Denying the Causes of the American Civil War Dismantles American Pride
- The American Civil War was about slavery
- Seriously
- Cultural pride is awesome
- Sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words
- The stories we tell of our histories reflect who we are and what we aspire to be
A certain cloddish buffoon wondered aloud what the American Civil War was about, and suggested a man long dead would have prevented it were he still President. This is somewhat like suggesting people would be better off had America not been involved in World War 2 while shrugging uncertainty about the reasons for America’s intervention. These words are not accident, confusion or ignorance but a small facet of an active campaign to deny Confederate history so as to strip Americans — particularly those descended from slaves — of identity, history and fact by denying the demonstrably racial nature of the mass enslavement of black people by white people and the glorious righteousness of the war that saw the Confederacy defeated. It seeks to rehabilitate the very worst of criminals and recast them as mythologised role models by denying the nature of their crimes. It ultimately seeks to make neoConfederate and therefore white supremacist ideology more palatable to morally normal people, who find slavery and mass murder reprehensible, by diminishing the suffering it inflicted and the tyranny that it was.
Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science. It has been so even amongst us.
-Vice President of the Confederate States of America, Alexander Stephens
Why did the civil war happen? Every state that proffered reasons for its secession from the United States — Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina and Texas — establishes unequivocally that it did so for fear that the federal government had and would continue to encroach on the capacity for white men to own black people; Georgia even goes so far as to declare that her imminent cause is no reason other than the election of a President hostile to the expansion of slavery. When the future President of the Confederacy announced his state was to secede, he gave but a single cause: the preservation of the institution of slavery. The infamous cornerstone speech of the Confederacy’s vice president literally, explicitly and passionately argues that slavery was the fundamental ‘cornerstone’ on which the Confederacy rested. When future Confederate General Robert E. Lee wrote a letter to his wife explaining his view that people should not agitate to end slavery, but wait for God’s decree, he prophetically stated that the US would soon be embroiled in a war over the peculiar institution. The Confederate constitution differs little from the US constitution, but those distinctions are significant and repellent: the document that replaced the US constitution, the document which sought to redress the ills of the federal government, was explicitly devoted to better protecting the property white men had in black slaves, putting paid to the lie that secession had anything to do with ‘states’ rights’: they obviated the sovereignty of states to protect slavery even more explicitly than did the US constitution. Secession was a unilateral declaration that owning black people was more important and more fundamental a principle to slaver states than even being American. The war of aggression slavers initiated by firing upon Fort Sumter was a declaration that the ownership of black people was more important than the lives of hundreds of thousands of their fellow Americans.
In their speeches, their founding documents, their private missives, the slaver states and the founding fathers of the Confederacy expounded at great length and with great honesty about the reasons for separation and war, only for their descendants and sympathisers to deny them their minds and hearts so as to preserve a false history. Partly this is because the conniving traitors who partook in creating the Confederacy themselves discovered how, after the crushing defeat of their ideology and the elimination of the institution of slavery, the maelstrom of the war they begat could no longer be justified by the worst cause that ever existed. So they fabricated nonsensical excuses for their deeds.
Denialism means to deny the essence of a proven thing. To merely hand wave that slavery was a factor in the Civil War is not honest or true: it is to do an immense disservice to reality by making a small nod towards fact, but truth does not make concessions. Slavery was the pre-eminent, sufficient and necessary reason for the attempted secession of southern states from America and the ensuing war. Maritime and zoning disputes, excise and tariff quibbles, violent clashes between abolitionists and slavers were all understood in the context of the slavery question itself; all were part of the struggle to restrict or expand the scope of slavery. In an effort at conciliation it may comfort us to think of slavery as merely an economic issue. After all, 31% of households in southern states owned slaves, and the sons of slave owning men disproportionately made up the armies that marched on the north. The wealth of the south hinged on the labour of slaves, which created the legend of King Cotton that the Confederacy honestly thought could buy the morality of Europe come the civil war (it is somewhat shocking that they were wrong).
But such straightforward greed did not halt those who went on to defeat the Confederacy and ultimately abolish slavery. The economies of the industrialised, northern states were complementary to those of the agrarian south, they were not in competition; all of the United States was made wealthier by slavery and the slave trade, and not merely directly through, for instance, the slave ports of New York and elsewhere. It did not matter to the Treasury of either Britain or America if the gold that filled their coffers was awash in the sweat and blood and toil of black slaves. But it did matter to the large and vital abolitionist movement, which permeated the north and made inroads via heroic individuals of the south. We are not allowed the comfort of historical moral relativism: slavery’s legality did not alter the fact that everyone involved very much understood the moral dimension of the suffering inflicted on slaves.
Those men who wrote and argued and fought and killed and died in defence of slavery made it exceptionally clear that they thought it right and proper and necessary that white man have dominion over black people; that it elevated both, or at worst was a greater burden on the white man than on his property, who were somehow improved by the viciousness and persecution visited upon them. They spoke of divine duty and the chain of being, of natural law and the moral necessity of the cruelties of slavery, of the fearsome prospect of an outbreak of justice should black people be free, or even — gasp — equal citizens. They were not shy or sly about the belief that slavery was a fundamental aspect of their culture and tradition, or the threat that black liberation posed to their beliefs, privileges and what they held to be their sexual and social sanctity. The mass enslavement of Africans and black Americans was not merely lucrative but a way of life. They were proud of these beliefs.
