Okay, continuing with the discussion from yesterday, Stogie
remarked at my comment that you "should read the article I referred you to ... until you do, you are wasting my time."
My comment at issue was elaborated here, "
Response to Stogie at Saberpoint on Southern Heritage and the Confederate Flag."
The article Stogie's referring to is Professor Donald Livingston, "
Why the Civil War Was Not About Slavery," which is
published in full at Stogie's blog.
There's a couple of ways to respond to Livingston's essay. The first way, and more professional, is to pick apart the essay's historical and logical arguments, highlighting especially Livingston's egregious logical fallacies, historical inaccuracies, and frankly, outright lies.
The second way, more partisan and bloggy, is to attack Livingston as a rank ideological hack, driven by fringe ideological tendencies with about as much mainstream acceptance as Holocaust denial. Purportedly a reputable historian, Professor Livingston's professional biography includes links to some rather steamy Southern revisionist outfits --- the kind of organizations with which I'd never associate and of which I lend very little professional credence. Seriously, the guy comes off as rather a crank.
But more about that later. Let's look at a number of problems with his essay from a straightforward historical and political analysis.
First, Livingston argues that to correctly understand the debate on
Southern slavery is to expand the playing field to include
the entire United States, and to go back to the Founding of 1787 to grasp the universal acceptance of slavery --- with the concomitant national ideology of white supremacy --- in the Northern states, in New England America especially, shortly after the overthrow of British colonialism. By doing this, one can see that slavery as an ideological system of political, social, and economic racial domination wasn't unique to the American South, but rather was a nationwide phenomenon with uniquely Northern characteristics.
The problem with this argument is that it's an extremely simplistic straw man. I mean, I don't claim to have anything nearing a scholarly familiarity with the historical scholarship on antebellum America, North and South. But just frankly from my wide reading of history and my professional teaching of the Founding, the Constitutional Convention, and the growth of slavery throughout the 19th century, to say that slavery was a "
national enormity, an American sin for which every section of the Union bore some responsibility," and to use this as an argument against those who attack the South, is simply irrelevant. Of course slavery was a national institution. Slavery was a thoroughgoing institution in all the 13 colonies by the end of the 17th century. Who argues otherwise? Slavery developed in the colonies and after the Constitution of 1787 for almost 150 years. It did break down into regional varieties, as part of the economic regionalism that took hold in the country. For example, by the early- to mid-1800s, rural agrarianism came to be predominantly associated with the South, and with the invention of the cotton gin, the Southern economy become increasingly the locus of cotton production in the U.S., on the backs of slave laborers.
The debate we're having today is the persistence of racial supremacy symbolism in the present day South, like the Confederate Flag, hardly a sign of Northern white supremacy. But the "national enormity" argument is a logical diversion, a fallacy that's easily exposed.
Second, Livingston argues that in antebellum American "no nation" had developed, in the sense of the national unification seen contemporaneously among the European continental states as Britain and France. Further, he claims that the national government couldn't interfere with slavery in the states, that "Congress simply had no constitutional authority to interfere with slavery in the States." This is just a bunch of ideological hooey. It is true that the U.S. remained a largely agrarian, decentralized nation-state in the early 19th century, but the argument ignores monumental developments in constitutional law that created the foundations for what legal and political analysts identify as national supremacy within the system of political federalism. Crucially, majestic Supreme Court cases such as McCulloch v. Maryland expounded nationalist doctrines that placed federal authority as supreme to conflicting state power. Of course the debate on federalism wasn't (practically) resolved until decades later, perhaps not even until the 20th century. But it's absurd to claim that there was no national ideology or national consensus on federal power in the years before the Civil War. Indeed, why would the Southern states bother developing doctrines of nullification and so forth if no national culture and constitutional power had developed?
Livingston goes on, "Since Congress had no power over slavery, and did not want such power, the only way to abolish slavery would be through individual state action or by an amendment to the Constitution." This makes no sense. While any individual state could abolish slavery within its boundaries, all the 27 amendments to the Constitution have been passed by Congress and ratified by the states, including the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery. Further, major congressional action on slavery took place in 1808 with abolition of the international slave trade, in 1820 with the Missouri Compromise, and in 1854 with the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Frankly, Congress was at the center of regulatory activity involving slavery right up to the Civil War. Maybe from the perspective of radical states rights' theory Congress "had no power over slavery," but in reality Congress did have such power and passed consequential legislation that shaped national events over decades of time.
