Astonishing
Thanks to Nick, I have come across the most remarkable and simultaneously unspeakable article. There are bad articles, Christopher Hitchens articles, Gerson articles and then there’s this, which is in a class all by itself. It has practically every lazy assumption and misguided polemical trope that you’ve ever encountered. There is, naturally, Lincoln-worship involved, and a hefty dose of Teutonophobia, which are the usual prerequisites for truly execrable historical analysis. I am almost overwhelmed by its breathtaking awfulness, but I will try to make a few points.
Let’s start at the beginning:
In 1861, free institutions seemed poised to carry all before them. In Russia, Tsar Alexander II emancipated 22 million serfs. In Germany, lawmakers dedicated to free constitutional principles prepared to assert civilian control over Prussia’s feudal military caste. In America, Abraham Lincoln entered the White House pledged to a revolutionary policy of excluding human bondage from the nation’s territories.
Spot the nonsense. It isn’t hard. By March 1861, several states had seceded from the Union in protest against this “revolutionary” policy, and rather than being “poised to carry all before them,” according to Lincoln 1861 was the year in which free institutions were supposedly on the verge of being subverted and wiped from the face of the earth. It was so endangered, in fact, because of the dangerous principle that voluntary Union was actually voluntary, which Lincoln made sure would not stand. There was certainly a coercive reaction to the idea of the voluntary Union, and it was the so-called Unionists who did the coercing. The “war to save the Union” was, of course, the assassination of the very principle that made it a Union.
Lincoln was wrong, as he often was, but from the perspective of Mr. Beran 1861 seems an unusually poor year to mark the impending triumph of what he calls “free institutions.” In Russia, the emancipation of the serfs was realised by the order of an autocrat. A Christian, humane and decent-minded autocrat, probably the finest Russian ruler of the century, but an autocrat. Free institutions? In any meaningful sense, they did not yet exist in Russia. Indeed, one might observe with some irony how much more easily an autocracy embraced a policy of emancipation than did a democracy, which might tell us something about democracy’s flaws, but no matter. Meanwhile, in Germany the liberals became the allies of the Junkers, the Prussian “caste” to which Bismarck belonged, and Bismarck was himself the champion of a combination of liberal nationalism (down with all the reactionary Reichsfeinde and no Canossarepublik, he said) and nationalist and anti-socialist social legislation. Those champions of “free constitutional principles” were the architects and leading cheerleaders of the Kulturkampf against German Catholics. In this, German liberals exhibited precisely the same hostility that many American Catholics perceived in the Red Republicans, so called by Orestes Brownson and others because of the clear similarities with European liberal revolutionaries. It is not surprising that many German exiles who had fled the suppression of the ’48 revolution were sympathetic to the principles of the GOP. By the way, none of this appears to me to be a compliment to Lincoln.
Beran isn’t done:
But in the decade that followed, a reaction gathered momentum. Around the world, privilege rose up to defend its prerogatives.
Egads, reaction! There is something truly strange about trying to associate the Republican Party with something other than privilege. As a party, it represented (and Lincoln represented), and to some considerable extent still represents, the interests of corporations and finance, just as the Whigs had represented commercial and mercantile interests before them. The causes of the War are many and complex, but if you said that it boiled down to a conflict between the landed and moneyed interest you would not be far wrong. The latter won, and it replaced one kind of hierarchy and stratification with another while brutally centralising power into the hands of fewer and fewer people. Someone will need to explain to me how this represents the victory of “free institutions,” since I have a funny idea that arbitrary, coercive government is not really compatible with “free institutions.”
It gets even funnier:
The paternalists, Lord Macaulay wrote disapprovingly, wanted to “regulate the school, overlook the playground, fix the hours of labour and recreation, prescribe what ballads shall be sung, what tunes shall be played, what books shall be read, what physic shall be swallowed.”
It should be painfully obvious, but it was in Republican Party-dominated regions of the country where the uniform public school first appeared, and it was among Republican progressives at the turn of the century that you found some of the greatest advocates of regulation of business. If there were paternalists in the post-War period, they were very often Republicans, the heirs of Lincoln. Certainly, Southern aristocrats also accepted paternalistic ideas, but the Red Republicans wished to be paternalists for everyone in the country.
