The Roots of Modern America Blog

January 20, 2009

Lincoln’s First Inaugural and American History

Filed under: Civil War, politics, social experience — Tags: , , , , , — wthomas @ 2:19 pm

When Abraham Lincoln took the oath of office as President of the United States, he faced an unprecedented crisis. Seven states had already formally seceded from the Union, set up their own government in Montgomery, Alabama, and were actively recruiting more states to join them in forming a rival national government. Lincoln’s inauguration speech has often been admired for its moderation. The new President stated clearly that he would “hold, occupy, and possess” the federal government’s buildings and forts in the seceded states, but also that “there will be no invasion, no using of force against or among the people anywhere.” Lincoln tried to speak past the fanatics to “those who love the Union.”

We can admire Lincoln’s calm restraint, yet in retrospect Lincoln would seem to have misjudged the temper of the times and the resolve of the Southern whites. At the core of Lincoln’s first inaugural address was his assertion that “plainly, the central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy.” Hundreds of thousands of white southerners disagreed, of course, and saw their nation as an independent republic, fully justified in peaceable separation from the Union. Lincoln asserted that “one section of the country believes slavery is right and ought to be extended, while the other believes it is wrong and ought not to be extended.” Although he knew well that many Northerners found little wrong with slavery, Lincoln claimed that “physically speaking” the country could not be separated. And in his beautiful and poignant closing, calling on the “mystic chords of memory” and “the better angels of our nature,” Lincoln hoped Americans would set “passion” aside and renew their bonds of affection in the Union.

Lincoln had reason to believe in these feelings for the Union and that they might avert the looming conflict and violence; indeed, he probably had to have this faith on that day. His personal qualities and his political calculation led him to take a position of open invitation to the white South to return their hearts to the Union. He hoped time would cool off the angry response to his election, and with this expectation his inaugural address was genuinely offered as an attempt at reconciliation. Despite the elegance of his rhetoric, Lincoln’s idea that the American continent could not be physically separated into two or more republics was an assertion unsupportable by history or logic. Various empires had controlled large parts of the American continent and national identities in other parts of the world constantly changed the maps and atlases.Lincoln, however, challenged his “dissatisfied countrymen” to think twice about their actions. He vowed to uphold the constitution and his oath to defend the government, and he said that they in choosing secession bore the responsibility for a civil war. Most of all, Lincoln urged that both sides take time and move deliberately. With time, he hoped, these sad divisions might heal.

The difficulty Lincoln faced was in convincing white Southerners that these sentiments mattered. Few were listening. What happened to make such a distance of feeling, such alienation, possible? Lincoln likened the separation to a divorce, but all such analogies fail. Lincoln’s inaugural address, brave and elegiac as it was, was speaking into a hurricane. The white South in spirit and identity left the Union long before March 4, 1861. The divergence is difficult to time and locate in American history. Too often, our histories have followed Lincoln’s logic that separation was impossible, secession was a “sophism,” and the civil war was the product of discontented extremists–a set of arguments most forcefully made in his message to Congress on July 4, 1861. We might reconsider, however, the national purpose of the Confederate South and its origins. Historians, such as Drew Gilpin Faust, Anne S. Rubin, Peter and Nicholas Onuf, and Edward L. Ayers, have helped us see the white South’s national identity as deeper and more complex that Lincoln might have admitted. These historians and others suggest a white South whose Confederate national loyalties proved durable, even advanced and logical, drawing on the same sources of American nationalism in the Revolution and early national history. They knew what they were doing. We need to retain Lincoln’s sense of historical contingency, for he (almost alone) in his inaugural held out the possibility that things might be different, that persuasion and good will might be reciprocated, and that a reservoir of Unionism might save the nation from war and bloodshed. But we also might consider how sectionalism reinforced its own logic by slowly recasting forms of national identity, and in the process how two modern nations of Americans emerged ready to fight one another on modern scale of conflict. Then we might understand how Lincoln’s eloquent first inaugural fell on deaf ears.

October 15, 2008

Why Virginia Will Decide the 2008 Election–Looking Back at the 1960 Election and The Long History of a Battleground State

Filed under: Uncategorized, politics — Tags: , , , , , — wthomas @ 11:52 am

It has been 48 years since Virginia was so thoroughly contested by both political parties in a presidential contest. In 1960 John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon campaigned across the state and both candidates recognized then that their party’s future might be found in the Commonwealth. 

Today the Obama-McCain contest bears a striking similarity to the Kennedy-Nixon battle. Then, as now, the possibility of a dramatic change in electoral patterns and political alignments seemed to dangle within reach of both parties. Then, as now, a new medium was shaping the political landscape. Then, as now, cultural battles over religion and values competed with foreign policy concerns, threats of economic recession, and ideas about executive leadership. Subtle and not-so-subtle ethnic prejudices hung in the air: could a Catholic be trusted, many Protestants asked about Kennedy.

Because a Democratic candidate has not won Virginia since Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1964, and because Johnson has been the only Democratic candidate to win Virginia since 1948 when Truman carried the state, the close contest shaping up in 2008 over Virginia deserves the attention it is getting. Republicans Eisenhower (1952 and 1956), Nixon (1960, 1968, 1972), Ford (1976), Reagan (1980 and 1984), Bush (1988 and 1992), Dole (1996), and Bush (2000 and 2004) have won Virginia. But the pattern was not set until 1960 and only in that election did its shape and importance become clear.

Virginia, like most Southern states, had a long history of Democratic Party rule following Reconstruction. There were always opposition movements and independents who challenged the Democrats, but well into the twentieth century Virginia’s Democratic Party ran the state. Their political organization depended in large part on low voter participation. Poll taxes, one party rule, and understanding clauses kept many white and black voters from voting. Black voters were kept from the polls by constitutional provisions enacted in 1902. Political scientist V. O. Key called the state a “museum piece” in the late 1940s because so few Virginians voted.

