Jeb Bush, Black Politics, and Respectable White Supremacy

We're going to get to a recent news headline soon, but let's begin a little earlier in the story. It's useful that we do so, because Black politics have confounded White assumptions for centuries.

A stylized rendering of an escape attempt

During slavery African Americans carved out systems of reciprocity and mutual obligation between enslaved and enslaver that defied their status as chattel. The demands they made--from time off on Sunday to space for a measure of familial autonomy--though often breached by White enslavers, nonetheless exposed the gulf between the White ideological construct of "slave" and the lived reality of human beings. This was a form of politics that, in the White imagination, could not exist. Yet it did. During the 1850s a steady stream of enslaved people escaped to the North. Meanwhile, free Blacks in the North launched repeated salvos of antislavery propaganda. These actions were so politically explosive that they did much to provoke the Civil War. [1]

Lady Columbia asks, "And not this man?" Harper's, 1865

The service of Black troops during the Civil War caused some racist Whites to reluctantly conclude that enslaved people had not only earned their freedom, but could perhaps become members of the polity. Before he died, President Lincoln began to imagine the possibility of Black voters. But the idea of Black citizens remained deeply radical for White Americans. This was a society in which respectable White opinion about African Americans traditionally ranged between the goals of perpetual enslavement or total deportation. Either case assumed White supremacy.

In this context, most Whites viewed Black politics as a grasping and illegitimate imposition. Black politics demanded of the nation the same rights and privileges afforded to Whites. But in a society in which White supremacy was normative, such claims were controversial. For most White Americans, the very meaning of words like freedom and equality assumed a racial hierarchy with Whites on top. To "give" Black Americans citizenship, then, was not to grant them their due. It was a special concession, an unearned privilege. It was, in short, the ultimate handout.

Anti-Freedman's Bureau Campaign ad. Pennsylvania, 1866.

In the first year after the war, southern states passed "Black Codes" in an effort to reassert White control over Black labor and reestablish the social order on something as close to slavery as possible. The ongoing efforts to steal Black labor and gain unearned advantage defined the politics of White southerners. Such double-standards loomed large in the imagination of White northerners too. In the 1866 campaign for Pennsylvania Governor, the Democrats ran a race-baiting campaign warning Whites that a vote for the Republican candidate was a vote to give handouts to Blacks at the expense of Whites.

The Freedman's Bureau, a federal agency established to assist African Americans in the South, was the target for much of this criticism. What was the Freedman's Bureau actually doing? It provided limited food assistance to a countryside devastated by war, and it offered freedpeople the possibility of justice that could not be obtained in southern courts. But most of all, the Freedman's Bureau arbitrated labor disputes and tried to compel African Americans to sign unfavorable labor contracts, often with their former owners.

In the White American imagination, restoring land to wealthy White property owners represented nothing more than the protection of property rights. They had been killing U.S. soldiers a few months before but their property in land (if not in people) remained sacrosanct. Meanwhile, Black squatters eagerly working the land for themselves had to be either evicted or compelled to sign an onerous labor contract. The unearned advantages of Whites could not be seen as such, for the ability to control the labor of racialized others and the assumption that the government should facilitate that control defined the very meaning of freedom.

Perhaps what's most striking to the modern reader about the Freedman's Bureau officials' reports is their abject fear that any measure of help for freedpeople would create dependency. Though practical freedom for freedpeople was hard to imagine without land redistribution, the Freedman's Bureau was reluctant to even distribute food to prevent starvation. Assistant Commissioner Rufus Saxton of the Georgia Freedman's Bureau ordered his agents to "bestow as little charity as possible" even during the desparate first summer after the war. [2]

While Freedman's Bureau agents fretted about the dangers of creating Black dependency and took unearned White advantage (and thus, White dependency) for granted, Democrats in the North ran the kind of racist campaigns reflected in that poster above. The political discourse of Black dependency existed independently of any facts on the ground. By the time a Black cry for freedom made it to White ears, it had been disfigured into a demand for a handout. 

