Showing posts with label Slavery. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Slavery. Show all posts

Thursday, December 28, 2023

Can you say "slavery"?


Why does this absurd version of the Civil War still exist in the South? The war was about slavery. At the time, the Southern states fully admitted it.

It had nothing whatsoever to do with "economic freedom".

Sunday, December 24, 2023

The Reformation as unmixed evil.

I am firmly convinced that the Reformation of the sixteenth century was as near as any mortal thing can come to unmixed evil. Even the parts of it that might appear plausible and enlightened from a purely secular standpoint have turned out rotten and reactionary, also from a purely secular standpoint. 

By substituting the Bible for the sacrament, it created a pedantic caste of those who could read, superstitiously identified with those who could think. By destroying the monks, it took social work from the poor philanthropists who chose to deny themselves, and gave it to the rich philanthropists who chose to assert themselves. By preaching individualism while preserving inequality, it produced modern capitalism. It destroyed the only league of nations that ever had a chance. It produced the worst wars of nations that ever existed. It produced the most efficient form of Protestantism, which is Prussia. And it is producing the worst part of paganism, which is slavery.

G. K. Chesterton

Thursday, July 6, 2023

Western angst and spinning history.

I don't know if it was the anniversary of the raid, or what, but my Twitter feed for some reason picked up a link to a story about a large raid by the Barbary Pirates on the coast of Ireland.  In 1631 the pirates raided Baltimore, Ireland, in the County of Cork.  The town was not large, but between 100 and 300 of its inhabitants were abducted.  Only two made it back to Ireland, in part because the English government had just enacted a law which forbid paying ransom, which was often the goal of such raids.

The article that was linked in was scholarly, and noted that what would have occured is that, for the most part, children would have been separated from their parents and everyone sold into slavery when it became obvious that they would not be ransomed.  The male slavery would have been of the grueling work variety.  Women would have largely been sold as sex slaves, which the articles like to call "concubines".  

The reason that I note this here is that the author, again it was a scholarly article, felt compelled to blame the raids on the Spanish expulsion of the Moors from the Iberian Peninsula.  That process has commenced in 1492, and it was completed, effectively, in 1614.  The entire period wasn't a peaceful one, and in the Mediterranean various nations raided each other.

The final stages of the story are more complicated, in Spain, than might at first be imagined, as by the 1600s the "Moriscos" weren't actually Muslim, but rather Spanish descendants of Berbers and Arabs who were Catholic, but who retained Berber/Arab ancestry. Some claim they were "crypto Islamic", but more likely they were Catholics who retained some folk connection to their ancestor's prior religion.  Indeed, it'd be worth noting that Islam itself has a murky origin connection with Christianity, and this may have been confusing at the street level.  Anyhow, the last stages of this seem to be an ethnic spat, but it did have the effect of expelling Moriscos to North Africa, where they were absorbed ultimately into the local population, or to distribute them across Spain where the same thing occured.

Anyhow, blaming the Baltimore, and other Barbary Pirate, raids on this event is stretching it.  I suppose you could argue that the general belligerency of the Mediterranean contributed to the raiding atmosphere, and both sides did that, but that traces back to the rise of Islam in the first place, which was spread by the sword.  That this process went on, in one fashion or another, for a thousand years, and in some cases to this very day, does not mean that much except that the long arch of history and the fact that events play out over decades or centuries is the rule, and only seems to be odd to us, as we're used to everything occurring rapidly.

Anyhow, the author claimed that the children were treated with "utmost kindness".  Really?  Separating them from their parents, sending their fathers off to early grueling slave induced deaths and selling their mothers as sex slaves?  And then they'd end up slaves themselves, with boys often ending up enslaved soldiers and girls. . . sex slaves.

What BS.

The same author claimed that the women were sold into "concubinage", which is sex slavery in this context, and lived lives of "relative luxury", as if this weird image of the Playboy ethos had the women looking forward to this life of chattel status while they still retained their desirability.  The reality of it is that they had value as they were exotic, and bought for their physical attributes alone.

Why this story has to be spun in this fashion is really remarkable. We're supposed to feel some guilt for the story of the kidnappers and slavers, and even look kindly upon some of the grossest examples of slavery that are around.

None of this is to excuse Western conduct, whatever might be sought to be excused. Slavery was common amongst all Mediterranean societies, Christian and Islamic, but what played out with the Barbary pirates was not.  They engaged in slave raids, and forced sex slave status of captured women was endorsed by the Koran, although frankly probably not really in the form that was practiced here (it likely applied to women captured as a result of warfare, not that this makes it a lot better).  Putting a gloss on any kind of slavery, moreover, is bizarre.  When people attempt to do that, as many once did and a few still try to do, in regard to American slavery, we're rightly appalled.  This isn't any better.