Virginia’s Democratic leaders and the state’s small electorate began voting for conservative Republicans in the national elections beginning with Eisenhower in 1952. Some, such as Senator Harry F. Byrd, Sr., simply distrusted national Democrats as big spenders and as more likely to use federal power to meddle with the state’s segregation codes. Other voters simply appreciated Eisenhower’s war service and steady leadership. At the time when a war in Korea claimed thousands of American lives and the terrifying prospect of nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union loomed large, Eisenhower possessed credentials many Americans valued.

But in 1960 Kennedy and Nixon battled for Virginia because none of these patterns were clear and because Virginia would test the reach of both parties. The election is now famous for the importance of the televised debates and for Nixon’s poor performance on TV. As a new medium television had a powerful effect on the way voters understood the election and the candidates. In the nationally broadcast debates, Nixon appeared nervous and to have lost, while Kennedy was viewed as relaxed, more appealing, and the clear winner.

Both men appeared on local news in dozens of places across the country. They tried to use local television news in key districts to reach voters, and as it turned out the location of television stations brought a new geography to political campaigning. Both Nixon and Kennedy campaigned hard in Virginia. Both expected local television news to give their campaigns deep reach into the swing voters of the state.

Virginia was a battleground because it had a fast-growing suburban population with a rising young, baby-boom generation of voters coming of age. The state had a long Democratic tradition which Kennedy hoped to extend, but it also had a growing Republican base of transplants to the suburban areas. In the mountainous regions of its western borders in Appalachia and on its southern borders with Tennessee, Virginia had large areas of rural poverty and a long tradition of independent, even Republican voting. In these places working people made a living in coal mines, on tobacco farms, and in lumber mills. They distrusted the eastern Virginia Democrats and, yet, they also had reason to doubt whether the Republicans had their economic interests at heart.

Kennedy flew to Roanoke to appeal to these voters and energize the Democratic base on the state. At the edge of the state’s mountain region, he hoped to find enough support in Nixon’s stronghold area to return the state to the Democratic column.03_14.jpgFor a full view of Kennedy’s speech in Roanoke, see the Television News of the Civil Rights Era site.

Kennedy depicted himself as a candidate in the long tradition of the Democratic Party and as more capable of meeting the Soviet threat. He promised to stand up to Nikita Khrushchev and to balance the budget with lower taxes and interest rates. After the prosperous fifties, a lingering recession unsettled voters. Kennedy did not mention civil rights at all, even though in February 1960 students in North Carolina began a sit-in movement that swept across the nation and called national attention to the discrimination of segregation laws in the South. He chose to concentrate entirely on who was qualified to meet foreign dangers and which party could be trusted to lead the nation into prosperity.

Nixon on the other hand flew to Richmond where he hoped to convince longtime Democratic voters that he would continue in the mold of the popular Eisenhower and that the Republican Party represented their true conservative views and interests.2_32.jpgFor a full view of Nixon’s Richmond speech, see Television News of the Civil Rights Era site.

Nixon for his part hoped to gain a foothold for the Republican Party in the South, a region where white voters had disdained the party for generations. Because these voters went for Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956, Virginia offered a place to begin Nixon’s southern strategy and revitalize the Republican Party in the region. He won Virginia with 52.44 % of the vote and carried the big suburban areas and the mountainous western counties. Kennedy, for all of his television appeal, youth, and glamour, lost handily in the suburban counties and won most easily in the traditional, conservative, tobacco-producing rural Democratic strongholds. In retrospect, Kennedy’s county-by-county performance in Virginia seems unbelievable because he won the counties most committed to the racially segregated South and its Democratic Party. Running with Lyndon Johnson of Texas, Kennedy won nearly all of the rest of the South relying on the same voters who had supported him in Virginia.

In 1960 the election in the South held few surprises, but Virginia’s overwhelming support for Nixon indicated the earliest beginnings of the Republican resurgence in the entire region, a movement that radically reshaped the electoral map in the following decades. In 2008 Virginia’s role could be similarly pivotal, perhaps for the Democrats.

As McCain and Obama concentrate on Virginia, their campaigns may not be able turn to 1960 for guidance. The nationally victorious candidate did not win the state, and instead the most important realignment came on the side of the national election’s loser. In 1960 Virginia became for the first time a reliable possibility for Republican presidential candidates after nearly a century of Democratic predominance. Nixon’s coalition in Virginia combined moderate and conservative new voters in the fast-growing suburbs with the traditional Republicans in the mountains. It was truly a Pyrrhic victory. Neither side seeks such an outcome.

Kennedy’s failure to carry Appalachian voters, except those with the most loyally Democratic coal mining labor unions, was lost in the glare of his national success. The Democratic weaknesses in 1960 Virginia were clear in hindsight–despite Kennedy’s national victory, his party was losing ground in the state to demographic changes and Democratic Party divisions.

In 2008 the roles might be reversed. Division afflicts the Republicans and demographic changes favor the Democrats. Of course, Obama, like Kennedy, could lose Virginia and still win the national election.

There is a final and most important consideration in this campaign and explains why Virginia may decide the election. Virginia is the only state in the South to have elected a black governor since Reconstruction. Douglas Wilder in 1989 won election to the state’s highest office–the grandson of slaves and a Democrat, he began his historic campaign in the remote western reaches of Virginia at the Cumberland Gap, seeking the votes of those same Appalachian voters. Much discussion followed the election when polling showed that some Virginia whites said they would vote for Wilder but then did not. Still, Wilder was elected, and Virginia voters showed they could elect a black chief executive.

If 1960 was the last pre civil rights election, the 2008 election may be the first election in a post civil rights era of politics. In 1960 black voters were almost completely disfranchised as Kennedy and Nixon battled for the votes of white Virginians. When poll taxes were declared unconstitutional and voting rights protected through the determined efforts of civil rights advocates, and after black voters in Virginia registered and organized in the 1960s, decades of black voter participation followed.