Northern Whites strongly believed in a free labor ideology. Everyone should have the right to keep the fruits of their labor earned by the sweat of their own brow. Those who worked hard would rise by virtue of their industry and frugality. Surely African Americans in the South would embrace this ideology and would emerge as a sturdy class of independent laborers. Yet with unexamined assumptions of White supremacy still at the root of White politics, many northerners failed to see that  conditions on the ground in the South foreclosed the promise of upward mobility. Black politics demanded the destruction of systems of oppression that many Whites insisted did not exist. Thus White northerners reinterpreted Black demands for basic rights as a dangerous form of politics that was unamerican and socialistic. [3]

Let's zoom ahead 80 years. During the civil rights movement as Black Americans demanded equal rights, a common White rejoinder was, "Whites have rights too." This made no sense in context, but it did make sense if one assumed that among those White rights was the top status in a racial hiearchy that distributed social and economic benefits. On the Senate floor, southern senators warned that the Civil Rights Act would "take away rights from one group...and would give them as privileges to members of another group." [4] In such rhetoric, Whites were invariably endowed with legitimate rights, while Black attempts to secure those same rights were grasps for special privileges.

HOLC map of Philadelphia. Part of the system of White subsidies.

This played out not only on the field of high politics. Ordinary White Americans during the civil rights era had little sense of how their society was structured. They put a down payment on their first house, not realizing they were getting the subsidized White price for it. They held down that good job, not realizing their Whiteness was one of their key qualifications. They sent their kids to school, not realizing that their Whiteness was, in part, paying for their children's education. However confused they may have been about the nature and source of these subsidies, they knew they did not want to lose them.

In short, for centuries Black politics has demanded equal citizenship while mainstream White politics has naturalized the denial of it. The result is that most White Americans can't understand Black demands, for Black Americans are demanding something that, in the White imagination, they already possess. "This is America! Everyone is equal! There are no second class citizens!" This is the essence of the respectable politics of White supremacy. It is a politics of denial. It is the politics of good and ordinary people.

And it's popular! This week at a campaign event a man asked Jeb Bush what he and the GOP could do to woo Black voters. Bush responded mostly by talking about school choice, but not before saying this:

Our message is one of hope and aspiration. It isn’t one of division and get in line and we’ll take care of you with free stuff. Our message is one that is uplifting — that says you can achieve earned success.

I want to emphasize that this is wrongheaded regardless of what you think about the efficacy of government programs. It is wrong not because "free stuff" may or may not be good for people, but because it is represents a comprehensive misreading of Black politics and the normalizing of White supremacy. African American voting patterns are rooted in the effective denial of equal citizenship in twenty-first century America. Black politics has nothing to do with the pursuit of "free stuff." Nor do African Americans embrace a politics of "division." The idea that success ought to be "earned" is on the one hand uncontroversial. On the other hand, White Americans' very concept of freedom intertwined for centuries with expectations of unearned success. Building the country on stolen land and labor and then calling it a heroic pioneering project was a massive delusion that grips us still. It may be that someone needs to hear Bush's message of earned success, but Black Americans are probably the last people who need to hear it. 

Jeb Bush sounds like someone who doesn't understand the United States. He sounds like someone who can't hear Black demands for equal citizenship for what they are, so they must be reinterpreted as something more sinister. He sounds like a proponent of the respectable White supremacy that has defined America for centuries.

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[1] See Steven Hahn, Eugene Genovese, and Walter Johnson
[2] See Paul Cimbala
[3] See Heather Cox Richardson
[4] Congressional Record, 88th Cong., 2nd sess., April 17, 1964, 8292.

Central Africans & Atlantic Creoles

Linda Heywood and John Thornton. Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585-1660. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

In Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, Linda Heywood and John Thornton build on Ira Berlin’s influential “Charter Generation” thesis. Berlin argued that the first generation of enslaved people brought to Anglo-Dutch settlements in the early seventeenth century were Atlantic Creoles originating from centers of trade in the Caribbean and West Africa. As cosmopolitan residents of the Atlantic, these Charter Generations managed to carve out opportunities for themselves that would not be open to subsequent “Plantation Generations” as American colonies shifted from societies with slaves to slave societies.[1] Heywood and Thornton argue that Berlin was right about the existence of a creole Charter Generation, but wrong about where they came from and the extent of their influence. They demonstrate that West Central Africa is a much more likely candidate for the source of Atlantic Creole culture and contend that the Charter Generation’s early arrival and homogeneous culture enabled it to exert an outsized influence on the subsequent development of African American culture. In a powerful but flawed book, the first claim is more convincing than the second.

