James M. McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom, Part 2

2,538 words

Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here ^[3])

[The present constitutional crisis over slavery] embraces the fearful issue whether the Union shall stand, and slavery, under the steady, peaceful action of moral, social, and political causes, be removed by gradual voluntary effort, and with compensation; or whether the Union shall be dissolved and civil war ensue . . . — William H. Seward, speech to the US Senate, 1850

Their vices are vices aped from white men, or that white men and bondage have taught them: improvidence and intemperance and evasion — and laziness . . . Promiscuity. Violence. Instability and lack of control. Inability to distinguish between mine and thine . . . — William Faulkner, The Bear

That the American Civil War was fought over slavery has become a maxim, but it is misleadingly simplistic. The famous contention that “all men are created equal” may have been at the heart of the war, but Abraham Lincoln was less concerned with the actual freedom of slaves than he was with the strain the pre-war antagonism was placing on the Constitution, and therefore the Union.

The tension was, sometimes literally, palpable. There were not infrequent fistfights in the House of Representatives during the decade leading up to the outbreak of war, and the Southern position was unequivocally that all men were not created equal. An Alabama Congressman outlined the South’s stance:

[I]t is clear that the power to dictate what sort of property the State may allow a citizen to own and work — whether oxen, horses, or negroes . . . is alike despotic and tyrannical.

In the first part of this review, I noted McPherson’s emphasis on the division between the upper and lower South, with the former “facing both ways.” In terms of slavery, statistics show the disparity:

Slaves constituted 47% of the population in the Confederate states, but only 24% in the upper South; 37% of the white families in Confederate states owned slaves compared with 20% of the families in the upper South.

This made for voting disparities even between slave-owning states, and what the South had once seen as a necessary evil had now become an economic necessity. Slavery was seen as “a positive good . . . the most safe and stable basis for free institutions in the world.” Northern industrialization could do without slaves; the agrarian South could not.

Whereas today slavery and the resultant civil war are often seen purely as a moral question, in the antebellum years it was primarily an economic one. Making slaves of men and having them work in production was an extraordinarily good business model. “The yield of raw cotton doubled each decade after 1800,” writes McPherson, and the South supplied 75% of the world’s market of “King Cotton.” Economic liberty trumped personal liberty. “Free-soilers,” on the other hand, proposed a different business model on the hypothesis that “free labor was more efficient than slave labor because it was motivated by the inducement of wages and the ambition for upward mobility rather than by the coercion of the lash.” But America, North and South, had an economy with global reach to protect, and freeing the slaves could have calamitous macroeconomic effects.

Thus, the debate became fiercer and sabers rattled louder. The North feared for the Union and feared a revolution in the South. But revolutions are linked with the mob, with action on the streets, and not in the chambers of government. McPherson shows the connection between the two during a House debate:

Nothing yet had so dramatized the parting bonds of Union as this struggle in the House. The hair-trigger temper of southerners is easier to understand if one keeps in mind that the contest opened just three days after John Brown was hung in Virginia for trying to incite a slave rebellion.

The Civil War may have had a political motive on both sides, but antebellum America was about to see a bizarre and rather underwhelming display of direct action.

John Brown was a renegade soldier with a fascination for literature on guerilla warfare and slave revolts. Today he would certainly be on a Homeland Security watch list, meaning he would probably still have been able to do what he did. He did not, McPherson writes, “share the commitment of most abolitionists ^[6] to nonviolence,” and his favorite Bible passage was from Hebrews 9:22: “Without shedding of blood there is no remission of sin.”

Brown took a motley band of negroes and free-soilers into Harper’s Ferry in October 1859 in an attempt to start a revolution which would free the slaves, but after the 36-hour standoff that ensued, he was captured, tried, and sentenced to death. Freeing the slaves directly rather than via democratic means may have seemed a straightforward proposition to a man such as John Brown, but he was obviously insane. This did not, however, prevent his martyrdom in the eyes of some, including Ralph Waldo Emerson. But shrewd Washington minds saw the knock-on effects of sudden emancipation, not least were blacks to be conscripted, as “[a]rmed blacks were truly the bête noire of southern nightmares.”