Now, in 2008 with an African American candidate leading the Democratic Party, Virginia seems poised to cast its electoral votes for him. If it does so, the election will have been fought out and decided much in the same manner as the 1960 contest but with a crucial difference–a fully participating black and white electorate to whom both candidates are appealing. It seems likely that what happens in Virginia will prove decisive. If 2008 is anything like 1960, we will be surprised only in retrospect when we look back and see a pattern that no one at the time fully recognized.

October 13, 2008

The British View of Lincoln and the American War

Filed under: Civil War, politics, women — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — wthomas @ 11:12 am

In the fall of 1860 as the United States presidential election heated up with four major party candidates in the field, few observers in England had formed much of an opinion of Abraham Lincoln, the prairie lawyer from Illinois. The rise of the Republican Party and the emergence of Lincoln as its standard bearer took place so quickly that many in Britain were uninformed about the party and the man.

Few commentators, for example, were as widely known in Britain as Harriet Martineau who traveled to the United States in the 1830s and wrote over one thousand letters in the London Daily News on American affairs. A renowned political economist, highly successful author, and committed abolitionist, Martineau knew little about Lincoln. Naturally, she was doubtful. Her overall impression of the Northern United States was that the white politicians there had been so subservient to the South’s slaveholders for so long that as a group they possessed no moral backbone, and consequently could not be trusted. The North was a fallen, immoral society, complicit in the greatest evil of the day–slavery. To Martineau, a Garrisonian and a close friend of Maria Weston Chapman, the Republican party and Lincoln seemed hopelessly conservative.

After Lincoln’s election she wrote her editor, “I fancy Lincoln is honest, as far as he goes; but it is a very short way.” As the sectional crisis deepened and Virginia threatened to secede, she admitted to a growing admiration for the man. He had at least done the things she had hoped and not done the things she thought should be avoided. When Virginia left the Union and Lincoln issued his call for troops, Martineau revised her opinion of him: “he is an immense relief!”

Martineau’s friend, Richard Cobden, also initially misjudged Lincoln. Cobden, an influential M.P. and longtime free trade and antislavery proponent, met Lincoln in Springfield when he went to Illinois to evaluate the prospects for his investment in the Illinois Central Railroad. Cobden took this trip in 1859 and only briefly spoke with Lincoln. In March 1861, however, he wrote his friend John Bright, also an M.P. and leading antislavery man, that Lincoln was a “backwoodsman of good sturdy common sense but evidently unequal to the occasion.” Such views were common.

If Lincoln did not initially impress the liberal British politicians and observers, he certainly held little weight with the conservative classes. August Belmont, a British emigrant to the U.S. in 1837 and a successful New York financier, reported every week on American political affairs to his London banker N. M. Rothschild. Belmont was a Democrat and viewed Lincoln’s Republican Party nomination over William Henry Seward as entirely unexpected. When his election prompted South Carolina’s move to secede, Belmont was surprised again, admitting to Rothschild that he had had no idea the situation was so serious.

Because Belmont kept Rothschild informed on political affairs every week, and perhaps because Rothschild held large shares in U.S. federal and state bonds, the London banker showed little surprise when Lincoln was elected. Only when Lincoln began to pursue a policy of unrelenting war for the Union was Rothschild stunned. To a significant degree Rothschild’s realism left him unprepared for a civil war that traced its proximate cause to a presidential election. Rothschild, like many other British observers, expected a settlement and compromise to come quickly and doubted whether Lincoln, and the North, had the resolve to carry out a war with such a limited political objective of keeping the Union together as its chief war aim.

Few presidents have been nominated and elected who had less experience in political office than Abraham Lincoln. None have been confronted with the crisis he faced in his first weeks in office. Knowing how successfully Lincoln waged the war, it would be easy with hindsight to smirk at the way Lincoln’s contemporaries underestimated him. Yet, the British concerns about Lincoln point to an important, and often overlooked, dimension to the Civil War: the conflict had significant international ramifications and there were huge differences of perspective between the British and Americans on the war.

On no issue was this more pronounced than the British view of the violence and destruction in the war as a humanitarian crisis. The Americans were willing to kill one another at a rate and with a determination the British had not anticipated.The assessment of Lincoln that British observers conducted in late 1860 and 1861 mirrored their assessment of American affairs more generally. Lincoln and his party represented a resurgent Northern determination to contain slavery, a goal widely admired in Britain. But the prospect of a modern, large-scale war offended British sensibilities and ideas of progress. Lincoln’s election and the move to secession were surprises, but the war and its unprecedented bloodshed were a shock.

July 29, 2008

Why Did Virginia Secede?

Filed under: Civil War, U. S. South, politics, slavery — Tags: , , , , — wthomas @ 5:04 pm

Today it seems almost inconceivable. Eleven states, in the Southern region of the United States, called constitutional conventions and in a matter of months formally withdrew from the nation. In breathtaking speed they had established an entirely new and separate nation with a capital at Montgomery, Alabama. What made this possible?

After all, secession seems entirely counterintuitive. Why would the most wealthy individuals, the men with the most to lose in society, risk everything, including slavery, as well as their lives, peace, property, prosperity, position, and inheritance? Why would they knowingly bring on a war with the United States by creating a new and risky republic in the South, and then throw everything into its defense until their capital lay in ruins, their population half-starved, and every army battered into total submission? 

