It’s The Slavery, Stupid

Title: This Vast Southern Empire

Rating: 4 Stars

Nations that don’t face up to their past end up only delaying the inevitable.

I think about WWI (apparently one of my favorite subjects as of late for some reason). At its end, the German army was collapsing. It’s not like the British or the French were in much better shape. However, they had an influx of American soldiers, not yet inured to the horrors of trench warfare, still full of fighting spirit.

Even though no Allied forces were actually in German territory yet, Germany’s defenses were collapsing. Ludendorff, at his wits’ end (apparently literally, there were concerns he was having a nervous breakdown), went to the German political leaders and said that the army was no longer capable of defending Germany. This led the German government to negotiate for an armistice.

The German army was in pieces and the Allies knew it. They dictated a harsh armistice treaty that the German government was forced to swallow, including the infamous Article 231, which said that Germany aggression was the cause of the war.

Ludendorff, apparently now having recovered his sanity, denounced the treaty, claimed that the German army did not lose the war, and blamed the German government for betraying the German people and army.

This led to the ‘stab in the back’ myth that Hitler rode to the chancellorship and ultimately, to Germany’s destruction in WWII.

Why am I talking about this? Well, because a similar thing happened in the US at the end of the American Civil War. The South was destroyed and was occupied by Union forces. Somehow, US leaders needed to figure out a way to stitch the North and the South back into some integrated unified whole.

Ultimately, the idea that was stumbled upon was the Lost Cause. That is, that the Southern cause was just and heroic but it was doomed to defeat by the superior manpower and equipment of the North. In particular, the leaders of the South were just trying to protect their ‘way of life’ and states rights against Northern aggression.

Instead of healing, you can say that the wounds were covered up. By the 1890s, as the old Southern aristocracy re-assumed their places, statues and plaques were going up commemorating the heroic fight.

The fact is that any even close reading of history will tell you that its bullshit. Read the Confederacy constitution. Read the Cornerstone speech. It was about slavery, pure and simple.

This book goes to lengths to prove this. In fact, the South was not being dominated by the Federal government in antebellum US. The South was the federal government. Until 1850, the only US presidents that did not own slaves were named Adams. Southern politicians dominated the leadership of the State Department, the Army, and the Navy.

The South effectively used the federal government to defend slavery. In the early 1830s, England abolished slavery. This caused some rather paranoid desperate counter-actions to keep the other existing slave territories (Cuba and Brazil) out of England’s orbit. A primary cause of the Mexican American War was that, since Mexico had outlawed slavery, that they would use their influence to pressure the new republic of Texas. This caused a flurry of activity from the federal government to annex Texas, and ultimately goad Mexico into attacking a US force so that the US in turn could invade.

This wasn’t just radical slave owners. Southern leaders legitimately believed that slave labor was the model of the future. There were certain crops (cotton, sugar, tobacco) that needed to be grown in a specific climate under back breaking conditions. They believed that the only way that such crops could profitably be grown was via slave labor. With the world economy so heavily reliant upon cotton (the bulk of which was grown in the South), they believed that slave labor wasn’t just going to wither away but would continue to grow. They had slave count estimates planned well into the twentieth century.

They only became concerned about the federal government when it became clear that they weren’t going to be running it forever. The Northern population was growing much faster than the Southern. The territories that were being acquired and admitted as states did not necessarily lend themselves to a slave based economy. The pro-slave forces had already basically lost the House of Representatives. They still controlled the Senate but they could see what was coming. They somewhat desperately tried such measures as buying Cuba from Spain and various filibustering invasions of Central American countries to try to increase pro-slave power in the federal government, all of which came to naught.

When the Republican party came to power in 1860, the pro-slave politicians saw that, even though the Republicans were not planning on ending slavery immediately, that they were losing their grip on federal power. Their worry wasn’t about federal power traipsing on state rights, but that at some future point they wouldn’t be the ones with the hands on the levers of power.

They saw a threat to slavery on the horizon and decided that, especially with King Cotton, that now was the optimal time for them to become independent so that they could keep their slaves. They calculated and they lost.

To quote W.E.B. Du Bois, Jefferson Davis became “the peculiar champion of a people fighting to be free in order that another people should not be free”.

When will we truly face up to this?