The West has had a hard time reconciling an imperial past with its democratic values, and one way it tries to cope with it is by making Westerners always be the baddies.  The story of empire is a complicated one, but the 100 to 300 inhabitants of Baltimore didn't have much to do with it, and neither, really, did the Barbary pirates. Slavery was always bad and this sort of slavery gross.  Kidnapping people is always bad.  There are always bad people.  The Barbary Pirates don't need to be portrayed as if they're Captain Morocco, or something, in a Marvel movie.

Saturday, April 8, 2023

Thursday, April 8, 1943. Roosevelt freezes wages, prices, and jobs. The law of unintended consequences.

USS Tuscaloosa (CA-37) steaming at high speed through heavy seas off Cape Hatteras, April 8, 1943.

Franklin Roosevelt instituted wage and price controls in an effort to combat inflation, and froze employment in place.  The move, of questionable constitutionality, had a permeant, unintended impact on the U.S. economy.

While wages and prices were frozen, benefits, including health insurance, were not. That's because many employers didn't offer it until this time.  Unable to induce workers to switch from one employer to another, they switched to offering benefits, such as health insurance, although Roosevelt's order also precluded workers from switching jobs.  Employees required permission to move employment, and unions lost the ability to bargain for higher wages in an era when wages were rising, but the benefit inducements came in none the less.

We pick that story up here, from a prior thread:













Now, expenses have reached the point where many cannot afford to pay themselves and health insurance has gone from being a workplace benefit to a near necessity for most.  People actually keep jobs just for the insurance.  I've known, for example, of one person who kept a job she wanted to leave to return to school for just that reason.  As a practical matter, the government has become the insurer of last resort for many who have no insurance and who end up using the hospital, in emergencies, as their health care provider.  Increased private medical competition, in the meantime, has become an increasingly common feature of health care as the large dollar amounts that are present in the industry naturally has resulted in private competition.  County and state facilities, therefore, end up in competition with each other, with the practical result of that often being that county and state facilities end up becoming more and more in the nature of public clinics in some ways.

And people have an expectation of health care, which is not abnormal, nor greedy, in a generally affluent society.  That's true of our views on a lot of various things, and its particularly true of health care.  People generally feel that anyone ought to, and even should, seek the health care that they need, when they need it, and there's a feeling of distress when a certain percentage of the population cannot afford it.  Put another way, back in the 1940s if a person was afflicted with a stroke died, it was probably the case that this would have occurred no matter what.  If they were unable to secure health care for some reason for that condition, the result probably would have been the same as if they did.  This would not be true, of course, for every sort of condition, but what that does mean is that there was an overall greater acceptance that if economic conditions prevented treatment, that this was part of the nature of life, rather than being something that would be regarded as deeply unfair. And, for that matter, the medical community made a dedicated effort to include those who could not pay in their practices. They still do, but the nature of that society wide had become different.

Preventing workers from moving from one job to another was frankly a shocking move, in the modern context.  It effectively imposed a type of conscription, or even darned near slavery, upon the civilian population during the war.   Employees could move jobs if they secured permission, but it required that.

The 1943 NFL draft was held.

French actor Harry Baur died shortly after being released by German authorities, having been tortured by the Gestapo after his arrest which stemmed from his efforts to secure the release of his wife, Rika Radifé.  A Turkish actress, she had been arrested on charges of espionage and would survive the war.

I guess on this one, I should ponder what this meant for my family.  My grandfather owned his own business, a meat packing business, so the order wouldn't really apply to him, save for the fact that it did for his employees, which must have been an odd experience.

Thursday, March 16, 2023

Slavery in Renaissance Italy

Up until today, I was unaware that there was slavery in Renaissance Italy, Italy of course being a region at the time, not a nation state.

There was.

Somebody has come out with a theory that Leonardo da Vinci's mother, about whom nothing is really know, was a Circassian slave.  I don't know about that, and it's probably impossible to prove. The evidence for it is, frankly, in my view extraordinarily weak and completely circumstantial, but that there were slaves held in Italy at that point in time was a surprise to me.

Which probably means that there's more here to be surprised about. Where else in Renaissance Europe was slavery practiced?

Wednesday, January 11, 2023

Ready To Wear.

Racks of ready to wear clothing, Lord & Taylor, New York.  1948.

We recently had a big item on sewing.

Well, sort of. We had this item:

"Government Housewives". Sewing, sewing and seamstresses.

American soldier in Cuba in 1898 doing a sewing repair.

That entry, concluded with this:




Which brings us to this.

Prior to the early 19th Century, pre manufactured clothing didn't exist at all.

This is something that's difficult for us to really imagine now.  We don't think of our daily clothing being homemade, or anything of the type.  Indeed, this is so much the case that we pass right over the references to it on the rare instances in which they occur. For instance, in the song House of the Rising Sun, which we discussed here recently.  In the classic Eric Burdon version, we hear:

My mother was a tailor

She sewed my new blue jeans

My father was a gamblin' man

Down in New Orleans

And as we know from the lengthy discussion the other day, in the original version we find:

My mother she's a tailor

Sews those new blue jeans

My sweetheart, he's a drunkard, Lord God

He drinks down in New Orleans

What?  Sew blue jeans?