Historian and leading scholar of the Civil War, James McPherson answers that secession was a “counter-revolution” not a “revolution.” White southerners, he argues, saw the Lincoln administration and the Republican Party as the revolutionaries. The move to secede was a counter-revolution, a conservative  effort designed to protect what they had and stem the tide of change sweeping across the nation. All of their resistance, he argues, was aimed at maintaining slavery and their position in society. To McPherson the answer is straightforward–they saw a greater risk in the Union and perceived themselves as the inheritors of the true republican virtues of the Revolution. Their new republic was, therefore, modeled on the “union as it was” before the slavery issue threatened their principles and prosperity. McPherson indicates that the South was in a way seeking to turn back the clock or at least stop time. Their vision was not progressive but regressive. 

When you read the four volumes of The Proceedings of the Virginia State Convention of 1861, or an updated history of what the southern delegates said to the Virginia convention (Charles Dew, Apostles of Disunion), however, a number of further considerations become equally important. Virginia, of course, included West Virginia at the time and so delegates came from the far western, mountainous counties too where slavery was less prominent. The convention met for weeks in Richmond and those favoring immediate secession maneuvered to keep the convention in session, hoping for a dramatic event that might tip the votes their way. Eventually, the got their wish, as President Abraham Lincoln called for troops from Virginia and the other states after the firing on Fort Sumter. Lincoln clearly intended to suppress secession in the South and Virginia’s delegates voted the next day 88-55 to secede with the South and join the Confederacy.

Let’s reconsider, though, what these delegates said. 

First, not a single Virginia delegate criticized slavery. Indeed, many of the western delegates were slaveholders and those that did not spoke in support of the institution. No delegate wanted to be branded an abolitionist. Delegates outdid one another to voice their commitment to slavery. Slavery and its protection was clearly in the forefront of their motivations.

Second, slavery was not just an abstract or political issue, but one that for these white men was centered on “property.” When Thomas Branch of Petersburg offered his constituents’ views in the form of a resolution to the Convention, it was to affirm that “negro slaves are property.” Somehow, these white Southerners thought, the North had lost sense of slavery as a form of property and needed to be reminded of the bare, essential nature of the rights the South was going to defend. Branch for his part only needed to state that he would represent the will of his constituents and that meant immediate secession.

Third, the debates read as if they took place outside of time, and indicate that the delegates, however duly constituted, had few ways to articulate what was happening in the spirit of the white South. Despite the fast pace of events and the complex political and diplomatic issues at stake, the Virginia delegates spent hours and days parsing words such as “sovereignty” and “person” and “vital” and “social institution.” The delegates gave long-winded explications of constitutional history and read into the record as evidence the speeches, letters, and proclamations of Lincoln, New York U. S. Senator William H. Seward, Massachusetts U.S. Senator Henry Wilson, and others. There was remarkably little discussion of the real events taking place, the possibilities of war, the nature of the conflict, or the resources at their command. The delegates were assembled to debate “secession” as a legal right and to craft an ordinance that would tender Virginia’s withdrawal from the United States of America.

Fourth, despite the close votes in February 1861 and the reluctance of some to cause a war, the majority of these delegates already understood themselves as part of a Southern, modern nation on equal footing with the North, as well as Britain, France, Russia, and Italy. Indeed, a number of delegates placed the idea of the Confederacy in the context of newly forming nation-states in Europe. They saw themselves as part of the vanguard of modern state formation. Their sense of Southern progress, civilization, and modernity may be the most surprising aspect of the debates.

This last point is critical. The state conventions and legal machinations that flowed from them structured the debates over secession in very specific and circumscribed ways, especially in Virginia. Unlike the deep South states where the procedures moved quickly in December 1860, Virginia with its long history of Revolutionary heritage stood in the breach for months, the decisive tipping point, and the Virginia delegates knew it. It was no wonder they acted cautiously.

Only when we take the debates for what they were–a constitutional forum burdened with the history of Virginia’s role in the United States–can we begin to see the underlying frameworks that made secession not only possible but likely. The view of slaves, of course, as property offered the decisive common ground for these white Virginians. But confidence was equally important. Not confidence in a constitutional right worthy of defense, but instead confidence in the capacity to hold up a modern nation-state on the world stage. In this respect nothing about Virginia’s secession might be considered counter-revolutionary. “Nations act on their interests,” one Virginia delegate argued, “not on their sentiments.” (Vol. II, p. 673)

The idea itself is strikingly modern. As for the South, and indeed Virginia, it could not do otherwise if it purported to be a nation, to be sovereign to itself, to be a civilization worthy of the world’s respect. “It is a fact, Mr. Chairman,” the delegate concluded, “that there is a separate national existence at Montgomery.” (Vol. II, p. 675) The question was when, not if, Virginia would join it.

July 18, 2008

The Rise and Fall of Segregation

Filed under: U. S. South, Uncategorized, politics, social experience — Tags: , , , , , , , — wthomas @ 10:42 am

In the final months of the Democratic primary, presidential candidate Barack Obama faced an unexpected dilemma. His minister at Trinity Church in Chicago, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, became the subject of intense criticism and attention, so much so that Obama felt compelled to distance himself from his remarks. Wright had preached incendiary sermons, holding America accountable for generations of racial injustice, sermons that condemned, sermons like none that many white churchgoing Americans had heard before. They were downloaded off the Internet, and the most controversial clips were played again and again on television and the radio. Wright’s sermons sparked frenzied commentary, as many Democrats were left flat footed and many Republicans pounced on the Obama candidacy as insufficiently patriotic and deeply out of touch with American values.

Historian and author Garry Wills has likened Obama’s speech in answer to these charges to the one that Abraham Lincoln made as a Republican candidate for president at the Cooper Union in which he distanced himself from John Brown and presented his moderate positions against slavery’s extension clearly, firmly, and forthrightly.  In The New York Review of Books, Wills points out that Obama emphasized both the painful realities of our racial past and the positive progress the nation has made. Obama, more than any other presidential candidate in history, presents the future as open to change, able to be shaped, and this optimism resonates among many younger voters who believe that an era of racial division and discord has passed. 