In six chapters Heywood and Thornton trace the emergence of Atlantic Creole culture, establish West Central Africa as its source, and attempt to demonstrate its continuity in the Americas. Chapter one shows that the overwhelming majority of enslaved people in Anglo-Dutch colonies before 1640 were from Angola, brought by Anglo-Dutch privateers preying on Spanish and Portuguese shipping. The following three chapters centering on West Central Africa constitute the heart of the book. Chapter two demonstrates the significant religious and linguistic homogeneity existing across West Central Africa and describes early Portuguese contact with the kingdoms of Kongo and Ndongo. The Kongo

Miguel de Castro, Kongo's ambassador to the Netherlands, 1641

elite’s early adoption of Christianity would serve as a primary vehicle of creolization. Chapter three explores the wars in West Central Africa that produced tens of thousands of slaves. Though Portugal did not have the power to independently dominate Ndongo, it found allies among the Sobas chafing under Ndongo’s rule, unleashing decades of intense warfare. Heywood and Thornton show that many of the regions producing the highest numbers of war captives were also areas of extensive creolization. In chapter four, they trace the growth of an Atlantic Creole culture as it was expressed through religious practices, naming, musical forms, and material culture.

These three chapters on the West Central African context make an intriguing and mostly convincing case that cultural mixing and warfare in Kongo, Ndongo, and the surrounding region was sufficient to create a large population of enslaved Atlantic Creoles. Yet the authors do not do enough to answer potential objections. As James Sweet argued in his review in New West Indian Guide, Heywood and Thornton do not sufficiently address the possibility that actions of West Central Africans represented political machinations in pursuit of Portuguese favor more than cultural mixing.[2] More troubling, at times in the narrative creolization seems little more than a synonym for assimilation. These chapters are brilliant and fascinating, but still leave the true extent of creolization open to a substantial range of conjecture. 

The final two chapters shift to the Americas. Here the source material is much thinner, a fact Heywood and Thornton acknowledge but do not satisfactorily overcome. Names and baptismal records reveal that many Africans in the Americas continued to practice Christianity and use Portuguese names in common with those of West Central Africa. But the meaning of a baptism or name is speculative. At times it is not clear whether it represents an act of continuity with Atlantic Creole culture or an act of assimilation or political convenience. Heywood and Thornton spend a significant amount of chapter five tracing settlement patterns in an effort to show that Atlantic Creoles, though constituting very small percentages of the population, had contact with each other and thus could perpetuate their culture. Here too the evidence is thin, and the authors are reduced to claiming that three Africans together in the Americas (three!) constituted a “cultural community” (242). Robert Desrochers noted this weakness as well in his review for the Journal of American History.[3]  

The last chapter of the book delivers a significant payoff as the authors apply their findings to the longstanding historiographical debate on early European attitudes toward Africans and the emergence of racial slavery. They argue that Europeans had complex--rather than wholly negative--attitudes toward Africans. More than that, they show how European attitudes toward Africans in general cannot necessarily be applied to the Charter Generation. Both polls of the traditional debate—the cultural interpretation of Winthrop Jordan and the economic argument of Eric Williams—centered Europeans. Heywood and Thornton shift the discussion by centering Africans. Perhaps the decisive variables in the early malleability of slavery in the Americas were neither cultural nor economic forces centered in Europe, but the unique characteristics of the enslaved people themselves. The authors go so far as to argue that the Charter Generation of Atlantic Creoles was more culturally similar to Europeans than to Plantation Generation Africans (293).  As a result, a disproportionate number of them gained freedom and economic success that would become atypical in later generations.  

Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas makes a clear and substantial case that a creolized culture rooted in West Central Africa provided the great majority of enslaved people in early Anglo-Dutch settlements. It less successfully demonstrates that this Charter Generation formed the foundations of African American culture. Such a hypothesis is plausible, but the precise mechanisms by which this occurred, and the evidence for it, are only thinly referenced here. The book ultimately tells us much more about the fascinating interactions of Portuguese and West Central Africans than it does about the “foundation of the Americas.” Yet the book stands as a significant achievement for its African chapters alone and is a decisive contribution that future scholars of Africa, the Atlantic World, and American slavery will dare not ignore.   

---

[1] See Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).

[2] James H. Sweet, Review of Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, in New West Indian Guide (83) 2009: 124-127.

[3] Robert E. Desrochers, Jr, Review of Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, The Journal of American History (95) 2009: 1128-1129.

Why White Southerners Fought

We've just passed the 150th Anniversary of Appomattox, where Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia in April, 1865, bringing the Civil War's denouement to the point of formality. In times like these, I like to remember why the White South fought. The Vice-President of the Confederacy explained it quite clearly in the spring of 1861:

Alexander Stephens, Vice President, CSA

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea [of the equality of all human beings]; 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...it is, indeed, in conformity with the ordinance of the Creator. It is not for us to inquire into the wisdom of His ordinances, or to question them. For His own purposes, He has made one race to differ from another, as He has made “one star to differ from another star in glory.” The great objects of humanity are best attained when there is conformity to His laws and decrees, in the formation of governments as well as in all things else. Our confederacy is founded upon principles in strict conformity with these laws. This stone which was rejected by the first builders “is become the chief of the corner” the real “corner-stone” in our new edifice.