There is a number of strange mythologies to denialism. Since it cannot be accepted by denialists that the war was over slavery, the Union could not have fought to free slaves. Therefore President Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation is declared not to have freed any.
This would surely have been a great surprise to those slaves who write of their feelings upon being freed by Lincoln’s proclamation; those tens of thousands liberated immediately and then the millions unshackled following the Union’s glorious victories. We are to suppose the emancipation proclamation was merely a cynical ploy, that its intent was merely to galvanise support for the war, to improve Union morale, and then immediately forget that this is stating that the liberation of slaves galvanised support and improved morale amongst the Union. We are supposed to believe that the passage of the 13th amendment of the United States Constitution, which abolished slavery in the wake of the civil war, is a cosmic coincidence. These myths are so morally aberrant and counterfactual in their consideration that they immediately concede everything that matters by acknowledging the undoubted fact that the emancipation proclamation formally codified abolition as a war aim, that the Union found vitality and strength in this possibility, and that this possibility became a reality upon the war’s conclusion, literally as soon as the Union — and President Lincoln in particular — had the means to make it so. The war, thereby, was over slavery, even if we labour under the lies of denialists.
The myth of white slavery in America, which gained recent currency even so far as Ireland in a number of burbling news articles, is a part of this attempt to ignore the racist essence of the Transatlantic slave trade by suggesting everyone was guilty, and everyone was a victim, normalising a set of standards that were, in fact, awful and racist. Two separate issues are conflated — accounts of white-looking descendants of black slaves and white indentured servants.
The fact that people descended from black slaves were legally and socially black slaves, that no amount of white parentage was enough to save the sons and daughters of black slaves from themselves being considered black slaves, is further evidence of the racist characteristics of slavery, not evidence against it. Race is a social construct, not biological fact — despite our horrendous genitals we enjoy having sex with each other too much for reality to be any other way. In 18th-19th century America the freckles on a person’s face, their skin tone, eye colour, and hair colour were irrelevant in determining a person’s race. Sally Hemings — Thomas Jefferson’s slave, with whom he had a sexual relationship — had a white father and a half white mother. Their children had the whitest father then alive, and a mother who would, by today’s understanding, be three quarters white. None of them inherited Jefferson’s racial or legal status, but they did all inherit the racial and legal status of Susannah Epps, Hemingway’s grandmother, who was a black slave. One drop of blood, one black ancestor, was all it took for a person to be considered legally, politically and socially black.
The racist attitudes behind slavery were fundamental, necessary and sufficient to explain why white indentured servants enjoyed legal privileges over black slaves. For all its ghastliness, for all its cruelty and the disgraceful robbing of liberty it constituted — now unlawful, thank your local union — indentured servitude necessitated the initial consent of the indentured servant and carried with it a raft of legal rights and contractual obligations that slaves would never experience. Indentured servants could purchase and own property, could testify in court, had extended rights to keep their family together, had a significantly improved right to marry, secured strict regulations restricting corporal punishment, could bring their master to court over maltreatment, could substitute money for the time they must serve and had a contractual limit on that time, which did not extend to their children. As horrendous as indentured servitude was, to compare it to chattel slavery is to minimise chattel slavery so as to diminish the suffering of black people.
Slaver states seceded and then began a war which killed hundreds of thousands of their countrymen. They did so to preserve slavery, and this act, this horror conducted so that further horrors could be perpetuated, remains the closest the United States of America has come to destruction. Denying these facts is as baffling and asinine as a Briton claiming we had no part in the Atlantic slave trade. To deny a well-documented and well-demonstrated crime is to defend the actions which constitute that crime, ameliorating its importance and effects, denying its victims justice and acknowledgement and inflicting further harm upon them. Denying this crime allows the symbols of it to remain, such as the Confederate flags that fly at state capitols; they do so to proclaim how a large swathe of the country’s citizenry are seen by its power elite. That same elite builds monuments to the perpetrators and martial defenders of those crimes as a reminder of and threat from the dominant culture and its values. The historical relevance of the Confederacy and its traitorous defenders continue to wound America today, from economic and social stratification, to ethnic tensions, to the re-emergence of Jim Crow voting restrictions, to the perpetuation of the electoral college, itself developed in deference to slaver states’ abhorrent hatred of democracy. The success of denialism matters.
It is good to venerate the value in one’s country or state, in one’s ancestry and the history of home and birthplace. Whether a person is Quebecois, African-American, German, Papua New Guinean or even Welsh there will be important stories to tell, valuable artefacts and works of art and labour and charity and great acts of selflessness, values and demeanour and humour that we should treasure, each equally convinced that ours is the greatest (the British are the only ones who are, but in our magnanimity we forgive the rest of you for your hubris) because we can look into this great wealth of culture and the people who have contributed to it and we can see how it has shaped us.
