City upon a Hill
Samuel Huntington died yesterday. Though famous for his Clash of Civilizations thesis, more recently he argued for an emphasis on the reality that this (the United States) is an Anglo-Protestant country. But I think that this assertion needs to clarified to a finer grained scale. In Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, the author makes the claim that the culture of the United States is a synthesis of four strands of colonial settlers; New England Puritans, the Lowland Southerners (e.g., Tidewater Planters), the Highland Southerners (i.e., the Scots-Irish of Appalachia) and the polyglot peoples of the Mid-Atlantic (e.g., Quakers of Philadelphia, Dutch Patroons of New York and Swedes of Delaware, etc.). After reading quite a bit of American history, especially the period between 1600 and 1850, I think that over the long haul the concrete political and social realities of America owe much more to New England than the other regions. Â After I came to this conclusion (which I will flesh in more detail later), I couldn’t help but note that today New England isn’t included in the “Real America.”
Labels: culture
Well, it was New England’s side that won the Civil War and then consciously rubbed the South’s nose in the dirt.
I think that “Albion’s Seed” makes the error of originalism. There’s some germ of truth there, but nineteenth century immigration and 480+ years of American, non-European experience played enormous roles too.
The split now seems to be South vs. North, with the North including New England and Midland plus almost all of the nineteenth century immigration, and the South including the lowland and upland southerners plus (in many respects) the interior west south of Montana. After the Civil War a lot of Southerners headed West.
I’ll plug Raymond Gastil’s old but still relevant “Cultural Regions of the United States” again.
The South has done very well politically since 1880 or so, but only in recent decades have they done at all well economically.
Well, it was New England’s side that won the Civil War and then consciously rubbed the South’s nose in the dirt.
i’m think it goes back further than that. new england was the world’s first universally literate middle class society. in short i think that these traits are essential to understanding the development of american republican democracy.
The South has done very well politically since 1880 or so, but only in recent decades have they done at all well economically.
the south did very well before 1860 too. in fact, southern dominance was more pronounced then. every president was southern, or had southern sympathies, except for the two adamses.
btw, 1880 was in the long spell of non-southern presidents. between andrew johnson and woodrow wilson all the presidents seem non-southern. the period between 1860 and 1960 was to some extent the south’s exile from the presidency, with wilson and truman, both from the border south, being exceptions. since 1960 you’ve had LBJ, the two bushes (albeit, both are of new england, background), carter and clinton. so ~30 out of 48 years were with southern presidents.
Only 18% of the national vote went to the secessionists in 1860. A large, possibly majority share was split by two moderate parties who didn’t carry many states. The Republicans only got a plurality.
Only 18% of the national vote went to the secessionists in 1860. A large, possibly majority share was split by two moderate parties who didn’t many states. The Republicans only got a plurality.
right, but sectional politics was way stronger then than now. lincoln wasn’t on the ballot in many southern states, and i think the same was true of breckinridge in the north. 18% on a national scale means a comfortable majority in most of the deep south.
correction: only lincoln was not on the ballot in many states. also, i was wrong to say that breckinridge received a comfortable majority insofar as his plurality was comfortable, but he didn’t get above 50% in many states.
I haven’t read Albion’s Seed, but didn’t the author conclude that modern American culture is closest to that of the Quakers?
but didn’t the author conclude that modern American culture is closest to that of the Quakers?
this isn’t too far off. some could characterize the united states as diverse in terms of religion and ethnicity, but united by a common conception economic outlook. this is a defensible view. but, i would assert that
1) religiously non-protestants like jews and catholics have assimilated to protestant norms in outlook if not theological detail.
2) as a point of fact mid-atlantic commerce was often driven by emigre new england yankees, whose low time preference and thriftiness gave them a competitive edge.
the period between 1860 and 1960 was to some extent the south’s exile from the presidency
And even Lincoln was born in Kentucky (and Andrew Johnson in North Carolina).
well, johnson was senator from tennessee, so he’s obviously southern ;-) i did 60 to 60 for symmetry.
The South had a lot of power in Congress, though, much of it coming from seniority.
You don’t think of machine politics as being Southern, but I think that they had a version of it.
You don’t think of machine politics as being Southern, but I think that they had a version of it.
it was a one-party region between the collapse of the whigs in the 1850s and the rise of southern republicans after 1964. so i think that explains the lack of turnover to some extent; all the competition was internalized into the democratic party nomination process, where random outside actors were less likely to breakthrough than if it was put to the vote of the public.
New England, although it’s difficult to see much difference from the Quakers. And of course ignoring the intense religiosity of the Puritans.
Gentry culture has been dead for at least 100 years. The gentry ideal was a cavalier living on a large plantation, economically self-contained, with sharp social stratification from the lower orders. To make it work, a valuable export crop was necessary (tobacco, then cotton) and a source of cheap labor (indentures, then slaves).
It’s made two worthwhile contributions: the American Revolution and the modern concept of personal rights. The Revolution reflected aristocratic reaction to an overreaching king and was strongly supported by the Virginians. And a corollary to the lord of the manor ideal is that what you do in private is not the state’s business. The New Englanders had a much more limited idea of personal autonomy.
The people you’re referring to as Southerners are heirs of Borderlands Culture, aka Scots-Irish, aka Rednecks. Sen. Webb has written a book about the culture. There are some traits that are maladaptive in a modern society, such as poor social organization (no town greens in the Southern hills) and lack of emphasis on social advancement (including advanced education).
New England, although it’s difficult to see much difference from the Quakers.
no it isn’t. there’s plenty of data on socioeconomic & regional origins, literacy rate, etc., which differentiated the two groups. read albion’s seed and you’ll become aware of it.
The Revolution reflected aristocratic reaction to an overreaching king and was strongly supported by the Virginians. And a corollary to the lord of the manor ideal is that what you do in private is not the state’s business. The New Englanders had a much more limited idea of personal autonomy.
this is debatable. patriot fervor was concentrated both in new england and the south. the mercentile elites of the mid-atlantic were more likely to be royalists for obvious reasons of economic self-interest (just as the new englanders become “pro-english” in the early part of the 19th century due to their trade with the “mother country”).
I’ve read Albion’s Seed, and it seemed to me that the two northern cultures were glaringly different from the southerners in emphasis on nuclear family, large settlements and universal education, among other things.
I don’t put down the New England contribution to the Revolution. Both were necessary. But it was the last contribution of the Virginia gentry to US culture, depending on how you want to count what my ggrandfather referred to as “the late unpleasantness”.
and it seemed to me that the two northern cultures were glaringly different from the southerners in emphasis on nuclear family, large settlements and universal education, among other things.
no. the quakers were more educated than the southerners (on average), but far less than the puritans. on most of the measurable the metrics they were in between the other two. they were “lower middle class” from the midlands by origin, while the puritans were middle middle and upper middle from east anglia. it is perhaps arguable that the quakers were similar to the new englanders on most metrics, but not from what i recall when it came to literacy, where they were in the middle. i recall this very well because it surprised me.
I thought the quakers were from north of the midlands. Warwickshire and Northamptonshire are midlands and at the apex of the triangle for gentry origins. Aren’t quakers north and west of there? That region and East Anglia had strong Scandanavian influences. In East Anglia, Danes. In the north, a hodge-podge of traders and raiders. In both cases, people relate to a community larger than the famiily. We see this today in the Scandanavians, with their horrid socialism .
north midlands.
In East Anglia, Danes. In the north, a hodge-podge of traders and raiders. In both cases, people relate to a community larger than the famiily. We see this today in the Scandanavians, with their horrid socialism .
yes, east anglia was part of the danelaw. but 5 centuries prior to that it was the core of the saxon shore. and 5 centuries after it was part of the north sea trading network with close connections to the low countries. i’d be cautious as to putting the finger on the danes as the formative influence. next thing i know you’ll be telling me that north england’s labor support is due to the scandinavian character of northumbria ;-)
Gentry culture has been dead for at least 100 years. The gentry ideal was a cavalier living on a large plantation, economically self-contained, with sharp social stratification from the lower orders. To make it work, a valuable export crop was necessary (tobacco, then cotton) and a source of cheap labor (indentures, then slaves).
Lind in “Made in Texas” argues that the country club Bush Republicans, and Bush himself, are heirs of the E. Texas Confederate planters. They went into oil, a resource industry, and involved themselves in other, overseas, third-world resource industries. They believe in stratification and cheap, politically disempowered, minimally educated labor (whether native born, immigrant, or offshore).
oh, and remember that abroad americans are called “yankees.” why? my own hypothesis would be that it is because new england sailors were our first maritime people, so the first americans that most non-americans met in the 19th century were yankees.
John Emerson
I have little knowledge of the subject, but Lind’s description sounds accurate. I’n not sure how it fits into the gentry/borderlands distinction. Fischer points out that the borderlands culture tolerated large income disparities. It was cool to be rich as long as you weren’t uppity about it. Exploiting the help was tolerated, especially if they were an ethnic outgroup. So I wouldn’t characterize the classic Texas oilman as an extension of the gentry tradition.
Southern country clubbers (Republican if you insist on the tautology) tend to be heirs of the gentry’s manner, and sometimes their genes.
Razib:
You didn’t mention the Swedes in NJ. In my town, there’s a house consisting of a log cabin and sawn-plank addition of indeterminate date (I forget when the Swedes landed–and they brought Lithuanian slaves) but they’ve got a receipt from a Dutch ship-captain, dated 1639, for the bricks in the fireplace in the addition.
Also, from one of the links you’d provided, I went to the maps stippled to show concentrations of the different streams. And, of course, the inland, up-country South is the Scots-Irish “redneck” principal domain but, wonder of wonders, their highest concentration (black, actually) is right around Philadelphia and environs. And it makes sense, because almost all came thru the port here (and plenty stayed). Many lived in the Pine Barrens’ small towns and some, reclusively, in the deep scrub pine woods. Virtually all “jacklighted” deer for meat and there was no lack of moonshine. There’s plenty in the towns of SW NJ and, over in PA, they’re scattered in the poorer-land sections of Lancaster and York counties toward the Susquehanna (basically, wherever the PA Dutch aren’t).
A literacy survey (1820) found high-90% rates in Northern cities (Phila, NY, Boston), lower in rural areas, dropping off to 55% in rural SC.
In those days, Philly was the largest English-speaking city outside of London and the US had more newspapers than the rest of the world. De Toqueville also remarked on the high literacy rate even on the frontier (Michigan, Alabama, in those days) and how the newspaper brought by stagecoach was dinner conversation everywhere.
Razib:
Forgot to mention that here in NJ, we’ve got a whole string of originally-Quaker towns and a couple of old meeting-houses (and graveyards) dating to the 17th. Also a fair sprinkling of descendents of Hessian mercenaries (they were offered, and many took, the same mustering-out pay and land allowance as given American soldiers).
And it makes sense, because almost all came thru the port here (and plenty stayed). Many lived in the Pine Barrens’ small towns and some, reclusively, in the deep scrub pine woods. Virtually all “jacklighted” deer for meat and there was no lack of moonshine. There’s plenty in the towns of SW NJ and, over in PA, they’re scattered in the poorer-land sections of Lancaster and York counties toward the Susquehanna (basically, wherever the PA Dutch aren’t).
yes. there is some bizarre stuff on ethnic politics in 18th century pennsylvania. the quarker-origin elite of philadelphia ended up screwing and marginalizing the scots-irish in the backcountry by turning the german immigrants into a vote bank for their machine. as for the % of scots-irish in pennsylvania, they don’t call central PA alabama for nothing.
Roger Bigod:
When I was in high school (1950s), many of the southern states didn’t celebrate Thanksgiving (because, though it had long been a customary celebration, it was Lincoln who declared it a national holiday).
At the time of the Civil War, so many of the Southern planter class were so deeply in debt (to mostly Northern bankers) that it was a widely-circulated (and believed) story that seccession was primarily a ruse to reneg on debts. When the Confederacy issued bonds through a French banking house (and paid gold for the issue), the Union sent agents over (to England and France) that published the debts of the Confederate cabinet and congress: every one except the treasurer had years of accumulated unpaid loans (which chilled bond sales pretty fast). Then, the banking house talked the southern reps into buying a big chunk of the bonds (again, paid in gold) to “buoy” sales. But word got out, the scheme didn’t work, and the issue collapsed, with the Confederacy out-of-pocket bigtime and almost the only holder of their own bonds.
There was a US President (Tyler) who was born in 1795 and elected to office in 1840. My grandfather was born 100 years later (1895) and I’m 72, yet President Tyler’s grandson is alive today and about 8 years younger than I am. He lives in the house built (on the James River) by his grandfather’s great-grandfather, in 1621 (at which time he’d have to have been an adult (let’s say 25), so born 1596. That’s 412 years for 6 generations, an average of 68.6 years apiece. But Tyler died at 77 and his son at 79, meaning that the first 3 generations of Tylers had to have each sired sons at an average age of at least 64 years! Think that’s pretty studly? Well, it ain’t actually. You see, the way I could figure that out was that Tyler and his son (dying at 77 and 79) each sired their sons in the final year of their respective lives. Sounds to me as though each one of ‘em was just tryin’ to outdo his pappy, eh? And if you suspect hanky-panky, forget it! The current Tyler has got his Grandpop’s presidential portrait hanging there in the house and you wouldn’t be able to tell the two of ‘em apart. If you happen to stop by that way and knock at the door, he’ll be happy to show you around the place. Or, at least that’s what he said when I saw him on a C-Span piece about 8 or 10 years ago.