Let's break this down a little bit. The context here is Stephens talking about how wrong the founding fathers had been. He framed them as either anti-slavery or at least uncomfortable with the institution. In his view, they had imbibed harmful enlightenment ideas about the equality of all human beings. And though their Constitution had protected racial slavery well enough for three generations, it was now time for the South to break away and establish itself firmly on the foundation of racial slavery, in perpetuity. Rather than seeing slavery as a necessary evil, it was now a positive good. The southern system was not only practical as a means of creating prosperity and White social solidarity, it was a divine order aligned with natural and moral law.

Christians will immediately recognize that Stephens' speech is not only explicitly racist, but blasphemous. Using language the New Testament uses repeatedly to describe Jesus Christ, Stephens calls slavery "the stone" which was rejected by the first "builders" (the founding fathers). White southerners have now made slavery the "corner-stone," building their whole society upon it. In the New Testament, Christ is the cornerstone of the household of God, the cornerstone of the church (Ephesians 2 and elsewhere). For Stephens, slavery is to the Confederacy as Jesus Christ is to the Christian church. You comfortable with that?

Where, then, did all this states' rights stuff come from? It has a variety of roots, but one of the funniest is Stephens himself. By 1868, three years after losing the war, he was already singing a different tune. He wrote that the war had merely been a battle between contrasting views of government; one national, one federal. It wasn't about slavery after all! Unfortunately for Stephens, he was unable to expunge his 1861 speech from the historical record.

The reason the "cornerstone" speech is important is not because it is a "gotcha" document to use as a cudgel in a historical debate. After all, you can find people saying all sorts of things in the historical record, much of it contradictory. Rather, the speech is useful precisely because it exemplifies, in a particularly clear and entertaining fashion, what you'll find to actually be true of the antebellum South if you look into it a little bit. The South really was a slave society on an intense scale, one of the few in global history. It was a slave society in that not only did it have enslaved people (as many societies all over the world have) but one's identity, one's social place, was based primarily on one's relationship to the institution. There were three primary kinds of people: enslavers, enslaved, and those hoping to become enslavers. (How free Blacks in the South fit into this picture is an interesting discussion.)

Last I looked, some polling indicated that nearly half of Americans think the Civil War was about states' rights. If they're really attached to the term, they can keep it I suppose, as long as they correctly answer the follow up question: a state's right to do what?

All of this often feels rather trivial or even silly, but in fact these false beliefs are a mark of the moral degradation of our public culture. Good and decent people harbor these assumptions, which indicates a systemic problem. It is not a question of personal evil. This kind of systemically enforced ignorance is similar, I imagine, to the genocide and atrocity denial that is mainstream in places like Turkey and Japan. I firmly believe public memory matters. If we can't be honest about the White supremacist state our founders established, and the myriad ways it survived civil war and Reconstruction, we certainly are not equipped to repair it.

In America, White Supremacy Hides in Plain Sight

As we protest the systemic racism of the American criminal justice system, we must be conscious of the ideologies that sustain it. We must attack them at their roots. And we must have a positive vision for the changes that need to occur in the systems that shape life opportunities--education, housing, employment, healthcare--long before encounters with the police and justice system occur. Otherwise, I fear, the American state will never gain the capacity to respond to new circumstances and challenges in justice-producing ways. Mass incarceration and the war on drugs have not been, in my view, deliberately racist policies designed to replace the old Jim Crow with the new. They are, rather, a function of the United States' inability to develop policy solutions to pressing challenges without reinscribing White supremacy through those solutions.

As protests continue and, we pray, grow larger, we must come to understand that there is no carceral solution to the consequences of White supremacy. Punitive policies and "law and order" rhetoric will not get us any closer to justice and healing. I fear that many Americans don't realize this.

The sick  brilliance of White supremacy is in its ability to hide in plain sight. We see its shape-shifting work, for example, in the way its most devastating consequences are held up as evidence that it does not exist. You know the drill, the tired litany of complaints: Black illegitimacy, Black family breakdown, Black crime. All of these are framed as functions of Blackness itself, even if presented now in the more respectable  guise of cultural traits rather biological essence. As often as I've heard these complaints, I've yet to find a serious explanation for the certainty with which they're delivered. The basic claim that Black failure produces Black disadvantage is an ideological leap of faith with nothing to support it beyond the a priori assumption that the world works just so. 