There will be immense good to come from the nation one feels kinship with and it is important to recognise and celebrate it. For instance, when a British person bumps into another one, they will either be disgustingly effusive and apologetic or they will completely ignore the person they have bumped into, because we are not very nice people but through our manners sometimes pretend that we are, which is hilarious and cynical and beautiful. But a fundamental part of appreciating one’s nation is to acknowledge the grievous crimes that the structure of that nation, its government, its military and its people may have participated in. An attempt to tell the story of the place we come from which denies or elides the negative aspects of that story is not history. Developing a sense of identity or pride which denies or elides wickedness is not identity with or pride in one’s nation or people but in the fictional narrative one would like to replace it with. It is tying one’s sense of self worth to a fairy tale.
The United Kingdom has been responsible for a lot of dreadful things and without them the British people, collectively and individually, would be very different. To know how we came to be and what we are, to know who I am and where I came from, what all the symbols and the attitudes around me are about, why the people of some countries hate my own and how legitimate their grievances are, we need to know about those dreadful things. Some of them still have immediate relevancy, political and personal. The IRA were a bunch of terrorist murderers or enablers of murder, but Irish and Britons with grey in their hair will have been alive and aware of when the British Army shot into unarmed crowds, and when the British Government dutifully (if rather ineptly) tried to cover it up. I love Britain, but it would be wrong and foolish of me to say it without being able to acknowledge the fact that Britain has as a state for instance murdered a lot of people with a different skin colour to myself when they tried to stop us from selling drugs to their children; the people of Hong Kong, their interaction with the Chinese mainland and relationship with democracy are even now vitally affected by those decisions and actions. I do not have personal moral responsibility for its happening, any more than for magna carta, and I do not take pride in its happening, but it happened. Appreciating my country’s history, my country’s culture and attitudes, and thereby understanding the person my country contributes towards my being necessarily involves understanding and appreciating these things.
It is good and useful and beautiful for a person to take pride in who they are and the culture in which a person finds themselves shapes them. There is nought wrong in a German person having pride in being German (although ideally she should ultimately aspire to be British like all right-thinking folk). It is shameful for a German to say the Holocaust only involved the killing of a few hundred thousand scattered Jews in an unsystematic manner, that there were no poison gas chambers, that Hitler was unaware of such killings, so that she can take pride in the Third Reich. Not every Nazi killed a Jew. But the Third Reich was created with phenomenal and murderous racism and oppression at its core, and to take pride in that pack of criminals and thugs is to either deny or embrace their crimes. There is no shame in a Japanese person taking pride in being Japanese. It is shameful for them to say the Imperial Army never systematised rape, never conducted widespread killings of innocents and detainees, never conducted large-scale pointless torture-experiments, so that they may revel in the militarism of the period. Not every individual person in the Imperial Army conducted themselves so dishonourably, so criminally, so repugnantly, but the Army’s structure and leadership condoned and encouraged such outrage and its entire hierarchy carried them out — as an organisation it was responsible. To claim to take pride in it is to deny or to embrace such crimes.
There is no shame in a southerner of the United States who takes pride in the south. The south has created exciting contributions to cuisine, film, music and literature, and in their creation shared them with humanity. Without the travails and conflicts and victories and tensions of the numerous cultures that make up the south — all of its history, beautiful and ugly, as human beings are — we would not have William Faulkner or H. L. Mencken or B. B. King or Flannery O’Connor or Harper Lee or Hunter S. Thompson or Edgar Allen Poe or blues or funk or rock and roll or rap or hip hop or Coke or most other sugary cold drinks that keep Britain’s population in check. The south’s contribution to the culture of the entire Anglosphere and beyond is enormous and disproportionate.
The entire arduous, bloody, desperate, magnificent history of the civil rights movement and of those small bodies and organisations in the south which opposed slavery —the blacksmith slave Gabriel, Nat Turner, Moncure Conway, Quakers and Methodists — who fought and fight for black equality are all as much a part of the south’s history as the power elite who opposed it, and numerous are its heroes who deserve veneration. These are places and people and narratives from which pride can and should be drawn; their values and qualities dovetail with our own. The ongoing struggle for democracy raises us all up, reminds us of what we have gained and what we have left behind and what we still have left to fight for.
Which is why it is shameful when a southerner says the Confederate states seceded for nebulous economic or ‘state’s rights’ reasons, that slavery was not the principal cause for secession and the aggressive protection of that dubious right not the cause of the war. Not every Confederate felt in his heart that white men should own black men and that this property was worth the blood of Americans. Nonetheless the Confederacy’s raison d’être was a cataclysmic evil, one it began an aggressive and massively destructive war to defend, and to take pride in the cabal of traitors who comprised it is to either deny or embrace their crimes.
It is a terrible sadness that identifying the south with the Confederacy is so seemingly mainstream in the US. To make that identification and then take pride in it necessarily involves phenomenal dishonesty or straightforwardly evil views — one either must take pride in slavery or deny the reality of what the Confederacy was. Historical denialism of a crime of that scale should never be popular, particularly in a modern liberal democracy with such a vast access to information. It speaks to humanity’s capacity for deception and deliberate ignorance, our love of self-aggrandising fables woven at the expense of the knowledge of who we are.
