Massachusetts & South Carolina at the Sectional Divide: Conclusion

 

 

On December 15^th 1860 Barnwell Rhett met with the British consul Robert Bunch. He had no portfolio to speak with official capacity to a foreign diplomat but Rhett cared little for that. He made it clear that on February 15^th  South Carolina – as opposed to the Confederacy which hadn't been formed yet – would be a new nation and he wanted to establish a strong relationship with Great Britain. He told him  that secession would go smoothly, disregarded Buchanan's own message to conference. Bunch refused to let the concern over slavery saying his country wouldn't trade with a nation arguing for resumption of the slave trade. When Rhett turned argumentative Rhett said that France and Germany certainly would, which went against what both nations had made clear.

Bunch was unimpressed by Rhett, who reported to London that 'the man indulges in an absurd invective against all who differ from him." Many South Carolinians agreed. That December, they denied his nomination for governor in favor of Francis Pickens. A week later the secession convention that met in Columbia would nominate Rhett for President but he would only receive five votes on the first ballot. Rhett was going to be accepted as prominent voice in the secession deliberations but not leadership.

After South Carolina announced its secession Rhett and Christopher Memminger produced two separate documents. Rhett's was more sweeping and forceful tracing northern 'despotism' to nearly the beginning of the Republic. "All fraternity between the North and South is lost, or has been converted into hate," it read. Bunch had no more use for the manifesto then its author. He termed it "weakly reasoned and, in some respects, offensive.

On February 4^th all of the states that had seceded sent representatives to form the new Confederacy. Rhett had been elected head of the South Carolina delegation and anticipated a powerful role for himself in guiding the deliberations. His vision consisted of numerous distinct elements. There must be a permanent separation from the American North and the creation of a confederation of independent and equal states with no further discussion of compromise and no temporary provisional government in the South pending a permanent constitution. The new nation had to be built upon a foundation of slavery and made up exclusively of slave states – no mingling of slave and free states. The new nation must be dominated politically by slave interests: therefore no three-fifths rule for counting slaves for political representation. The African slave trade would not be curtailed. Economic and foreign policy would be based on free trade and fiscal policy would preclude appropriations for internal improvements such as roads, bridges or canal.

The overwhelming majority of these principles were not shared by his fellow delegates with all of them except free trade and internal improvement issues becoming rejected. Even worse the convention seemed bent on elevated Jefferson Davis as President of the Confederacy, a man who Rhett had never liked in part because he had never felt much for disunionists like Rhett. He was forced to vote for him out of political expediency. And Davis didn't give the founder of secession a cabinet post or a diplomatic office, no doubt because he had fed inside information about the deliberation to his own newspaper in part to criticize what was happening there.

And that was basically all the father of secession would have to do with the Confederate states he had founded. His last official position was delegate to the Confederate Provisional Congress which he left in February of 1862. He returned to private life where he spent the war years excoriating Davis for what he considered his abject incompetence.  As a final insult when he attempted to run for a seat in the new Confederate Congress in 1863 in his own third district he was repudiated by his voters.  By this point he was in such debt that at the start of the war he sold 31 slaves to escape insolvency. The war would destroy his finances thoroughly, his crops would be burned when the Union invaded and the Mercury ceased publication when its presses were destroyed. He died on September 14^th 1876 at age 75 forgotten by history and even most of his fellow Confederates.

When Fort Sumter was fired upon and war began, Garrison was confronted with a dilemma. Would he support the northern war effort or oppose it in fealty to his pacifist conscience? In the end he chose to support the war and embrace the leadership of Abraham Lincoln. At the end of the war he sought to disband the American anti-slavery society of which he was president. His friend Wendell Philips argued the mission was not complete until black Southerners gained full political and civil equality, something Garrison disagreed with. He ended publication of The Liberator at the end of 1865 and didn't attend another meeting until it was disbanded in 1870 at which point the 15^th Amendment, which guaranteed the right to vote the African-Americans had been ratified. Garrison refused to attend meetings going forward and wouldn't heal his estrangement with them until 1873.

 He was forced to resign, resigned and turned his attention to other reformist causes including temperance, women's rights, pacificism and free trade.

How much he ever helped in those causes is open to question. He had played a vital role in supporting 'the rights of women to their utmost extent' ever since 1837 when the female abolitionists Angelina and Sarah Grimke had letters published in the liberation. His promotion of woman's rights within the anti-slavery movement had caused some men to leave it, among them Arthur and Lewis Tappan. Henry Stanton, the husband of Elizabeth Cady Stanton had been among those who had left the AASS because they disagreed with Garrison's insistence that abolitionists should not participate in politics and government. They would eventually found the Liberty Party in 1840 and run James Birney for President. Garrison's decision to form a third organization might well have hurt the abolitionist cause – even though the Liberty Party only last through 1844.