And again:
The second idea was militant nationalism—the right of certain (superior) peoples to impose their wills on other (inferior) peoples. Planters in the American South dreamed of enslaving Central America and the Caribbean. Germany’s nationalists aspired to incorporate Danish, French, and Polish provinces into a new German Reich [bold mine-DL]. In Moscow and Saint Petersburg, Panslav nationalists sought to rout the Ottoman Turks and impose Russia’s will on Byzantium.
It was the Republicans who preached American nationalism over against federal and decentralist principles, and it was Republicans who waged a war of unification—not unlike Bismarck, actually—to enforce that nationalism. (Note that the “Danish, French and Polish provinces” in question were filled mostly with German-speaking Germans.) It was, again, the Republicans who most forthrightly stated America’s imperial and civilising mission to “inferior” peoples, and who launched our imperialist wars in the Caribbean and the Pacific. But don’t let that get in the way of a good story. The Pan-Slavists were a force in Russian politics, and their objectives were shared by no less than that reformer, Tsar Aleksandr II, who waged war on behalf of the Slavs of the Balkans during the 1875-78 crisis.
Speaking of imperialism, Beran writes:
Had Lincoln not forced his revolution in 1861, American slavery might have survived into the twentieth century, deriving fresh strength from new weapons in the coercive arsenal—“scientific” racism, social Darwinism, jingoistic imperialism, the ostensibly benevolent doctrines of paternalism.
But, again, it was the esteemed Party of Lincoln where imperialists and progressives espousing such views very often found their home. The devastation and ruination of the South and the elimination of slavery did nothing to stymy any of these things, but rather allowed them to prosper. Lincoln’s political heirs embraced most, if not all, of them and promoted them. It was in the name of both racial and cultural superiority that Americans sought to provide “uplift” for our “brown brothers” in the Philippines (minus those who died because of the war, naturally).
Then comes the ultimate idiocy:
The Southern Republic, having gained its independence, would almost certainly have formed alliances with regimes grounded in its own coercive philosophy; the successors of Jefferson Davis would have had every incentive to link arms with the successors of Otto von Bismarck.
It is amusing to consider that the one counterfactual author who has done the most to play around with the ideas of “what if the South won?”, Harry Turtledove (a Byzantinist by training!), comes to the exact opposite conclusion and held, I think correctly, that an independent CSA would have allied itself, to the extent that it was willing to go against the Jeffersonian grain against entangling alliances, with Britain and France. Britain and France had been interested, for economic and strategic reasons, to see the Confederacy succeed, and had the South won it is easy to see the Confederacy having become, if anything, a strong supporter of either Britain or France in foreign policy. It was the Unionists who were very cosy with the Prussian military during the War, and the Republicans who best represented the politics of Bismarck and the National Liberals on the American scene. The Confederates were, however, heirs of the heritage of Jefferson and Jackson. They were continentalists, and had a tradition of distrusting the British. It is likely they would have pursued a strategy of influence and occasional expansion in the Caribbean and in Central and South America, but the odds of their linking arms with the Germans are very poor indeed. The Yankees always had more in common with the Germans culturally and politically than did the Southrons. However, since I am not a stupid Teutonophobe, I do not hold this against the Yankees. I am not so desperate to vindicate the Confederate position, as Mr. Beran clearly is desperate to glorify Lincoln, that I feel compelled to vilify the political evolution of other nations and then randomly link that history with American historical figures that I dislike.
Cross-posted at Eunomia
There are bad articles, Christopher Hitchens articles, Michael Gerson articles, and then there are articles on the American Scene where the authors offer no original thoughts, but simply increasingly angry and bitter critisicm. Seriously, sometimes you guys really approach the skilless polemics you so hate. The article’s analysis is great reading, thought provoking and well worth the time. The introductory paragraph. . . I don’t know. Change your tone a little. You sound as angry as Hitchens.
