Slavery is the normal condition of the negro… as indispensable to his prosperity and happiness… as liberty is to the whites.
(From a petition sent to Confederate President Jefferson Davis from the 56th Virginia regiment against allowing black soldiers to fight for the Confederacy, quoted on page 836)
Racism…
The signers of the Declaration of Independence were wrong if they meant to include Negroes among ‘all men’, said Alexander Graham after he had become vice president of the Confederacy.
Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery… 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. (quoted on page 244)
Repeatedly, every few pages in this long book, the reader is slapped in the face by quite breathtakingly racist statements made by all classes of Americans in the 1860s. Here is the southern newspaper, the Richmond Whig, in 1865, discussing the heretical idea of arming the South’s slaves to fight for it. The idea was:
a repudiation of the opinion held by the whole South… that servitude is a divinely appointed condition for the highest good of the slave. (quoted p.834)
It is one of the characteristics of McPherson’s immensely thorough account of the American Civil War that he lards his text with quotations – from speeches by presidents, senators and congressmen, from newspaper articles and editorials, from the diaries and letters on both sides of the argument, and statements from the lowliest, barely literate, farmhands-turned-soldiers.
In other words, McPherson gives you deep insight into the minds of people at every level of society on both sides of the war.
And one of the big things that comes over is a level of anti-black racism at all levels of 1860s American society which is staggering, almost beyond words to describe.
Nowadays the word ‘racism’ is quickly applied to the slightest verbal slip or misspeak. It is eye-opening to come to understand what institutional racism really means, in the sense of a quite overt, explicit, unashamed and widely popular belief, promoted by politicians from the (Confederate) president at the top, throughout the entire (Confederate) press – that black Africans are a separate and inferior race, quite incapable of education, higher thought, or serious mental activity, a race set aside by GOD specifically to perform the most menial, humdrum, mindless activities. And a race which posed a permanent terrorising threat to all decent white folk.
As the Charleston Mercury put it, emancipation would mean:
the poor man… reduced to the level of the nigger. His wife and daughter are to be hustled on the street by black wenches, their equals. Swaggering buck niggers are to ogle them and elbow them. (p.836)
I suppose it was obvious that this would be the mindset of the southern plantation-owning class but it is still shocking to read.
But almost worse is the revelation that even in the north whose politicians were anti-slavery and who eventually turned the war into a crusade to emancipate the slaves, there was, of course, a strong abolitionist movement, particularly in snooty, Puritan New England – but there was also anti-black sentiment almost as strong as in the south, and just as profoundly racist.
Many northern soldiers, and their newspapers and congressmen, went out of their way to explain that they were fighting the war against rebels but certainly not for uppity Negroes. In the north, there were protests against the new draft introduced in July 1862, where protesters carried banners saying things like:
We won’t fight to free the nigger (p.493)
MacPherson quotes a Union soldier as writing: ‘I am not in favour of freeing the negroes and leaving them to run riot among us’. It wasn’t isolated bigots, but the state legislatures of Illinois and Indiana who called the Emancipation Proclamation ‘wicked, inhuman and unholy’. It was an Ohio newspaper editor who described it as ‘monstrous, impudent and heinous… insulting to God as to man, for it declares those “equal” whom God created unequal.’ (p.595)
In the 1863 congressional elections in the north, the remaining Democrats (a party mostly associated with southern slave-holders) campaigned as the peace party, expressing such vehement opposition to the war that one of their leaders, Clement Vallandigham, was forced to flee the country and campaigned from Canada. He wrote:
In considering terms of settlement we should look only to the welfare, peace and safety of the white race, without reference to the effect that settlement may have on the African. (quoted page 592)
The editor of New York’s leading Catholic weekly told a mass meeting that:
when the president called for them to go and carry on a war for the nigger, he would be damned if he believed they would go. (quoted p.609)
The Democrat Party in the north split into war democrats and peace-at-any-price Democrats. The most outspoken wing of the peace Democrats was given the nickname ‘copperhead’, after a particularly venomous American snake. A copperhead campaigning in the Ohio elections wrote:
Let every vote count in favour of the white man, and against the Abolition horses, who would place negro children in your schools, negro jurors in your jury boxes, and negro votes in your ballot boxes. (quoted page 686)
Being a democratic politician means you have to listen to the people, you have to take their beliefs into account, even if you think they are ignorant and prejudiced beliefs. As Lincoln himself put it:
A universal feeling, whether well or ill-founded, cannot be safely disregarded. (p.128)
All of this evidence, which McPherson marshals so effectively, explains why Lincoln had to proceed slowly, retaining as many allies as he could, in the political class as well as among the broader population, in a culture awash with anti-Afro-American thoughts and prejudices.
But it’s still a shock to read the remarks he made to a group of black leaders in the White House on 14 August 1862. Slavery was:
the greatest wrong inflicted on any people.
But even if slavery were abolished, racial differences and prejudices would remain.
Your race suffer very greatly, many of them, by living among us, while ours suffer from your presence.
Blacks had little chance to achieve equality in the United States.
There is an unwillingness on the part of our people, harsh as it may be, for you free coloured people to remain among us… I do not mean to discuss this, but to propose it as a fact with which we have to deal. I cannot alter it if I could.