While John Brown’s doomed mission kept antebellum America on the boil, the fire had already been partly lit by a work of literature. Harriet Beecher-Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin ^[7] was a bestseller, and predictably as loathed in the South as it was lauded to the North. Along with providing today’s Left with a polite phrase with which they can describe blacks they see as collaborating with the white man, Lincoln told the author — who he addressed as “little lady” — that her book had “made this great war.” British Prime Minister Palmerston read it three times, and Lincoln himself borrowed a book entitled The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin from the Library of Congress in 1862. The New Orleans Crescent, on the other hand, was of the opinion that “[t]here never before was anything so detestable or so monstrous among women as this.”

Lincoln is pivotal both to the war and the whole relationship of slavery to the state as framed in the terms of the sacrosanct Constitution. His pronouncements are a barometer of his own changing shade of opinion, as well as the state of the battle for the Union. Lincoln let his generals take care of the fighting, although was on one occasion told to “keep your head down, you damn fool!” by a plain-speaking captain — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., for you history buffs — as bullets cracked around him on a parapet. But he was also targeted by political opponents.

The centrality of the rights of slaves, viewed legally and thus constitutionally as property, revolved around America’s founding document. The “Know-Nothings” were the anti-slavery faction of the Democrat Party, and Lincoln said of them:

I think little better of them than I do of the slavery extensionists . . . Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that “all men are created equal.” When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal except negroes.”

This would, he predicted, later be extended to foreigners and Catholics. Lincoln said he would rather move to Russia, where at least “despotism can be taken pure.” Coincidentally, serfdom in Russia was also abolished in the 1860s.

While the Mason-Dixon Line was a physical demarcation, the line the Confederates were looking to prevent the North crossing was that between blacks as property and blacks as citizens. Frederick Douglass, himself a black man who wisely turned down John Brown’s offer to join the raid on Harper’s Ferry, drew that line clearly in the sand:

Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters, U.S.; let him get eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on earth which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship.

This was the nightmare scenario for many Americans on both sides of the great divide. The South was forced into the position of having to arm blacks and enlist them, because the North was doing just that. Blacks had been property, now they became soldiers in the last days of a civil war. As one Southern newspaper wrote:

We are forced by the necessity of our condition to take a step which is revolting to every sentiment of pride, and to every principle that governed our institutions before the war . . . It is better for us to use the negroes for our defense than that the Yankees should use them against us.

Slave enlistment exposed the central problem of blacks in society. Blacks as slaves were one thing, but whole regiments of blacks, armed and ready to fight white men, were not only a threat in a literal sense, it challenged the social stratification on which slavery — and thus the Southern economy — was based. Georgian Howard Cobb exposed the anomaly:

[T]he moment you resort to negro soldiers your white soldiers will be lost to you . . . The day you make soldiers of them is the beginning of the end of the revolution. If slaves will make good soldiers our whole theory of slavery is wrong.

Armed black soldiers were one thing, the possibility of a crack black regiment was even more frightening to the Confederates. What was at stake here was not simply black enfranchisement, but the principle of stratification between white and black and the economic underpinning that provided.

More concerning was an aspect of black enlistment that led to one of the four leading post-war concerns McPherson later lists: the question of loyalty. The author reduces the ensuing national debate to a nicety:

Most participants in this debate recognized that if slaves became soldiers, they and probably their families must be granted freedom or they might desert to the enemy at first opportunity. If one or two hundred thousand slaves were armed (the figures most often mentioned), this would free at least half a million. Added to the million or so already liberated by the Yankees, how could the institution survive? asked opponents of the proposal.