Third, Livingston makes a number of bizarre arguments regarding President Abraham Lincoln's positions on slavery, and some of these appear to be bald-faced lies. He argues, for example, that "Lincoln did not object to slavery as long as it was confined to the South." This is again a red herring, for it's widely recognized that Lincoln was no abolitionist and that even at the time of secession in 1861, Lincoln's fundamental war aims were the preservation of union. Livingston goes on with a number of selective quotations in an attempt to paint Lincoln as pro-slavery as any Southern rebel. The reality is way more complicated, as any historical review of Lincoln political career would recognize. During the Lincoln-Douglas debates, for example, Lincoln made a clear distinction between his acquiescence to slavery in the North and his clearly foundational belief that the Declaration of Independence made all men equal in the eyes of God, and that in the long run the U.S. could not survive with slavery as an institution. When he said a "house divided upon itself cannot stand" it wasn't a political program of abolition as much as a recognition that at some point one side would prevail over the other, either the pro-slavery forces would prevail and slavery would win out over the land or the abolitionists would prevail and slavery would die out altogether.
Livingston in fact lies about the meaning of Lincoln's statement that the United States as "the last best hope of earth." He claims that Lincoln supported colonization of American blacks back to Africa, and that "The 'last best hope of earth' referred to a purely white European polity free of racial strife, and not to a land of freedom for all as it is absurdly interpreted today." Actually, voluntary colonization of slaves and compensated emancipation were just policy alternatives that Lincoln included in his message to Congress in December 1862. A simple reading of the conclusion of his address reveals Lincoln's exceptionalism and his faith in Jefferson's ideals in the Declaration:
Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We -- even we here -- hold the power, and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free -- honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just -- a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless.
I don't know why Livingston would so blatantly distort what Lincoln actually said, other than to chalk it up to dishonesty. Lincoln's views were complicated and developed along with the political necessities of his day.
And it's important to remember that we can't read present-day moral sentiments into history. That is, we cannot apply 21st century normative commitments to the political mores of the mid-19th century. Livingston in fact attacks his critics as adopting a presentist ideological agenda, but much of his essay employs the exact type of presentist commitments that he so decries.
Finally, Livingston breaks down "the main anti-slavery episodes in the antebellum period," from the Constitutional Convention to the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. Again, there's a lot of arguments against straw men and even more tendentious connections to the historical record. I'm going to eschew a longer analysis simply to avoid repetition. Suffice it to say that Livingston provides completely decontextualized and selective interpretations of historical events, spurts of analysis that really add up to more of an ideological screed than a dispassionate historical critique.
And that brings me to my second, more partisan and bloggy criticism of Professor Livingston. He is indeed a genuine scholar and is Professor Emeritus at Emory University and an expert on the writings of Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume.
But he's a lot more than that. Livingston's a radical libertarian whose ideas place him at the fringes of respectable historical scholarship. The Ludwig von Mises Institute, which originally published "Why the Civil War Was Not About Slavery," is a radical libertarian outfit co-founded by the bona fide crackpot Lew Rockwell. Another co-founder, Murray Rothbard, has the dubious distinction of holding down the lunatic wing of the far-right ideological fringe. (See Jamie Kirchick's discussion of Rothbard's associations with former GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul, at the New Republic, "
TNR Exclusive: A Collection of Ron Paul’s Most Incendiary Newsletters," and "
TNR Exclusive: More Selections From Ron Paul’s Newsletters." Also, an interesting anonymous online article, "
Is it possible for a Jew to also be anti-Semitic? The case of Murray Rothbard.")
Plus, Livingston at one time served as the Director of the League of the South Institute for the Study of Southern Culture and History. Make what you want of this --- and Stogie and
Robert Stacy McCain are former members of the League of the South --- but certainly some of the positions of this organization are at the least unsavory and at most completely crackpot, for example, in the group's February celebration of the assassination of President Lincoln (see, "
Honoring John Wilkes Booth").
Livingston was profiled at the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2009, "
Scholars Nostalgic for the Old South Study the Virtues of Secession, Quietly." According to the piece, in 2003, Livingston founded "the Abbeville Institute, named after the South Carolina birthplace of John C. Calhoun, seventh vice president of the United States and a forceful advocate of slavery and states' rights." And it continues:
On his own campus, Abbeville's founder is anything but a pariah. "Mr. Livingston has a great reputation as a professor among his students," says John J. Stuhr, chair of the philosophy department at Emory. "His connection with this institute has not impacted his teaching, research, or campus service by any standard professional measure."