This fact, Lincoln thought, made it necessary for black people to emigrate to another land where they would have better opportunities. He asked the black leaders present to ask for volunteers for a government-sponsored pilot scheme to resettle black Americans in Central America. (p.508) So even the leader of the North and the proclaimer of the emancipation of the slaves thought the only real solution to the ‘Race Problem’ was to pack off the ‘other’ race to a different country. Wow.
It makes for a lot of unpleasant reading, but it also gives the reader a sense of the deep, deep, deep racist, anti-black sentiments which were central to American society, had been for decades beforehand, and would continue to be for decades afterwards. It helps you understand why profoundly racist attitudes continued in full flood well into the 1960s and beyond, and had to be combated by black movements which themselves were often radical and violent.
It makes you understand that African slavery and the racism it engendered is the Original Sin which just can’t be cleansed from the American soul.
… and constitutional law
It’s easy to overlook because it’s so much less shocking than the racism, but in among the descriptions of the economy, of banking and then – of course – of the paraphernalia of war, the recruitment, arms factories, train lines and battles – a steady hum which, once you notice it you realise makes up most of the book, is the central importance to American politics of the law.
Having read Alan Taylor’s book about the American War of Independence I now understand that the American constitution wasn’t some pristine and perfect theory of government devised by political philosophers working in a vacuum, but an extremely hard-headed set of compromises between the squabbling thirteen colonies who all had particular interests to protect, not least the southern slave states who fought to ensure that slavery was protected, even if it was nowhere explicitly mentioned.
Reading this book helps the reader to understand the uniquely complex and legalistic nature of American society, whereby each state has its own elected officials and supreme court, which may – or may not – be overridden by federal i.e. national president, congress and Supreme Court.
In other words, any two parties caught in a civil or criminal case, has at least two sets of authorities to appeal to, state and federal. When U.S. society split from top to bottom in the civil war there became in effect four sets of law. And since each state had its own traditions, made its own laws, and elected its own officials, the reality was something more like 30 squabbling states, plus two overriding federal authorities who were at war with each other.
What is fascinating is the extent to which neither side really appealed to moral or religious principles, but tried to dress up their decisions in the cloak of the Constitution. The main arguments of the civil war occurred at the where Law meets Political Theory. Both sides appealed to the Constitution, but gave their own (wildly conflicting) politico-legal interpretations of it.
Thus the most obvious thing, to us, today, about the quote from the Confederate vice-president at the top of this review, is its repellent view of race: but what’s symptomatic of its era is that it is couched not in terms of scientific theory or morality or religion – but as a theory of government.
When politicians argue in this book (and they argue all the way from page one to page 860) of course they sometimes express themselves in terms of ‘racial theory’ or religion but, when push comes to shove, they argue strongest about laws and the basis of all American laws, the Constitution.
They argue whether the Kansas-Nebraska Law of 1854 is constitutional, whether the president has powers to proclaim emancipation, they argue whether states have the right to secede under any circumstances, about what a state actually is (early in the war West Virginia seceded from Virginia – was it allowed to? who said so?).
What’s easy to forget in all the bloodshed and in the inflammatory rhetoric of racism, is that this was a highly articulate, well-educated argument taking place among sometimes blunt and rude but often very subtle and clever lawyers.
If one obvious element of Battle Cry of Freedom is to rub your face in some very unpleasant racist ideology and make you appreciate how deep and enduring anti-black racism has been in America – a less immediately obvious but just as important conclusion is the extent to which America is a country meshed in a fascinating and endlessly complicated web of state and federal laws and courts and legal powers.
Something which goes a long way to explaining why outsiders often find American politics confusing and end up with a simple-minded focus on the personality of whoever happens to be in the White House (JFK, Nixon, Barack, Donald), ignoring the complex web of political, legal and constitutional wrangling which go on continually at lower levels of American political life, and which are often more important in determining the lives and livelihoods of most Americans.
And explains Americans’ apparently ceaseless appetite for TV shows about lawyers. Are there any British TV series about solicitors? No, because their work is very boring. Whereas American law really is a) more complex, challenging and swashbuckling; b) seems to automatically offer the possibility of a career progressing into state politics and then, potentially, on into national politics.
In terms of its racial heritage, and its legal-political arrangements, this books helps the reader really come to appreciate what a very different country from our own America is.
Related links
Other posts about American history
- Beauty and barbarism (a note on Banastre Tarleton)
- Thomas Cole: Eden to Empire @ the National Gallery
- American Revolutions: A Continental History 1750-1804 by Alan Taylor (2016)
- The Global Seven Years War by Daniel A. Baugh (2011)
- John Ferling’s use of description in his history of the American War of Independence
- Almost a Miracle: The American Victory in the War of Independence by John Ferling (2007)
- Bury the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery by Adam Hochschild (2005)
- 1759: The Year Britain Became Master of the World by Frank McLynn (2004)
- American Colonies: The Settlement of North America to 1800 by Alan Taylor (2001)
- Battle For Empire: The Very First World War by Tom Pocock (1998)
- Black Ivory: A History of British Slavery (2) by James Walvin (1992)
- Black Ivory: A History of British Slavery by James Walvin (1992)
- Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (5) by James M. McPherson (1987)
- Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (3) by James M. McPherson (1987)
- Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (2) by James M. McPherson (1987)
- Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (1) by James M. McPherson (1987)
Books & Boots 