If slavery dominated the first 250 years of the nation’s racial history, then the rise and fall of segregation certainly characterized the next 150 years.  From about 1880 to 1965 legal segregation in one form or anther prevailed in large parts of the United States, and the legacies of that system continued to have far reaching effects in American society into the 1990s. In the long context of racial division, Rev. Wright’s remarks, however challenging, cannot be surprising. We ought to ask, now more than ever, what sustained racial segregation for so long and what caused it to fall when it did.

C. Vann Woodward, the eminent Southern historian, pointed out in The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955) that segregation emerged in Northern cities before the Civil War and that for a long period after the war in the South formal, legal segregation did not take root. The autobiographies of Frederick Douglass and of Harriet Jacobs described their encounters with segregated rail cars in the North. And there is considerable evidence that southern racial boundaries were shifting, unclear, and in flux in the 1870s and 1880s. No one knew then, Woodward indicated in his still landmark analysis, that segregation would become so pervasive and resistant to change. Woodward held out the hope that the South had not always been so racially divided. He provided a history for how we became who we are in a way that allowed Americans, especially Southerners, black and white, to recover an experience of racial integration. 

The rise of segregation in the South came as it did in the North with the development of the most advanced technologies of the day–the railroad. Once segregation began, it was difficult to stop. Segregated cars, then depots, water fountains, bathrooms, beaches, pools, lunch counters, and voting booths. Like a cancer it metastasized, moving silently into unexpected places. By the 1950s segregation had become deeply entrenched in the South, a pattern of thinking and behavior, a wall of racial categories and divisions, a series of daily practices enacted with such consistency that few could comprehend how to challenge them. Anne Moody in Coming of Age in Mississippi gives us one of the most moving accounts of how disabling and and pervasive racial separation became in the rural South.

Historians have begun to reconsider the fall of segregation. First, historians have pointed out that resistance to segregation began much earlier than we commonly think, long before the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954. In the thirties, indeed in the teens and twenties, black Americans protested and opposed political disenfranchisement and segregation laws. So, the movement to oppose segregation did not spring out of white Americans’ recognition after World War II of racial injustice, nor did it arrive in 1954 in the form of a Supreme Court decision as if out of the clouds. Black Americans actively and consistently opposed segregation much earlier, and the growing movement in the 1950s and 60s extended from and connected to these earlier efforts.

Second, scholars are beginning to look again at what made the broad social movement to end segregation possible, what made it take off, when so many social reform movements in American history have failed. The pillars holding up segregation were significant, based in political power, legal precedent, and social custom. The Supreme Court in its Brown decision in 1954 and again in 1955 rendered segregation in schools unconstitutional. And states in the South responded with what Virginia’s U.S. Senator Harry F. Bryd called “massive resistance.” Virginia in fact passed a series of “massive resistance laws” in a special legislative session in August 1956 designed to prevent desegregation by closing affected schools if necessary. In 1957 in Virginia J. Lindsay Almond won the governorship in a bitter campaign against Ted Dalton that hinged on the politics of who would defend segregation better. Then in 1958, Virginia plunged into “massive resistance” full force. The state closed schools in four places rather than allow them to integrate under federal court order, and in that same year, in rural Caroline County, sheriffs served a grand jury indictment against Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter for violating Virginia’s ban on interracial marriage.

But often in these years, when whites were asked questions and prompted to defend segregation, they could not precisely say why segregation should prevail. They fell back on tradition, conservative values, and twisted constitutional logic and legalisms. A good example of this befuddlement occurred whenWDBJ intervew with Norview High School Studentsstudents at Norview High School were asked directly about desegregation in February 1959. When asked why he did not want black students at Norview, this student could only say “I don’t know why, I just don’t.” Yet, other students could easily see a time, probably in their lifetime, when interracial marriage would be accepted.

The forces holding up segregation were many and well-defended, and we should not underestimate them. Dozens were killed for challenging segregation and hundreds brutally beaten. Blind allegiance to a past way of doing things was powerful and provided the strongest elements of resistance to change. Despite the bluster of Virginia’s “massive resistance” and the stuffy and esoteric doctrine of “interposition” cobbled together by Richmond News Leader editor, James J. Kilpatrick, many whites, like the young man from Norview High, defended segregation for reasons that they could not fully articulate.

One of the most interesting recent perspectives on the struggle for civil rights in the South is David L. Chappell’s, A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (University of North Carolina Press, 2004) which stresses black prophetic religion as the decisive force in what was, in effect, a cultural battle. He points out that black southern leaders were driven by a deep sense of realism, indeed a form of conservativism. They had little faith that economic progress would bring social justice. After all, segregation spread across the South at the very time of the region’s modern development and it came hand-in-hand with that era’s most modern devices.

There was no reason to believe, in other words, that time would solve the problem of racial injustice. Most of all, Chappell argues, black southerners seemed to have little of what white liberals so valued–optimism. Instead, a profound pessimism rested at the core of black prophetic views. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s hope, Chappell explains, was carved from a mountain of despair. The black ministers and leaders were, it turns out, not idealistic at all. They read Neibhur. They drew on a deep reservoir of the Hebrew Prophets–they could not count on the world to improve itself, nor could they simply stand by while injustice persisted.

The white liberals, from Chappell’s viewpoint, were especially ineffective, if sincere and well meaning. Liberals at the moment of their greatest cultural authority, the 1930s, seemed to have failed to achieve anything substantial for black rights. They read Gunnar Myrdal, not the Hebrew Prophets, and believed that reason somehow would eventually wear down prejudice. But it did not and it probably would not.