But in 1870 he became an associate editor of the women's suffrage newspaper The Women's Journal and would serve as President of the American Woman Suffrage Association. He was a major figure in New England's woman suffrage campaigns during the 1870s. And yet he remained unwilling to ever take public office to the end. When Charles Sumner died in 1874, some Republicans suggested Garrison as his successor. He declined based on his grounds of moral opposition to taking office.

For all the very real morality Garrison had towards the causes he believed in his beliefs were far from perfect. He had a mixed view to Judaism,  suggesting the Jewish diaspora was the result of 'their own egotism and self-complacency." He was particularly visceral towards the Jewish American writer and sheriff Mordecai Manuel Noah. When Noah defended slavery, he referred to him as 'the lineal descendant of the monsters who nailed Jesus to the cross." That said he acknowledged the prejudice against Jews in Europe, accurately comparing it to the prejudices African-Americans faced in their daily life. He opposed a proposed amendment to the Constitution affirming the divinity of Christ on the basis of religious freedom, writing 'no one can fail to see that the Jew, Unitarian or Deist could not worship in his own way…because the Constitution under which his citizenship exists, would make faith in the New Testament a national creed."

Most importantly was, for all the causes he embraced throughout his long career, he never embraced the idea of radical redistribution of wealth or income. When pressed on the matter he said: "it is enough for me that every yoke is broken and every bondman set free."

After The Liberator folded his followers would establish a new political journal in 1865 meant to fill the gap left by the termination of that paper. That magazine is called The Nation.

 

What can the stories of the men from Massachusetts and South Carolina tell us about today about the era of political division and strife that seems closer to mirroring the decade leading up to the sectional divide with each passing day?

It must be said the causes of the far right that were best represented by the plantation lifestyle have learned lessons better than the ones on the cause of the abolitionists. It is rare even now to see a politician of the likes of Rhett, though one can see the parallels of those who find the leaders in the cause lacking in the demand for purity to it as members of conservative demand with each generation a cause for purity that previous elected officials can never match.

That said most of the politicians from this section of the country seem to have adopted the manner not so much of Rhett but of Pickens Butler and the F Street Mess. They know the best way to get your most far reaching dystopian vision is to work the system from within. One can see parallels between the politicians of  F Street and later organizations such as the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society as well as the same originalist believes that led to Dred Scott.

But at every level of this this cause in the South has been based on a simple realization: one needs electoral power from the voters to get your vision realized. And for the last hundred and fifty years they have operated on Napoleon's principle that men are more easily governed by their vices then their virtues or in the case of the South and rural America, their prejudices rather than the better angels of their nature. Whether it is most race baiting Jim Crow southern politician from the 1870s to the 1920s, Dixiecrats like Richard Russell and Strom Thurmond,  or more modern conservative destroyers such as Lee Atwater and Newt Gingrich, all have fundamentally understood this basic concept. I agree with many of my colleagues that this decision is morally bankrupt. Where I fundamentally differ is considering how effective it has been for this group of politicians unless they are faced with political or economic opposition from other voices these politicians have no motivation to stop doing son.

By and large it seems that in the more than a century and a half the cause of the reform has far too often been led not so much by the heirs to Lincoln or even the Sumners or Henry Wilsons but rather the Garrisons, who pride moral purity and activism over involvement in the political process. One can argue that so many of the major reforms in our society have been impeded as much by the division between the activism versus politician divide as the opposition against them from the powers that be. We see in so many of the movements that Garrison and his colleagues thought for – civil rights, suffragettes, and the antiwar movement. That these causes managed the advances they did was mainly because their were political figures who frequently warred with the activists for the cause and they prevailed. In this century those political figures who know how to build consensus and coalition for reform are all not only nearly non-existent but even the ones who try to do so or lambasted for failing similar tests of purity.

What is striking about the divisions we face today is not only that they still mostly involve rural and urban America but that several of the obstacles that may have made those divisions easier to maintain should have been removed. Most important of this is how much easier it is now to travel from Massachusetts to South Carolina. It is worth noting that the lion's share of the abolitionists never bothered to go to the antebellum South to even see the practices they condemned where as some of the Southern plantation owners by necessity came north to Washington. These days highways, railroads and airplanes make it infinitely for each side to see the reality of the world they condemn. But by and large that urban section chooses not to, content to condemn it from afar.