I have a friend in Austin, TX whose wife is a direct descendant of Mass. Gov. Bradford, lately of the Mayflower (and a little Miles Standish mixed elsewhere in the geneology). Her people stayed in MO awhile and then moved on to Texas. Their family’s property was “land-granted” to them by Spain in 1756. His folks’ ancestors were running a circus along the middle-Atlantic coast circa 1808 and many in their family followed similar paths. My friend got out of the business about 35 years ago and his younger brother closed his zoo (in NC) three years ago but can’t get away to retire ’cause he’s got a pair of macaques and a chimp older than he is (63) and a jaguar at least 54–and all of ‘em are old folks just like in a nursing home, decrepit and needing their Depends changed. They were all born there (except for the chimp), who was purchased (full-grown and ornery–had bitten two kids) in 1956 for $300 from a tourist zoo in York Beach, ME.
Razib:
There may have been German immigrants that voted with the Quakers but would very much doubt that true of Amish (there are many different communities with widely varying practices but voting is one of the most universally frowned-upon activities). I don’t know about the Mennonites. About ten years ago, I learned that many Amish will use scientific gadgetry (soil moisture meters, for instance) and glassware like beakers, flasks, etc., for running certain tests. Apparently, the biggest no-no is stuff that involves them with or makes them dependent on the outside world. Electricity from wires–bad. Batteries–good. Electric refrigerator bad, kerosene refrigerator good. Gasoline engine bad, steam engine good. And, from what I’ve read lately on the Net, wife’s snatch good, daughter’s snatch good (maybe better), and sisters’ snatches mighty handy. Sounds like they got big trouble in River City and it’s a matter of some severe distress to many of those gals.
It’s odd that in the US it’s the English New Englanders who liked education, not the Scots-Irish, whereas in Britain it’s the other way round. I don’t remember Albion’s Seed commenting on that rather obvious contrast, tho’ I admit that my memory is lousy.
Forgot to mention that here in NJ, we’ve got a whole string of originally-Quaker towns and a couple of old meeting-houses (and graveyards) dating to the 17th.
True, dat. My New Jersey hometown’s High School mascot was “The Fighting Quaker” in deference to the town’s Quaker founders. Kind of like “The Fighting Amishman” or “The Fighting Ghandi,” if you think about it.
There may have been German immigrants that voted with the Quakers but would very much doubt that true of Amish
yes, but most german immigrants were not amish or mennonites.
It’s odd that in the US it’s the English New Englanders who liked education, not the Scots-Irish, whereas in Britain it’s the other way round.
the scots-irish and new englanders are a subsample of scots-irish and englanders. the new englanders were mostly from east anglia, with the balance being from london.
I think that we better define what is meant by the term “culture.” If we mean legal and educational trends unique (maybe too strong a word) to the States then the concept of British influence has some validity, but if you mean music, food, fads, sports, and a host of other pursuits that make Americans different, then the contributions of Irish, Blacks, Germans and a host of other immigrants probably outshines those of the Puritans and Lowland English.
On the other hand, the influence of the Scots-Irish is pretty broad and often defines the character of Americans, especially in the eyes of non-Americans. Webb’s book points out the Jacksonian influence in out politics, music, and life style that still exists and is a formidable force in politics. Popular music from the minstrel period on (about 1830 or so) was dominated by Irish, Blacks and Jews until the 1940s while Rock and Roll is easily the venue of Black and Scots-Irish. Country music and Rock are archetypes of American culture, but I doubt that any Puritan Harvard graduate had much to do with it.
Of course there are British influences in our culture, we speak English after all, but to say that theirs is the main influence is wishful thinking on the part of those remaining Eastern snobs. :Grin:
At first when I read your post, I thought — what!Fitzgerald’s Babylon! The Great Satan! A Quaker!
But I think you’re on to something about this country becoming “Quaker”, or at least Quakerish in ideation.
A little genealogical research on a family line I’d thought was all southern creole (French,Spanish, Irish, British and African)turned up surprises. It had offshoots that led to — Quakers! I already knew about a bunch of New Haven, Connecticut families, who make me a distant cousin of Aaron Burr, Jonathan Edwards and Harriet Beecher Stowe among other illuminaries; but thousands of Americans are cousins in various degrees of these folks as colonial Yankees were extremely prolific and had comparatively low child mortality. However, the Quakers were a surprise. What the hell were they doing in Mobile, Alabama? Apparently a group of them, my forebears included, left Pennsylvania in the late 1600s, and settled in Georgia and the Carolinas, and some later in Alabama. That may explain why, in the late 1800s, two siblings of this family had married two siblings of a family known to be “mulatto” despite their mostly European appearance. One of the “Quakers” even put himself as “black” in the 1900 census (they took away the “mulatto” classification that year, though it was somewhat restored in 1910) when he was known to be from a white family. Yep. Self-congratulations by self-denial and identifying with the underclass was well underway at the dawn of the last century, thanks to Quakers who know what’s best for us all.
“South including the lowland and upland southerners plus (in many respects) the interior west south of Montana. After the Civil War a lot of Southerners headed West.”
The migration tended to be lateral. The emmigrants didn’t usually veer strongly to the north or south, but went straight west. Thus a lot of New Englanders and upstate New Yorkers ended up in the Dakotas and, of course, Oregon and Washington State, which explains a lot.
The southwest got the real southerners, as Lonesome Dove so well portrayed the defeated Confederates and womenfolk taking off for Texas, Arizona etc. The mid-Atlantic dwellers went to the central western areas.
mikeyes, new england was the first universal literacy society predicated on middle class dominance (the colony purposely excluded the blooded nobility and lower classes). that’s what i mean. cracker individualism, gentry cash crop economy an lifestyle leisure, and the extreme inequality characterized by new netherlands and a lesser extent pennsylvania (the dutch patroons ha neo-feudal estates in the hudson valley as late as the 19th century!) are also part of the american story. leftists might argue that the model of new netherlands, with its powerful capital class controlling economic production and trade, is a better description of america. but, i think the new england model of a middle class society and its virtues of civic engagement is a better guide as the prescription which won out. jefferson’s yeoman farmer is no more. the anti-egalitarian economies of production in the south and trade in the mid-atlantic are realities in some ways, but they aren’t idealize, except perhaps by objectivists.
gene berman
At the time of the Civil War, so many of the Southern planter class were so deeply in debt (to mostly Northern bankers) that it was a widely-circulated (and believed) story that seccession was primarily a ruse to reneg on debts.
The same was true of the VA gentry and the Revolution. They owed huge sums to English trading houses and the legislature voided the debts after the war started. John Marshall’s early career in Richmond was defending the planters against attempts to collect. One provision of an important post-war treaty with England was the enforceability of the debts, and this was upheld by the USSC in the 1790′s.
[Tyler] lives in the house built (on the James River)
Where on the James? I know about Harrison’s Landing, close to William Byrd II’s stomping grounds. Didn’t remember the Tylers.
I have a friend in Austin, TX whose wife is a direct descendant of Mass. Gov. Bradford, lately of the Mayflower
There’s a place in NW Louisiana a few miles from the Red River called “Alden Bridge”. It’s named after one Philo Alden, descendant of the historical John Alden. He came from NY well before 1840, when a huge raft of fallen trees and decaying vegetation was removed, opening the river for navigation. Mr. Alden was interested in timber, including large stands of cypress. Later, he built a sawmill, and to reach it, a bridge over a small stream. The mill and the bridge are gone over a century, but Philo’s name is still on the land as a term for the neighborhood. Philo went on to become High Sheriff of the Parish in the 1850′s, but I’m aware of no New England influence he left.
Razib,
You are clearly a fan of Alexis de Tocqueville who thought that the Southerners were “men without character” (mostly due to the introduction of slavery) while the Northern English were “the first in enlightenment, in power and in happiness” with the possible exception of their trying to wipe out the Indians who lived there. I happen to agree that the opportunity to own land and become wealthy is a basic reason for the success of the United States and that the NE version of this idea (versus the one that promoted slavery) is the one that predominated and shaped our society.
But that is not all that our culture is. You will say that without the base provided by this polity our society would never have developed the way it is now, and I agree, but I suspect that our culture evolved in spite what the New Englanders wanted. If you look at the other cultural issues that they introduced such as state religion in all the NE states except RI, refusal to allow immigrants to be taught in public schools, etc., you will can surmise that the egalitarian society de Tocqueville saw was farthest from their minds. Other cultural values from other places changed all that.
The NE English were insular if nothing else and did not invite others to join. In fact it was only the influx of the Irish and others that forced their hand to accept changes in MA and then they delayed it as much as possible.
If you assume that the political philosopy of the NE prevailed forming the skeleton of our culture you also have to admit that the rules changed once the Civil War occurred and those outsiders had to be incorporated. While the original rules often favored the originators, culture was forever changed by the immigrants and continues to be changed as groups contribute to the mix.
Ironically it was NE that changed the slowest, mostly MA, as the elite fought as long as they could. One of de Tocqueville’s observations in 1835 was that the States was not an intellectual and educational meritocracy. Instead there was a buffering force that ignored superior intellect or education in favor of earning power and hard work. While those NE elites were educated, the schools they attended (Yale, Harvard, etc.) were more like boy’s clubs whose purpose was to improve the lot of the attendees most of whom came from wealth to begin with, not necessarily to improve the intellect. It was a way of perpetuating the status quo. It wasn’t until the 60s or 70s that the “Jewish quota” and other means of avoiding the underclasses were eliminated (only to be re-instituted later on as an intellectual meritocracy) that the full result of the founder’s philosophy came to light in NE.
I think that the culture you see in the United States now was an unintended consequence for which we are all forever grateful.
You are clearly a fan of Alexis de Tocqueville
actually, i’m totally not. de tocqueville is OK for literature, but i prefer cliometrics after all.
I couldn’t help but note that today New England isn’t included in the “Real America.”
What role might heavy non-British immigration have played in hardening that attitude toward New England proper and the upper Atlantic region generally?
razib,
the south did very well before 1860 too. in fact, southern dominance was more pronounced then. every president was southern, or had southern sympathies, except for the two adamses.
Your third sentence is accurate, but fails to justify the two that precede it.
The US today has a black (more precisely, mulatto) president-elect, and all his predecessors for the last 50 years can be accurately described as “pro-black” in just the same sense that Northern “doughfaces” such as Buchanan were “pro-Southern” – ie, in political controversies involving blacks, they tended to side with the blacks.
Nonetheless, to infer from this evidence that the US political system exhibits “black dominance” would be a considerable leap. Some might be willing to take it – but not, I suspect, you!
The best evidence for who was wearing the pants in the pre-1860 North-South relationship is the flow of tax revenues, which (due to Northern protectionism) was overwhelmingly from the South (source of hard-currency exports) to the North (home of industrial protection and “internal improvements.”
Presumably, if the South had actually been “dominant,” they would have been taking rather than giving. And it also would have been the South that coercively opposed Northern secession (the project of most early abolitionists), not the other way around. The South, of course, was also less populous, militarily weaker, etc, etc.
So why all the Southern and doughface presidents? My theory is simple – for the South, keeping Washington under control was a matter of life and death. As results proved. Therefore, the story of the “Slave Power” presidents is the standard story of a minority interest group whose disproportionate influence is the result of its disproportionate sensitivity to the outcome, much like the influence of Miami Cubans over US-Cuba policy.
The South did not use its Tylers, Buchanans, Taneys, etc, to impose slavery on the North, reverse the flow of tax revenue, etc, etc. It used them to preserve the old constitution, preventing what was called “consolidation” at the time, keeping Washington small and impotent and the federal system highly decentralized.
In other words, the “Slave Power” is best understood as a defensive response to Northern nationalism and abolitionism. This does not make it right or wrong, of course, but it is very hard to see the South as “dominant” except in the good old sense of Cet animal est tres mechant; quand on l’attaque, il se defend.
Here is a great overview of the conflict, written by an anonymous Southern essayist in 1850 – highly prescient. (Hat tip: the Carlyle-Mill debate page, which is full of other great links.)
American readers (ie, those who can access Google Books, and have an unhealthy interest in the “late unpleasantness”) might also enjoy Mary Scrugham’s 1921 classic, The Peaceable Americans of 1860-61. Written from a Kentuckian perspective, it makes the case for Bell and the Constitutional Union movement.
(This was Scrugham’s PhD thesis at Columbia. I can’t find any other work by her – I suspect she got married, or something. Pity.)
