A Rebuttal of Adam Gopnik's Book Review in This Week's New Yorker

 

 

On November 7^th 1860, with news of the triumph of Lincoln’s victory just a few hours old, South Carolina District Judge Andrew McGrath closed the latest term with a starling announcement: because secession was inevitable, he was resigning his judgeship.

While South Carolina had been at the forefront of the secessionist movement few had thought that McGrath, who had always been on the side of the cooperationist part of the divide in his home state, would be the one to lead the secessionist movement. Yet he was the first member of the first state to secede from the Union.

In Massachusetts William Lloyd Garrison’s Observer the loyally abolitionist newspaper marked the occasion – with amusement. “Will they secede from the Union?” the paper asked jocularly. “Will they jump into the Atlantic? Will they conflagrate their own dwellings, cut their own throats and enable their slaves to rise in successful insurrection? Perhaps they will – probably they will not? By their bullying and raving they have many times frightened the North into a base submission to their demands – and they expect to do it again.

Garrison, it’s worth noting, never acknowledged his mistake. He would spend the remainder of the Civil War endorsing the effort and Lincoln, a man who he thought too much of a conventional politician on slavery to support as an election.

In a column in this week’s New Yorker too mindless to be considered a think piece Adam Gopnik discusses the leadup to the Civil War and all the bloodshed that followed as a lost cause by essentially arguing, for a Northern perspective, the causes the South spent a century arguing for in their textbooks. He acknowledges that slavery had no future, indirectly agreeing that the South was fighting for states rights rather than the horrible cause of chattel slavery. He argues that the cause of fighting to preserve the union – the reason that Lincoln gave to get the soldiers to fight – was not fundamentally part of the Constitution, essentially giving the cover to the argument that John C. Calhoun made for South Carolina since 1830. And he argues that because at the end of the war that while slaves were free they were still held in essentially a kind of servitude in the South that for all intents and purpose 800,000 men died for the status quo in the South for a century, so what was the point?

I have little doubt Gopnik’s attitude is very heavily influenced by the dark times we have today. Indeed, he almost seems to yearning for a kind of secessionist movement himself, arguing that if Washington, Oregon and California were to leave the Union and form their own country there is nothing in the Constitution saying they can’t. There are many reasons this is a horrible idea, but let’s deal with some of the more realistic problems that Gopnik seems more than willing to gloss over.

Lincoln has been accused by so many progressives as being a racist because he didn’t believe in the kind of full equality Radical Republicans like Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens did. It’s worth repeating that these views were held by a minority of politicians in Congress and were not held by the majority of Republicans, let alone the North. The mere fact that Lincoln believed in the immorality of slavery was enough to convince the South that his election was enough to lead the South to secede just by implication.

Lincoln’s famous statement: “If I could preserve the union by not freeing a single slave, I would do it”, has been reviled by progressives for more than a century as arguing that Lincoln was more interested in preserving the Union then ending slavery. That the alternative was a nation half slave, half free – and that very well nearly happened – is almost always ignored by those same scholars.

Even if we are to argue that slavery had no future in America, it would been a horrible present waiting for it to die out. How long would it have lasted? Ten more years? Twenty years? Until the end of the century? How many millions of African-Americans would have had to suffer a life in bondage before the South realized ‘the error of their ways?” The fact that they had essentially existed for nearly two hundred years with a plantation lifestyle and that it was only through violence that they were willing to end it at all should be a clear sign that slavery was never going to die a natural death.

And there was never a guarantee of Northern victory. Indeed as countless historians have written over the years were it just for the sake of a few key moments – McLellan’s defeat of Lee at Antietam, the repulsion of Lee at Gettysburg – the Confederacy might have been able to win the war and exist as the independent nation they so desired. Even when the chance of a military victory for the South seemed unlikely by 1864 many believed that if they could maintain a stalemate Lincoln would lose reelection and if a Democrat became President the South could achieve a negotiated peace. Indeed in the spring and summer of 1864, some believed that negotiated peace would end in the total fragmentation of the Union. There would be hostilities as to whether Kentucky, Tennessee, Maryland, Delaware and Missouri would choose to unite with the North or the South. The abolitionists of New England might have considered a Union with British Canada. Similarly the Confederacy was engaged in a conspiracy to form an attack in the Northwest in Kentucky, Illinois and Ohio to form a third nation – the Northwest Confederacy – in the nation’s heartland and only through immense action and blind luck did this movement fail.