This is rooted deep folks. In the decades after the Civil War, White scientists and intellectuals were eagerly speculating about when African Americans would literally die out. Now that they were no longer under the tutelage of slavery, they would obviously revert to a state of savagery. It followed that crime committed by African Americans was not an American social problem; it was just Blackness expressing itself. Meanwhile, sociologists took it for granted that White crime was not White as such, and could readily be alleviated by education and social programs. When we talk about "black on black" crime without any sense of irony or absurdity, we place ourselves in this intellectual tradition.

In the United States of White supremacy, White problems are social, Black problems are racial. It is considered unnecessary to explain or quantify how, precisely, a group that has been systematically plundered and oppressed for hundreds of years could possibly be expected to have the same amount of wealth and educational attainment as the plunderers. As this question is silenced, the fervent faith that there is somehow something wrong with Black people that is not wrong with America rushes in to fill the void.

The family breakdown thesis, in particular, is important for White Americans because it explains Black disadvantage without reference to the larger society, and does so in a way that upholds conservative religious value about the importance of the family. Americans are not wrong to stress the importance of strong families; they are wrong, however, in the application they think it has to this discussion. The family breakdown thesis locates disadvantage and cause alike within the Black community. For it to have any explanatory power at all, then, this view necessarily contrasts the contemporary Black family with a prior era in which the Black family was strong and stable, illegitimacy rates were low, and the norms of the White middle class prevailed. There was no such period. 

The family breakdown thesis gazes at the problems racism has produced, and flippantly turns consequence into cause. The Black family in the United States has always been under tremendous pressure. Emancipation was a boon, and many African Americans desperately searched around the country for their spouses and children that had been separated by enslavers.  But sharecropping in the shadow of Jim Crow, lynching, and convict leasing was a precarious existence for any family. In the twentieth century, as mechanization of agriculture proceeded, the traditional occupation of the vast majority of African Americans was rendered obsolete. They responded as human people do: they moved en masse, eagerly looking for work. For a brief moment they found it in the nation’s burgeoning industrial cities. Yet even as mechanization foreclosed traditional Black agricultural occupations, by the 1960s and 1970s globalization and deindustrialization began to cause a sustained hemorrhaging of industrial jobs, beginning with those at the bottom of the ladder: African Americans.

Dr. King recognized how devastating these changing economic conditions were. In "A Testament of Hope," published posthumously, he wrote:

Before 1964, things were getting better economically for the Negro; but after that year, things began to take a turn for the worse. In particular, automation began to cut into our jobs very badly, and this snuffed out the few sparks of hope the black people had begun to nurture.

The people who stress the importance of strong families should not need much convincing that being shut out of gainful employment makes it hard to sustain stable families.

Whites responded to the influx of Black migrants looking for work and housing with their own mass migration—out of city centers to new, federally subsidized White suburbs. Business and government investment followed the movement of the White population, leaving little to no work for African Americans. Concurrently, federal housing and education programs that excluded African Americans began to build the modern White middle class. Buffeted by discrimination in housing and employment, unequal education, globalization and deindustrialization, discriminatory government programs and poorly designed federal assistance programs, many Black families splintered. Rather than addressing the problem, federal and state governments launched massive punitive operations, building a mass incarceration state that ripped men from their families for petty offenses and exacerbated the persecution of the Black family. By the end of the twentieth century, the Black family had passed through what was, in some ways, the most sustained and multi-pronged assault on it since enslavers had broken up a third of their families by sale the century before. 

This is an extraordinarily brief overview of the story that complainers from afar want to reduce to a tale of Black irresponsibility, with a little "big government welfare" thrown in for good measure.  As we continue to protest, we must fight these simplistic morality tales. We must fight the pervasive assumption that the message Americans of all backgrounds convey to their children in the quiet of their homes--work hard, take responsibility--is somehow an answer to the problem of white supremacy. The moral instruction we instill in our children is no substitute for reform of systems, laws, and institutions.

White supremacy is continually rendered invisible as we glance at the devastation it creates and then resolutely turn away. We change the subject from causes and solutions to scapegoating. American problems become racial problems. Social sins become individual sins. In a lot of ways, Americans hate our own history. We really do. We can't stand it. If we're ever going to become a country that works for all of us, we must gain the courage to look at our history, and this time, not turn away.