Now, in fairness, my mother, who had learned to sew and wasn't bad at it (although she doesn't compare in that category to my mother-in-law, who is a true and very talented seamstress) actually did sew some trousers in the 70s that I can recall, right about the time that women started to wear trousers.  As we've also discussed here in the past, women didn't really wear trousers until the 20th Century, or didn't wear them much, and it was the combined impact of the First and Second World Wars that really started to open that up.  Contrary to popular myth, the Second World War did really move women into the workplace, but it did certainly help move them into trousers.  As part of that my mother sewed some jeans, and they truly had really long wear as I can remember her wearing them into the 90s. They weren't blue jeans, however.

And they were bell-bottoms.

But I digress.

Royal Navy sailors, 1850s.

Bell-bottoms are a good place to start this discussion, in fact, as before the American Civil War the only pre-made ready to wear clothing of any kind for civilians was made for sailors.  Sailors were their own rootless class, and they didn't often have wives and sisters at home to make clothes for them, particularly if they shipped out of an English port and wore their clothes out prior to returning to it, but they stopped in an American port, or any version of that you might imagine.

Interestingly, the only other group for whom ready to wear clothing were made, at least in North America, was for slaves.

Port towns had ready to wear clothing made in a single size.  Most sailors were pretty good with a needle and thread as it was necessary knowledge for the age of sail, and they or a member of the crew had to tailor what they bought to fit after they bought it.

This, by the way, was a pretty common male role.  In addition to civilian sailors, and slaves, soldiers also had ready to wear clothing issued to them, and it too tended to be altered by a member of the company, which in the case of cavalrymen at any rate, was usually a saddler, who had to be particularly adept with needle and thread.  Interestingly, this role carried through all the way to the end of the horse cavalry and artillery and was picked up by parachute riggers for the airborne during World War Two, who likewise were good with needle and thread and who heavily altered the uniforms issued to U.S. paratroopers.  Modern riggers should be envious of their Second World War predecessors skills.

Clothing for slaves was advertised as "Negro Clothing", for what it's worth.  It was produced by seamstresses working for low pay, better than that for slaves, which was nonexistent, but hardly a wealthy class.  Singer, the sewing machine company, actually noted in its advertisements that its sewing machine was particularly suitable for making "Negro clothing".

As an example of the operation of Yeoman's Fourth Law of History, it was the Civil War itself that really got ready to wear clothing rolling.  Military clothing, unlike that for sailors and slaves, was sized.  What it wasn't, prior to the war, was massed produced. The war took care of that.

While we don't tend to think of military clothing of being readily adaptable to civilian wear, in facts it's an old maxim, which had broad truth to it, that all men's clothing comes from war or farming, although in recent years some of it seems to have come from toddler departments.  While the uniforms of Civil War ear soldiers don't look immediately close to civilian wear, particularly as the war went on, they were much closer than we might at first imagine.  In terms of clothing, the soldier wore wool undergarments (an unpleasant thought) wool trousers, a cotton shirt, and a wool coat year around, unless for some reason he chose to strip himself of the coat in hot weather, which was rare, or to equip himself with some civilian clothing that could be worn under the wool trousers and coat.

Mass production of Army uniforms lead to post-war mass production of clothing in general.  The entire industry exploded after the war, as clothing was really expensive in general, and this offered a cheaper way to obtain this basic need.  By the 1920s, ready to wear clothing had so expanded that it had taken over the female clothing market in addition to the male.  

As mass production clothing rose, it had a leveling effect.  Finely tailored bespoke clothing had a much different appearance than "home spun".  It was easy to tell the difference from a wealthy person, or an in town professional, and a farmer or rural person simply by this fact.  When mass-produced clothing came in, it not only represented a cheaper option, it was frankly also generally better looking than homespun was likely to be.  That upgraded the appearance of people of more modest means, and over time it also caused those of middle class income to opt for the cheaper option as well, and even some wealthy individuals did.  It's no wonder then that when we look at scenes of the 1920s through the early 60s that so many people we know to be of modest means were "well-dressed". While still a significant expenditure, they were able to "dress up" to a higher standard, while those of middle class and even wealthy means would "dress down" to it.  There were, of course, exceptions.

This didn't mean that everything was off the rack, and particularly with more dress wear, some tailoring was needed.  If a person bought a suit, for example, it would often need alternation by a tailor. The same was true for dresses, with it often being the case that more was required for women's wear.  Still, there's a big difference between going into Brooks Brothers, for example, and buying a suit that's finished by a tailor, and going into a tailor to have a suit made.

For much in the way of daily wear, however, ready to wear really took over by the early 20th Century.  People generally don't have, for examples, shirts made, J. Gatsby not with standing.  Most sizing problems, even with suits, have long been adjusted with belts and suspenders.  Nobody has their "new blue jeans" sewn by a seamstress, and only a few would ever have them tailored.