Most of the best historical work on the Civil War and Reconstruction after was written either immediately after (eg, George Lunt’s Origin of the Late War – Boston, 1866! Now that took some balls…) or in the first half of the 20th century (eg, Craven, Burgess, Dunning, Rhodes…). Post-1945 histories tend to adopt a triumphalist neo-Unionist tone which I find quite distasteful, and the occasional neo-Confederate work (eg, DiLorenzo) is not much better.
Of course, this is history, ie, literary history. Those who prefer cliometrics will have to get their pointers from razib ;-) Note, however, that an unmixed diet of post-1945 history is enough to drive anyone to cliometrics! While there is no excuse for dissing Tocqueville, reading today’s inferior product and deciding you don’t like history is about as understandable as listening to Kenny G and deciding you don’t like jazz.
Harvard and Yale described New England in its earliest days. They and other Ivy Leagues started as religious institutions just as the earliest universities in Europe started with the patronage of the Catholic Church, whatever the sentiments of the faculty centuries later. I always thought the Civil War hero, Joshua Chamberlain, was the quintessential Yankee, par none. As the tale goes: In his early teens he was stuck with horse and wagon on one side of the river. His impatient father said to get to the other side. “How?” cried the boy. “I don’t care,” growled dad, “Just DO it.”
So little Joshua did it. Yankees had a reputation for practical invention and for getting things done without b.s. It’s not for nothing that Edison described genius as 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration. His contemporary and sometime rival, Nicola Tesla, son of Serbian peasant clergy, reversed those percentages to explain his own inventions.
Chamberlain’s idealism, the physical courage so startling and unexpected when one considers his mentality and pre-war intellectual life-style, the tendency to see life as a struggle towards the light, towards something higher, are all . It’s not for nothing that the Utopian movements emanated from New England. I know of none that came from the South or mid-Atlantic.
For Chamberlain, war veteran get togethers were transcendental experiences. He used that term some 50 years before the 1960s counter culture made it famous.
But I’m not sure about the U.S. becoming the new New England. Too many Yankee inventions are made in China. To really manifest his powers, a Yankee must DO it himself.
Mencius, the south had disproportionate power in relation to its population. you’re great at winning arguments by defining a metric you like, so fine. no argument, better things to do than argue with you (like reading things you might refer to actually). the north (or monied interests more precisely) would have liked the BUS too, but that didn’t happen. though i have to say that the tariff “deal” which van buren pushed through under jackson seems a bit more complicated than a straight win for the north, but honestly i don’t know the details of tariff policy well enough to really get into an informed discussion about it.
The South did not use its Tylers, Buchanans, Taneys, etc, to impose slavery on the North
The South was intent on imposing slavery on the new states of the west and on forcing northerners to return fugitive slaves. These were two of the most important issues leading to the Civil War. A lot of northerners probably would have been willing to grandaddy in slavery in the states where it was already.
An anti-abolitionist tone sympathetic to the South (though not to Slavery) was normal in American history at least as late as 1960. Post War triumphalism was met with a lot of revisionism at a certain point. What you got depended on where you were — a friend of mine got a southern point of view in a Catholic university in Boston. (Boston U or Boston College, whichever is Catholic).
The Civil War is a pretty good example of how determined minorities can push an issue to a breaking point and leave the centrists with no option. But this happened after a couple of decades of unsuccessful attempts at compromise.
razib, the question of “who had more power” is so subtle as to be almost aesthetic. Reasonable people can disagree. (There are reasonable people on each side of every war.) Acknowledging that the matter is controversial is quite sufficient.
As you mention, the South before the war tended to use whatever power it had to block things and make them not happen. Sometimes in alliance with the West it would seem more like a motive force – eg, the Mexican War. But in general, the prewar Democrats were the “party of no.”
What’s also indisputable is that this annoyed the Boston aristocracy and the liberal intelligentsia no end, to the point where most of these normally peaceable people had their fangs out dripping for blood. The Northern ideologists saw the US as the leader of the radical, republican, and/or revolutionary movement, and this do-nothing government under the corrupt domination of manorial barons wasn’t exactly their cup of tea. Sadly, the Washington that war made wasn’t either.
(I’ve seen late-1850s letters from Henry Adams and Carl Schurz, to name two, in which they explicitly hope for a war. And, of course, in retrospect all the people in 2008 who believe that the war of 1861-65 was in some sense a prudent or rational war are exhibiting the same bloodlust in hindsight, a mistake Henry Adams’ generation did not make. See, for example, this address, given in 1913 in Charleston (!), by his brother CF Jr.)
1) Indiana is the exception to the east-west settlement of North America. Settled from the south by kentuckians, it’s the original flyover country.
2) Yale was not like Harvard. It always had pro-southern sympathies, and a lot of southern students. Check out the difference between the Harvard and Yale civil war monuments.
3) Mencius wrote: The best evidence for who was wearing the pants in the pre-1860 North-South relationship is the flow of tax revenues
Really? Why? I’d say the best metric is the expansion of slavery to new western states, as the economic interests of the slave-owning elite was to maximize the value of their human assets. More slave states (combined with the prohibition on importation of enslaved humans) made them richer. By that metric, the slavers were very successful, first getting the popular soveriegnty doctrine, with the possiblity of no limits on slave expansion in the west, and then (thru the Taney court and Buchanan’S lobbying) the Dred Scott decision, which prohibited territories from banning slavery and implied that states were similarly restricted.
Effectively, this would have made slavery the law of the land throughout the USA. Given their numerical and economic weakness, the political power of the slavers in pre-civil war USA is astonishing.
(Don’t just look at the presidency. Also look at control of the Supreme Court and Congress)
1) Indiana is the exception to the east-west settlement of North America. Settled from the south by kentuckians, it’s the original flyover country.
southern “butternuts” were dominant in the southern 2/3 of illinois and ohio as well (cincinnati was somewhat exceptional, in part because of the huge german community). before the completion of the erie canal the yankee settlement of the northerns of the midwest was not as vigorous, while the ohio river valley was always a relatively convenient transporation artery.
I’d say the best metric is the expansion of slavery to new western states, as the economic interests of the slave-owning elite was to maximize the value of their human assets. More slave states (combined with the prohibition on importation of enslaved humans) made them richer.
Frankly, I don’t know where you heard this, but “nonsense” is not too strong a word for it. It was always clear that expansion of slavery, as an actual practice, to the West would be limited – it was a function of the cotton belt.
The primary practical motivation behind the South’s insistence on slavery in the territories was the desire not to be outvoted in the Senate, where the free-state/slave-state balance was critical. The principle on which the South stood, if you think slaveholders are entitled to have any principles at all, was that since the territories belonged to all Americans north and south, discriminatory regulations intended to prevent Southerners from migrating there were not fair play.
Furthermore, the South did not do well in this game at all. It was always making concessions in return for promises to enforce the fugitive-slave compromise in the Constitution, and insinuations that the antislavery agitation could be ended by yet another cave-in. The promises were seldom well-kept in practice, and the antislavery agitation is still going strong.
(For those interested in the reality of African slavery in the US, there is actually a good book published in the ’70s – Eugene Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll. For those not so interested, stick with Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Howard Zinn, etc.)
The South was intent on imposing slavery on the new states of the west and on forcing northerners to return fugitive slaves.
On the expansion of slavery, see my earlier comment. And if the North didn’t want to return fugitive slaves, it probably shouldn’t have promised to do so in the Constitution. (At least as a legal brief, the South’s case in the war is a lot more compelling. The North’s case makes a much better sermon, however.)
(Today, if a child runs away from New Jersey to California, California will (in theory) find him and return him. In chains! Well, if necessary. From a legal perspective, that’s what a slave is: an adult unrelated dependent. If you’ve ever wondered why the term “emancipation” is used both for manumitting a slave and disowning a minor, this is why.)
Also, you probably need to decide whether you’re going to go all in with the Slave Power conspiracy theory, or not. Do you agree that (a) the Union could not exist “half slave and half free,” (b) the war between the North and South was an an “irrepressible conflict” (ie, had to happen, so no one can possibly be blamed for starting it), and (c) that, as Lincoln suggested, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Roger Taney and Stephen Douglas had a secret plan for extending slavery to the North? If so…
Mencius wrote:
It was always clear that expansion of slavery, as an actual practice, to the West would be limited – it was a function of the cotton belt
Do you have a cite for that. Or some argument, beyond “it was always clear”.
Once upon a time, you used to see people cite Charles Ramsdell’s “The Natural Limits
of Slavery Expansion” (American Historical Review, Sept 1929). It’s old and superseded. Read Nobel winning economic historian Robert Fogel’s book “Without consent or contract”. Slavery was most profitable in a cotton plantation, but depending on the price of a enslaved human, it was not impracticable in other areas (e.g. mining).
(And yes, Lincoln’s contention of a second Dred Scott, this time for free states, was not far fetched. A case of this sort was winding its way to the USC, and the Dred Scott decision clearly indicated which way some members of the Taney court leaned.)
Mencius, you seem to have locked yourself into a contrarian position. There wasn’t much admirable about the Old South in 1860, and the people who regret its passing today are a sorry lot. Hardly anyone outside Saudi Arabia takes a nuanced view of slavery anymore.
There are all kinds of little tweaks and quibbles you can use to make your case as long as the person you are arguing with is not a specialist in the era, but most of us have multiple reasons for disagreeing with what you say. If you want to argue with people who know their stuff, both “Lawyers, Guns, and Money” and “The Best of the American West” have Civil War posts often enough, and the people there know really their stuff.
In favor of the economic determinism position is the fact that many Virginians freed their slaves beginning around 1790. The law professor at William & Mary, St. George Tucker, wrote a treatise on the law of slavery which was highly critical of the institution. He proposed a scheme for phasing it out.
This was after the tobacco market had cratered and before the rise of cotton culture. It’s hard to avoid the connection.
I’ve enjoyed some de Tocqueville, but I’ll take either of Jared Diamond or Michael Hart for all their flaws over him.
I don’t think the Mexican-American war can be so easily dismissed without explanation (as you did with the “curious exception” of Afghan guerrillas defeating the Soviets). I also think the fugitive slave act is pretty significant and I don’t know where in the Constitution any states were obligated to return slaves (I suppose that should make the FSA superfluous). You’re right though that the South was payings lots of taxes going toward infrastructure that primarily benefitted the North (as did the tariffs’ protection).
Politically the Democrats seem to have been the dominant party. The opposition kept changing parties because the previous incarnation kept falling apart. I’d also add that the fact that we re-entered a full-fledged war with England but only had a quasi-war with France is evidence of the South having the upper hand over New Englanders.
Russ Robert’s has an EconTalk podcast the author of “Time on the Cross” about the economics of slavery (which Adam Smith was apparently wrong about):
http://www.econtalk.org//archives/2006/11/engerman_on_sla.html
Ikram,
I endorse the traditional “natural limits” argument. Clever 20th-century arguments do not cut much ice over 19th-century experience on this one. The fact is that it was hard to get slaveholders to move to Missouri, much less further west.
I’m not sure what you mean by “a second Dred Scott for free states” as the whole point of Dred Scott was that expropriation of slaves was unconstitutional. Technically, one could easily read Dred Scott as legalizing slavery nationwide, and that was certainly the “paranoid style” interpretation of it at the time.
Dred Scott, originally a test case brought by abolitionists, was one of many dreadful tactical mistakes by Southern statesmen. The idea of slave factories in Massachusetts was always preposterous, and it was certainly not the goal of those who wrote the ruling. Taney’s intent, I think, was just to kill the antislavery movement by judicial fiat – much as Brown v. Board killed the segregation movement. Sadly, the medicine was wildly insufficient for the disease. The Court was simply not powerful enough to prevail.
John,
For you – of all people – the present popularity of a thesis is evidence of its accuracy? Frankly, I have never understood how a thinker as original and perceptive as you can remain entranced by 20th-century progressivism.
I don’t suppose I’ll change your mind, or you mine. But if you’re interested in grappling further with the issue, for you I particularly recommend CF Adams Jr.’s Charleston address (‘Tis Sixty Years Since). Adams was the grandson and great-grandson of Presidents, plus a Union general himself. So I feel he is entitled to an opinion on the subject – although he did live in the past, not the present, and must therefore attract your automatic contempt.
On slavery in specific, if you are interested in making up your own mind rather than having it made up for you, I recommend browsing the Slave Narratives. You might find yourself surprised. Note that writers who claim that the Civil War and its aftermath had a generally positive effect on individual African-Americans are rather hard to find. There are also some cool prewar sources, such as this – by a Congregationalist minister from Massachusetts.
Also, I find an excellent way to reconsider one’s views on the “late unpleasantness” as a whole is to read one or two Southern apologias – such as Pollard’s infamous Lost Cause, Rev. Dabney’s mind-boggling Defence of Virginia, or Admiral Semmes’ winter beach-reading Memoirs of Service Afloat; then following it with an unrepentant abolitionist or two, such as John Ferguson Hume’s The Abolitionists or James Freeman Clarke’s Anti-Slavery Days. (I appear to have used up my URL limit for today.)