Black southerners had no such illusions about their odds, nor about what they were up against. And Chappell asks an interesting and surprising question: why were the forces of resistance to change so culturally weak? Neither liberals (think of Kennedy) who wanted to slow down change and contain and control it (let time run its course of progress without intervention), nor segregationists who wanted to resist greater black freedom, were able to use religion to inspire self-dedication and solidarity to their cause. Chappell considers white religion the weak link in the segregationist armor. The failure of segregationists–for all of their political and legalistic authority–to get their churches to give them active support stripped the massive resistance campaign of cultural force, of conviction, of deep social power. Search as they might, white Bible readers could find little of the sanction for segregation that their grandfathers found for slavery.

The rise of segregation was not a by-product or inevitable extension of slavery. C. Vann Woodward told us that. Instead, segregation took shape around the modern spaces and technologies in the 1880s, gained strength from the progressive reform movement as a means to “clean” up politics, and gathered cultural weight with the rise of scientific racism or eugenics. Segregation, more than anything else, became a means of economic control and oppression.

The fall of segregation was equally complex and contingent. The new medium of televised news affected the way Americans saw racial injustice. The federal government’s battle with Cold War adversaries prompted wholesale changes, such as the desegregation of the military. And the black prophetic ministers preached sermons of great power, determination, and conviction.

Black prophetic criticism of American racial segregation sparked intense reaction in the 1950s and 60s. White politicians and government leaders cast suspicion on them as un-American and Communist-influenced. They were criticized for their pessimism, for protesting during the Cold War conflict, for calling attention to America’s blemishes and flaws. The prophetic voice of protest, whether black or white, has often been marginalized in the United States, where progress and optimism have held sway in the public square. Without that voice, however, Americans may never have heard the call, much less maintained the conviction, to end segregation.

The South has changed, and so has the nation. Jim Crow segregation has been brought down, though racism obviously persists. In the March 3, 2007 special issue of The Economist which focused on the American South, there is ample evidence of a progressive South, of a true “new South,” a South to which African Americans are moving at rate that exceeds those leaving, a South where there are more black elected officials than any other region in the nation, a South where polls show widespread acceptance of interracial dating.

Some aspects of the South, however, have not changed. There is still a place for the voices of change. Most significantly from The Economist special report came the disturbing news that the South’s schools still lag far behind the rest of the nation’s in nearly every category of measurement. It is safe to say that the region’s persistent undercapitalization of education over such a long time–one of the deepest legacies of segregation that has extended through the 20th century into the 21st–has crippled the South much more severely than all destruction by Sherman’s army in the Civil War.

March 22, 2008

William Jennings Bryan

Filed under: Podcasts, Uncategorized, politics — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — wthomas @ 3:09 pm

Why did William Jennings Bryan run for the Senate in 1894, and why did he lose, and how was this campaign a precursor to his Democratic presidential campaign in 1896? We might look for the beginnings of modern American politics in this showdown between Bryan and the Union Pacific Railroad lead counsel, John M. Thurston. Michael Kazin’s recent biography of Bryan, A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan, views Bryan more as a progressive reformer than as a populist crusader. Kazin allows Bryan to stand as a transitional figure to the modern era in both his Christian liberalism and his progressive vision for the political economy. Bryan, in retrospect, made a concerted attempt throughout his career to resolve a very modern problem—how to realign the Democratic Party so that it represented the broad working and middle classes in an aggressively growth-oriented political economy–in other words, how to appeal to voters based on their class interests without being labeled a demagogue or being accused of class warfare. In recent presidential contests in 2000, 2004, and now in 2008, the problem Bryan faced has reemerged. We might say that the line between statesman and demagogue in American politics has been a thin one ever since Bryan.[display_podcast]

March 21, 2008

Lincoln and the Gettysburg Address

Filed under: Civil War, Uncategorized, politics — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — wthomas @ 6:21 pm

Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address has become especially relevant this week as Americans undertake a sixth year in the Iraq War, a struggle that has now exceeded the Civil War in length. It might be time to take stock of what Lincoln meant in the middle of one of our longest and bloodiest wars. We might ask how the Northern (and Southern) public managed to sustain the war for as long as they did. Certainly, there were significant interests at stake in the Civil War and ideals as well. But after even four years of numbing casualties, resolve in both sections became tenuous. We might recall that the purpose of the war was not always entirely clear to its participants and the higher ideals we have inscribed on the Civil War were not entirely self-evident to those fighting it. Numerous commentators and politicians have invoked Lincoln several times since September 11, 2001, and they have often depicted the Iraq War as a struggle for freedom. The concept of freedom, however, has had more modern meanings, often associated with the Cold War struggle against totalitarianism. In Lincoln’s day the concept of “liberty” resonated more deeply among white Americans, since its meaning was tied directly to the Revolution. Liberty invoked rights, either those of the individual or the states, rights that were to be guarded vigilantly and defended vigorously against the inevitable encroachments of tyranny. Lincoln at Gettysburg spoke most directly about equality, and in his opening line quoted “all men are created equal” from the nation’s Declaration of Independence. Lincoln’s invocation of a “new birth of freedom” came at the end of his address, and specifically in the context of the stunning threat to free government that secession and war had caused. Freedom also stood in opposition to enslavement, and in this context to be free meant simply to not be enslaved. Free men were masters of themselves. The political cry of “free soil, free labor, free men” caught on with white Northerners because slavery was perceived as restricting their [free whites] movement and economic prospects. Still, “freedom” had little of the purchase that “liberty” did in the mid-nineteenth century. Instead, it was Lincoln’s emphasis on equality that was revolutionary and in the year of his Emancipation Proclamation so very important. It was the concept of equality in the Gettysburg Address that set Democrat’s teeth on edge and prompted southern scorn. So, what did Lincoln say and do in the Gettysburg Address and why should we remember it? Was it the beginning of a modern experience of national mourning and dedication, aimed at finding meaning in war?

These questions lie at the center of several recent books. Gabor Boritt’s The Gettysburg Gospel: The Lincoln Speech Nobody Knows is only one example of a growing (and seemingly endless) interest in Lincoln and his Civil War leadership. In addition, Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering: The Civil War and Death has recently called considerable attention to the question of the Civil War in our national identity and culture.

