America's Other Original Sin: 'Preserving the Union'

by Thomas Neuburger

Almost all of America's ills — but not whole set — stem from a single source, its "original sin" if you will. America's real original sin was not its founding as an elite-dominated republic in the 1780s, but the importation of a large population of African slaves starting in the early 1600s. It's a commonplace to say that if slavery had never touched these shores, we'd be a vastly different nation today. 

But America may have a second original sin, a follow-on, and it's one that may surprise you. Consider this, from the opening of a good piece on the history of the Electoral College by Justin Fox published at Bloomberg:

The Many Unintended Consequences of the Electoral College

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- When it came time in 1787 to set the rules for choosing a president of the U.S., three of the principal authors of the Constitution — James Madison, Gouverneur Morris and James Wilson — argued that the best approach, the one most likely to inspire public confidence and national feeling, would be a nationwide popular vote.

All three also understood the prospects of this happening were, as Wilson put it, “chimerical.” It was obvious the method would instead have to reflect the two great (or awful, if you prefer) compromises hammered out at the Constitutional Convention over political representation. To keep the slave-holding states on board, the delegates had apportioned seats in the House of Representatives on the basis of a population count that considered slaves to be three-fifths of a person. And to assuage the smaller states they had created a Senate with two members per state, regardless of population. [emphasis added]

Consider the next-to-last sentence: "To keep the slave-holding states on board, the delegates had apportioned seats in the House of Representatives on the basis of a population count that considered slaves to be three-fifths of a person."

Now consider the American Civil War. That war was a violent and successful attempt, in essence, to also "keep the slave-holding states on board." It stripped them of their slaves, but not their deep history of racial animus, anger, exploitation, constant fear of rebellion. 

What if America's second original sin was this — the attempt to "keep the slave-holding states on board" at all? It wasn't at all a given that it should do this.

What if, in other words, the framers of the Constitution had written rules for only the non-slave states? It's entirely possible that the all of the states north of Maryland would have joined the Union, and left those south of that line to do ... what? Stay separate from each other? Form a proto-Confederacy? 

Who knows what they would have done? And why should we care, given what they've done to us since, from 1789 to today, as part of the "union" we so desperately cared about?

Had they departed the Constitution, or never been folded in, the rest of us would have been rid of them, having never been made to lie with them in the first place. And we certainly would not have had the Electoral College. Madison may well have won.

What If Lincoln Had Just Said, 'Fine, Go Away"?

Consider another juncture in our history when we could have been freed of them. What if Lincoln had not been so hell-bent on "preserving the Union" — had just said, "Let the slave states go and good riddance to them all"? 

By then the slave-induced wounds on the republic had already festered — the compromises that led to war left a mess in the west — but the massive national bloodletting might have been avoided, and the new, non-slave nation of the Northern Union would not have been continuously and politically roiled by the slave-holding South from the day of Emancipation till now. 

We're poisoned today by Lincoln's determination — at least that's one way to look at it.

But What About the Slaves Themselves?

The greatest obstacle to this way of thinking involves the state of the slaves themselves. The benefits of freedom as a result of the Civil War should not be understated or underestimated. It's certain that the history of Africans on this part of the American continent would have been vastly different had they not been freed in 1862. 

It's true that men like Frederick Douglass would still have achieved their greatness — he escaped slavery to Pennsylvania well before the war — but everyone who failed to escape would have remained in the wretched condition she or he was subject to prior to emancipation. So we cannot consider this thought lightly.

Yet we should consider it, at least in an alternative-history sense. What may have happened indeed had the Founders not bent the Constitution to include the slave states? What may have happened had Lincoln not valued union over peace?

In the first case, a number of possibilities present themselves, among them the non-consolidation, at least for a time, of the slaves states into one entity. This would have left each of them vulnerable, considering the smaller size of their individual economies, to shrink even further when the northern industrial powerhouse began to dominate the continent. 

As they watched the Northern Union grow stronger, would the southern states have sought to join with them, their hats in hand? Perhaps some of them might. 

More likely, though, they would eventually have banded together, but as the industrial North became the engine it was to become, even a united Southern Union would have been no match for it in real wealth, and the need to trade with the North would have placed natural restraints on southern power. 