Land of the Free, Home of the Slave

Alan Taylor's The Internal Enemy continues to occupy my mind. His treatment of slave owners' psychology is excellent. He writes, "When confronted with suffering slaves, some masters showed a deft ability to evade blame by, instead, congratulating themselves for a superior ability to feel the pain of inferiors." When Henry Tucker acquired a ten-year-old slave boy named Bob in 1804, the boy "felt devastated by the forced separation from his mother." His new owner wrote,

Poor little fellow! I was much affected at an incident last night. I was waked from a very sound sleep by a most piteous lamentation. I found it was Bob. I called several times before he waked. "What is the matter, Bob?" "I was dreaming about my mammy Sir"!!! cried he in a melancholy & still distressed tone: "Gracious God!" thought I, "how ought not I to feel, who regarded this child as insensible when compared to those of our complexion"...How finely woven, how delicately sensible must be those bonds of natural affection which equally adorn the civilized and the savage -- the American and African -- nay the man and the brute.

Taylor writes, "Despite discovering a shared humanity with the boy, Henry reiterated a stark polarity in which he stood as the superior: the civilized American man in contrast to the savage, African brute. In that view, slave labor supported, rather than contradicted, the freedom of those who most deserved it." Most White Virginians assumed that Black slaves had a fundamentally different inner life that allowed them to bear up under hardship in a way that Whites could not. "'Their griefs are transient,' and their afflictions 'are less felt, and sooner forgotten,' insisted [Thomas] Jefferson" (58-59).

Lest you think these attitudes are distant irrelevancies, consider two recent studies of modern Americans:

Researchers at the University of Virginia found that young children "report that black children feel less pain than white children."
Frontiers in Psychology published a study finding that "Caucasian observers reacted to pain suffered by African people significantly less than to pain of Caucasian people."

It is no great stretch to infer a line of connection between the Henry Tuckers of antebellum Virginia and psychological studies of implicit bias two hundred years later. This raises big problems for most Americans, for whom history is either an abstraction or a tool to be picked up and used at their leisure. It is rather more galvanizing--and terrifying--to face up to history as an independent weight pressing in on us and shaping us well before we're ever able to shape it. What happened exerts an influence that is, despite the distortions of memory and vulgarization of historical thinking, independent of what is said to have happened.

Americans understand this even if we are loath to admit it. Jefferson's language of liberty is assumed to matter. The importance of the Constitution is obvious and inarguable. We take it for granted that these documents, and the intellectual currents that produced them, matter to us in 2014. But the popular discourse surrounding the much more recent institution of human bondage takes place on an entirely different ground. History suddenly disappears; all is the present; all is political. Racial prejudice is so entrenched in our discourse that the influence that is assumed for other centuries-old American institutions is denied to slavery. And not just denied. To explain any contemporary phenomena in light of slavery is now a tired cliche that earns ridicule.

The idea that the enslavement of four million human beings a century and a half ago still tangibly matters is vehemently denied by most White Americans. Take the pervasive White-immigrant narrative: "My ancestors weren't even here. I had nothing to do with slavery." This a la carte Americanism is something to behold. Somehow, we are to believe, the late arrival of these White immigrants on the American scene was comprehensively fortuitous and ennobling. Theirs is the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and the Pursuit of Happiness. Other American birthrites of rather more recent vintage--racial slavery and White supremacy--left them unscathed.

Beneath the flag-waving and the invocations of history resides the psyche of a people that cannot abide what has happened. So we must tame history and make it manageable, however incoherent the results. There is no question that Americans' fear of history is often expressed in ways that are downright funny. But then, those who can see it for what it is laugh only so we won't cry. For the past bears down on us whether we recognize it or not. And it does its most brutal work among the ignorant.

When White Evangelicals Learned To Tolerate Slavery

I'm reading Alan Taylor's prizewinning new book, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832. Describing Virginia's post-revolutionary path to retrenchment rather than reform, Taylor writes that Virginia's white evangelicals urged the state to adopt a plan of gradual abolition. Here's Taylor:

They insisted that as republicans as well as Christians, Virginians needed to do right by their slaves. "The holding, tyrannizing over, and driving slaves, I view as contrary to the laws of God and nature," declared the Baptist preacher David Barrow, who regarded liberty as "the unalienable privilege of all complexions, shapes, and sizes of men." Citing the Golden Rule, Barrow wished that masters would be "doing as they would others should do to them!"