Which gets us to a claim I saw the other day that "everything now is poorly made".  Is it?  We'll take a look at that.

Sources:

Much of this entry relies upon the excellent:

A Brief History of Mass-Manufactured Clothing

Sofi Thanhauser on the Early Days of Ready-to-Wear

By Sofi Thanhauser

Monday, May 30, 2022

A 2022 Memorial Day Reflection.

Today is Memorial Day.


I've done a Memorial Day reflection post a couple of times, and I did a short history of Memorial Day once on our companion blog here:

Memorial Day

Observers here may have noted that I failed to put up a post for Memorial Day when this post was first made, in 2012.


This is in part due to Memorial Day being one of those days that moves around as, in recent years, Congress has attempted to make national holidays into three day weekends. That's nice for people, but in some ways it also takes away from the holiday a bit.  At the same time, it sort of tells you that if a holiday hasn't been moved to the nearest Friday or Monday, next to its original location on the calendar, it means that the holiday is either hugely important, a religious holiday, or extremely minor.  The 4th of July and Flag Day, one major and one minor, do not get moved, for example.

Anyhow, Memorial Day commenced at some point either immediately after or even during the Civil War, depending upon how you reckon it, and if you are date dependent for the origin of the holiday.  In American terms, the day originally served to remember the dead of the then recent Civil War.  The holiday, in the form of "Decoration Day" was spreading by the late 1860s.  The name Memorial Day was introduced in the 1880s, but the Decoration Day name persisted until after World War Two.  The holiday became officially named Memorial Day by way of a Federal statute passed in 1967.  In 1971 the holiday was subject to the Uniform Monday Holiday Act which caused it to fall on the last Monday of May, as it does now.

The day, therefore, would have always been observed in Wyoming, which had Grand Army of the Republic lodges since prior to statehood. But, like many holidays of this type, observation of the holiday had changed over the years.  In the 1960s and 1970s, by my recollection, the day was generally observed by people visiting the grave sites of any deceased family member, and therefore it was more of a day to remember the dead, rather than a day to recall the war dead.  This, however, has changed in recent years to a very noticeable extent.  Presently, it tends to serve as a second Veterans Day, during which veterans in general are recalled.  This year, for example, Middle School children in Natrona County decorated the graves of servicemen in the county with poppies, strongly recalling the poppy campaigns of the VFW that existed for many years.

Wyoming has a strong military culture, even though the state has lost all but two of its military installations over the years. The state had the highest rate of volunteers for the service during World War Two, and it remained strongly in support of the Vietnam War even when it turned unpopular nationwide.  The state's National Guard has uniquely played a role in every US war since statehood, including Vietnam, so perhaps the state's subtle association with Memorial Day may be stronger than might be supposed.

On remembrance, we'd be remiss if we didn't point out our Some Gave All site.

It's worth remembering here that Memorial Day has its origin in a great act of national hatred, the Civil War.  That is, the day commenced here and there as an effort to remember the Civil War dead, which, at the end of the day, divide sharply into two groups; 1) those who gave their lives to keep their fellow human beings in cruel enslaved bondage, and those who fought to end it.

Now, no doubt, it can be pointed out that those who died for slavery by serving the South, and that is what they died for if they were killed fighting for the South, didn't always see their service that way.  It doesn't matter. That was the cause they were serving. And just as pointedly, many in the North who went as they had no choice were serving to "make men free", as the Battle Hymn of the Republic holds it, irrespective of how they thought of their own service.

And it's really that latter sort of sacrifice this day commemorates.

The first principal of democracy is democracy itself.

And because of that, it is inevitably the case that people will win elections whom you do not wish to.  Perhaps you may even detest what they stand for.

Democracy is a messy business and people, no matter what they claim to espouse, will often operate against democratic results if they don't like them.  In the 1950s through at least the 1990s, the American left abandoned democracy to a significant degree in favor of rule by the courts, taking up the concept that average people couldn't really be trusted to adopt a benighted view of the liberalism that they hoped for which would be free of anything, ultimately, liberally. An enforced libertine liberalism.

The results of that have come home to roost in our own era as a counter reaction, building since the 1980s, has now found expression in large parts of the GOP which have gone to populism and Illiberal Democracy.  

We have a draft thread on Illiberal Democracy, which is a term that most people aren't familiar with, but it's best expressed currently by the Hungarian government of Viktor Orban, to the horror of Buckeyite conservatives like George F. Will. 

Defining illiberal democracy isn't easy, in part because it's most commonly defined by its opponents.  Setting aside their definitions, which it probably would be best defined as is a system in which a set of beliefs and values are societally defined and adopted which are external to the government and constitution of a county, and a democracy can only exist within it.  The best historical example, if a good one can actually be found, might be Vichy France, which contrary to some assumptions was not a puppet of Nazi Germany so much as a species of near ally, but which had a right wing government, with elections, that operated only within the confines of the beliefs of the far right government.