Seems that it would be interesting to see to what extent these colonization patterns were rooted in genetics.
Is it a coincidence that Europeans could not colonize the heart of Africa? Most attribute it to heat tolerance and disease resistance.
The army has collected data which show substantial differences in cold/heat tolerance between whites and blacks, in the predictable directions.
This surely influenced settling patterns and eventuaLly political outcomes
even within ethniciities is it a coincidence that the Finns colonzed the northern peninsula of Michigan?
Today, if a child runs away from New Jersey to California, California will (in theory) find him and return him. In chains! Well, if necessary. From a legal perspective, that’s what a slave is: an adult unrelated dependent. If you’ve ever wondered why the term “emancipation” is used both for manumitting a slave and disowning a minor, this is why.
There is, however, one major difference: slaves could be bought and sold, children of course cannot.
Mencius, you’re not really seeming like less of a contrarian with that kind of argument. My disagreement with you is overdetermined and multi-faceted. For me to argue the points you would like me to, I’d have to spend several months of research, and it’s not a priority for me. As far as orthodoxy and conventionality go, the anti-abolitionist position was, as I said, popular if not dominant in my youth.
And are you seriously taking the Saudi position on slavery? Are the Saudis wise to preserve this ancient, wrongly-maligned institution? I’m unashamed of my closed-mindedness on this issue. It seems to be one which has been pretty definitively settled, and the only way I can see a reversion would be with a collapse of the world economy and state system and a return to agrarianism and warlord rule. Which I’m again closedminded about, viewing it to be an entirely undesirable outcome.
Possibly my views about this are colored by the fact that I’ve never learned anything about the South that made feel good about it. You have the novels, and the music from both races, but as an actually existing place it’s always seemed to be generally repellent. I’m not really a courtly gentleman, you know.
As for the Progressives, I happen to live in the heartland of successful progressivism/populism/agrarian leftism. Five or ten important national politicians of that general description grew up within about 60 miles of my little town. it’s pretty indigenous for me.
Many writers about the Civil War wish that slavery could have been abolished in a less bloody fashion, and some see turning points where the war might have been avoided. Many also regard the abolitionists as have been politically unrealistic and excessively bloodthirsty. But that’s as revisionist as I’ll get, and I’m also sympathetic to the abolitionists themselves.
For the record, Dred Scott’s owner was named John Emerson. A very distant relative at worst, probaby from the Southern Emersons who may or may not have been related to the Yankee Emersons.
In Winnipeg, which is the coldest large city outside Mongolia and Siberia, there are 70,000 Filipinos. I’d love to see an interview of some of the early immigrants.
Winnipeg is home to nearly 37,000 Filipinos making them the third largest Filipino community in Canada. The Filipino community in Winnipeg is the largest visible minority group in Winnipeg ahead of the Chinese-Canadians and Indo-Canadians. Winnipeg is home to the oldest Filipino community in Canada with Filipino immigration to Winnipeg beginning before 1950. Winnipeg was home to the largest Filipino community before the 1980s. About 1 out of 10 Filipinos in Canada call Winnipeg home. There is also Filipino community centre called The Philippine Canadian Centre of Manitoba (PCCM) providing social and service to the Filipino community and also holds events such as Folklorama. There are a lot of Filipino politicians that live in Winnipeg. There are also Filipino newspapers such as The Pilipino Express News Magazine, The Filipino Journal, Ang Peryodiko and others. There is also a radio station, CKJS, which broadcasts Filipino related news, music, lifestyle and much more.
TGGP, Tocqueville and Diamond are not really comparable at all. Tocqueville talks about American institutions and culture from a historical and political point of view, whereas Diamond talks about global history from a biological point of view.
The thing that people about Diamond is that he’s not merely a literary historian, he’s almost a pop historian. His books are studded with conjectures and snap judgments. I love him for his scope, for the new material he brings in, and for the boldness of his hypotheses, but there’s nothing scientific or intellectually powerful about the overal structure of his books.
History really isn’t and shouldn’t by scientific, since your always dealing with particulars, unpredictable transformations, inadequate data, and so on. Just look at how a physicist or chemist works and how physical and chemical theories are constructed and tested, and then look at a historian.
Using lots of scientific data or making materialist-naturalist-reductive hypotheses does not in itself make history scientific. You can call it critical history or naturalistic history, bit it’s still literary in it’s overarching structure.
TGGP – just for the record – Article 4 Section 2:
No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, But shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due
The constitution is sometimes vague, but that clause is about as definitive as it gets.
TGGP, Tocqueville and Diamond are not really comparable at all. Tocqueville talks about American institutions and culture from a historical and political point of view, whereas Diamond talks about global history from a biological point of view.
The thing that people don’t realize about Diamond is that he’s not merely a literary historian, he’s almost a pop historian. His books are studded with conjectures and snap judgments. I love him for his scope, for the new material he brings in, and for the boldness of his hypotheses, but there’s nothing scientific or intellectually powerful about the overall structure of his books.
History really isn’t and shouldn’t be scientific, since you’re always dealing with particulars, unpredictable transformations, inadequate data, and so on. Just look at how a physicist or chemist works and how physical and chemical theories are constructed and tested, and then look at a historian.
Using lots of scientific data or making materialist-naturalist-reductive hypotheses does not in itself make history scientific. You can call it critical history or naturalistic history, but it’s still literary in its overarching structure.
[I just couldn't stand all those mistakes. Too much coffee].
John,
History really isn’t and shouldn’t be scientific, since you’re always dealing with particulars, unpredictable transformations, inadequate data, and so on. Just look at how a physicist or chemist works and how physical and chemical theories are constructed and tested, and then look at a historian.
Using lots of scientific data or making materialist-naturalist-reductive hypotheses does not in itself make history scientific. You can call it critical history or naturalistic history, but it’s still literary in its overarching structure.
How can I possibly quarrel with someone who says things like this? Frankly, we need to stick together to protect ourselves from razib.
All I can say is: there’s a difference between not understanding the Southern narrative of the period, and not agreeing with the Southern narrative of the period. Unfortunately, most educated people these days seem to skip the first and go straight to the second. This was fine for the twentieth century, I guess, but in in a world where Semmes and Dabney are a click away at Google, I suspect it will prove increasingly difficult to sustain.
Roger,
Tucker’s dissertation on slavery looks quite interesting, but sadly only excerpts are online. (Hey, Google! Does the date “1861″ mean anything to you? Subtraction – ur doin it rong.) Thanks for the pointer, though.
Mencius
Tucker wrote the treatise on slavery in the early 1790′s, and there is a publication date of 1796. The 1861 edition would have been a reprinting.
It’s notable that he was able to publish it without apparent damage to a long and successful legal career. This would probably not have been possible in most of the South at a later date. Also, he was concerned with the real-world operation of the institution, not just the cases he examined, an approach that seems advanced for the 18th Cent. Both these features tend to confirm my impression that the 19th Cent, especially in the South, was a period of coarsening and retrogression.
An aside: St. George Tucker was stepfather to John Randolph, the eccentric Congressman. There are a couple of books on an incident involving the Randolphs, in which Tucker plays the role of sane advisor trying to temper their financial, emotional and sexual excesses.
Everybody,
Let us have some views on Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations.
For a layman, the original paper was simple and offered solutions.
He has quoted M.J.Akbar who is still active in India as journo.
Mencuis wrote:
I endorse the traditional “natural limits” argument.
Hmm. It’s no doubt a daunting task to attempt to refute such a powerful argument. And I’ll forsake the “appeal to authority” — as one could argue that the arguments in a book by a Nobel prize winning economist and cliometrician (Fogel) published by Norton rank equal to two sentences by pseudonymous commentor published on an internet blog (Mencius).
Using the labour of enslaved human beings was immensely profitable in cotton plantations. It drove up the price of a human slave, making it — at the time — economically less viable to use slave labour in other economic sectors. But slave system, from an economic persepctive, was very adaptable. It’s shift from indigo to rice to tobacco to cotton in the US shows its adaptability and resilience. Slavery — technically — was an economic technique to extract a certain type of labour at a cheap price. It’s prevalence in cotton was a function of high slave labour productivity in a cotton plantation, not a lack of producivity in other areas.
Using the labour of enslaved humans was also adaptable to industrial prodiction, — at times, slaves made up half the workers at the Tredegar Iron Works, the South’s only important iron foundry.
(I’m rehashing a lot of Fogel’s arguments. Given that it uses new-fangled 20th century arguments you abjure, maybe restating them now in the 21st century will allow you to consider them with an open mind.)
As for Dred Scott, I’m not sure where to begin The Taney decision not only considered the status of Dred Scott — as a result of his sojourn in illinious — is also went out of its way to invalidate part of the Missouri comprmise. This is astonishing because the Act had already been superseded by the 1954 Kansdas-nebraska act (“Popular soveriegnty”)
KJS
For erudite goofiness, it’s hard to beat Oswald Spengler. I came across it in a library with a lot of old books, without knowing anything about the author or the controversies it spawned. That’s the best approach, I think.
Works for most other books, too.
Roger,
You’re right – Spengler is much more fun than Huntington.
The Southern “coarsening” you detect, which is certainly real although like anything it is subject to a variety of evaluations, is almost certainly best explained as a reaction to the antislavery movement. As late as 1831, the House of Burgesses (Virginia) almost voted to abolish slavery. 20 years later, of course, this would have been inconceivable. This is your “coarsening.”
Until the American antislavery movement began to look like a real threat to the South, there was no “proslavery movement,” there was no inverse-PC effect in which it was socially unacceptable to criticize slavery, widespread press censorship, or any of the tendencies unattractive to the modern eye which the Southern regime later assumed.
You’ve got to remember that the early abolitionists tended to favor what might be called the “San Domingo” approach to abolishing slavery – ie, a massive slave revolt in which whites were expropriated at best and murdered at worst. A la Nat Turner, of course, and also John Brown.
When it became clear that the aristocracy of Boston was behind John Brown, a divorce filing was to be expected. The abolitionists, of course, having spent the first fifteen years of their crusade arguing that the North was morally obliged to divorce the South, shifted instantly to the position that the South was legally barred from divorcing the North. This maneuver cannot come as a surprise to any historical student of the Puritan, whose supple conscience has so often out-Jesuited the Jesuits themselves.
And nowadays, John Brown is in style again. Is it any wonder we have a problem with terrorism?
Ikram,
Fogel’s position is certainly defensible. The reason I don’t favor it is that I see Southern slavery as a specific institution, not an economic abstraction.
Slavery as an economic abstraction is surely profitable – the term “slavery” is a vast and invidious generalization, but if it means anything it means a legal framework in which long-term labor contracts are negotiable and enforceable. Since I have no problem at all with long-term labor contracts, I suppose I am pro-slavery, although I am not as sure about hereditary slavery (in which a child’s labor rights pass automatically to the owner of its mother’s).
Moreover, the partial ownership of labor rights which is expressed by income taxation is an obvious relative of slavery. You can see slavery as a sort of micro-sovereignty, much like its close relative European feudalism. The evolutionary path from the manorial corvee to the IRS is clear. Since I don’t have a problem with taxation, I cannot object to slavery in general. And taxation is profitable pretty much by definition.
However, Southern slavery as a specific institution involved a specific population and a specific legal framework, both of which were well-adapted to certain kinds of agricultural labor. The evidence that this combination of persons and practices was well adapted to industrial labor is thin – at best.
Basically, if industrial slavery, in the American South with African-American slaves, was profitable, why didn’t we see an antebellum industrial base in the South? Why, instead, did the South import industrial goods from Britain and the North? (I suspect the “at times” at the Tredegar Iron Works was, um, wartime.)
And Fogel’s line of reasoning is being deployed historically to justify the fact that a great deal of Northern public support for the war (especially in the West, where the “free labor” ideology was often more racist than anything coming out of the South) was a consequence of what, to the 21st-century eye, looks a lot like a conspiracy theory. Even more curiously, much the same can be said about the Revolutionary War. Certainly predates Hitler by a number of years…
“Slavery was most profitable in a cotton plantation, but depending on the price of a enslaved human, it was not impracticable in other areas (e.g. mining).”
history is full of what ifs, but the fact of North American slavery is that it was almost all confined to privately owned, family farms.
If they were really big enterprises, they were called plantations. Mulattos and even a few blacks owned slaves. I know–my ancestors were among them. I have seen records of my “griffe” grandmother, 5x removed, having her slaves baptized. She herself had been a slave, became a common wife of her “master” who freed her and her many children. She inherited the slaves and she lived to be about 90, dying in the 1840s. Some blacks make excuses for these cases, saying the blacks and mulattos who inherited slaves did so to free them. Maybe some, but only the Civil War freed most slaves, even when the owners were black or “of color.”
