House of Dixie

Blogging's been light.

My sister was hospitalized on Sunday with a hideous MSRA infection. I drove up to L.A. yesterday to visit. She's going to be fine, and in fact she went home last night. Had me worried there for a minute, though, especially since she went to the ER straight from the airport, after just landing from attending a wedding in Ohio.

In any case, on the way home I stopped by Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena. The only thing I don't like about Vroman's is that it's too far away, heh.

Their current events section is spectacular. I could spend hundreds of dollars in one outing if I lost all restraint.

As it is I picked up just one book, Bruce Levine's The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South.

I've been reading up on the Civil Wall pretty much all summer now. And I've been shopping for books, both new and used, to augment my collection of Civil War history.

This Levine volume is fantastic, certainly one of the most exciting tomes yet. Chapter One, "The House of Dixie," is a tour de force of the antebellum South. Slavery is without a doubt the central institution in the region's politics, culture, economy, and history. Levine weaves his account with a deep social analysis backed by data to indicate the brutal financial hegemony of the Southern plantation elite.

A small percentage of the Confederacy's population, the planter elite was propped up by an ideology of anti-black racism that was almost universally endorsed among Southerners. Indeed, landless whites, and those who never owned slaves, were nevertheless some of the most vital human elements sustaining slave society. A great many, if not the majority, acutely identified with planter economic interests, and were encouraged by Southern aristocrats to strive toward joining their ranks in slave ownership. Even those who never owned slaves reinforced the system by serving as the Southern regime's Praetorian guard, the "rural patrols" who captured slaves wandering off the plantations without travel passes. These "common whites" held aspirations to "someday cross into" the "charmed circle" of the slaveholding masters. Slavery was the very core of the region's identity. Moreover, the nearly three-quarters of the non-slaveholding population had gained the suffrage by the mid-19th century, and they voted their interests in keeping the planter aristocracy in political power.

To deny the centrality of slavery to the South's identity is willful blindness. And to deny the core importance of slavery to the origins and outbreak of the war is outright dishonesty and debauchery.

The slave system was perpetuated by totalitarian politics and the reign of political violence. It was not uncommon for cotton-picking slaves to pick 500-600 pounds a day. Such a huge cornucopia would be impossible with wage laborers alone, who would simply walk off the job rather than be driven to the length of their endurance to pick so much. How was it possible to reap so much product? Well, through violence. Political violence at the end of a bullwhip. Frederick Law Olmsted, a landscape architect, journalist, and social critic back in the day, toured the region on horseback, and here's Levine's account of the role of violence Olmstead witnessed firsthand:

The northern traveler Frederick Law Olmsted witnessed this form of what masters called "slave management" in action one day. He was touring a plantation on horseback in the company of its overseer. As the two men rode along, they saw a black girl apparently trying to avoid her assigned tasks. The overseer promptly dismounted and "struck her thirty or forty blows across the shoulder with his tough, flexible, "raw-hide" whip, Olmstead recorded. "At every stroke the girl cringed and exclaimed, 'Yes sir!' or 'Ah sir!' or "Please sir!'" Unsatisfied that the young woman had yet learned her lesson, the overseer made her pull up her dress and lie down on the ground facing skyward. He then "continue to flog her with the raw-hide, across her naked loins and thighs, with as much strength as before." As he beat her, she lay "writhing, groveling, and screaming, 'Oh don't, sir! Oh, please stop master! Please sir! Please sir! Oh, that's enough, master! Oh, Lord! Oh master! Oh, God, master do stop! Oh God master! Oh God master!'"

It's no mystery that murderous violence, backed by state laws, kept the slave power afloat. Slavery wasn't incidental to the system. It was the key institution and it became the basis for the country's sectional crisis.

Of this there should be no dispute. But there is. There's dispute among Marxists and radical libertarians who attack Abraham Lincoln and the Union North as invaders and imperialists.

I've been over this many times. Neither North nor South elevated blacks to the status of whites in 19th century America. The key difference is white Northerners despised slavery. It upset their system of free labor, and owning humans demeaned those who proclaimed cosmological universal natural rights. As sectionalism heated up Northerners were right to fear the South's slave power efforts to expand slavery to the territories and eventually to the Northern states themselves.

This is why Northerners stood firm against the expansion of slavery. And President Lincoln refused to allow secession seeing it as a bid to make permanent a hegemonic, expansionist slaveholding power across the Southern territory of United States.

Stogie hates these facts, and if you push too hard on slavery and Southern white supremacy, he'll threaten you.

Indeed, he considers anyone who disagrees with his slave-backing views an "enemy." He attacked me as an enemy a while ago, and now he's at it again in a blog post, See, "Enemies: Max Boot and Jeff Jacoby Vomit Hatred Towards the South; Time to Ditch the GOP?"

Yeah, so everyone is an enemy who's not down with the totalitarian violence of the Southern plantation slave regime. It's not about "heritage." The debate's about basic human values. And supporters of the Confederacy who refuse to acknowledge the totality of the system, the violence and anti-black hatred, have none.

Here's the full link to Levine's book, which is a must-read: The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South.