The other Abbeville scholars teach history, philosophy, economics, and literature at institutions including Emory, the University of South Carolina, the University of Georgia, and the University of Virginia. They write books with titles like Defending Dixie: Essays in Southern History and Culture (published by the Foundation for American Education, a nonprofit group "dedicated to the preservation of American culture and learning") and The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, his Agenda, and an Unnecessary War (Prima). They say the institute's work, although academic in nature, is really about values. Its members study the South in search of a history of piety, humility, and manners. The scholars acknowledge a history of bigotry and slavery, but they focus primarily on what they say are the positive aspects of Southern history and culture.
To do so, they have created their own guarded society, something of a secession in its own right. Mr. Livingston will not provide Abbeville's entire list of scholars and participants, because he fears "academics who claim to find something valuable in the Southern tradition are sure to suffer abuse." Institute members say they rarely submit work in the field to mainstream journals. Now they are creating a Web periodical, called Arator, as an outlet. The title is taken from an 1813 book by a Virginia planter and senator named John Taylor, who defended "the socioeconomic and political order of an agrarian republic," according to one description.
Still, the outsiders who have heard of Abbeville tend not to like what they hear. One historian, whose research includes the cultural history of racism and white supremacy in the United States, and who asked for anonymity to avoid becoming a target of "Southern identity groups," says the lectures he has listened to on the Abbeville Web site (http://www.abbevilleinstitute.org) are dominated by racialism and are "ideological, through and through." There is the condemnation from the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil-rights group. In 2005, Time magazine pegged Abbeville as a group of "Lincoln loathers." Mr. Livingston initially declined to be interviewed for this article, citing bad experiences with the news media. But he eventually agreed to talk, as did a handful of scholars and students involved with the institute...
I want to discount the article's allegations of racism and its reference to the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization to which I have nothing but disdain. I do not know if Professor Livingston is racist. I think it's noteworthy, though, that Livingston's work through the Abbeville Institute is considered way outside the mainstream of historical scholarship and the members of his groups are in fact self-cloistered into an extreme isolation that goes dramatically against the ideal of a universal community of scholars.
In any case, I know Stogie will take exception to the discussion of Livinston's fringe associations, and I've heard it before. Mostly, the point is Livingston's "Why the Civil War Was Not About Slavery" is the product of a programmatic ideological commitment that is so far outside of the mainstream it's literally ridiculous. Thus, on grounds of both shoddy historical analysis and fringe ideological foundations, the case that the Civil War was not in fact about slavery is preposterous. The notion of "national enormity" is a pathetic straw man and Livingston's substantive historical narratives are either red herrings, inaccurate, or outright falsehoods. The man's as fervent an ideologue as anyone writing on the
far-left of the ideological spectrum, at outlets such as Rolling Stone or the Nation, to say nothing of the Jacobin or the New Left Review. In any of these examples, you're going to get partisan advocacy rather than scholarship. Unfortunately in Livingston's case his agenda is to disguise radical libertarian screeds under the nominal institutional respectability of a scholarly think tank.
Finally, as noted above, all this debate on the origins and ideologies of the Confederacy distracts from the fact of the matter: the post-Civil War regime of racial segregation, oppression, and terrorism was a product and foundation of the Democrat Party. I mean jeez, President Wilson showcased "Birth of a Nation" at the White House and President Lyndon Johnson bragged, upon passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, that he'd have them "niggers" voting Democratic for the next 200 years.
And as I've pointed out in a number of posts this past couple of days, the Democrats did not abandon their racist ideologies after the 1960s. Indeed, as recently as 2008 the Clinton-Gore campaign trafficked in all kinds of Southern segregationist sentiments and Confederate Flag sensibilities. Hillary Clinton, in fact, still has much for which to answer (see, "
Hillary Clinton’s History With the Confederate Flag").
I doubt that I'll have much success in changing Stogie's mind about things with this essay. I understand the cultural heritage argument, and as I've said, I respect it. And in fact, I've been learning a lot from Stogie these last few years and I'm thankful. Writing this piece as been further edification for me, and I'm open to further information to help me refine my views. But as it is, the national GOP has read the writing on the wall and it's clear that expressions of public support for the Confederate Flag are out. In fact, it now looks as though all the recrimination over the flag is in fact a liability for the Democrats, and if Republican candidates rightly point out the Democrat Party's ugly racist history then leftists will be eating crow on all their "blame-righty" demonizations.
Until then, check back for further iterations of the discussion.