Fairly common story among mixed people in the Gulf area. When you think about, many of the slaves came from slave holding societies in Africa. Some had Muslim backgrounds (the Arabs were into slave trading big time.) If it was god’s will you were a slave, so be it, they may have thought.
Slaves made wealth for individual families, though large plantations, esp. in the Caribbean, did make sugar very cheap.
Most of the North was opposed to slavery as was Europe. The pressure of Great Britain on the United States was as strong as that put by the U.S. or South Africa in 80s, or Iraq in the 90s.
Slavery almost certainly–though one can never know such things for sure–would never have spread beyond the areas it already existed. The terrible bloodiness in Kansas during the 1850s, involving mostly whites either opposing or supporting it, undoubtedly had a discouraging effect.
In the long run, the change of economy would have ended it. Most historians have said it would have ended by the 1880s, which is about the time most South American countries ended it. If you’re the slave, though, that’s a long time to wait.
Roger,
Google Books is still very hit and miss before 1850, and the 1861 edition of St. George Tucker on slavery is the first they know of. Of course, they have his commentaries on the Constitution, although a better rip is here.
Speaking of Tuckers, however, don’t miss the unrelated Dean Tucker (Josiah Tucker), who more or less eats Locke alive in his Treatise considering Civil Government (1781). If you care to see democracy wittily torn to shreds with the faggy, lisping long S, Dean Tucker is just the prelate for you.
(Indeed I suspect our ignorance of Tucker, and others like him, is best ascribed to what well might be termed “episcophobia.” There is considerable concordance between Tucker and modern historians like Bailyn, and both would agree that the irrational fear of bishops played a considerable role in the political history of North America.)
Most historians have said it would have ended by the 1880s, which is about the time most South American countries ended it
most of spanish south america (exclude cuba) outlawed it in the early 19th century after independence. slavery was one of the reasons that the texans revolted against mexico. OTOH, since you are probably thinking of brazil, which had most of the slaves in south america, most south american slaves were freed in the 1880s.
Mencius-
I read some of your book recommendations after you posted them on your blog ( C.F. Adams, Nehemiah Adams, Thomas Page ). It is mind blowing stuff. The Sith library indeed.
What’s your ultimate take on the issue? Are you actually taking the Confederate line? Was slavery as practiced in the South a generally acceptable institution in your mind?
The Southern “coarsening” you detect, which is certainly real although like anything it is subject to a variety of evaluations, is almost certainly best explained as a reaction to the antislavery movement.
It’s a general wordiness and imprecision of language that turns up in most of the written prose of the time. It may reflect fashions of the Victorian period, but it’s especially evident in the slavery apologetics. The writers evade a discussion of the economics and the unpleasant features of the institution.
In the broader view, the “antislavery movement” was irrelevant, because outside the South, Europe and the rest of North America was a Bad Thing. It’s difficult to do cliometrics on the Zeitgeist, but clearly there was change in perception of the role of the individual which was in conflict with slavery. IIRC, the Constitution recognizes this in a time limit on the trade. And to the extent that people started thinking of themselves as US citizens, not citizens of individual states, they started to notice the glaring contrast with the use of “freedom”, “liberty” and “rights” in the founding documents. These changes would have happened without the agitation of the abolitionists.
… if it means anything it means a legal framework in which long-term labor contracts are negotiable and enforceable.
This is insane.
The Sith library indeed.
The crisp, definitive statement of the issue is due to Richard Henry Lee. He said he knew that slavery was wrong, but selling off his slaves was the only way he could feed his family. This isn’t admirable, but it meets one standard of “accepting responsibility for ones behavior”, as conservative cant would have it. Later Southerners produced Sith libraries of pompous rhetoric trying to evade Lee’s simple truth.
Mencius wrote:
.. the term “slavery” … if it means anything it means a legal framework in which long-term labor contracts are negotiable and enforceable.
Negotiable? This is insane.
Mencius wrote:
Since I have no problem at all with long-term labor contracts, I suppose I am pro-slavery, although I am not as sure about hereditary slavery
Not as sure? Still on the fence about inherited human bondage?
Anyway, you seem quite set in your views, and impurvious to post-1900 arguments. But you can check out Starobin’s Industrial Slavery in the old south, and also Urban Slavery in the American South 1820-1860: A Quantitative History by Claudia Goldin.
You’ve also got the history of the Tredegar iron works wrong. Half the workers were slaves before the start of the civil war. Look it up.
To repeat:
1) Slavery in the American south was an very adaptable insitution, transitioning between industries and sectors.
2) Its prevalance in cotton in the pre-civil war period was a function of the productivity of slaves in cotton plantations driving up their price, not a statement on the impracticability of human bondage in other areas
Roger -
When I said “Sith library”, I meant that these books are things you have been taught from childhood to contain the very embodiment of evil, but then when you actually read them for yourself, you actually wonder to yourself if perhaps they are right and you’ve been lied to your entire life.
Roger, Ikram, John-
I highly recommended reading the books Mencius recommends, if for no other reason so that you can pull me away from the dark side. Or perhaps you will find yourself taking a more nuanced view towards slavery … The most stunning books are ‘Tis been Sixty Years Since and A South-side View of Slavery. Both were written by strong northern liberals who reconsidered their position on slavery after witnessing events first hand. What would you tell them, with all your modern wisdom, that would convince them to return to their original liberal position?
Mencius and Ikram-
As Thomas Nelson Page writes:
“In the cotton section they knew how to raise and prepare cotton; in the sugar belt they knew how to grow and grind sugar; in the tobacco, corn, wheat, and hay belts they knew how to raise and prepare for market those crops. They were the shepherds, cattle-men, horse-trainers and raisers. The entire industrial work of the South was performed by them. They were the trained domestic servants – laundresses, nurses and midwives. They were the carpenters, smiths, coopers, sawyers, wheel-wrights, bricklayers, and boatmen. They were the tanners and shoemakers, miners and stonecutters, tailors and knitters, spinners and weavers. Nearly all the houses in the South were built by them. They manufactured most of the articles that were manufactured in the South.”
Looks like it goes a little beyond cotton, no?
Roger,
The primary consequence of the antislavery movement was a war that killed 500,000 people – besides destroying the economy of the South, reducing the former slaves to abject destitution, and sending the Constitution into a tailspin of malignant consolidation from which it has yet to recover and almost certainly won’t.
Apart from this, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the show? The American talent for preferring abstractions to realities is impressive and remains so after almost 150 years, but it strikes me as quite difficult to construct any abstraction that justifies such a volume of death and destruction.
Are you going to argue, for example, that sharecropping was so much better than slavery that it was worth killing half a million people for? Are you going to argue, for that matter, that life in the Robert Taylor Homes is so much better than slavery that it was worth killing half a million people for?
Awfully bloodthirsty of you, I must say, old chap. The ability of the modern liberal to produce tears over Gaza, vaguely wistful regret over Dresden, and bloody foam at the mouth over Atlanta, is remarkable. I will never cease to wonder at the number of moral absolutes that can coexist amicably within a single skull.
The fact is: European civilization was built on immobile agricultural labor, adscripti glebae. Most of our ancestors lived and died on the same plot of land, ruled by the same master. The difference between slavery and serfdom is a difference of words, and minor legal details. Would I want to be a slave, a serf, or for that matter an industrial laborer? Of course not.
But demonizing normal conditions is not a sensible way to think about history. There was cotton, and someone was going to be picking it. Once you tell me that I am going to spend the rest of my life picking cotton, my chief concern is that I will be well-fed and governed sensibly. Details beyond this – like whether I stay on the same farm, move of my own volition, or move involuntarily – are secondary concerns, and they certainly do not justify wars, pillaging and distruction, etc, etc.
At least, not in the mind of this Sith Lord. Your mileage, O righteous one, may vary.
Roger,
Later Southerners produced Sith libraries of pompous rhetoric trying to evade Lee’s simple truth.
Have you actually read any of this material? Or are you just discussing it third-hand, as it were? Also, given Hume, I’m afraid I need to object to your use of the word “truth.”
If it means anything it means a legal framework in which long-term labor contracts are negotiable and enforceable.
Let me clarify this. I meant negotiable in the financial sense of the word, ie, transferrable. It should be obvious that any legal system in which you can sell your labor in advance for a year, ten years, life, etc, is one that provides for slavery.
In fact, as we can easily see by reading the Constitution, the idea of being “bound to labor” is hardly a novelty in either the English common law or, of course, the Roman law. It is the idea that long-term labor contracts are prima facie invalid that is the novelty.
But slavery is resilient, and pops up everywhere. My brother-in-law, for example, is a slave. Not that he picks cotton. He’s a kitchen designer for one of the US’s major cabinet fabricators, in Ohio.
And does Ohio still have slavery? Actually, it does. Not hereditary black slavery, of course. But it allows remarkably rigid non-compete clauses in employment contracts, which would be unenforceable in almost every other state. My brother-in-law’s prohibits him from working, for the next year, in the same industry, anywhere within 100 miles. Effectively, he has zero labor mobility. Switching employers is not a practical option for him.
Here’s how my brother-in-law became a slave: he worked for a medium-sized contractor which was acquired by said megacorp. Upon the acquisition, said megacorp demanded all acquired employees to sign their contract, including said clause, in 48 hours – or quit. It’s a contract. Full of boilerplate. So he signed.
Two years later, someone high up at Megacorp made a decision that (by changing the rules on sales commissions) effectively reduced my brother-in-law’s salary to minimum wage. Along with most of the other employees at the acquired subsidiary. A friend of his offered him a new job. He talked to a lawyer. What the lawyer told him was that he could try to get out of the noncompete, but it would cost about $50K and involve not working for a year. That’s if he won, which he probably would.
Fortunately, the outcome was that my brother-in-law pleaded with Massa and made a big fuss, and the problem went up the chain to HQ, and HQ realized: “we didn’t mean to do that!” And his pay was restored, more or less. Massa made good. And my brother-in-law remains a slave.
Moral of the story: the line between employment and slavery is a lot fuzzier than most people think. You either have the power, in practice, to change jobs, or you don’t. If you don’t, you are a slave.
Here’s another business that operates on the principle of binding labor contracts: professional sports. At least in the US, with its strong cartels, players are generally just traded. In European soccer, of course, they are bought and sold. Like cattle. Like slaves! Do we need a new war, to give Cristiano Ronaldo the liberty for which he so longs?
Of course, the situation of my brother-in-law is not the situation of Cristiano Ronaldo, which is not the situation of a cotton-picker on Jefferson Davis’ farm. But this is my entire point. If you want to consider the institution, you have to examine what it actually was, rather than attaching a hot-button word to it and hurling balls of Puritan flame at the word. And again, I don’t think there is a better book on Southern slavery than Eugene Genovese’s.
Ikram,
Anyway, you seem quite set in your views, and impervious to post-1900 arguments. But you can check out Starobin’s Industrial Slavery in the old south, and also Urban Slavery in the American South 1820-1860: A Quantitative History by Claudia Goldin.
I appreciate your knowledge of the subject, but no, you are not going to change my view that the antebellum South was predominantly non-industrialized.
In fact I am quite sympathetic to the earlier part of the century. I would describe myself as generally impervious to post-1950 arguments. Our modern historians, if we can agree to award them the title they claim, have displayed a positive genius for a sort of man-bites-dog history in which the exception is held up as the rule. Thus, we see this strange creature, the industrial Old South.
Did industrial slavery exist? Certainly. Was slave labor rented out for industrial purposes, in the US and in other countries (notably prerevolutionary Russia)? It was. Did experience after the war, whether in the North or the South, demonstrate that American black labor could be used industrially? It did.
But to apply this analysis to the thinking of Americans in 1860 is, in a word, presentism. In 1860, the menace of slave factory labor on a national scale, so enthralling to the Northern immigrant voter, was a fantasy. To us, it is a counterfactual. Despite the electron microscope of the post-1945 Whig historian, which can turn any molehill into an Everest, here is the one thing it was not: reality.
Do I know why the antebellum South had not built an industrial base with slave labor? Do I know why there was only one iron works (Tredegar) in the old South? I have no idea. Possibly they just hadn’t realized yet how profitable it could be. But the reality is that they hadn’t (which was a major reason, of course, for their loss of the war), and not all the professors in the world can change this.
Cratinus,
No, I am not a fan of hereditary slavery. (I also have no personal ties to the South, apart from the fact that my father retired to North Carolina. A while ago he was walking down the street and some redneck kid on a bike called him a n____er. My father is an Ashkenazi Jew of unusually swarthy complexion.)
I basically don’t believe that parents should be able to contract debts and assign them to their children, which is essentially what hereditary slavery is doing. Whether the debt is denominated in labor or in money, it is an obligation that the child did not agree to. While the law has the power to enforce it anyway, the creation of contracts for which there is no real agreement is invidious, and creates an undercurrent of suppressed hostility and violence.
So I would have taken the approach that most Northern states followed, and some Southern states considered, in the first half of the 19th century: gradually terminating slavery by emancipation on age of majority.