The legislature, unmoved, unanimously rejected abolition. Again, Taylor:

Sobered by this defeat, the Methodists and Baptists retreated from antislavery activity...Most leading evangelicals sought respectability as middle-class men of property. Preferring neighborhood peace and acceptance, they marginalized any radicals who continued to agitate the issue. Becoming more conservative, mainstream evangelicals reframed their message, urging slaves to obey their masters and wait for freedom after death in heaven. Among the state's Christians, only Quakers clung to antislavery principles, but they comprised a small and increasingly despised sect in Virginia.

They could stand up for the oppressed, or they could be good neighbors and respectable people. They could not, in the eyes of the great majority of White Virginians, do both. Don't look down on them. These are the same calculations we're making today. These are the sorts of accommodations from which White evangelicalism has yet to recover.

The Long Reach of Slavery

Slavery, abolished 150 years ago, measurably influences who is rich and poor today (see abstract below), and even who we vote for. It is one thing to say in a general sense that we are living with the echoes of slavery. It is quite another to control for all other variables and find that current inequality correlates with slave concentrations eight generations ago. We're not as independent as we like to believe. We can't escape the past. We must either face it as best we can, or let our ignorance compound its ravages.

Gettysburg in Film vs. Reality

My favorite movie as a kid was the 1993 four hour civil war epic, Gettysburg, starring Martin Sheen as General Lee and Jeff Daniels as Col. Joshua Chamberlain. (Yes, I was that kind of kid.) I'd like to revisit it now that I've read Allen C. Guelzo's new book, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion. Guelzo is a serious historian, and it shows. He demolishes nearly every myth yours truly took in as a I watched and re-watched the Hollywood version of the story as a child.

We learn, for example, that Chamberlain owes his reputation as much to his long life and gift for self-promotion as for the objective importance of his heroics on Little Round Top. Several other low-level commanders who offered equally vital service in holding the tenuous Union line on that second day paid for it with their lives. Guelzo also shows an astute political sense, revealing the cleavages between abolitionists and Democrats among the Army's top generals. As late as the Gettysburg campaign, the upper crust of the Army of the Potomac remained a largely McClellanite faction. Talented abolitionist commanders repeatedly found themselves stuck in low-level command. In Guelzo's account, abolitionist O.O. Howard is praised, and his 150-year old bad reputation is at least partly ascribed to his political beliefs. More provocatively, the possibility that commanding general Meade's moderate politics informed his failure to aggressively pursue Lee after the battle cannot be discounted.

The military narrative is handled deftly, but Guelzo's key contributions lay elsewhere. He does not shy away from the true nature of the invading army or the purpose for which it fought. As Confederate divisions spread across south central Pennsylvania, they had little compunction about "sweeping up any black people they could lay their hands upon," including those born free in the North (73). Put simply, kidnapping was the official policy of Confederate armies. Guelzo puts this policy in its appropriate context:

This might, in the larger scheme of the campaign, have seemed a waste of military time, but slaves were a valuable commodity. As one farmer was told by Confederates who were escorting "four wagon loads of women & children between Chambersburg & the Maryland line," even the children "will bring something." This was, after all, an army whose cause was inextricably bound up with the defense of black enslavement. To have left Pennsylvania's blacks in undisturbed freedom would have been tantamount to denying the validity of the whole Confederate enterprise. (73-74).

Of even more interest is Guelzo's description of what the Confederacy's premier army in the field actually looked like. A British military observer of the Gettysburg campaign noted, "in rear of each regiment were from twenty to thirty negro slaves." Guelzo writes:

From the beginning of the war, Confederate armies had annexed large contingents of slaves--between 12,000 and 20,000 at Manassas Junction in 1861, and "fifteen or twenty thousand" on the Peninsula in 1862. By the time of the Gettysburg Campaign, Thomas Caffey, an English-born Confederate artilleryman, estimated that "in our whole army there must be at least thirty thousand colored servants who do nothing but cook and wash." (160-161).

The very appearance of the opposing armies reflected the differing social and economic visions for which they fought. While Confederate armies took advantage of thousands of forced laborers to perform the menial tasks of camp life, Union armies had to rely on their own soldiers. The fact that as many as 30,000 enslaved Blacks marched into Pennsylvania with Lee's 80,000 White soldiers is not reflected in popular narratives of Gettysburg or the war. I certainly don't recall seeing many slaves in the movie I loved so much. Their absence fosters a false portrait of a conflict between two honorable and equally sympathetic sides.

The true appearance of a Confederate Army is little known today, and it's easy to see why. The basic apparatus of the Confederate war machine rebukes all the attempts to recast the war as a battle between White brothers with merely differing views of the Constitution. When we take in the logistical realities of the how the opposing armies operated, we're reminded that the war was fought on the same grounds on which it was provoked: whether a slave society or a free labor society ought to have supremacy on the North American continent.