Much of what we see going on now in the far right of the country, which is now the province of the GOP, is described in this fashion, although not without its ironies.  Viewed in that fashion, the January 6, insurrection actually makes sense, as the election was "stolen" because it produced the wrong results, culturally.  I.e., if you assume that the basic concepts of the Democratic Party fall outside of the cultural features which the far right populist wing of the GOP holds as legitimate, such an election would be illegitimate by definition.

The United States, however, has never viewed democracy that way.  Not even the Confederate South, which may be the American example that treads on being the closest to that concept, did.  The Southerners felt comfortable with human bondage, but they did not feel comfortable instituting an unwritten set of values into an unwritten constitution.  Slavery, the core value of the South, was presumed justified, but it was written into the law.

Much of the nation now does.

Indeed, in the Trump wing of the GOP, or the wing which came over to trump, and brought populist Democrats into the party, that is a strong central tenant.  When the far right in the current GOP speaks about being a "Constitutional Conservative", they don't mean being Constitutional Originalists.  Rather, they are speaking about interpreting the Constitution according to a second, unwritten, and vaguely defined "constitution".

The ironies this piles on are thick, as the unwritten social constitution this piles on looks back to an American of decades ago, much of which has indeed unfortunately changed, but much of which the current backers of this movement are not close to comporting with themselves.  The imagined perfect America that is looked back towards, the one that we wish to "Make Great Again", was culturally an Anglo-Saxon Protestant country, or at least a European Christian one, with very strong traditional values in that area.  Those who now look at that past as an ideal age in part because social movements involving such things as homosexuality and the like need to appreciate that the original of the same set of beliefs and concerns would make heterosexual couples living outside of marriage and no fault divorce just as looked down upon.  Put another way, the personal traits of Donald F. Trump, in this world, would be just as abhorrent as those of Barney Frank.

This is not to discuss the pluses or minuses of social conservatism or of social liberalism in any form.  That's a different topic.  But American democracy, no matter how imperfect, has always rested on the absolute that its first principal of democracy is democracy.  Taken one step further, a central concept of democracy is that bad ideas die in the sunlight.  

That has always proven true in the past, and there's any number of movements that rose and fell in the United States not because they were suppressed, but because they simply proved themselves to be poor ideas.  In contrast, nations which tried to enforce a certain cultural norm upon their people by force, such as Vichy France or Francoist Spain, ended up doing damage to it, even where some of the core values they sought to enforce were not bad (which is not to excuse the many which were).

All of that may seem a long ways from Memorial Day, but it's not.  No matter how a person defines it, as the end of the day the lost lives being commemorated today were lost for that concept of democracy and no other.  Those who would honor them, from the left or the right, can only honor them in that context.

That means that those who would support insurrections as their side didn't win, aren't honoring the spirit of the day. And those who would impose rule by courts, as people can't be trusted to vote the right way, aren't either.

Related threads:

Tuesday, May 30, 1922. Lincoln Memorial Dedicated.

Thursday, June 17, 2021

Juneteenth

This passed Congress earlier this week, and was signed into law today.  Unusually, the impact is truly immediate.

For those who might not know, Juneteenth commemorates the news of the Emancipation Proclamation reaching Texas, which would have been the Confederacies most distant territorial assertion. 

Governor Gordon Responds to Federal Recognition of Juneteenth Holiday

 

CHEYENNE, Wyo. – Today, President Biden signed a law creating a federal holiday recognizing Juneteenth. Governor Gordon has also signed a proclamation recognizing the significance of the day, which commemorates the end of slavery, while encouraging self-development and respect for all cultures. Wyoming has recognized the Juneteenth holiday since 2003, when the state legislature passed a bill establishing the holiday on the third Saturday of the month.

Because of the President's action, Friday June 18, 2021 is a holiday for most federal employees per the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. In Wyoming the Legislature has set State Holidays. While tomorrow will not be a state holiday, the Governor will work with lawmakers to consider this option for future years. 

“Freedom is always a cause for celebration and this is a momentous day in our nation’s history. I encourage people to observe this commemoration of the full enactment of the Emancipation Proclamation, which embodies the values of all Americans,” Governor Gordon said.

--END--

Thursday, December 10, 2020

Today In Wyoming's History: Today In Wyoming's History: Wyoming Myths. Sacagawea and York

Today In Wyoming's History: Today In Wyoming's History: Wyoming Myths. Sacaga...

Today In Wyoming's History: Wyoming Myths. Sacagawea. An added footnote

Something I really should have footnoted in this item from the other day:
Today In Wyoming's History: Wyoming Myths. Sacagawea: Mural in the Montana State House by Edgar Paxson depicting Sacagawea and the Corps of Discovery in Montana.  Sacagawea's actual appearan...