— Chris · Nov 2, 02:59 AM · #
The Beran article is a farrago of nonsense and ignorance. But really, must the refutation take the form of this dreary Lost Cause apologia? The Civil War as a conflict between the moneyed and landed interest? I’m fine with the occasional bit of Charles Beard nostalgia, but surely we can do better than that old reductio. It springs from the typical confusion of the Confederacy with the South. The South was born of the Confederacy’s collapse. It society was static, poor and dependant on cheap tenant labor. As a way to nurse their pride, its intellectuals were prone to dressing this up as a traditionalist, quasi-feudal alternative to Northern society, ruled by a benevolent “landed interest.” The Confederacy was dynamic, rich and based upon a vastly more efficient work gang system of labor born of a kind of technical expertise in the domination of the human spirit. The basis of this society wasn’t land, or a landed interest. It was flesh and souls, and the limits to which they could be pushed.
— rd · Nov 2, 04:21 AM · #
Sorry. Terrible history does irritate me.
— Daniel Larison · Nov 2, 04:22 AM · #
Thanks for your comment. As I said, the causes of the war are more complicated than that. I realise that it was an oversimplification, and I tried to acknowledge that. My point, which apparently I did not make very well in that section, was that there was nothing less coercive about the system championed by Lincoln. I was not actually trying to write an apology for the Confederacy here, though I might write one somewhere else. I was mainly trying to challenge what seemed to me to be very bad readings of the history of three countries. I’m glad we can agree that Beran’s readings were quite bad.
— Daniel Larison · Nov 2, 04:30 AM · #
In regards to German expansionism – the French provinces coveted by the 19th century German nationalists were certainly mostly populated by German speakers and culturally more German than French. The Danish provinces arguably so. But what “Polish provinces” is Beran referring to? There was no Poland in 1861, the Western “Polish provinces” had already been incorporated into Prussia or Austria-Hungary by 1815. And German speakers (even including Yiddish) in Russian Poland were never close to a majority. Most German nationalists were more concerned with Germanizing the Poles already living in Prussia rather than trying to add more.
— vanya · Nov 2, 05:36 PM · #
You are quite right. I should have caught that when I was writing.
— Daniel Larison · Nov 2, 05:42 PM · #
I always thought it was interesting that the most pro-Union government in Europe during the war was Russia. The Austrian government was also pro-Union, I believe. Indeed, there are certain similarities – VERY superficial ones, I hasten to add before Daniel jumps on me – between the relationship between Austria and Hungary and the relationship between the North and South, with the South and Hungary both having a tendency to be “zealous of their own rights and trampling on those of others,” in Jefferson’s self-reflective phrase.
— James Kabala · Nov 2, 06:56 PM · #
A reduced United States probably would have appeared to aid Britain (the British certainly seemed to think so), and the Russians would have had reason to support whatever would prevent Britain’s advantage. Beyond that St. Petersburg and Washington had always had good relations dating back at least to the time of Aleksandr I, and it wasn’t in the interests of the Russian government to be encouraging anything that resembled “rebellion” (one of the relevant things that Beran neglects to mention is the 1863 Polish revolt, which was brutally put down by the Russians, which does damage Aleksandr II’s record a bit). The Austrians had good reason to not encourage anything that resembled separatism, given the difficult balancing act they had to manage with the several kingdoms and peoples under their authority. For their part, the Prussians became very interested in Union military technique, and I have seen the argument that they employed what they learned from the later Union generals in the wars of unification.
I wouldn’t “jump” on you for saying that there was a resemblance between the two cases. Especially after 1867, the relationship between Austria and Hungary was one between two zones that were increasingly alienated from one another and the Hungarians were very “zealous” of their right to lord it over the Croatians and Slovaks, among other rights.
— Daniel Larison · Nov 2, 07:46 PM · #
“The causes of the War are many and complex, but if you said that it boiled down to a conflict between the landed and moneyed interest you would not be far wrong.”