The pro-Confederate writers of the “Sith Library” era are very prescient in many regards, but one mistake they generally make (Carlyle, for instance, is notable for this) is in predicting that free African populations in a white society will fail to compete and gradually die out.
In fact it now seems clear that the golden age of African-American culture was roughly 1920-1960 – when American blacks had to compete on a playing field that was, if anything, tilted in favor of whites. This is a conclusion congenial to neither your merciless Sith Lord, nor your bunny-hugging Jedi activist.
The Jedi will certainly be hard-pressed to argue that the “civil-rights movement,” or as I would say the black-rage industry, has bettered the general condition of his melanistic mascots (see under: projects). The Sith Lord will note, hopefully with relief rather than disappointment, that populations of African descent can function in a civilized society, and even make serious contributions to that society (see under: jazz). History, as always, surprises.
“most of spanish south america (exclude cuba) outlawed it in the early 19th century after independence. slavery was one of the reasons that the texans revolted against mexico. OTOH, since you are probably thinking of brazil, which had most of the slaves in south america, most south american slaves were freed in the 1880s.”
Yeah, razib. I thought there were a few more countries than just Brazil that still had slaves. Guess I had the wrong continent. It’s Africa that still has slavery as any number of Sudanese and Mauritanians can tell you.
Concerning slavery: the fact that slaves were associated with certain work probably did a lot to discourage progress. If slaves had been profitable then the industry of the South would have rivaled that of the North. It did not. They did work that was an extention of the farming, shipping and various industries associated with agrarian societies.
Some of my mulatto ancestors owned an Island in the gulf of Mobile that had been claimed by their French forebear in 1710. This family was famous for their orange groves and for hosting Andrew Jackson during the war of 1812.
Mulattos in Mobile (AL) had a monopoly on ship carpentry by the mid-1800s. They did jobs related to shipping, fishing the waters, and growing things on land. Most of my mulatto ancestors who were not land owners (inherited from the white fathers) worked in ship trades and in sheet metal factories. Well into the 20th century most did not pursue higher education. If they wanted that, they left for the north and west. The ones i know of looked entirely white anyway. They probably thought the whole identity was sort of silly as the family line descended further from the original mixed couples. About the work they did: There was a stigma attached to such work in that area. There is a true story of a white family whose son had befriended a school mate. When they found out the boy’s father was a bricklayer the white family ended the association because–although the boy looked white–bricklayers with French or spanish names were all mulatto (and a few blacks) in Mobile.
This is sort of crazy because plenty of European immigrants, Irish, Italian, etc., were working blue collar trades in Mobile and new Orleans. But if someone had a French or Spanish surname and was in such work, they were assumed to be of mulatto heritage.
The mulattos had their own fire brigade in the 1850s, and it was only open to mulattos. They had a spectacular mechanical light display for Mardi Gras, 1855, which they had had sent from Philadelphia.
So yeah. I think we know “people of color” (actually it was the mulatto class rather than blacks who were out and about the most) did more than pick cotton and make cornbread. However, the agrarian societies of the South were not a million miles from the way of life in some ancient Roman enterprises or a feudal serfdom more than even the most humble Massachusetts mill town.
KJS, I have a post on Huntington’s Clash and a frequent and blatant misreading (or should I say NONreading) of it here.
From Sixty Years Hence:
So far, then, as the institution of slavery is concerned, in its relations to ownership and property in those of the human species,–I have seen no reason whatever to revise or in any way to alter the theories and principles I entertained in 1853, and in the maintenance of which I subsequently bore arms between 1861 and 1865.
What he claims to have changed his mind about is something other than slavery. And just because one doesn’t approve of chattel slavery doesn’t mean one must approve of Lincoln’s war (see Lysander Spooner).
I don’t have any problem with indentured servitude (and I am under a non-compete contract like Mencius’ brother-in-law) but to steal a favorite phrase of Walter Block (who also approves of indentured servitude/contractual slavery, despite Mencius’ claims otherwise) if you can’t tell the difference between a living room and a bathroom, stay out of my house. They did not enter into a contract with their masters, nor did their ancestors. I say this despite having endorsed aristocracy/apartheid (and implicitly slavery) for others.
The lack of industry in the South doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with slavery being a bad fit with it. If you’ve read Thomas Sowell’s Black Rednecks & White Liberals you’d know that Southerners in general were not very industrious, leaving Northerners, foreigners and Jews to occupy something like the place of Koreans in the modern ghetto.
How did conditions under slavery compare to freedmen conditions or modern ones in housing projects? Being a thoroughgoing subjectivist, I’d look to reveal preferences. Was running away despite the threat of capture and punishment fairly common or the result of an aberrant mental illness known as “drapetomania”? Some slaves were able to purchase their freedom (though I believe manumission laws prohibited this in some areas). Were they willing to pay large amounts? Some former slaves were noted to have walked across several states to be reunited with their families that had been separated. Were many more indifferent to that cost of slavery and preferred to stay were they were?
I think we have better data regarding the Great Migration north to industrial cities. Aside from the revealed preference of so many leaving, in aggregate it was responsible for a larger larger increase in black SES than the Civil Rights era (after that it plateaued relative to whites though I think it still increased). People often forget that the biggest reason blacks went to crappier schools (the impetus for integration) was that blacks disproportionately lived in the south which had crappy schools generally. Thomas Sowell, who went from being near the top of his class in the Carolinas to the bottom in Harlem as a boy has written about this.
There has been a migration of blacks back to the south (most notably Atlanta). If I recall correctly, this did not primarily take place when the Great Sixties Freakout was turning “inner city” into a bad word but the 90s, when the New South had become more hospitable to blacks and (relative to many Blue states) business.
Finally, I know many southerners view (or viewed) Reconstruction as a really terrible period. I know lots of carpetbagging politicians came down and made things fairly corrupt, but as Theodore Dalrymple has noted corruption isn’t necessarily so bad. From watching Birth of a Nation I got the sense that interracial marriage was the big boogeyman. Since Mencius seems familiar with that view of the period, I’d like him to summarize the indictment.
TGGP,
On Reconstruction, try Charles Nordhoff’s The Cotton States in the Spring and Summer of 1875. Nordhoff was a respected liberal journalist (and author of many other fascinating works, such as The Communistic Societies of the United States), and his reporting on Reconstruction, along with that of other journalists with liberal credibility (see also James S. Pike’s The Prostrate State: South Carolina Under N-gro Rule – Pike was an abolitionist who had been Lincoln’s ambassador to Holland) contributed greatly to the Liberal Republican turn against Reconstruction, and its consequent dismantling in the corrupt Hayes-Tilden bargain of 1876.
The resulting historical narrative, codified by academics such as Dunning, Burgess, Fleming, etc, is what you see also in the writing of CF Adams and the like. In other words, it was regarded as merely the truth until about 1950 or so – ie, until the last people who actually remembered Reconstruction had passed away – and is now known, derisively of course, as the “Dunning School.” You see why I have a beef with late 20th-century historians.
Basically, much as Rhodesia was a piece of the 19th century that accidentally fell into the 20th, Reconstruction was a bit of the 20th that accidentally fell into the 19th. Call it the Third World before its time. What is funny, when you read the works of Nordhoff and Pike, is how minor the peculations and incompetences they describe seem by 20th-century standards.
But by the standards of the few undecayed American aristocrats and statesmen who remained after a century of democracy, Reconstruction was appalling. This is interesting, because it gives us a clue as to what our ancestors would think of us – always an interesting question to those who admire the past.
Hilaire,
I find it fascinating that your entire race has essentially been written out of American history – simply because it complicates the narrative, it seems.
I have an adopted relative whose birth parents were members of the American mulatto class. For years some of her other relatives (she is in her ’50s) were told that she was of Italian extraction. Similarly, look at a lot of Barack Obama’s cronies: Valerie Jarrett, Eric Holder… these people are marketed as black. But they are not black. If you want to call them a color, “beige” is about right.
What they are is American mulattos, which is not at all the same thing as being “biracial” (like Obama). The mulattos has been a distinct tribe for quite some time, and if they are part of a larger tribe it is the American black aristocracy. Samuel R. Delany’s autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water, has a lot of good stuff on this class, with its Jack and Jill clubs, its Martha’s Vineyard, etc, etc.
TGGP,
As a thoroughgoing subjectivist, get ye to the Slave Narratives.
Also, for revealed (as opposed to narrated) preference, note the absence of slave revolts during the war. This was one point on which abolitionists and slaveholders differed in their prediction. Not surprisingly, the slaveholders were right. (After all, most of them had actually met an African-American or two.)
I’ve always liked the term “drapetomania.” I suspect I have a good bit of it myself. Perhaps if we can get it in the DSM-V, Sandoz will start working on a drapetomania pill.
But remember, from the legal perspective a slave is (to paraphrase Kipling) half employee, half child. What do you think runaway children tell us about the revealed preferences of the adolescent?
Indeed a substantial percentage of runaway children are running away from bad parents, and I’m confident that a substantial percentage of runaway slaves were running away from bad owners. On the other hand, I’m also pretty confident that a substantial percentage of runaway children are just bad children.
So I have no problem with a general policy of returning runaway wards to their guardians. When society recognizes the relationship of guardian and ward, it delegates – or at least, should delegate – the sovereign power of the state to the authority of the guardian. This is not Nazism, just common sense.
The primary consequence of the antislavery movement was a war that killed 500,000 people – besides destroying the economy of the South, reducing the former slaves to abject destitution, and sending the Constitution into a tailspin of malignant consolidation from which it has yet to recover and almost certainly won’t.
My impression was that the primary consequence was the eradication of chattel slavery. The destructiveness of the war and the failure of Reconstruction don’t lead to the conclusion that chattel slavery was a Good Thing. It’s a separate issue. The conclusion of your argument seems to be that it was a wonderful institution that we should return to. If that isn’t your conclusion, why are you wasting our time?
Have you actually read any of this material? Or are you just discussing it third-hand, as it were?
I downloaded and looked at the stuff you linked to. There were several books of the same ilk in my DAR/UDC grandmother’s library which I read as a boy. I adored my grandmother but thought the books were wrong, and worse, pathetic and depressing. Still do.
Mencius and/or John Emerson:
I’m no historian, have just read stuff here and there, most frequently with not even a memory of “where.” But there are a couple of odd recollections (from reading) I’ve got that seem to have some relevance/importance to the subject but which, somehow, resist easy integration to any actual understanding.
The first was something written by the military guy (name escapes but it’s famous–he’s the character played by Guiness in the movie Khartoum). He’d been especially selected (recalled from retirement, I think, was the narrative, prevailed on by Wilberforce as a similarly-inclined opponent of slavery). My memory is that he wrote, at the very time of suppressing the slave-raiders, that the natives were so stupid and ignorant that it was hard to see how they could survive were it not for the kindness of the slavers in placing them in well-appointed, hospitable households. (I’m being facetious, of course, but not by so much.)
The other is a fact, rattling around, that, in barring the continuation of the slave trade, that is, the further importation of slaves, the southern states wanted to make 1800 the cut-off year but were opposed (and beaten) by the northern states with a choice of an 1808 date (and which time permitted an augmentation of about 10% to the then-current slave population).
Any comment, clarification, coorrection, explanation, etc.?
Thanks for the pointer to the slave narratives. There was some interesting if not necessarily reliable stuff (look for John Brown and 1784).
But by the standards of the few undecayed American aristocrats and statesmen who remained after a century of democracy, Reconstruction was appalling. This is interesting, because it gives us a clue as to what our ancestors would think of us – always an interesting question to those who admire the past.
Again, from Birth of a Nation I got the impression that the standout horror was interracial marriage, which does indeed strike us today as a non-issue. I don’t feel like reading some old timey books if that’s all they’ll boil down to, so just summarize what the actual problems with Reconstruction were.
note the absence of slave revolts during the war. This was one point on which abolitionists and slaveholders differed in their prediction
I thought it was southerners who thought was a more distinct possibility, which is why they had created a bunch of black codes after Turner’s rebellion and gave conscription exemptions to people that owned a sufficient amount of slaves. I don’t think the Soviets faced many internal rebellions after Kronstadt either (subject peoples did join the Germans, just as many slaves joined the Union Army). I believe Gordon Tullock best explained the logic of why we should not expect a lower class to spontaneously revolt. It disappoints me how many optimistic libertarians citing de la Boetie are not familiar with that line of reasoning.
What do you think runaway children tell us about the revealed preferences of the adolescent?
That they prefer not living at home, at least in an ex ante sense. Those that choose to return home must have realized they were mistaken, but some confirm their opinion that they would rather be free of their family.
On the other hand, I’m also pretty confident that a substantial percentage of runaway children are just bad children.
After an excellent demolition of some moralism with Hume, it’s sad to see you go the same way. Just what is a “bad” child, one who runs away? I’ll go with Rothbard in saying that once a child homesteads themself by leaving they become self-owners and there is no reason for the rest of society to enforce any demands made by their former guardian on the child. I don’t even think the term “child” is appropriate for most runaways, but unfortunately in the modern era we insist on infantilizing those who previously were considered adults. Prior to leaving the home though I see no reason to interfere with anything parents choose to do with their children up to and including murder.
