Time for Jefferson Davis to Leave KY's Capitol Rotunda (Part II)
Last week I posted a column saying it’s time we removed Jefferson Davis’ statue from Kentucky’s Capitol Rotunda. Instead of occupying such a prominent place in the center of our civic and political life, we should, I suggested, move it to a new, less auspicious place, such as the Commonwealth’s Military History Museum. Finally, I suggested that it would be difficult to remove Davis without a suitable replacement and I made a few suggestions for great historical figures that could justifiable be said to be more prominent and important than Jefferson Davis. Daniel Boone and John Marshall Harlan topped my list of suitable replacements.
My opinion, naturally, invoked some quick disagreement from a couple of my faithful fans. They responded with condemnations of me and defenses of Jefferson Davis.
Thankfully, neither commenter questioned the notion that, if Jefferson Davis had represented, as the President of the Confederacy, an effort which had as its primary goal the defense of slavery, he would indeed be a poor candidate for the rotunda. Instead, they decried my premise and suggested that I was ignorant of history and had failed to understand that what Jefferson Davis was doing was fighting tyranny, not fighting for slavery.
Claims such as this pop up frequently in discussions about the Civil War. There’s a certain romantic attachment that many Americans have to the lost cause that makes them hanker for many of its supposed lost qualities, such as gentility, nobility, resistance to the elite establishment, etc. This identification requires reconciling these otherwise good folks’ minds with the fact that conventional history tells us that this terrible conflict was primarily fought over slavery. How to reconcile it? If you’re a conservative, it’s fairly easy: the damned, yellow rags, representing as they do the liberal establishment, simply lie. They lie about the true nature of the south, they lie about the Confederacy’s heroes, and they lie when they write that Abe Lincoln was some sort of benign saint.
To a degree, they have a point. It’s easy to punch holes in 6th grade histories because they are, after all, written for 6th grade minds. Lincoln wasn’t really an abolitionist and made statements suggesting that he would accept slavery in order to maintain the union. Jefferson Davis said nice things about blacks and we can find instances where Lincoln did not. Many of the soldiers who fought for the Confederacy were not slave owners. As Shelby Foote reminisces in Ken Burn’s magisterial documentary on the Civil War, a Confederate Infantryman on being asked why he fought for those slave owners replied simply, “we fight because you’re down here.”
Wars, as political outgrowths of large societies, are not simple. There are, necessarily, many contradictions. Propaganda requires spin, and sometimes outright lies; elites may themselves be more moderate than their voters but can find themselves dragged along by their constituencies; thus if you look at their private statements, you’ll see one thing, but look at their public statements and you’ll see another. In a related vein, politicians frequently say one thing to justify themselves today, and another tomorrow. Then there is always the inherent need to compromise in order to avoid embarrassing losses. This was what made the British offer nearly all of the American pre-war aims during the Revolutionary War, for example.
Another challenge with looking into the history of a particular conflict is that there’s usually more than one contributing factor for a given war. Society has several spheres of action including economics, culture, and the political realm. These often act like tectonic plates and are continually moving; during a war their movement accelerates and rapid changes can occur. For these and other reasons it’s impossible to form one monolithic explanation for any war or its conduct.
Nonetheless, if you’re willing to look for it, you can find a continuous thread in the history of most conflicts. In the Civil War, it’s clear that slavery was that continuous thread. Though there were other differences between North and South, nothing separated the American people quite so much as that terrible issue.
Slavery was not merely an academic issue, especially in the south. First, like the Spartans with their Helots, the Southern people had accumulated a group of uneducated men and women within their communities and homes who they had reason to fear. John Brown’s actions made clear to southerners the dangers that abolitionism could hold for them. What could these rallying, obnoxious “Black Republicans” do now that they were in the White House, went the line of questioning from the Confederacy.
Slavery was also an economic issue. It was the linchpin of the Southern, agrarian economy. Removing slavery would have destroyed the southern economy for generations, as it eventually did.