And here’s a nice bit of speculation: what if the Confederacy formed a separate nation but ended slavery? At one point James Seddon, the Confederacy Secretary of War in 1864 floated the idea of freeing slaves and arming them in order to preserve the Confederacy. This idea was carried out in the final months of the war when the South conscripted many slaves but by that point most of them had deserted.

Harry Turtledove, who works in the sci-fi field of alternate history, wrote multiple series arguing the Union and Confederacy existed as separate nations. In his scenario, the Confederacy ends up making alliances with Britain and France in the 1880s while the Union allies with Germany. When World War I breaks out, we see trench warfare, air bombings and mustard gas play out in cities across America. That scenario could have been a reality had we just let the South go.

Even allowing for the possibility that had the Union divided peacefully and that somehow we could have coexisted peacefully as neighboring nations on the same continent forever, what would ‘the Negro problem’ have been like for those in the South? Borders and checkpoints would have had to have been set up along the limits of the Confederate territory, simply as a matter of diplomatic relations. One would have required a passport to travel between Nashville and Chicago. Armed guards would no doubt be all along the various levels of the Mason-Dixon line. It had been difficult using the Underground Railroad before the war; now if an African-American was caught along the border, he could just as easily have been killed. One could see a future Southern President – an Alexander Stephens or Judah Benjamin – demanding a ‘border wall’ be built but to keep ‘Negroes’ in.

This condition would have been the same even when slavery ended. Jim Crow would have continued in the South but it would never have ended. Why would it? The North would have had no motivation to end. Plessy versus Ferguson would have been the law of the South and the Confederacy would essentially have exact as an apartheid state. It’s highly unlikely that other foreign nations would have done more than raise token objections. We certainly wouldn’t have been able to raise any objections to imperialism or the fascist rules of far right movements across the globe.

How could we? We’d be a divided country ourselves. I have little doubt that had we decided to separate we would have spent the rest of the 19^th century and well into the 20^th fighting among the various stages of the frontier, fighting over whether Colorado or the Dakotas became Confederate possession or Union ones. God knows how much bloodier the fight for Westward expansion would have become.

Gopnik seems to argue that the idea of union is just a shifting cause that we’ve basically only used to hang together to fight against common enemies. There’s a certain truth to that. The problem is without even this shifting, fragmentary cause, there really isn’t much of a reason that we aren’t 48 small countries on the same continent. People in Montana don’t have the same values as people in California and people in Nebraska don’t seem to have the same ones as those in New York. Without the idea of a shared belief in some idea of national unity, there’s nothing really to stop us from tearing each other the ribbons the moment we cross the border from Washington to Montana.

John Hancock once famously said at the founding of the Republic: “We must hang together or we shall surely all hang separately.” The idea of unity and loyalty to an institution has historically always been harder for those on the left to grasp then those on the right and they have a much harder reason to argue for disunion then the other side. At least when the Confederacy broke away from the Union, they had an economic reason along with a (horribly distorted) moral one. When Gopnik argues even hypothetically that Washington, Oregon and California should form their own country, he can’t even come up with a real reason for that, aside from the liberal arguments that Trump is destroying America. That secessionism is essentially doing the same thing is an equivalence that he and his colleagues don’t agree with – and they are forgetting that it didn’t end well for the ones chose to try it in 1861.

It is understandable for some to be concerned, even greatly worried by the trends of the current administration. But if anyone seriously thinks that the only logical step is to argue the United States has failed and to start dissolving it have forgotten the one reality of the last time it was tried: the Union was preserved at the cost of a great loss of life and more hostility in the region towards the federal government. If Gopnik and his colleagues truly think that there would be a better outcome this time, he clearly hasn’t learned anything from history.