When the Corps of Discovery went into winter camp after their first year of trekking across the western half of the continent they voted on the location and decided it by majority vote.

Both Sacagawea and York were given a vote.


Friday, July 3, 2020

The missed opportunity. 40 Acres and a Mule.

"The end of the line of one hundred thirty Negro farmers with mule teams who are buying their cotton seed and other supplies cooperatively at Roanoke Farms, North Carolina."  1938.

Every once and a while in  history you can look back on a specific event and know exactly when the opportunity to cause a different historical outcome was lost.  It's rare, but it does occur.

And eschewing Radical Reconstruction following the Civil War is one such example, the tragic consequences of which we are still living with today.

That opinion, which I've held for a very long time, has not been a popular one in American history for the reason, I'd submit, that the compromise of the 1870s followed by the renewed rise of Southern aristocracy and the glorification of the "Lost Cause" worked an inaccurate historical revision on it, or at least upon its attitude.  Suffice it to say, most historians have tended to herald the demise of Radical Reconstruction following the Lincoln assassination and have taken the position instead that Lincoln wouldn't have approved of it, and as the great reuniter, he would have done what Andrew Johnson did . . . reconstruction, but not so radical.

I'm not so sure.  Lincoln was a shrewd man, something often forgotten about him.  A man willing to endure the war that he did may have been willing to thrown in with the radicals in his final term and forced the conclusion of the effort that was started in 1860.  There are, of course, reasons to believe that he would not have taken that path, he was after all acting in a conciliatory way as the war ended, but there are reasons to believe the opposite  He was a shrewd politician, and one of conviction, who had proven unusually willing to endure extreme hardship in order to obtain a goal. Would any other newly elected President have been willing to take the country into a Civil War in 1860 without any effort to placate the states attempting departure?

We'll never know, of course, but we can wonder and truly not know.  We can know, however, that not following through with the goals of the Radical Republicans was a mistake.

A huge mistake.

The Radicals would have taken steps to reform, in the true sense of the word, the South politically, economically and socially (and for all practical purposes in that order, while simultaneously). That would have meant politically disenfranchising the treasonous portion of the white Southern population while enfranchising the blacks, but it would have meant far more than that.  Indeed, the one good bit of evidence that Lincoln would have gone with the Radicals is that politically enfranchising the former slave population in fact did occur during Lincoln's late administration and it continued on during Johnson's.  Blacks were made citizens and given the right to vote, even achieving a majority black government in South Carolina for a time.

But it also would have meant, in some form, putting the black population into the economic shoes formerly owned by the treasonous planter class who dominated the South economically and politically. And that would have meant busting up the plantations and distributing land to the freed slaves.

And that idea was definitely around by the mid point in the Civil War.  Indeed, it was definitely circulating around in the Army, which had occasionally taken a liberating view towards slaves even early in the war.  It was expressed in the sentiment that caused General William T. Sherman to issue Special Field Order Number 15, which read:
Special Field Orders No. 15.
Headquarters Military Division of the Mississippi, In the Field, Savannah, Ga., January 16, 1865.