Then there was the political calculus. Until 1860 a carefully fought out balance had existed between Northerners and Southerners. Of course this balance had at its core the issue of Slavery, as the Compromise of 1850 had made so clear. So long as the South had parity in the Senate with Unionist Northerners, they felt Union was tolerable. Once that changed, beginning after the admission of California into the U.S. as a state, the south began to slip away from the North.
Then there were cultural issues. The North and South, by virtue of their differing economies, had grown quite distinct from one another in cultural terms, especially in southern eyes.
Several books help illuminate these issues. First, on the cultural front: Cavalier and Yankee by William R. Taylor is described as an intellectual history of the South. Taylor wrote “the problem for the South was not that it lived by an entirely different set of values and civic ideas, but rather that it was forced either to live with the values of the nation at large or- as a desperate solution- to invent others, others which had even less relevance to the Southern situation.” This sort of cultural strain created strained arguments about things like the Southern way of life that Taylor rejects. Why go through these intellectual hurdles to proclaim your own uniqueness? For Taylor the answer was slavery: “Most important of all, close to a third of its population lived in conditions of chattel slavery, a fact that exposed it to a wave of criticism not only from the North but from the whole Western world.”
On the economic front I recommend Clash of Extremes: the Economic Origins of the Civil War A book that’s been hailed as a new interpretation of the war’s causes, and a work that describes itself as critical of the “idealistic” explanation that Lincoln was a crusading avenger set on freeing the slaves, it nonetheless ends up as only a slightly more nuanced interpretation of the war. Instead of being divided over the horrors of slavery, the South were merely attempting to protect their economy, the basis of which was slavery, and the North were trying to further their economic agenda of industrialization, which didn’t require slavery. Consider this “The South Was Greedy, Not Evil” thesis.
Then we come to the political causes of the war. Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secessionist Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War by Charles Dew should be read by all Civil War buffs. It’s a frank and frightening look into the rhetoric employed by Southern Secessionist Commissioners in their efforts to get other states to withdraw from the Union. The arguments are appalling. Here’s William L. Harris, Mississippi’s Commissioner to Georgia speaking to the state legislature about why they should leave the Union:
Mississippi’s Ambassador of Ill Will continued lecturing to the esteemed Georgian legislators that the choice was simple:
Page after revolting page of this sort of hate filled rhetoric fills Dew’s pages. Dew was, by the way, a Southerner previously sympathetic with their cause until he began research of this work.
For me, however, the most damning brief against Jefferson Davis came from his most comprehensive biography. Jefferson Davis, American by William Cooper. A generally sympathetic work on its subject, the book received an average 4.5 stars from personal reviews at Amazon.com. The book is full of descriptions of Davis’ efforts to protect and expand slavery. From the beginning Cooper describes Davis’ views as follows:
As for Davis’ long term view on slavery:
Page after page details Davis’ comfort with the sins of slavery. For example, the average life expectancy of a slave on Davis’ plantation was around 40 years old. Cooper also gets at some of Davis’ and his acolytes’ efforts at myth making, including ones that suggested Davis was some sort of ultra-caring owner.
These and other works put slavery front and center in the Confederate’s and Davis’ efforts to protect and even promote slavery. There can be no escaping that central fact. By keeping his statue in our Capitol rotunda, Kentucky is honoring a man who did in fact strive to keep millions in chains. By seeking his statue be removed to a less prominent place, I believe I’m asking for small comfort to the millions of slave ancestors who live today.
Cross Posted @ Cyberhillbilly.com
My opinion, naturally, invoked some quick disagreement from a couple of my faithful fans. They responded with condemnations of me and defenses of Jefferson Davis.
Thankfully, neither commenter questioned the notion that, if Jefferson Davis had represented, as the President of the Confederacy, an effort which had as its primary goal the defense of slavery, he would indeed be a poor candidate for the rotunda. Instead, they decried my premise and suggested that I was ignorant of history and had failed to understand that what Jefferson Davis was doing was fighting tyranny, not fighting for slavery.
