Echoes From the Past

As we have seen in the news recently on a daily basis, the American Civil War means different things to different people today.

For some, it was the heroically tragic failed attempt of Southern nationalists to protect their civil liberties by declaring themselves independent of a nation whose government they feared would impinge upon their rights.  Their attempt to assert and defend their political independence was no less principled – and no less illegal – than the acts of the American colonials asserting their independence from Britain in 1776.

For others, the creation and defense of the Confederate nation was an attempt to preserve the institution of racially based slavery from the political and historical forces that threatened its existence.  Quite understandably from today's perspective, those who hold this latter view consider any claim that the Confederacy was based upon notions of liberty to be corrupted by the vileness of slavery.

That we now engage in a heated public debate over the propriety of the public display of the Confederacy battle flag, a topic that a generation ago would have received little if any notice, is an indication of how we, as a nation, are changing – in our notions of fairness and equality and in the makeup of the national polity.

The long view of history helps us understand just how dramatic this change has been.  In 1860, slavery was a robust institution in the southern portion of the United States, and most of the Negro population was held in bondage.  Slavery had not withered, as had been hoped in the early days of the republic, but rather it took on new vigor as the world's appetite for cotton grew.  By 1860, cotton states of the American south produced roughly 80 percent of the global crop.

Abolitionists, who futilely demanded an immediate end to slavery, represented a distinctly minor point of view and were indeed criticized for provoking the pro-slavery advocates and the southern nationalists, who were known a "fire eaters".  The Republican Party, which formed in the early 1850s, was united principally by the desire to prevent the spread of slavery into the federal territories.  Although some members of the party held abolitionist and antislavery views (in the jargon of the day, the former was a more extreme version of the latter), it cannot be asserted that the motives of the party as a whole were to achieve political freedom and social equality for the Negro in the United States.  Nonetheless, the Republicans' opponents charged that this was in fact the case, and emphasized the point by referring to the Republicans as "Black Republicans".

The tiny free Negro population lived under legal restrictions and conditions of social inequality in both the north and the south, although as is inevitable in so large a nation, conditions and circumstances varied from place to place and given the individuals involved.  Some whites were prepared to deal with Negroes on the basis of social equality, but many were not.

When the Civil War came, people understood that although the triggering cause had been the election of a Republican as president, the root cause was slavery.  The stated Federal war aim was to restore the union, and it is unlikely that the northern states would have fought if the purpose of the war was to end slavery.  President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation was intended to make the destruction of slavery a tool of the war to defeat the Confederacy – its claim to legal validity as a war-powers measure rested upon its impact upon the conduct of the war – but inevitably some critics and supporters of the Federal war effort would regard it as making the abolition of slavery an aim of the war.  The Confederates propaganda machine chose to depict it as an act of desperation in which the Federals sought to encourage servile rebellion.  Some British observers scoffed at the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation (published shortly after the Battle of Antietam in 1862, it provided that it would become effective as of January 1, 1863) as the offer of a corrupt bargain in which the southerners who ceased their rebellion before that date could retain their slaves and the institution of slavery.  That is a fair reading of the instrument.  Yet the fact remains that despite the intent of the original document, once the Final Emancipation Proclamation was issued, President Lincoln effectively refused to retreat from the steps taken toward abolition, which made it – from that point – a goal of the Federals in waging the war.

When assessing the history of the Civil War era, given the many attitudes about race, slavery, union and secession – and given the possible change of those attitudes given the passage of time and the reaction to events – the most accurate statement about the effect of the Civil War upon slavery is that the Civil War resulted in the end of slavery, and the demise of slavery was in the nature of collateral damage.  That's not the story that we teach children as grade school history, and even people who have a more sophisticated knowledge of American history are less informed about the decades that followed the Civil War.

Although the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution put a formal end to slavery as a lawful institution, and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments were intended to secure the political rights and citizenship of Freedmen and free Negroes, a terrible repression ultimately set in under color of law that separated the races and denied large portions of the Negro population equality under law or the opportunity for economic advancement.