Is it not true that an American slave was rather likely to be beaten, raped, and otherwise tormented? (I ask non-rhetorically, not knowing much history.)
he_United_States#Treatme nt_of_slaves
Wikipedia reports lots of beating and rape:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_t
If this is true, the suggestion that a lack of job mobility is functionally equivalent to slavery, is laughable.
Consider not just the tortures themselves, but also the brutal and unnatural extremes of labor that could be extracted from you day after day by the threat of such tortures.
I don’t deny that “free” peasants in some feudal systems (eg Roman empire) sometimes faced regimes that were at least structurally/qualitatively similar – though I have no clue which feudal systems administered benign-ish thrashings to serfs and which were instead torturous to one degree or another. But anyway, having a non-compete contract in modern Ohio is nothing like this.
> I see no reason to interfere with anything parents choose to do with their children up to and including murder.
Oh sure, I guess only the most stoic and rational motives will cause modern parents to exercise the severe prerogative of the paterfamilias.
Really, don’t you think most people today killing their children are just partly or wholly deranged?
I’m all for liberal eugenics, but why not limit infanticide to babies under two years old – and strictly require orderly, regulated euthanasia?
To scrutinize your analogy, Iraq is sovereign and outside our state system. What do Saddam and the Kurds have to do with our state stopping Andrea Yates’ psycho filicides? Am I missing some Swiftian irony here? Should you have to die as a child just because your mom gets some psychotogenic virus, and the state hasn’t restrained her though she already killed your siblings? If it is OK for the state to regulate homicide committed on majors, why can’t it regulate homocide committed on minors?
me: The primary consequence of the antislavery movement was a war that killed 500,000 people – besides destroying the economy of the South, reducing the former slaves to abject destitution, and sending the Constitution into a tailspin of malignant consolidation from which it has yet to recover and almost certainly won’t.
Roger: My impression was that the primary consequence was the eradication of chattel slavery.
That’s exactly my point. You are so fixated on the eradication of slavery that you consider it the primary consequence, and half a million deaths and the destruction of the original Constitution a minor, secondary afterthought. Yet you are entirely unable to produce any argument that this change resulted in any substantial improvement in the lives of its nominal beneficiaries.
The destructiveness of the war and the failure of Reconstruction don’t lead to the conclusion that chattel slavery was a Good Thing.
I am not arguing that chattel slavery was a Good Thing. I am arguing that it was a Thing, like many other things, good in some ways and bad in others. Reasonable people can disagree on the ratio of good to bad.
I am arguing that the American abolitionist movement was a Bad Thing – because it caused the Civil War, which caused the aforementioned death and destruction.
Don’t you find it just a little surprising how, as a good liberal, you are so comfortable in endorsing military conquest, death and destruction – when your side is the conquering one?
Here’s another way to think of it: if you think it was sweet and good and true for the North to conquer the South and abolish slavery, you must think it would have been a sin of omission for the North not to do so – thus selfishly preserving hundreds of thousands of Yankee lives, at the expense of failing to eradicate the peculiar institution.
In that case, I note that in 1865, Brazil still had slavery. So why stop at the Gulf of Mexico? Can’t the Radical Republicans be faulted for failing to continue their crusade, sweeping south toward the pampas until every last African in the Western Hemisphere enjoyed life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? For that matter, Arab slavery in East Africa was still going strong at the time. Zanzibar delenda est!
(What’s scary is that present-day American foreign policy seems to be built on exactly this logic.)
I downloaded and looked at the stuff you linked to. There were several books of the same ilk in my DAR/UDC grandmother’s library which I read as a boy. I adored my grandmother but thought the books were wrong, and worse, pathetic and depressing. Still do.
So: because your grandmother, while adorable, is a stuffy old dingbat, Charles Francis Adams is not worth reasoning with. Why, if he were alive, he’d probably be a stuffy old dingbat too!
I’m afraid I find your prejudice more than a little unsavory. Surely those who despise the past, and feel free to express contempt for the dead based solely on the fact that they are dead and their opinions have since become unfashionable, can at least have the decency to find interests other than history.
TGGP,
just summarize what the actual problems with Reconstruction were.
What are the actual problems with the Third World? That’s what the actual problems with Reconstruction were.
I thought it was southerners who thought [a slave revolt] was a more distinct possibility
No – the argument that the South could not militarily hold off the North and simultaneously repress the slaves was a common bit of abolitionist propaganda, which depicted them as in general “politically conscious” in the Marxist sense of the phrase. Of course this was the exception rather than the rule.
I’ll go with Rothbard in saying that once a child homesteads themself by leaving they become self-owners and there is no reason for the rest of society to enforce any demands made by their former guardian on the child.
Even for a nine-year-old? This is how Rothbard so frequently reasons himself from Lockean absolutes to sheer insanity. He is a master of the reductio ad absurdum, but so stubborn that he defends the absurdum.
Eric,
Is it not true that an American slave was rather likely to be beaten, raped, and otherwise tormented?
I suspect that if there was a Wikipedia page for the beating, rape, and otherwise torment of American children, it could easily lead one to conclude that the nuclear family was a crime against humanity. Especially if all children were now raised communally, kibbutz style.
Think of the slaveholder-slave relationship as equal parts parent-child, employer-employee, and ruler-subject. Corporal punishment is a normal aspect of the first and third forms.
The fundamental question is: was sadistic physical abuse a normal and ordinary part of American slavery, or an exceptional case? When you read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, are you looking at the rule, or the exception? (Mrs. Stowe also produced a nonfiction Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in which factual cases of the abuses described in the novel are listed. AFAIK these facts are not disputed, and if they were I’m sure others could be found.)
The impression I get from the slave narratives I’ve seen is that sadistic abuse was unusual, though not nearly as unusual as parental child abuse. As this collection, whose editor is certainly no Confederate, puts it: “Nostalgia veils many memories for the former slaves… why is there no pervasive cry of rage from the former bondsmen? Why instead these protestations of affection for a condition which shames the civilized world?”
On the Confederate side, here is the Rev. Dabney on the subject, from his fascinating and witty, if slightly theology-obsessed, Defence of Virginia:
It is true again, that our law gave the master the power of corporal punishment, and required the slave to submit. So does the law of, England give it to parents over children, to masters over apprentices, and to husbands over, wives. Now, while we freely admit that there were in the South, instances of criminal barbarity in corporal punishments, they were very infrequent, and were sternly reprobated by publick opinion. So far were Southern plantations from being “lash-resounding dens,” the whipping of adult men and women had become the rare exception. It was far less frequent and severe than the whipping of white men was, a few years ago, in the British army and navy, not probably more frequent than the whipping of wives is in the Northern States of America, and not nearly so frequent as the whipping of white young ladies now is in their State schools. The girls and boys of the plantations received the lash from masters and agents more frequently than the adults, as was necessary and right for the heedless children of mothers semi-civilized and neglectful; but universally, this punishment by their owners was far less frequent and severe than the black parents themselves inflicted. We may be permitted to state our own experience as a fair specimen of the average. The writer was for eighteen years a householder and master of slaves, having the government of a number of different slaves; and in that time he found it necessary to administer the lash to adults in four cases; and two of these were for a flagrant adultery (resulting in the permanent reform of at least one of the delinquents.) His government was regarded by his slaveholding neighbours as by no means relaxed.
One can, of course, impugn the credibility of the author. But one would need a better basis for impugnment than his color, creed, age, facial hair, resemblance to one’s grandmother, etc, etc, etc.
The first was something written by the military guy (name escapes but it’s famous–he’s the character played by Guiness in the movie Khartoum). He’d been especially selected (recalled from retirement, I think, was the narrative, prevailed on by Wilberforce as a similarly-inclined opponent of slavery). My memory is that he wrote, at the very time of suppressing the slave-raiders, that the natives were so stupid and ignorant that it was hard to see how they could survive were it not for the kindness of the slavers in placing them in well-appointed, hospitable households. (I’m being facetious, of course, but not by so much.)
Gordon. Fascinating character, but a bit of a nut, frankly. I wouldn’t be too quick to place much weight on any of his enthusiasms.
The other is a fact, rattling around, that, in barring the continuation of the slave trade, that is, the further importation of slaves, the southern states wanted to make 1800 the cut-off year but were opposed (and beaten) by the northern states with a choice of an 1808 date (and which time permitted an augmentation of about 10% to the then-current slave population).
I don’t know about this specifically, but it doesn’t surprise me – the slave trade was a New England industry. Those Yankees! And, as other commenters have noted, the belief that slavery was a curse was generally prevalent among Southern aristocrats at the time. It is difficult to find anything like true proslavery opinion before the first onslaught of the abolitionists, in the 1830s.
“find it fascinating that your entire race has essentially been written out of American history – simply because it complicates the narrative, it seems.”
eans.typepad.com/creole_folks/2006/10/betryal_of_moth.html,
Thanks, but more on “my race” a little later. The media conception of race nowadays is embarrassingly type-cast. For instance, a devout Catholic nun, Herietta DeLisle http://creoleneworl
was famous in her day, 1810s-20s, for her work among the poor blacks and pocs in New Orleans. In appearance she was completely European, quite pretty and well-known as being of mixed blood. If current Hollywood got hold of her story she’d probably be played by Whoopie Goldberg. Whoopie’s fine, but Henrietta DeLisle she ain’t. Modern race politics conflate black with mulatto or even quinteroon (look that word up for an education in math and race) and is quite a problem even today among people who still identify with the “people of color” label. I don’t. It was my dad who whose parents were from that group and they left the area long, long ago and are long since deceased. Dad didn’t know and didn’t care though some of his brothers and my cousins did eventually. My mother is Euro-ethnic. I don’t look black by any stretch of the imagination and while I’ve met many blacks I like a lot, I don’t identify with them. Even many poc’s who do look a bit “colored” are not well received by blacks. There’s no point of claiming that identity and if I did I’d just be looked upon as ridiculous. A DNA test done showed my genetic heritage as 99% Caucasian and 1% American Indian. Who that Indian was I have no idea though I know names and dates galore for the blacks, pocs and whites in my genealogy. Yet in spite of all those blacks, I have no African genes in my pool that manifest. I had figured it would be about 6% at least.
Still, it is a fascinating history. The interplay of black and white and Indian was far more complex than most people understand.
One interesting thing I found out. The French priests in the early days used to encourage Frenchmen to marry Indian women, white women being in short supply and often demanding French born husbands. The priests opined that there was little difference in color between the Indians and French and that such marriage was better than illicit fornication. Many tribes of eastern seaboard Indians were different in type from plains Indians and their origins have been a source of speculation. Some think they may have middle eastern roots. Anyway, “Color” as shorthand for race was an important, though not always decisive consideration, and the Indians seemed more integratable with whites than did the blacks. I definitely got that impression in my studies of the histories. The black women who ended up as wives of white slaveholders — interracial marriage was legal under Spanish law, extant during the 1770s-90s or so — must have been exceptional people. Some of these interracial unions lasted for decades, despite the fact they could have been “dismissed” at any time. Under French and English law, the mixed unions were common law.
After the initial African/European pairing, the descendants mated assortatively, generally mulattos married mulattos. It has been determined that the great majority of mulattos in the anti-bellum south had parents who were both mulatto. Mulatto could mean half black or 1/8 black or even less. It just meant “mixed”. Because their numbers were limited, there were a lot of cousin marriages, leading to very close family ties. I was always somewhat in awe of my macho father and his many brothers kissing each other in greeting and departure, like a bunch of Frenchmen. They kissed each other more in one Christmas weekend than my Irish mother kissed her own kids all year. So I began to investigate the culture.
and then the genealogy.
I’m afraid I find your prejudice more than a little unsavory. Surely those who despise the past, and feel free to express contempt for the dead based solely on the fact that they are dead and their opinions have since become unfashionable, can at least have the decency to find interests other than history.
Perhaps this quick resort to personal slime says more about your character than mine or my grandmother’s.
Well Mencius, I’m glad you clarified that you are out to contest the value of the abolitionist path into war, rather than robustly rehabilitate chattel slavery. Knowing you I’m sure you didn’t leave that ambiguous in order to play the provocateur a bit.
(I have read read your whole blog. Pretty interesting on the whole, especially with dissenting commenters pushing back. I guess no one can call you a pinko anyway.)
You cite me a book brought out in 1867, which, it’s worth noting, belongs by your own lights to the era generally characterized by pro-slavery propaganda and political correctness. Dabney mentions publick reprobation as a check on the maltreatment of slaves; publick reprobation could also be a check on maltreaters allowing their acts to become broadly publick in the first place. I guess I am a priori pessimistic about what American slaves experienced, considering the abundance of torment in this world when there is no effective check on it and especially where there is an outgroup to victimize. Obviously empirical facts trump this consideration to the extent that they can be clarified, and I acknowledge the possibility that the received wisdom could be largely false, but I will have to bow out of the question now not being a historian.