This also confronts the myth of the Black Confederate soldier. Rooted in the remembrance activities of White Confederate veterans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, modern-day apologists for the South have attempted to recast the enslaved forced laborers as "soldiers" who gladly fought for the South. The persistence of the Black Confederate soldier myth shows that we are not blind to the ideological and moral importance of what the respective armies looked like. Just as the reality of tens of thousands of enslaved menial laborers presents a microcosm of the South's anti-democratic cause, the myth of the Black soldier implies an egalitarian cause fought for states' rights and limited government.

Black soldiers did, of course, play a decisive role in the final years of the war, as 200,000 served in the Union Army and Navy. But at Gettysburg that was still in the future, as was the Confederacy's last-gasp and half-hearted effort in the final months of the war to organize a Black regiment. Allen Guelzo has subtitled his book, "The Last Invasion." Unlike so many popular treatments of the battle, we can begin to see what this invasion represented: an expansive White slaveholder's republic, designed to persist indefinitely. The invasion was a moral as well as a physical drama, constituting the high-water mark of tyranny in the United States. We can only be grateful that it failed.

Robert E. Lee Wasn't a Good Guy, But That Misses the Point

NPR's On Point had an interesting discussion this morning with Michael Korda, author of a new biography of Robert E. Lee. The show made a point of also inviting Gary Gallagher onto the program, which set up an interesting tension between two very different figures, the former a popular author of fiction and several accessible biographies, and the latter a respected academic expert on the civil war.

One of the inevitable topics the discussion ventured into is Robert E. Lee's relationship to slavery. Korda strongly argued that seeing Lee through the lens of slavery is to miss most of what he was about. In doing so, we insert our modern preoccupations into a foreign world and demand that this historical figure possess the same sensibilities we do. Then Korda trotted out the old, "he was a man of his time" defense.

Three quick points:

It seems to me that Korda is absolutely right to be wary of overlaying the past with our own agenda in such a way that we miss what was actually occurring.  We have to be able to empathize with historical figures if we are to have any hope of understanding what their world was like. Notice, empathy is a quite different thing from sympathy. Empathy is, I would argue, the foundation of useful historical knowledge.

That being said, I think Korda is doing something more here. Too often, empathy can dissolve into squishy nothingness that leaves us sputtering, "Well, he was a man of his time after all..." This attitude is ultimately incoherent, because it relies on an arbitrary definition of what was considered "normal" at any given time. If the overwhelming majority of people of your class and birth were of a certain view, then you are granted absolution. But what if the issue splits people 60-40 rather than 90-10? Where is the line between hero and villain? Was William Lloyd Garrison not a man of his time? Was his life experience so dramatically different from that of numerous other antebellum whites? How do we account not just for his political radicalism, but for his absence of racial prejudice? There is a fine line to walk here. When we speak of people being "of their time," it ought not be a statement of absolution for them, but indictment for us. Put another way, the endpoint of properly practiced historical empathy is not redemption for the people we study, but a more sober assessment of ourselves and humanity. I don't look at Lee with empathy so I can conclude that, in the end, he was a decent sort of chap. (What kind of phrase is that? It must be said with a British accent, right?) Rather, I look at him with empathy so that I am able to acknowledge that I probably would have done at least as badly if I were dealt his hand of cards. Instead of rehabilitating Lee, I use him to confess my sinfulness. You can, and should, look at it much more broadly too. Lee's failures, our own failures, are often the result of human action in a scarred, distorted world that compels us to act unjustly. And we most likely can't see our deepest acts of injustice for what they are. Few of us are generals as Lee was, but we're all subject to the proverbial fog of war. It blinds us to the fact that we are often on the side of selfishness, greed, and oppression.

Finally, I think Korda's defense of Lee was entirely too dismissive of the power of the Lost Cause narrative. He didn't seem to realize that if he wants to defend Lee he ought to do so in careful terms that unequivocally reject the racist hagiography that has surrounded Lee for over one hundred years. This narrative is so strong that many people don't even realize that Lee was a slaveholder. And they certainly don't know that his army practiced slave-raiding in their ventures into the North, or that his policy was to enslave black troops captured on the battlefield. It will be interesting to see more response to this book as it develops. One of the few academic reviews of one of Korda's previous books, a biography of Grant, called it "incorrect and ill-informed," but granted that Korda was at least a "master of distracting or pretentious analogies and foreign references." So there's that.