After the end of World War II, Winston Churchill spoke of an iron curtain falling across Europe.  Something comparable happened in the United States after the Civil War.  For a time the radicals in the Republican Party attempted to impose a political and social revolution on the Confederate south – a period of time known as Reconstruction – and for a time the powers of the federal government, including the Army, were employed for that purpose.  But as the years passed the radicals grew old, the nation grew tired on the constant conflict and the effort of maintaining the policies of Reconstruction became a political liability.  The national government became more interested in protecting big industry from the growth of big labor.  The Supreme Court eviscerated the Civil War amendments.

In 1877, Ulysses S. Grant, having served two terms as President and engaged in a European tour, wrote in a private letter to a friend:

For the last eight weeks I have seen but few American papers, and am consequently behind in home news.  The foreign papers, however, have been full of the great railroad strike, and no doubt exaggerated it, bad as it was.  The United States should always be prepared to put down such demonstrations promptly and with severe consequences to the guilty.  I hope good may come out of this, in pointing out the necessity of having the proper remedy at hand  in case of need.  "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure."  One thing struck me as a little queer.  During my two terms of office the whole Democratic press, and the morbidly honest and "reformatory" portion of the Republican press, thought it horrible to keep U.S. troops stationed in the Southern States, and when they were called upon to protect the lives of negroes – as much citizens under the Constitution as if their skins were white – the country was scarcely large enough to hold the sound of indignation belched forth by them for some years.  Now, however, there is no hesitation about exhausting the whole power of the government to suppress a strike on the slightest intimation that danger threatens.  All parties agree that this is right, and so do I.  If a negro insurrection should arise in South Carolina, Mississippi, or Louisiana, or if the negroes in either of these States – where they are in a large majority  – should intimidate whites from going to the polls, or from exercising  any of the rights of American citizens, there would be no division of sentiment as to the duty of the President.  It does seem the rule should work both ways.

Over time the courts and social consciousness of the people at large started to reverse the trend and started to chip away at segregation and political and social discrimination.

The story of the decade immediately after the war is told in Eric Foner's Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877.  The longer view is considered in C. Vann Woodward's The Strange Career of Jim Crow and John Hope Franklin's From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans.  The national politics in the period immediately after the war is the subject of W.R. Brock's An American Crisis: Congress and Reconstruction 1865-1867 – a very thoughtful analysis of the evolution of policy into law and inaction, enhanced by a understanding of the practical dynamics of American politics.

Woodward suggested that the growing awareness of the treatment of minorities in Europe before World War II made a number of white Americas more conscious about the treatment of minorities at home.

The recent publication of Go Set a Watchman has brought renewed attention to Harper Lee's  To Kill a Mockingbird.  The latter, published in 1960 and made into a movie in 1962, depicts events in a small southern town in 1936, which include the threatened lynching of a black man accused of raping a white woman.  The attempt is turned aside by the courage of the accused man's white lawyer and the guilelessness of the lawyer's 10 year old daughter.  Although the events of the story are set in the 1930s, the book and the movie reflect rather the attitudes of America in the 1960s – a turbulent time in which old habits and attitudes clashed with changing ideas.

Something of the difference between the 1930s and the 1960s is reflected in a poem called "Strange Fruit" that was written by Abel Meeropol, published in 1937 (the time of the story told by To Kill a Mockingbird) and recorded as a song by Billie Holliday in 1939.  The first verse reads as follows:

Southern trees bear strange fruit,

Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,

Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,

Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

(Several recordings are on YouTube.)

In the current controversy about how we should regard America's Confederate past, we need to keep in mind that, at the time of the Revolution, slavery existed throughout the American colonies, and only by 1860 had it become primarily a southern institution.  The legacy of slavery is not a southern burden but rather a legacy of the nation as a whole.  Discrimination based upon race and other personal attributes has marred all parts of the country.

The ugly legacies of an ugly past remain with us.  Progress to better conditions in society has been slow and uncertain, but the progress has been real, and it is a reason for hope.