Author: William Thomas (page 18 of 21)

William G. Thomas III is a professor of history at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the John and Catherine Angle Professor in the Humanities. He teaches digital humanities and digital history, 19th century U.S. history, the Civil War, and the history of slavery.

October 15, 2008

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

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.For 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.For 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

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.

September 9, 2008

An Update from London

My posts will resume this week after a few weeks off to travel to the U.K.–next installments will be on American foreign policy in the Civil War, the subject of my current research in London at the British Library and The Rothschild Archive.The global capital market expanded in the 19th century and it was especially important in the development of the American South and Midwest. It is striking that of the nearly 30,000 miles of railroad track in the United States in 1860, over 22,000 of it were laid in the 1850s, nearly all of it in the South and Midwest. These two regions dominated the boom of the 1850s. British and European capital financed a significant amount of this expansion. Their relative experience in these years and through the Panic of 1857 shaped their identities as much as the political crisis over slavery. In the coming weeks we’ll look at these questions in more detail.

July 29, 2008

Why Did Virginia Secede?

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 25, 2008

Top Five Summer History Tours–New England

Where do you go to find the best history? There are so many choices! Museums, battlefields, exhibits, galleries, and walking tours. It is summertime and that means a chance to explore American history sites and tours. Sometimes, we experience the past more directly when we walk through an old house or see a historical object or stand in a historical place. This feeling is something that children experience intensely as they begin to see that they are part of a continuous flow of time and space, and they are often especially willing to be “transported” in time through history. So, take your children and visit a historic place this summer. Or go visit a historic place and get into the landscape of the past.

Here are my top five history tours for New England, a region rich in landscapes of the past where you can feel the history:

1. The Robert Gould Shaw Monument, Boston, Massachusetts

This is a must see stop on any history tour of New England. Shaw led the 54th U.S. Colored Troops in the American Civil War. He and the 54th are the subject of the film Glory (1989, directed by Edward Zwick, starring Matthew Broderick, Denzel Washington, and Morgan Freeman).The bronze monument by Augustus Saint-Gaudens stands near the State House in downtown Boston on the Boston Common. Although area near the site is busy with traffic and tourists, few take the time to stand directly in front of the large memorial monument and look at it closely. The monument evokes all sorts of emotional responses and as you stare at the men, Shaw, the horse, and the weaponry, you might be overcome with the meaning of history, the war, and the scale of the conflict. Stand on the edge and look at the relief of Shaw and the horse and you will see half of them exposed, as if they are stepping out of time into our present.

Before you go, take a look at the only available letters from regular soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts to get a sense of the war from their perspective–the letters of the Demus and Christy Family. Five of these young men enlisted in the 54th at the first opportunity. Their story of the Civil War makes the monument even more powerful.

(One of the best ways to see Boston is a neat organization of volunteers called Boston by Foot–you can get your exercise and your history at the same time!)

2. Deerfield, Pocumtuck, Massachusetts

There are few sites from the colonial period so well-preserved. In and around one of the nation’s best prep schools, Deerfield Academy, are the historic buildings of the old village of Deerfield. The settlement was a frontier outpost in the seventeenth century and repeatedly attacked by Mohawk Indians determined to hold off white encroachment on their lands. The museum includes one of the most extensive collections of material culture and decorative arts in New England.

Before going, you might take a look at Richard J. Melvoin’s terrific book, New England Outpost: War and Society in Colonial Deerfield (W. W. Norton, 1989), an excellent study of the multicultural blend of people in the region and their difficult struggles on the border between and among native and English aggressive societies. The Pocumtuck Indians in the Connecticut River Valley first settled there, and yet these Algonquians faced constant pressure from their Mohawk Iroquois neighbors. and English settler moved into the village. The English society at Deerfield collapsed in King Phillip’s War (1676) as the Algonquian Indians fought across New England. Eventually, the English settlement returned and the Mohawk (with French support) attacked the village in 1704. As English settlements spread up the Connecticut River Valley and west into the mountains, the English settlement stabilized and grew.

While there, walk up the ridge near Eaglebrook School, to the top of the “rock” and see the whole Pocumtuck Valley below and the village (ask for directions at Historic Deerfield–this is a one mile, unmarked hike, straight up a mountain, but the view is worth it).

3. Litchfield, Connecticut, The Tappan Reeve School of Law

Litchfield, though not as uniquely preserved as Deerfield, is home to one of the most important pieces of American history, the Tappan Reeve School of Law. The school was at the center of the legal and political battles of the early republic. John C. Calhoun and Aaron Burr attended the school, and hundreds of others who went on to become U.S. Congressmen and Senators. The school was particularly important as a seedbed of Federalism.

Much of this setting remains remarkably intact and you can see the rooms, libraries, materials, and organization of the school. Historic Litchfield also includes period houses, exhibits of material culture, and the Litchfield Female Academy where Catherine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe attended.

4. Walden Pond, Concord Massachusetts

Henry David Thoreau’s 1854 Walden stands as one of the greatest American works of nature writing and history. Walden Pond is part of a Massachusetts State Recreation Area and has been designated a National Historic Landmark. You can visit a replica of Thoreau’s cabin, and you can walk the pond and fields he planted. Don’t forget to read Walden before going! In fact, take it with you and read passages as you walk the pond and woods.

5. Newport Historic Homes, The Breakers, Newport, Rhode Island

This is a close call. Do you go to Lowell, Massachusetts, to the excellent National Park Service site to see the factory or do you take a walk through the Gilded Age society of America? The Breakers was the home of Cornelius Vanderbilt II, railroad president of the New York Central lines and heir to his father’s fortune in steamship and railroad businesses. The architect Robert Morris Hunt’s design featured 70 rooms and an ornate Italian Renaissance style. The views of the Atlantic Ocean are immense, the gardens sprawling, and the house lavishly ostentatious.

You can tour many other homes in Historic Newport and appreciate the Gilded Age’s displays of extreme wealth. Any visitor might also want to read Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence as a guide to New York high society and the changes underway at the turn of the century.

In August New England is lovely, full of bright blue skies and cool Atlantic breezes, and for any history traveler the sites are rich and rewarding.