In addition, a look at the history of Haiti is instructive. The Haitian Revolution occurred at the end of the 1790s and concluded in 1804. Would a weakened South have been subject to a similar rebellion, or many of them? If revolts had occurred, the Northern Union (I certainly would hope) would have found it in its interest to stand aside. (If they would actually have stood aside is another matter, but abolitionist voices were strong.)

A war may well have emerged between the Northern Union and the South, caused either by skirmishes launched by separate southern states or by the South itself united. But would it have gone the same as the actual war? It may well have ended earlier. 

In addition, if after the war the Northern Union had not tried to force the slave states back into the fold, the price of victory could simply have been to declare all the South's slaves free, with right of passage and citizenship to the non-slave Northern Union. 

Thus no Reconstruction. The occupying Northern Army could guarantee (to the extent that it could) the safety of every slave who wished to emigrate, then let the slaves states do what they wished to do without more interference, and left. 

The myth of the "war of Northern aggression" would never have been born, since the only way a broad war could have started would be by Southern aggression against its sovereign neighbor to the north.

Food for thought. Life for Africans and their descendants was horrible in the South before the actual Civil War, and after Reconstruction, ended by the corrupt bargain of 1876 (a "third original sin," if you will), life for African descendants became returned to terrible. The South did rise again, with lynchings, poverty, fear and social isolation replacing the slave cabins, whips and guns. 

Not an exact trade — slavery was still far worse — but not a good one either. This new bad life for African descendants lasted at least till the end of Jim Crow, if it ever ended at all.

The New Secessionists

Today many dream of a kind of new secession, one where California and the Pacific states are free of rules imposed by Alabama and Idaho; where Texas doesn't write creationist textbooks for Vermont; and one small-minded, power-hungry conservative from Kentucky can't put gay-hating climate deniers on the Supreme Court for the next four decades, to rule us from the bench.

Was the price of "union" worth it? Do we even have "union" at all, after all that effort and pain? Or would have been better for everyone concerned if the North were rid of the South from the very start?

Food for thought.

 

Guest Post by Tim Russo: If A Second Civil War Comes, Marxists Know Who Wins-- The Yankees Will Defeat Capital. Again.

An old friend of mine, Tim Russo, reviewed Andrew Zimmerman's book The American Civil War by Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels and agreed to let me share it here at DWT.



Americans know La Marseillaise largely from the above scene in Casablanca (1942). Bogart gives a knowing nod to his house band to play the French national anthem to drown out Nazis singing a German battle song. Truth being more incredible than fiction, turns out La Marseillaise is even more Yankee Doodle Dandy than Hollywood’s Golden Era imagined.

August Willich emigrated to Ohio as a German exile, following a well worn path of radicals from Europe’s crushed revolutions of 1848, wandering the globe. As a communist of 1848, waving Marx’s Communist Manifesto in the air on the battle field, Willich was too radical even for Marx or Engels, regularly clashing to the point of a bungled duel in London. Thus, Marx and Engels kept an eye on Willich, as well as their many other comrades who made it into the Union Army as German born immigrants. By the Civil War, Willich was publishing a socialist newspaper in German in Cincinnati, soon to join himself.

In Zimmerman’s 2016 volume of Marx’s Civil War correspondence, Engels regularly mentions Willich having found his way into the Union Army as colonel commanding the 9th Ohio & 32nd Indiana. Willich brought 1848’s revolutionary anthem, La Marseillaise, with him to General Grant’s first major victory at Shiloh. At Shiloh’s second day, April 7, 1862, Willich rallied his troops, unsteady under withering Confederate fire, his back to the enemy, by ordering the regimental band to strike up La Marseillaise, as revolutionaries did in 1848, and as Bogart would 80 years later on celluloid. 

How is this not a movie? Oh wait.

Combining Marx with America’s finest hour (let alone Humphrey Bogart) was, and remains, so dangerous, Zimmerman pays tribute to the 1937 edition’s editor who lost his job over it. Herbert H. Morais was hounded out of Brooklyn College for publishing Marx and Engles’ Civil War works, even though Morais hid behind a pseudonym.  In his introduction, Zimmerman salutes the brave American leftists before him…

“They have made it relatively safe, at least for the time being, for me to publish the present edition of Marx and Engels’s writings on the Civil War under my own name even when a pseudonym could not protect my predecessor from government persecution in the United States of America.”

