John Buell

Civil War and Popular Memory

Why does it matter that many southern conservative Republicans believe — and demand of their high school texts — an interpretation of the Civil War that downplays the role of slavery? In their favored texts slavery’s central role in the conflict is often displaced by a rather bloodless argument over the rights of states in our Federal system.

These controversies over the causes of the Civil War, the nature of slavery, and Reconstruction are especially important today because these historical controversies are mirrored in several of the most divisive issues in our politics. Important as the issue of monuments is, more is at stake. There is a concerted effort to deny the right to vote to minorities, and historical interpretations of Radical Reconstruction affect the tone and substance of such efforts. If slavery were an inessential feature of Southern society, one could have fewer qualms about leaving to the Southern states determination of the procedures governing voting.

Historians today give little credence to the sanitized view of Civil War history. Columbia University professor Eric Foner argues that Slavery was basic to the plantation economies of the New World and the profits made from the slave trade and the goods that slaves produced made northern capitalism possible. Of the 12 million people who came to these shores between 1500 and 1820, 10 million were slaves.

Foner also carefully distinguishes among slave systems There are societies with slavery as one incidental aspect and slave societies. In most earlier social orders slavery was not the foundation of society. It existed in small numbers, primarily in households. And often opportunities for freedom were not unusual. In the Western Hemisphere, slavery was racialized. There was a difference of appearance of slaves that came to be characterized as race. Differences in physical appearance are regarded as showing one is doomed to slavery.

In a slave society, slavery dominates the economy, slaves are near majority, slavery is more brutal and harder to escape.

Slavery in south was racialized and was plantation slavery. In plantation slavery there is a vast distance between owner and slave. There is a pervasive fear of slave rebellions. Supervision was the hardest and racism in US was most intense, in part because of the psychological need to square our core belief that all men are created equal with the hard reality that some beings were being held as permanent slaves. They were deemed less than fully human. The harsh conditions and brutal treatment belie that other exculpatory claim, that most slaves willingly served their masters, a theme touted most recently by the Daughters of the Confederacy.

That states’ rights were the cause of war is contradicted by any careful examination of events leading up to war. It would be hard to imagine a stronger assertion of federal power than the Fugitive Slave Act, ardently advocated by the South and a source of great bitterness in the North. That act not only allowed pursuit into Northern states of escaped slaves, but also made assistance of their flight a crime. Today’s ICE raids are inspired by the same vindictive and authoritarian spirit.

Ending slavery was a world historical accomplishment, for which the slaves themselves and abolitionists merit great credit. Nonetheless, an institution so deeply rooted inevitably left deep cultural and economic scars. These persist not only at the level of policy, but also gut feelings and perceptions. Older stereotypes live on in popular imagination. And most citizens derive their knowledge of history through the visual displays and brief narratives viewed in museums.

Today, there are no museums devoted to slavery in the South and Southern plantations open to visitors say nothing about slaves and speak only of servants. Most of the monuments in Southern cities were erected long after the Civil War and not primarily to celebrate the heroism of Confederate soldiers. Many were effected between 1900 and the 1920s, during the implementation of “Jim Crow” laws, and in the 1950s, at the early stages of the Civil Rights movement, and they were an attempt to reassert white supremacy. Tearing down Confederate monuments in public squares is an appropriate response but counter narratives are essential. Monuments and museums devoted to the slaves, abolitionists, and victims of lynching are needed.

One positive response to this need is the recently-opened museum on lynching in Montgomery, Ala. The museum graphically portraying the extent of the atrocity both geographic and over time. We may no longer encounter extra judicial lynchings as public spectacles. Nonetheless, as the struggle over monuments, voting rights, police assassinations, mass incarceration, and border politics reveals, the issues are hardly dead. How race and the residues of slavery play out on the field of welfare politics is the subject for my next column.

John Buell lives in Southwest Harbor, Maine, and writes regularly on labor and environmental issues. Email jbuell@acadia.net.

From The Progressive Populist, September 15, 2018

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