the economic recovery.
This is how the president framed the issue last night. “Will we accept an economy where only a few of us do spectacularly well? Or will we commit ourselves to an economy that generates rising incomes and chances for everyone who makes the effort?” Americans are concerned about income inequality. In a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, a majority of people said the income gap between rich and poor is a major problem.
Republicans predictably lambasted the president’s proposal. But the president’s initiative placed the burden on congressional Republicans to explain why they won’t cut taxes for middle-class families. Most congressional Democrats favor the idea of middle-class tax relief. But even some of those Democrats are not enthusiastic since they know the proposal will die a quick death on Capitol Hill. Nevertheless, Obama is looking at the big picture, which is the need to rise above the debate on the federal budget deficit and discuss taxes in terms favorable to working families and his party.
The best thing about the president’s activism is that his job rating has increased significantly while he has been laying it out on the line for the last two months. The Washington Post-ABC News poll also shows that for the first time in a long time, there are more Americans who approve (50 percent) of the president’s performance than there are who disapprove (44 percent).
Obama used his State of the Union address to create an environment for a serious national discussion of the pernicious effects of income inequality. Occupy Wall Street put the income equity problem on the table, and last night the president made it the main course. The president may have created his legacy last night.
By: Brad Bannon, U. S. News and World Report, January 21, 2015
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