We remember Lincoln’s words commemorating the dead at Gettysburg, but we might ask whether Americans at the time found them worthy of comment. Surprisingly, few Americans, it seems, heard these words or even read them. If you scan the newspapers in the weeks after the address, you will find it gets barely a mention and almost nowhere was it reprinted in full. On November 19, 1863, the occasion was a poignant and most modern of national events–a commemoration, a remembering of the dead in wartime and the creation of a national cemetery. Lincoln tried to speak beyond the immediate circumstances, however, and risked losing his own audience but gaining one for the generations. In the first instance the Address was received by many in the North as an opportunity to consider the great battle and its place in the national struggle. At Gettysburg over 23,000 Union soldiers, or 25 % of the Army of the Potomac were killed or wounded or missing. For Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia the toll was even higher: 33 % of his army, over 28,000 men. On the 3rd day in Picket’s division all 3 brigadier generals and all 13 regimental colonels were killed or wounded.

The reaction to the battle in the North in early July was ecstatic. Josiah Strong, Presbyterian minister, wrote in his diary that “the charm of Robert E. Lee’s invincibility is broken” “the copperheads are palsied and dumb for the moment” “the government is strengthened 4 strong at home and abroad.”

But many white southerners took a far different view of the battle at Gettysburg. It took weeks for many to understand much of what had happened, the information trickled in with the wounded and from northern newspapers. Southern papers told of a large battle with heavy casualties but presented Gettysburg as a stalemate rather than a loss, and one in which southern soldiers gave every bit as good as they got.

Soldiers wrote home, of course, but many were uniformed about the larger consequences. One, Jed Hotchkiss, Stonewall Jackson’s mapmaker, took a view shared by many in the Confederate ranks. The northern papers were full of nonsense, he wrote his wife Sara on July 14th, “we did not take the heights at Gettysburg” but, he noted, Lee and the army waited 3 more days to “offer” battle and when the Yankees did not come into the open for a fight, Lee and the Army came away from Gettysburg “at our own pleasure.”

For the white South Gettysburg was less troubling than the simultaneous loss of Vicksburg. There, indeed, a place, a Southern army, did fall, was lost, and the consequences for the Confederacy were plain–it had been cut in two.

But even with this loss on top of Gettysburg Jed Hotchkiss could find a way to dismiss it. “She is not the Confederacy,” he observed of Vicksburg. The North would find out, he thought, that it had only an “imagined possession” of the Mississippi. Vicksburg was “no vital blow.”When Hotchkiss looked north after Gettysburg he saw a people afflicted with political divisions. Many in the white South hoped, as Lee did, that the battle would widen those divisions and so weaken northern resolve to win the war. White Southerners saw their solidarity, so clearly displayed on the field at Gettysburg, in sharp relief to the Northern political divisions.

After the November 19th events at Gettysburg, these issues framed how Lincoln’s address was received. Republicans in the Northern press focused on the importance of the battle itself, the only battlefield in the North–distinguishing between it and the raids into other parts of the border North. Gettysburg as a place for the battle, then, was significant because it was “the first trial of the capacity of the rebels to fulfill the boasts, so often made by their leaders at the outset of the war, that they would march through the free States in triumph. . . The ambition of their chieftains, the plunderous lust of their predatory followers, the domineering pride of a vainglorious people, all went into that battle with high hopes and banners flying, and came out of it crushed, despirited and despairing.” (North American and United States Gazette, (Philadelphia, PA) Saturday, November 21, 1863; Issue 26,639; col A)

In nearby Franklin County, the Republicans there had been architects of Lincoln’s victory in 1860 and they saw in the events at Gettysburg a higher national purpose. They focused not on Lincoln but on the sanctity of the commemoration of the dead: there was “no eulogy too eloquent, no granite too enduring to extol and perpetuate their virtues.” The key to the memory of the event was its character: “Inseparably with this event, which has become history–must be recorded this fact, that the proceedings of the day were conducted with profound solemnity, and that in no instance was the bounds of decency and propriety disregarded. No accident of any character occurred, and the demeanor of all, without scarcely a single exception, was in conformity with the rules of law, respect and good order.” (Franklin Repository, November 25, 1863) In the same issue the Republican editors noted that Delaware voted to end slavery. Republicans, as a rule, paid much more attention to Edward Everrett’s long address than to Lincoln’s short talk.

Northern Democrats, however, found little to praise in either man’s words. The Buffalo Courier, called the consecration of the cemetery at Gettysburg a “national wake” and denounced it as “a relic of barbarism.” (New Haven Daily Palladium, (New Haven, CT) Friday, November 27, 1863; Issue 308; col A) The New Hampshire Statesman ridiculed, “so far as it was a pageant, it did not reach the public expectation.” It called Edward Everett’s speech manufactured if mildly eloquent. Of Lincoln the paper wrote nothing. (Concord, NH Friday, November 27, 1863; Issue 2217; col B)

In the Southern press the events provoked a curious response. Most papers did not publish a single notice about them. Those that did focused not on Lincoln’s now famous words but on his impromptu speech the night before.

Here is the Richmond Examiner’s headline:

“The Dedication” of the Gettysburg Battle-Field—Details of the Ceremonies—The Cemetery—Speech and Wit of Lincoln Dropped on the Wayside

The Examiner used the occasion to ridicule Lincoln–on his arrival by train the evening before Lincoln gives a humorous short speech but according to the Examiner “the scene here, one would think, was one to inspire solemnity and reverence, but it seems to have given the Yankees quite another feeling–Lincoln seems to have regarded it as a very fit occasion for merriment and wit!”