We, of course, are used to armed blacks in the streets, both via the panopticon of the Internet and possibly (although hopefully not) via personal experience. We are also used to what are laughably called “national debates” about race which entirely redact direct reference to the issue. McPherson exhibits the sheer rawness of political discourse and conversation in and around the Civil War years, whether in Congress or in bar room. The talk is two-fisted, fact-related, very highly charged, and served raw. This is pre-lapsarian American, a land that had free speech and reminds us of our own policed times. Perhaps a civil war is not such a bad idea, if only to sharpen up debate a bit.

After the war, reconstruction. Again, this was constitutional as much as literal, and Lincoln having won both the Presidency and the American Civil War now had to package his victories to the people. Lincoln had thought ahead, commissioning majors to take over captured Southern states in readiness for the return of what the President called “civil government.” Louisiana was chosen as a testing ground, a state where freed blacks already led an agreeable existence. But this was far from a done deal, as “[m]any congressional Republicans . . . feared a revival of slavery if conservatives should gain control of a reconstructed Louisiana.”

Lincoln was in great danger of being at odds with Congress, and McPherson isolates the “four related issues” of which this tussle was composed:

[T]he fate of slavery; the political role of blacks in reconstruction; the definition of loyalty; and the status of free black labor in the new order.

Whether or not “the American Civil War was fought to free the slaves,” what to do with them once the mess was cleaned up was the focus of the postbellum years. Their involvement was inevitable for both sides, and advantage had to be taken, however risky it was to do so. When Lee sent a message to Confederate President Jefferson Davis surrendering Richmond, “Among the troops who marched into Richmond as firemen and policemen were units from the all-black 25th Corps.”

Davis may have had cause to question his religious faith, as the note was delivered to him in church.

Democrats, then as now, were prepared to use hoax and false flag to defeat Republicans. An influential newspaper released an incendiary publication:

[The New York World] coined a new word with their anonymous pamphlet Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races. Pretending to be Republicans, the authors recommended “miscegenation” as the solution of the race problem. This fusion, the pamphlet declared, would particularly “be of infinite services to the Irish.”

A Catholic newspaper adopted a less scientific approach and took aim at Lincoln himself, who it described as “brutal in all his habits . . . obscene . . . an animal. Filthy black niggers, greasy, sweaty, and disgusting, now jostle white people and even ladies everywhere . . .”

The war had not dampened the Democrat rhetoric.

Now that slavery is once again the focus of attention in the United States, much has come to light about what was a commercial concern. The history of slavery has been deliberately skewed by the black caucus and their white fellow travelers, and black African slave owners were more than willing to sell to American buyers. Then there are the media-funded images and symbols of the slavery years: the cruel plantation owner with his bullwhip and dogs, slaves in chains and manacles, black women raped as droit de seigneur. Historians must find it difficult to work in today’s intellectual climate, one in which historical research is not seen as a tool used to uncover the truth, but a buttress to reinforce a spurious version of the truth to support a political agenda and the ubiquitous “narrative.”

At no stage does McPherson — who seems left of center — emphasize any shortcomings in the slave population’s standard of living. I don’t believe “Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project 1936-1938 ^[10]” was available to the author, but it makes interesting reading. It is made up of accounts written by former slaves in the 1930s, and their descriptions of their own lives explains why this research tool is not pushed during Black History Month.

The comments to the first part of this review were a mine of information in themselves, proving again that the Counter-Currents comments section is a hive mind in the positive sense. The American Civil War, to which Mr. McPherson’s book was my introduction, is a key chapter in both American and Western history, as it both liberated a certain ethnicity, not all of whom have proven to be up to the questions asked by liberty, and provided the black caucus with their own version of the Holocaust. “Slavery,” like “racism,” is a word of such power that it freezes all who hear it. Through white ears, at any rate.

The final paragraph of McPherson’s book is particularly poignant for a modern, white reader:

What would be the place of freed slaves and their descendants in this new order? In 1865 a black soldier who recognized his former master among a group of Confederate soldiers he was guarding called out a greeting: “Hello, massa; bottom rail on top dis time!” Would this new arrangement of rails last?

That is a question we are being forced to answer today.