Claims such as this pop up frequently in discussions about the Civil War. There’s a certain romantic attachment that many Americans have to the lost cause that makes them hanker for many of its supposed lost qualities, such as gentility, nobility, resistance to the elite establishment, etc. This identification requires reconciling these otherwise good folks’ minds with the fact that conventional history tells us that this terrible conflict was primarily fought over slavery. How to reconcile it? If you’re a conservative, it’s fairly easy: the damned, yellow rags, representing as they do the liberal establishment, simply lie. They lie about the true nature of the south, they lie about the Confederacy’s heroes, and they lie when they write that Abe Lincoln was some sort of benign saint.
To a degree, they have a point. It’s easy to punch holes in 6th grade histories because they are, after all, written for 6th grade minds. Lincoln wasn’t really an abolitionist and made statements suggesting that he would accept slavery in order to maintain the union. Jefferson Davis said nice things about blacks and we can find instances where Lincoln did not. Many of the soldiers who fought for the Confederacy were not slave owners. As Shelby Foote reminisces in Ken Burn’s magisterial documentary on the Civil War, a Confederate Infantryman on being asked why he fought for those slave owners replied simply, “we fight because you’re down here.”
Wars, as political outgrowths of large societies, are not simple. There are, necessarily, many contradictions. Propaganda requires spin, and sometimes outright lies; elites may themselves be more moderate than their voters but can find themselves dragged along by their constituencies; thus if you look at their private statements, you’ll see one thing, but look at their public statements and you’ll see another. In a related vein, politicians frequently say one thing to justify themselves today, and another tomorrow. Then there is always the inherent need to compromise in order to avoid embarrassing losses. This was what made the British offer nearly all of the American pre-war aims during the Revolutionary War, for example.
Another challenge with looking into the history of a particular conflict is that there’s usually more than one contributing factor for a given war. Society has several spheres of action including economics, culture, and the political realm. These often act like tectonic plates and are continually moving; during a war their movement accelerates and rapid changes can occur. For these and other reasons it’s impossible to form one monolithic explanation for any war or its conduct.
Nonetheless, if you’re willing to look for it, you can find a continuous thread in the history of most conflicts. In the Civil War, it’s clear that slavery was that continuous thread. Though there were other differences between North and South, nothing separated the American people quite so much as that terrible issue.
Slavery was not merely an academic issue, especially in the south. First, like the Spartans with their Helots, the Southern people had accumulated a group of uneducated men and women within their communities and homes who they had reason to fear. John Brown’s actions made clear to southerners the dangers that abolitionism could hold for them. What could these rallying, obnoxious “Black Republicans” do now that they were in the White House, went the line of questioning from the Confederacy.
Slavery was also an economic issue. It was the linchpin of the Southern, agrarian economy. Removing slavery would have destroyed the southern economy for generations, as it eventually did.
Then there was the political calculus. Until 1860 a carefully fought out balance had existed between Northerners and Southerners. Of course this balance had at its core the issue of Slavery, as the Compromise of 1850 had made so clear. So long as the South had parity in the Senate with Unionist Northerners, they felt Union was tolerable. Once that changed, beginning after the admission of California into the U.S. as a state, the south began to slip away from the North.
Then there were cultural issues. The North and South, by virtue of their differing economies, had grown quite distinct from one another in cultural terms, especially in southern eyes.
Several books help illuminate these issues. First, on the cultural front: Cavalier and Yankee by William R. Taylor is described as an intellectual history of the South. Taylor wrote “the problem for the South was not that it lived by an entirely different set of values and civic ideas, but rather that it was forced either to live with the values of the nation at large or- as a desperate solution- to invent others, others which had even less relevance to the Southern situation.” This sort of cultural strain created strained arguments about things like the Southern way of life that Taylor rejects. Why go through these intellectual hurdles to proclaim your own uniqueness? For Taylor the answer was slavery: “Most important of all, close to a third of its population lived in conditions of chattel slavery, a fact that exposed it to a wave of criticism not only from the North but from the whole Western world.”