Eric Johnson, I have a Szaszian view of “mental illness”. Children within households can be viewed as the property of their parents, as with pets. This gives a fairly simple resolution to abortion debates over why a second before birth is different from a second after or whether the failure of a fertilized egg to implant counts as a wrongful death thanks to Plan B. It doesn’t require any sort of Child Protective Service bureaucracy to make any judgment as to what constitutes “good parenting” (as an emotivist/non-cognitivist, I don’t think that phrase has any objective meaning) and provide that role itself as nanny state.
If it is OK for the state to regulate homicide committed on majors, why can’t it regulate homocide committed on minors?
If it can be gotten, I’d prefer the sort of contractual law discussed in books like Bruce Benson’s enterprise of law. Adults would enter into contracts, but before children have become independent they would not be parties to any such contract and people other than their parents will have no say over them. As long as we have a state claiming a monopoly of violence though I’ll expect it to prohibit its subjects from initiating violence against each other (duels or boxing matches are consensual and okay though). The household though is like a mini-state within the state (not that strange, federalism and feudalism are old concepts). Parents inevitably exercise authority over their dependents, the concern of the state is only that their authority is restricted to its proper domain (their household).
I’d say principal problems of the Third World seem to be civil war, disease and hunger. Reconstruction began after the Civil War and took place under a military occupation whose authority was not really challengeable. Was it also characterized by disease and hunger?
Mencius, you say enough things that strike most people as ridiculous that you’re not really in any position to use that as an argument against Rothbard! There’s even biblical support for the idea of killing children that disrespect their parents.
Beatings and murders of children do take place within nuclear families. Any evolutionary psychologist will tell you this primarily occurs when there is an unrelated adult male in the household. Parents are genetically wired to care for their offspring, not so for their slaves.
There are some traits that are maladaptive in a modern society, such as poor social organization (no town greens in the Southern hills) and lack of emphasis on social advancement (including advanced education While reading Andrew Wheatcroft’s The Hapsburgs, a passage describing the feudal pre-Renaissance conditions in Europe north of the Alps and east of the Rhine [plus the Balkans] until the end of the 17th century reminded me of Fischer’s long description of the Borderlands culture and the frequent bloody feuds that prevailed between clans and families and other socially “backward” traits such as shunning and mistreatment of the old and injured. Also, extended hostilities between fortified towns and feudal castles prevailed until Absolutism in France & communications plus the Enlightenment/Industrial Revolution made central government more able to enforce its hegemony [except in isolated "backward" regions in various countries, of which the chief contributor to the US "originals" was the Scotch-Irish].
The Scottish borders and Highlands and the Irish clans obviously missed out on most of these developments and arrived in the Appalachian Highlands with a medieval cast of mind and society plus a Protestant veneer. Other takes on this from different angles are Horwitz’s entertaining travelogue “A Voyage Rich and Strange” and Tim Blanning’s Pursuit of Glory, 1648-1815. Balzac and Hugo and Chateubriand all write of their Breton ancestors as basically aboriginals living in gentrified squalor.
TGGP: the principal problem of the Third World is bad government.
Eric (and Roger), I feel it is possible for a perfectly reasonable person to feel that the abolitionists done right, and their opponents were just plain wrong. However, I feel it is imprudent to reach such a strong conclusion without at least acquiring some basic facility with the case for the defense. If not one roughly comparable to your obviously thorough education in the case for the prosecution.
Unfortunately, understanding the Sith side involves reading the pre-1940 literature. In practice all that is properly available, thanks to our good friends at the Sith Library, is the pre-1922 literature. The only way to evaluate this on a level playing field is to compare it to the pre-1922 abolitionist literature, which I also posted links to above. Whether he be right or wrong, the Rev. Dabney is not responsible for the absence of a faculty of Sith studies at your local federally-supported research institution.
daveinboca:
To some extent, the features of Borderlands culture are part of the social stages between hunter-gatherer and kingdom, and you’d expect similar folks in Europe. The only thing that was special about the Borderlands was its stability and duration.
The Scottish borders and Highlands and the Irish clans obviously missed out on most of these developments and arrived in the Appalachian Highlands with a medieval cast of mind and society plus a Protestant veneer.
Some quibbles: The Hignlanders and Irish Clans spoke Gaelic and didn’t immigrate in large numbers in the colonial era. Some historians characterize medieval culture has having many specialized social roles (guilds, fiefholds, Church ranks) enforced by legalistic rules. Clearly, the folks of the Borderlands wanted nothing to do with that. So in that sense they were premedieval.
TGGP,
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I’ll certainly agree that the state taking people’s children is rather an ugly subjective mess.
I’ll admit it’s probably impossible to cleanly demolish Szasz/Caplan, but the Caplan draft does not impress me too much. I’ll just raise a couple points.
The situation with Szasz trying to prove a negative boils down to these quotations employed by Caplan:
When his critic Seymour Kety objects that “Our ability to demonstrate and elucidate pathological disturbances is limited by the state of the art, and to assume their absence because they have not been demonstrated is a non sequitur,” Szasz responds: “True enough. But I do not maintain that the nonexistence of pathological findings in schizophrenia proves there are none; I maintain only that a promise of such findings is only a promise, until it is fulfilled… If psychiatrists had to pay interest on their promises of pathological lesions, as borrowers must pay lenders, the interest alone would already have bankrupted them; instead, they keep issuing the same notes, undaunted by their perfect record of never meeting their obligations.” (1997, p.51)
What Szasz’s parry elides is the fact that the brain is incomparably subtler and less understood than all the rest of the body. It’s not as though we lack a rationale for giving the brain science of neurosis and psychosis a few more “extensions” even though other fields have already “delivered” much more – quite the contrary. This fascinating little news item from Nature deals with rodent experiments suggesting that artificial stimulation of a single neuron can affect behavior. I haven’t read the actual paper, and I do have to wonder whether the neuron might be stimulated to an unnatural level of activity:
http://www.vetscite.org/publish/items/004169/index.html
Progress is being made – in narcolepsy, a lesion in the hypothalamus was suspected decades ago, while others preferred a Szaszian “aberrant personality” etiology (an etiology which incidentally has been applied to almost every physical disease, sometimes even when the physical lesions were already known). The actual lesion was not found until 1998. This is an excellent history which unfortunately ends a little early:
http://med.stanford.edu/school/Psychiatry/narcolepsy/narcolepsyhistory.html
In spite of this progress, the early postwar period was fraught with psychoanalytical explanations for narcolepsy-cataplexy. Together with Kleitman, who believed narcolepsy was an organic disorder involving abnormal carotid stimulation reflexes (46), Daniels, was among the few to believe in the organic nature of narcolepsy. In a letter to Kleitman dated July 21, 1948, Daniels wrote: ?I was particularly interested in your views regarding the significance of narcolepsy, because I came to the same conclusion early in the course of my studies and have been decidedly annoyed by recent attempts of the psychosomaticists to revive the old idea that narcolepsy is simply a form of escape?.
There are only ~10,000 hypocretin-secreting neurons in the brain, so the failure to discover this lesion until a few years ago is no shock. Evidence that most workers believe hypocretin deficiency to be the cause of most narcolepsy is found here:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=pubmed&DbFrom=pubmed&Cmd=Link&LinkName
The history of migraine is somewhat comparable, though I am not as clear on it. Migraine was rather widely considered to be “imaginary” or hysterical even in the 1960s.
I’ll address one other subject, Caplan’s “gun-to-head test.” As you pointed out somewhere on the internet lately, Mao “cured” opium addicts by offering to shoot them. I don’t doubt this. Caplan:
Obviously most physical diseases would pass the Gun-to-the-Head Test. Pointing a gun at a paralyzed man will not enable him to walk, nor can you frighten a cancer patient into living longer. Conditions like mental retardation and Alzheimer’s disease are also highly likely to pass the Gun-to-the-Head Test. [...] The same cannot be said, however, for the large majority of mental disorders [ahem, schizophrenia is an exception I guess -EJJ]. Though the Gun-to-the-Head Test rarely happens, most people with mental disorders respond to far milder incentives.
This notion of Caplan’s is missing the point about, say, depression, by being too simplistic. Mice exposed to depressogenic treatments do try to save themselves in the forced swim test AKA behavioral despair test, they just don’t try as hard or as sustainedly. A depression patient who has difficulty being industrious can surely be industrious for a good while if threatened with a gun. But if you pointed a gun at a depression patient for an extended period of time and tried to make him behave with normal energy and industry for months or years, he might eventually cease to respond to the threat/incentive. This is shown by the fact that people with a history of depression in fact do point a gun at their own head and pull the trigger, at a much higher rate than healthy people do – quite an irony on Caplan’s gun-to-head argument!
I found some other of Szasz’s/Caplan’s arguments to be deficient or rickety in not-dissimilar ways.
Again, I’m disputing the phenomena only; I’m not saying that all this necessarily renders simple and clear the questions about who ought to get state money/services or who ought to have their children taken away.
the principal problem of the Third World is bad government.
You’ve heard of Greg Clark’s book. One of his points is that institutions don’t really seem to matter.
TGGP,
Go spend some time in Haiti, then tell me that “institutions don’t really seem to matter.” All these statistics have made your head soft, like an overripe cantaloupe.
My prescription: extreme reality immersion. Get thee to Port-au-Prince, preferably along with a copy of The French Revolution in San Domingo, and maybe The Bow of Ulysses as well. If you come home believing that “institutions don’t really seem to matter,” there is no cure – give up thinking, and go to law school or something.
I’d thought it obvious that institutions matter. Anyone who compares North and South Korea should realize that. Of course there are always other factors, but institutions certainly isn’t one that can be ignored.
If you’d been reading Hopefully Anonymous the idea that I’d have anything to do with law school wouldn’t have crossed your mind.
East vs West Germany and North vs South Korea are the common objections to Clark’s view of institutions. He takes a long-run view in which those are temporary aberrations that get replaced by better institutions (as happened to East Germany with the fall of the wall). China was for a long time wealthier than the west, Maoism screwed things up for a while but now it’s come roaring back. Burma has hope for the future, Bangladesh does not. Medieval England, contra Arnold Kling, had much better institutions for economic growth than most countries today. Yet for millenia the only increase in standard of living came after massive die-offs. After the British conquered India they set up textile factories similar to the ones back home, right down to having English managers. However, productivity was far lower simply because the workers were Indians rather than English. That’s part of why “neo-liberalism” was such a disappointment to developing countries outside of East Asia. A visit to Haiti will be evidence of nothing more than that it is full of Haitians.
Roger Bigod
Yes, the Highlanders who spoke Gaelic in North Carolina actually supported George III during the Rev War, according to Fischer & others—they were instrumental in Guilford Courthouse, if I remember correctly. On the other hand, Kings Mountain was a case of S-I frontiersmen kicking redcoat butt.
I guess you’re talking High Medieval Burgerlich culture, but much of Europe was sunk in pre-medieval [Bretagne in France, par exemple] up until well into when England had developed an industrial base. Ask the French writer Celine, who captained Breton soldiers [he spoke the patois] in the First WW and thought them little advanced from farm animals. Like parts of the American South, many great French writers had a Bretagne connection—although the Tidewater must be separated from the Piedmont and the Smokies, I suppose, in Southern American Lit.
But the Scotch-Irish did seem have a genius for living outside wider social and economic systems, compared to Quakers and the Virginia Tidewater aristocracy. Maybe the extended chaotic history of the Borderlands prepared them for self-sufficiency.
The hell-raisin’ dudes at Emma Bovary’s wedding party sound like rednecks. But that was just the backwardness of rural Europe. When they were conquered, they stayed conquered. What stands out about the Borderlands is the stubborn refusal to accept central authority.
While pursuing a medical genetics question for some relatives, I came across a guy who was around for Kings Mountain, but apparently didn’t particiate. He was born in the Ulster Plantation, 1763, emigrated as a 6 year old orphan and enlisted out of the Waxhaws district of SC in 1778 (age 15) and served until 1781. His papers list 7 named battles or campaigns, but no Kings Mountain or Guilford Courthouse. I think his career makes a statement about the fighting spirit of the Scots-Irish. Also their judgment.
An ironic twist is that his name was Adams, from a family that originated in Somerset (SW England). Some people from southern England went to Northern Ireland and turned back. But a few stayed, intermarried,, became acculturated and came to North America in the great wave of immigration. Tracing his line back, many of the Somerset names are identical with ancestors of the Massachusetts Adamses. Trying to match individuals was pointless. By the time they’d been in Ireland 100 years all they had in common with the Boston bunch was a surname and some Y chromosome markers.
Another irony was that he named a son born in 1827 “John Quincy”. This was before JQ became the leading advocate of abolition. The son remained true to stubborn redneck tradition and kept the middle name, which appears on his tombstone. Hee-yah!