The editors in Richmond zeroed in on the image of Lincoln as disconnected from the suffering and oblivious to the carnage and loss he and his administration had created. They noted that Lincoln tried to joke about whether the local Pennsylvanians had seen the rebels last summer and fought them, but “the people looked at each other with a half amused, half puzzled expression, while the long, tall form of the President leaned from the car as he waited the reply.” (Daily Richmond Examiner, (Richmond, VA) Wednesday, November 25, 1863; Issue 217; col C )

The Richmond Daily Dispatch (November 24, 1863 ) called the ceremony the “National Necropolis.” The celebration was “entirely Yankeeish. The Star Spangled Banner was all over the ground, but was adorned with some strings of black in view of the occasion.” As for Everett’s speech they could not believe his assertion that if the secession vote had been put to the people of the South they would never have voted for it: “With the stiff corpses of one thousand two hundred and eighty eight men lying in a semi-circle around him, killed on the field for the express purpose of giving the lie to all such statements, this Massachusetts Yankee stood on the platform at Gettysburg and read aloud this printed folly.” (Richmond Daily Dispatch, November 25, 1863)

If we look at eyewitness accounts, most observers focused on the great speech of Edward Everett and on the solemnity of the occasion. On November, Wednesday, 18, 1863, Amos Stouffer from nearby Franklin County went to Gettysburg, for the “Dedication and consecration of the National Cemetery will be tomorrow.” The next day he recorded in his diary his eyewitness account of the Address: “A very fine fall day. The day opened with the booming of cannon. Abe Lincoln, Gov. Curtin, Gov. Seymour, Gov. Todd, Gov. Brough, Maj. Gen Schnock, Maj. Gen Couch, Gen. Stoneman & several other Maj. Gens. were there and about a doz. Brigadier Gens. Shook hands with Old Abe & Curtin. Everet delivered the oration. The dead of the different states are all kept separate. It was a grand affair. About 30,000 people here. We came home in the evening. Emma & Matty Snivel went over with Adam.” The next day he wrote: “A fine day . . . . the affair at Gettysburg was certainly imposing. The military display was good. The Lodges from different parts of the state marched.”

Two hundred miles to the South, Joseph Waddell, editor of a Virginia newspaper, did not attend the ceremony of course, but instead wrote in his diary about the war on the same day as Lincoln spoke. The contrast is significant:

“A general feeling now that the war will be interminable. All round the horizon there is not a glimmer of light or hope. Yet the war does not weigh as heavily as it did for many months after it began. The recollection of the security and abundance formerly enjoyed seems like a dream. — I picture to myself the scenes in our streets three years ago — piles of boxes before every store door, shelves and counters within filled and piled up with goods, merchants begging customers to buy; groceries running over with sugar, molasses, coffee, tea, cheese fish +c; confectioners making the most tempting display of fruits, cakes and candies; wagon loads of country produce calling at every house and farmers earnestly inquiring who wished to purchase flour, corn, potatoes, beef, pork, apples — Now, the stores (still so called by courtesy) will furnish you thread, buttons, pins, and other light articles which ‘run the blockage,’ cotton cloth of Southern manufacture (at $3.75 per yard!), vessels made of clay instead of glass or china ware, and occasionally a few yards of calico or linsey; the confectioner’s saloons are like ‘banquet halls deserted’ ; and you will be lucky if, by dint of entreaty and as a special favour , an ‘independent farmer’ will sell you at a high price a barrel of flour or a few bushels of corn.”

Like many white Southerners, Waddell had nothing to say about Lincoln’s address in later diary entries. Only a handful of Southern newspapers carried notice of it and none printed his remarks in full.

In the fall of 1863, however, the war was taking its toll on Waddell and other white southerners. To them, few of their expectations seemed to have been met. The political ruptures that Lee and his army hoped to see in the North after Gettysburg, at least for a time, faded with the national commemoration. The peace Democrats, Waddell thought, were “dead” in the North. The hope of secession had been pinned for some time on the idea that the North would tire of the war and eventually sustaining the war would become politically untenable for Lincoln and the Republicans. Yet, the Gettysburg Address and the speeches there had the opposite effect.

As we look back at Lincoln’s message and at the context of it in the Civil War, we cannot help but see the real political conflict Lincoln was managing, as well as the ways the newspapers tried to influence public opinion and everyday citizens. Lincoln’s war was not like ours today, of course, either in its aims or its origins. But Lincoln’s reelection hung in the balance in 1863 and 1864, and the war did too. Lincoln, in fact, was the first president to face reelection in the middle of a major war. His words at Gettysburg, so revered today, were received in the context of the modern nation’s political struggle, especially its battle to define the meaning and purpose of so many deaths. Lincoln meant what he said and the humility with which he delivered the address was genuine. But he seemed to know also that modern nations fought and sustained wars differently from the empires and feudal states of the past. There could be no calls to religious heritage, or ethnic identities, or past grievances at the hands of infidel invaders. Instead, there were the stage at the cemetery, the dead in the ground, and the sweeping battlefield within easy sight. This tableau offered a setting for national identity and national purpose, and Lincoln seized the opportunity to inscribe his words there.

The idea of commemorating, in fact, has had and continues to have a powerful appeal to a citizenry at war, even, perhaps especially, in a democratic republic. Lincoln’s address helped sustain the idea that the staggering deaths of the Civil War must have a purpose. Lincoln names that purpose in ways that white Southerners found ludicrous and Northern Democrats scoffed at. Still, the modern American nation has practiced this form of what we might call “remembering-as-meaning” ever since. The difficulty for the citizens of a modern democratic republic at war, ever since Lincoln’s brilliant Gettysburg Address, lies in discerning whether the act of commemoration is making meaning or giving voice to shared purpose. We Americans will probably always search for meaning when we are at war, and we will disagree. But also, like the citizens who gathered at the battlefield and those who later read about the events at Gettysburg on November 19, 1863, we will need to ask ourselves whether remembering the dead in war has obscured our vision about the nature of the struggle.

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