On the economic front I recommend Clash of Extremes: the Economic Origins of the Civil War A book that’s been hailed as a new interpretation of the war’s causes, and a work that describes itself as critical of the “idealistic” explanation that Lincoln was a crusading avenger set on freeing the slaves, it nonetheless ends up as only a slightly more nuanced interpretation of the war. Instead of being divided over the horrors of slavery, the South were merely attempting to protect their economy, the basis of which was slavery, and the North were trying to further their economic agenda of industrialization, which didn’t require slavery. Consider this “The South Was Greedy, Not Evil” thesis.
Then we come to the political causes of the war. Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secessionist Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War by Charles Dew should be read by all Civil War buffs. It’s a frank and frightening look into the rhetoric employed by Southern Secessionist Commissioners in their efforts to get other states to withdraw from the Union. The arguments are appalling. Here’s William L. Harris, Mississippi’s Commissioner to Georgia speaking to the state legislature about why they should leave the Union:
“Our government made this government for the white man, rejecting the Negro,
as an ignorant, inferior barbarian race, incapable of self government… [Whereas
Lincoln sought to] overturn this great feature of our Union… and to substitute
in its stead their new theory of the universal equality of the black and white
races.”
Mississippi’s Ambassador of Ill Will continued lecturing to the esteemed Georgian legislators that the choice was simple:
“The New Union with Lincoln’s Black Republicans and free Negroes without
slavery, or slavery under our old constitutional bond of union, without Lincoln
Black Republicans or free Negroes either, to molest us.”
Page after revolting page of this sort of hate filled rhetoric fills Dew’s pages. Dew was, by the way, a Southerner previously sympathetic with their cause until he began research of this work.
For me, however, the most damning brief against Jefferson Davis came from his most comprehensive biography. Jefferson Davis, American by William Cooper. A generally sympathetic work on its subject, the book received an average 4.5 stars from personal reviews at Amazon.com. The book is full of descriptions of Davis’ efforts to protect and expand slavery. From the beginning Cooper describes Davis’ views as follows:
"At the outset I want to address one matter. Race and the place of
African-Americans in American society were central in Davis’s life. His
stance on an issue that still vexes the nation more than a century after his
death would win no kudos in our time. For this entire life he believed in
the superiority of the white race. He also owned slaves, defended slavery
as moral and as a social good, and fought a great war to maintain it.
After 1865 he opposed new rights for blacks. He rejoiced at the collapse
of Reconstruction and the reassertion of white authority with its accompanying
black subordination…”
As for Davis’ long term view on slavery:
“Davis envisioned no early end to slavery. His long-term hope seems to
have been that somehow westward migration would take slaves out of the United
States by way of Mexico and Central America. Such a fanciful dream
certainly included an open-ended time frame for slavery, for in the unlikely
event such an exodus took place, it would happen in the unforeseeable future… He
believed blacks inferior to whites, and also that where blacks were present in
large numbers, social peace required the superior race to possess absolute legal
control and power over the inferior. Thus, slavery must remain in
place.”
Page after page details Davis’ comfort with the sins of slavery. For example, the average life expectancy of a slave on Davis’ plantation was around 40 years old. Cooper also gets at some of Davis’ and his acolytes’ efforts at myth making, including ones that suggested Davis was some sort of ultra-caring owner.
These and other works put slavery front and center in the Confederate’s and Davis’ efforts to protect and even promote slavery. There can be no escaping that central fact. By keeping his statue in our Capitol rotunda, Kentucky is honoring a man who did in fact strive to keep millions in chains. By seeking his statue be removed to a less prominent place, I believe I’m asking for small comfort to the millions of slave ancestors who live today.
Cross Posted @ Cyberhillbilly.com
Labels: Jefferson Davis, Jefferson Davis Statue, Kentucky State Capitol Rotunda
posted by Johnathan Gay at 9:38 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home