[Peace-discuss] 5 Myths re Why the South Seceded (James Loewen)

Sun Apr 10 14:30:12 CDT 2011

In fact, it was a topic seriously discussed in the Republican party in the 
generation after the Civil War.

The Radical Republicans argued that since they fought a war to end chattel 
slavery, they should now turn their attention to wage slavery and eliminate 
that.  (Lincoln, ever the political realist, was aware of the issue, as the 
State of the Union message I cited shows.)  It produced a severe ideological 
contest within the Republican party, because that party also represented the 
industrialists of the North - those whose interests "were most carefully 
attended to," in the destruction of their Southern rivals.

There was obvious force in the pre-war arguments from slaveholders, that they 
took better care of their workers than the Northerners did. (Just as you take 
better care of the car you own than of a rental.) E.g., when the pestilential 
swamps around New Orleans were drained, Irish wage-laborers were imported from 
New York for a task that was too dangerous for slaves: a dead slave was a 
capital loss, but a dead Irishman just meant you rented another one.

The matter was settled, at least for a time, by the "robber barons" of the 
Gilded Age, who - as one of their number, Jay Gould, is supposed to have said 
(in the context of the Great Southwest Railroad Strike of 1886) - "could hire 
one-half the American working class to kill the other half." So the war against 
chattel slavery was won (?) and the war against wage-slavery lost, but the 
immiseration of American workers, black and white (and Asian) continued apace.

The struggle emerged again after the depression of the 1890s with the American 
socialist movement. It took war, repression (the Palmer Raids), judicial 
chicanery ('fire in a crowded theater'), and the development of full-fledged 
propaganda system (Creel Commission) - all on the part of a liberal Democratic 
administration - to defeat it.

On 4/10/11 12:24 PM, Morton K. Brussel wrote:
> Evidently, Slavery is equivalent (in moral and economic terms)  working for a 
> wage. An amazing revisionist view of the Civil War.
>
> --mkb
>
> On Apr 10, 2011, at 9:18 AM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
>
>> Societies are defined by how the ruling class gets enough to eat.  The 
>> American civil war was a conflict between two ways of doing that.
>>
>> Two dominant political groups, one primarily resident North of the 
>> Mason-Dixon Line and the other south of it, competed because they profited 
>> from two different and incompatible ways of exploiting labor - by renting it 
>> or owning it (i.e., by chattel-slavery or wage-contract).  Extracting surplus 
>> value from the direct producer could be done ether way, but probably not by a 
>> mixture of both.
>>
>> That's what Lincoln meant when he said in 1858, "I believe this government 
>> cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free ... it will cease to be 
>> divided. It will become all one thing or all the other ... Either the 
>> opponents of slavery, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it 
>> where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of 
>> ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall 
>> become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new — North as well as 
>> South."
>>
>> ("Free" labor has a technical meaning - it refers to the labor of those who 
>> have no right to live without working for their masters, i.e., those to whom 
>> the society had no responsibility.)
>>
>> The Southern ruling class understood that the new Republican party, with its 
>> central plank of "no extension of slavery" was the vehicle of the northern 
>> ruling class and wage-slavery, as opposed to their form of slavery. When its 
>> candidate was elected president, the the rulers of the Southern states knew 
>> an attack was imminent and declared their independence - as these governments 
>> had done three generations earlier, in 1776.
>>
>> Gen. Winfield Scott, the leading US military figure - his generation's George 
>> Washington - wrote on the day before Lincoln's inauguration (March 3, 1861) 
>> and suggested the new president could conquer the Southern states at the end 
>> of a long, expensive, and desolating war, and to no good purpose; or he could 
>> say to the seceded States, "Wayward sisters, depart in peace!"
>>
>> Lincoln chose the former, and Scott was retired.
>>
>> That Lincoln understood what was at stake in his state-building is clear from 
>> his first State of the Union address: 
>> <http://www.presidentialrhetoric.com/historicspeeches/lincoln/stateoftheunion1861.html>.
>>
>>
>> On 4/10/11 6:02 AM, E. Wayne Johnson wrote:
>>> The best explanation of the "War of Northern Aggression" that I ever heard 
>>> came from Fred Madsen,
>>> who took a bullet in South Vietnam during reconnaissance in the early 60's.
>>>
>>> Fred said that the war was fought over who would control the Land occupied 
>>> by the southern states.
>>>
>>> I find Fred's explanation to be unassailable.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On 4/10/2011 10:49 AM, Jenifer Cartwright wrote:
>>>>
>>>>     I  ran into this today on Google or Yahoo news and made it into a word
>>>>     doc b/c I tho't it was interesting and enlightening enuff on its own,
>>>>     plus it had parallels with today's issues, i e poor white farmers [who
>>>>     were not slave-owners] supporting the Confederacy because that was the
>>>>     class they aspired to and identified with... (Sociologist James Loewen
>>>>     wrote /Lies My Teacher Told Me/ and /Sundown Towns/).
>>>>      --Jenifer
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>>>
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>>>
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