If this is true, then the slavocrats who intitated secession were among the stupidest politicians who ever lived. The only real grievance they mentioned was the threat to slavery and its expansion; their declarations of causes spend much more time on this than on any other cause.
This would be an odd thing to do if they in fact had other grievances, because (as they well knew) defending and expanding slavery was not an especially popular cause in the North or abroad.
I am willing to entertain the idea that the secessionists were in fact this stupid, but I have yet to see any evidence for it. I find much more plausible the hypothesis that they were in fact trying to defend and expand slavery, because they liked slavery and believed it was a good thing.
It is of course true that stopping slavery expansion is not the same thing as ending slavery immediately, but I view containment of an evil system as a good thing in itself.
— Former 1L · Nov 3, 07:03 PM · #
Perhaps I have not been clear. The landed interest in the South was obviously closely bound up with the continuation of slavery and its expansion in the west, and also tied to opposition to a high tariff that was inimical to the interests of large-scale agricultural interests. All of these things are subsumed under the phrase “landed interest.” As I have noted, the conflict between these interests was also not the whole story. There were also Southern constitutional objections to perceived encroachment, or at least potential encroachment, at the federal level, and there were factors of regional cultural difference with which Southern “nationalists” tried to construct their own identity. I regret if my shorthand references to “interests” has led to some confusion, but perhaps this will have clarified the point.
— Daniel Larison · Nov 3, 07:39 PM · #
“The landed interest in the South was obviously closely bound up with the continuation of slavery and its expansion in the west, and also tied to opposition to a high tariff that was inimical to the interests of large-scale agricultural interest.”
But tariffs weren’t high at the time secession began. They were lower than at any time since the 1790s. The tariffs were increased only after almost all the CSA states had seceded, and it is doubtful the tariff increase could have passed the Senate had Southern senators still been there. The tariff increase was a result, not a cause, of secession.
Then there are the sugar tariffs, somehow almost never mentioned in discussions of prewar tariff politics. They brought in over 15% of US tariff revenue, and served as a price support directly benefiting the sugar growers, all of whom were slaveholders (and “large-scale agricultural interest”).
Another fun fact: imports landed at slave-state ports actually paid a lower overall tariff than imports landed in free-state ports. Southerners consumed more duty-free imports, especially coffee.
In short, the idea that tariffs were a driver of secession is not at all well supported. The numbers just aren’t there.
Former 1L
— Former 1L · Nov 3, 09:23 PM · #
The open question in my mind is whether the United States was ever a voluntary union. To the extent that a war can ever settle a political question, it appears that states cannot secede from the union. But could they ever?
If 30 odd states joined together to fund a common military and a common economic market, could any one or a group just as easily withdraw? If so, then America is not a marriage of states, so much as casual dating relationship.
I don’t recall the question of “should we stay in the United States?” Appearing on the ballot very often, and doubt it would matter. Once you have voluntarily agreed to a common government, you cannot simply opt back out when the conditions are not to your liking. If you could, then each presidential election would pick two chief executives, and the states would simply decide whether they were in the red or the blue government.
Regardless of his reasons, Lincoln made the correct decision. The southern states had agreed to play by the rules, and then had decided to write their own rule book. The phrase “state’s rights” was simply a code word for racism and slavery. (Without that code word, most poor southerners would have refused to get involved.)
The entire country suffered a terrible war, but the end result was a rule that says national law trumps local law. Now we are stuck with it, even when the tide is reversed: These days, local governments would never consent to child labor, torture of prisoners, illegal wiretapping, or a religious war with no clear purpose.
Even though the current embarrassment-in-chief talks like a mean spirited juvenile, I still can’t see any argument that we would live in a better world if we could simply declare our state a free agent and refuse to play on the team any more.
There are some things worth fighting for. It is amazing how low the bar has dropped, but unless people are willing to vote against torture, then Lincoln can hardly be blamed for the ultimate end to which his policies were used.
Lincoln was a great man. He was not perfect, but wouldn’t it be great if we could elect someone else who had only a few imperfect ideas instead of only a few ideas at all.
— Dave · Nov 5, 07:05 PM · #