I. The islands from Charleston south, the abandoned rice-fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and the country bordering the Saint Johns River, Fla., are reserved and set apart for the settlement of the BLACKS now made free by the acts of war and the proclamation of the President of the United States.
II. At Beaufort, Hilton Head, Savannah, Fernandina, Saint Augustine, and Jacksonville the blacks may remain in their chosen or accustomed vocations; but on the islands, and in the settlements hereafter to be established, no white person whatever, unless military officers and soldiers detailed for duty, will be permitted to reside; and the sole and exclusive management of affairs will be left to the freed people themselves, subject only to the United States military authority and the acts of Congress. By the laws of war and orders of the President of the United States the negro is free, and must be dealt with as such. He cannot be subjected to conscription or forced military service, save by the written orders of the highest military authority of the Department, under such regulations as the President or Congress may prescribe; domestic servants, blacksmiths, carpenters, and other mechanics will be free to select their own work and residence, but the young and able-bodied negroes must be encouraged to enlist as soldiers in the service of the United States, to contribute their share toward maintaining their own freedom and securing their rights as citizens of the United States. Negroes so enlisted will be organized into companies, battalions, and regiments, under the orders of the United States military authorities, and will be paid, fed, and clothed according to law. The bounties paid on enlistment may, with the consent of the recruit, go to assist his family and settlement in procuring agricultural implements, seed, tools, boats, clothing, and other articles necessary for their livelihood.
III. Whenever three respectable negroes, heads of families, shall desire to settle on land, and shall have selected for that purpose an island, or a locality clearly defined within the limits above designated, the inspector of settlements and plantations will himself, or by such sub-ordinate officer as he may appoint, give them a license to settle such island or district, and afford them such assistance as he can to enable them to establish a peaceable agricultural settlement. The three parties named will subdivide the land, under the supervision of the inspector, among themselves and such others as may choose to settle near them, so that each family shall have a plot of not more than forty acres of tillable ground, and when it borders on some water channel with not more than 800 feet water front, in the possession of which land the military authorities will afford them protection until such time as they can protect themselves or until Congress shall regulate their title. The quartermaster may, on the requisition of the inspector of settlements and plantations, place at the disposal of the inspector one or more of the captured steamers to ply between the settlements and one or more of the commercial points, heretofore named in orders, to afford the settlers the opportunity to supply their necessary wants and to sell the products of their land and labor.
IV. Whenever a negro has enlisted in the military service of the United States he may locate his family in any one of the settlements at pleasure and acquire a homestead and all other rights and privileges of a settler as though present in person. In like manner negroes may settle their families and engage on board the gunboats, or in fishing, or in the navigation of the inland waters, without losing any claim to land or other advantages derived from this system. But no one, unless an actual settler as above defined, or unless absent on Government service, will be entitled to claim any right to land or property in any settlement by virtue of these orders.
V. In order to carry out this system of settlement a general officer will be detailed as inspector of settlements and plantations, whose duty it shall be to visit the settlements, to regulate their police and general management, and who will furnish personally to each head of a family, subject to the approval of the President of the United States, a possessory title in writing, giving as near as possible the description of boundaries, and who shall adjust all claims or conflicts that may arise under the same, subject to the like approval, treating such titles altogether as possessory. The same general officer will also be charged with the enlistment and organization of the negro recruits and protecting their interests while absent from their settlements, and will be governed by the rules and regulations prescribed by the War Department for such purpose.
VI. Brig. Gen. R. Saxton is hereby appointed inspector of settlements and plantations and will at once enter on the performance of his duties. No change is intended or desired in the settlement now on Beaufort Island, nor will any rights to property heretofore acquired be affected thereby.
By order of Maj. Gen. W. T. Sherman:
L. N. DAYTON, Assistant Adjutant-General.
— William T. Sherman, Military Division of the Mississippi; 1865 series - Special Field Order 15, January 16, 1865.
What Sherman ordered had a limited application, but others had a broader one in mind. And Sherman had seen something and appreciated it which made his act no only charitable, but political.  His armies had just marched across the American South from west to east and he'd seen nearly all of the Southern heartland.  He well knew that the economic power of the South was completely vested in large plantations and that the plantations and the planters are what had supported, and caused, the war.  Deprive the planters of their slaves and the Southern cause was over.

Indeed, most Southern soldiers were yeomen, which provided in some ways the ultimately irony of the Southern fight.  Yeomen by and large did not own slaves, although a few did. Their lives were marked by fierce independence and they were more or less aligned against everyone but their immediate families and neighbors.  Their stalwart independent frames of mind made them good soldiers in combat but also made them unreliable as well, figuring into both the length of the Southern war against the odds and the high desertion rate of the Southern armies, and even some instances of outright rebellion of various regions, West Virginia being the most notable, against the Confederacy.  In the antebellum period the yeomanry had been hostile to blacks but their hostility was not merely racist (it certainly was in part) but economic, viewing blacks as economic implements used against them by their real class enemies, the planters.

There was real hope in the post war period that enfranchising blacks with land would convert them to yeomanry and even the yeomanry seems to have grasped that in some places, forming tentative alliances in the post Reconstruction period with blacks as the planter class reasserted itself and disenfranchised everyone else.  In the immediate post war period, however, the real opportunity was presented, and lost.

Radical Republicans would have redistributed the planter landholdings to freed slaves. The logic was inescapable to everyone.  Plantations had been built and worked on forced black labor.  They would not have existed but for it. Deprive them of it, and they wouldn't exist.  Moreover, as that labor was forced it could be regarded as stolen, with the reparation of the worked land as compensation for the theft.

Most of the Southern black population had farming skills in an era when most Americans were farmers. What they lacked was land, animals and implements.  Lost to the modern American romantic notion of "homesteading", building up sufficient resources in order to start a farm was very difficult and nobody just simply "did it".  Homesteaders often took years building up sufficient assets in order to strike out on their own even when supported by paying employment or (farming) families.  Freed blacks in the South had, at best, their household possessions at the time they were freed.  They were universally poor.

Hence the "40 acres and a mule" ideal. What that really meant was the vesting of 40 acres, the basic American agricultural unit, and a mule, the most durable farm animal and one that could be used for planting and transportation.  Inherent in that phrase was the provision of basic implements.  All of these were readily available in the South and capable of quick obtainment and distribution.

What was needed in order to do that was a legal vehicle to accomplish and the will to do it.  Both were lacking.

Legally,. the problem was the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution which provide that people's property simply can't be taken.  There are exceptions, of course, such as Eminem domain, but they they still require that the land taken be taken with "just compensation" to the owners.  Therefore if we can imagine a way in which the land would have been taken from planters we still have to imagine one in which the planters would have been compensated for it.