And it's worth noting that when it came to the cause of slavery the south had one moral advantage that was the Achilles Heel and the fact that abolitionists never seemed that interested in economic inequality was a talking point. No less an individual then Jefferson Davis pointed out that the "Boston mill worker or the New York  laborer is free only to the starve'. This hypocrisy registered very much with Southerners and even some Northerners: why did so many New England and Norther citizens care so much about the well-being of African-Americans in a section of the country they never even went near yet ignored those of the white poor in their own neighborhoods? Garrison and so many of his fellow politicians never seemed to realize this hypocrisy and as we have seen men like Henry Wilson were more than willing to use the openly anti-immigration beliefs of the Know-Nothings in order to gain political power for the anti-slavery cause and never thought twice about the deeper implications.

One also sees the roots of so much of the left's decision that politics is not the solution to the problems of today. There were far more political parties in the era of Garrison and his abolitionists during the leadup to the Civil War and The Observer made it very clear that sufficient to the abolitionist cause. From here we see the argument that a party that protects the status quo (as the Free Soil and Republicans argued against the expansion of slavery) was the equivalent of a party that was going to make things worse (as the Democrats were more or less in favor of it). What's striking is that with the notable exception of John Brown's horribly planned rebellion, by and large the abolitionist cause had no alternative option of their own to suggest and spent their days mostly arguing that even politicians like Sumner and Wilson were inadequate to the cause.

What were they looking for in a political leader, one has to ask. Were they waiting for a man to run on the platform saying that if elected he would immediately emancipate every single slave in bondage, imprison all slave owners for crimes and do so with no violence at all? It's impossible to imagine men like Garrison as being that naïve even on the idea that any man in the country could run on that platform and hope to be elected, much less carry it out. Yet that would appear to be the implication. In their absence of coming up with an alternative so many of Garrison's scions seem more content complaining how all political figures are failing because they are not bringing about the ideal progressive vision. That they seem to know only what it isn't rather than what it is, much less have no idea how to realize it, is irrelevant to the discussion.

Of course in the aftermath of the Civil War both sides would rewrite history as to what it was really about. By far the Southern version came out first and is far more prevalent, the argument it was really about states' rights, that they were only acting in relation to 'Northern aggression', that it was never about slavery. The construction of Confederate monuments throughout the South and even certain parts of the North make it clear how much that myth has proliferated.

But in recent years an alternative version has come up from the Zinn's and Chomsky's of the world arguing that it didn't change anything and was not fought for the right reasons. They argue that Lincoln's decision to preserve the Union and even to free the slaves lacked meaning because he didn't believe in full equality for the black man, even though most Americans didn't agree with those values either. They argue that his successors gave up Reconstruction and left the black man to himself in the South, ignoring the fact that in the decade that followed the only way to make sure it had been enforced was at the barrel of a gun. Some will even argue the passage of the 14^th Amendment was a failure because it failed to take in to account the prison system that prevails to this day and that somehow men like Thaddeus Stevens failed to see what the future would look like. Many still argue that America is forever stained by slavery and is incapable of ever changing because of the fact that slavery was left standing in the Constitution. This argument might have some weight in Garrison's era. That people still argue it  now that African-Americans can among other things, drink at water fountains or go to water fountains and not be arrested for it some sections for the country, that they can vote, run for office and have even served as President, makes that argument much harder to hold water. Yet some still cling to it.

As I write this America is in the midst of another era of great political strife with many parallels to this era but with no single issue or argument as to argue what is causing this divide. Both sides can only argue in vague terms of 'protecting our way of life' or 'what America stands for'. Yet neither side can even tell you what their vision of it really looks like, only that the other's vision is completely and horrendously Unamerican. One side – the heirs to Rhett and Butler – have done far more work because they have built the power they did from the votes of their bases who believe in their vision. The other side – the scions of Garrison – still by and large eschew politics, saying that the far right is building a neo-fascist state while the Democrats are lacking because they are inadequate to the progressive cause.

And in both cases they are doing what their predecessors did: ignoring what the majority of Americans want. Those who argue that Lincoln was interested in preserving the Union over ending slavery ignore the fact that the results of the 1860 election showed the voters were in favor of that. Not just Republicans but those who voted for Douglas and Bell wanted the Union preserved first, even those who abhorred slavery.

  Both sides look at their agendas and will claim 'the people are with us' based on polls and both sides will argue the other is reading it wrong. And just like then, even violence against political figures is increasingly viewed strictly through a partisan lens.

I have no answers as to how to bring us together but I do know that only through the work of coalition building and finding common ground is it possible. We must look to those who view the world through a moderate lens, who understand it is only through compromise and hard work that our vision can be found, to understand that even people we loathe are entitled to a point of view even if we find it abhorrent. We must do all of it and make sure that as that great man once said that this government 'of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from this earth.'