That might not, however, be as difficult to imagine as we might think.  For one thing, while it would have been a huge investment on the part of the United States, the land's value in 1865 wasn't what it was in 1860.  Purchasing plantations at fair market value, all that would have been owed, would have been getting a heck of a deal at the time.  Like Tara in Gone With The Wind, that land was a mess by the end of the war.

But more radical means may have been available as well.

The South would never have attempted to break away from the Union but for slavery. The slave holding class saw slavery as vital to the economy of the South (this turned out not to be true) and thought the elimination of slavery would destroy the Southern economy.  No matter how it was dressed up, that was the underlying basis for it all.  Most Southerners, as noted, were farmers but most weren't slaveholders. Balancing that out, it should be noted, there were a lot of mid sized farmers that owned a small number of slaves but who still worked their own lands. Not all slaveholders, in other words, owned large plantations.  Indeed, there were slaveholders who were not in agriculture at all, although most were.  But production agriculture based upon slave labor was the economic backbone of the South.

Political power in the South was very unbalanced in addition.  Whereas Jefferson, a slaveholder, could imagine in the late 1700s a republic in which most voters were free yeomanry, in reality the slave-holding class held the political reins.  Yeomanry, the most numerous class (outside of South Carolina) did not.  Everywhere, of course, blacks held no political power at all, which made the Southern claim of the Civil War that their departure from the Union represented the will of the people a lie.  The people's will didn't include, rather obviously, the will of the black residents.  In South Carolina, the majority of those residents were black.

This is all noted as there were no Southern states where support for succession wasn't backed by the slaveholding class directly and there were few planters who weren't connected, in some fashion, with the South's war against the nation.  Given that, they were implicated in treason, if we accept that reason not only included fighting in a rebel army against the nation, but serving in a rebel legislature or rebel government, or giving material support to the rebellion.  It would have been few in that class who could have really escaped being implicated in the war against the United States.

Now, a person can't be tried for treason simply because he was on the losing side of a rebellion in terms of his residents or regional residence. But the United States didn't bother attempting to try anyone for treason at all.  Treason, at that time, was a capitol offense.  Executing those who had committed it seriously would have been allowable under the law, but would not have been a wise thing to do.  But trying those, like Robert E. Lee or Jefferson Davis, who made war against their country and sentencing them to long prison sentences would have been warranted.  Indeed, Davis was held in anticipation of just such a trial, and a jury pool, half black and half white, raised in anticipation of that, before he was released.  In fairness, part of the reason he was not tried was a fear that succession would be held to be legal, a fear that was relieved in 1869 when the Supreme Court held it was not.

Lee and Davis both lost their plantations in fact, and others did as well. But what did not occur was the mass acquisition of them by the United States for redistribution to the freed slaves.  Freed blacks were well aware that land was economic freedom and none the less pursued it, but given their lack of resources they could never acquire it in the same volume that white southerners could and did.  Starting in the 1910s they began to give up and move out of the South, with the result that changed a situation in which 90% of blacks lived in the South in 1910, a figure that had held steady since 1790, to its current figure of just over 50%, which was reached in the 1970s.

Had blacks been able to acquire farmland in the 1860s, as they hoped to do, this history would undoubtedly have been radically different.  The breakup of the Southern plantation economy would have destroyed the planter class as an economic and political base, and vested it in a black and white yeoman class instead.  This is not to say that black and white yeomanry would have suddenly existed in harmony. Southern whites of all classes were hostile to blacks and steeped in generations of racism.  Northern whites, for that matter, held strong racist views.  But Southern yeomanry had shown an acclimation for appreciating their political position and making alliances accordingly.  It's not impossible to imagine them doing that fairly rapidly in the late 19th Century.

Of course history didn't take this path.  Lincoln was assassinated in 1865 and Andrew Johnson, surviving an attempt at impeachment, took the country down the road he thought Lincoln would have wanted to travel. Reconstruction was attempted, but not of the radical variety.

An opportunity was lost.

Thursday, July 2, 2020

Worth Reading: Opinion: You want a Confederate monument? My body is a Confederate monument

Caroline Randall Williams has written a remarkable editorial for the NYT that's also in at least the Houston Chronicle.

NYT:

Opinion: You want a Confederate monument? My body is a Confederate monument

Houston Chronicle:

Opinion: You want a Confederate monument? My body is a Confederate monument

I'll noted that the editorial has been lifted, in its entirety, by at least one Facebook poster, but as that's no doubt pretty clearly a copyright violation, I'll forgo linking that in here.  But I will link in an item on her upcoming live reading of her editorial (the only time I've ever heard of that being done) and a snipped of that, which is a paragraph taken from the NYT editorial:














That's pretty powerful stuff.

A person can try to dive into the weeds on this and argue this and that, and at least on Twitter some are doing that. But when isn't that done on Twitter?  The fact is, this is a glaring aspect of the historical legacy of slavery and it remains a legacy of it in an odd sort of way today.