August Willich

Zimmerman thus does the American left of the 21st century a great service. Marx clearly saw the Civil War as a revolution against capital’s exploitation of unpaid labor-- slavery. Anticipating by seven decades Gramsci’s theory that capital controls its exploited through the voluntary acquiescence of their own minds, Marx boils the Civil War down to a battle of ideas. Two value systems clashed, slavery versus free labor, and only one would survive. Marx was under no illusion which system, facing life or death, went on the attack.

“The South” … is not a country at all, but a battle slogan…not a war of defense, but a war of conquest, a war of conquest for the spread and perpetuation of slavery.”

Throughout Zimmerman’s volume, Marx & Engels yearn for Lincoln to cast aside the “constitutional” waging of war (merely to preserve the Union as is) and launch the “revolutionary” stage to abolish slavery. Marx blames the North’s slowness toward the “thunder cry” of abolition on America’s system of government allowing America’s racial original sin access to power, thus preventing full revolution against capital. Obstacles include the “border states” requiring constant baby sitting of their racial prejudices, the Union’s “loyal slaveholders” deploying racial resentment in an all too familiar way, even the North’s broader disinterest in the war other than as a way to make some money. 

Half Efforts

“One hand behind its back getting rich,” was how the Union won the war according to Shelby Foote, the Southern writer whose 3 volume history of the war has become the standard. Both Marx and Engels noticed the Union’s half efforts in real time, citing as Foote does a century later the Homestead Act sending tens of thousands to the West. Marx and Engels bristle with frustration that America shrank from the enormous power of revolutionary ideas, only to bog down in “constitutional” status quo maintenance. Engels in particular ties McClellan’s military failures to the broader reluctance of the country.

Marx easily dismisses the notion that racism created slavery, noting that capital cares little what labor looks like versus how much it costs, preferably zero. Marx writes Nov. 7, 1861, in Die Presse that should the South prevail, the whole United States would succumb to slavery, color of skin being no matter.

“…the white working class would gradually be forced down to the level of helotry. This would fully accord with the loudly proclaimed principle that only certain races are capable of freedom, and as the actual labor is the lot of the Negro in the South, so in the North it is the lot of the German or Irishman, or their direct descendants.”

Cincinatti recruitment add

Once Lincoln overcame the “constitutional” war and emancipated the slaves after the Battle of Antietam, Marx knows the affair is settled and the Confederacy doomed. But the revolution against capital? Had it been won? Reconstruction disappoints both Marx and Engels immediately. Jim Crow’s embryonic ugliness did not escape note, causing Marx to issue a warning to the US in October, 1865, which today is haunting.

“As injustice to a section of your people has produced such direful results, let that cease…If you fail to give them citizens’ rights, while you demand citizens’ duties, there will yet remain a struggle for the future which may again stain your country with your people’s blood…We warn you then, as brothers in the common cause, to remove every shackle from freedom’s limb, and your victory will be complete.”

Victory was not complete. Thus, predictably, the Trump era of capital’s crowning control shrieks of a coming second “civil war”, sounding just like Jeff Davis before Ft. Sumter. A way of life is threatened! We are such victims! Our sacred honor! Mob rule! None of it is new. Protecting a Confederate statue today, according to Marx, is as “defensive” as lobbing shells into Fort Sumter, a counter revolutionary attack against free labor, against freedom itself.

Echoes 

The most important portions of Zimmerman’s volume are Marx’s analyses of the decades preceding the war. Closely, eerily, mirroring our generations’ 40 years of Reagan Thatcher neoliberal global domination by capital of the state, Marx dissects slavery’s decades long expansion via control of US government by a tiny faction of aristocratic slaveholders.  The “slaveholder party” Marx calls them. From the 3/5 compromise, through the 1820 Missouri Compromise, the Mexican War, the 1854 Kansas Nebraska Act, to the Dred Scott decision of the US Supreme Court in 1857, Marx gives chapter and verse how a tiny landed gentry can capture every organ of power in pursuit of legal protection of its holy right to the highest possible profit. Not a thing has changed.

Having failed to heed Marx’s warning to ensure complete freedom for the enslaved, America yet reaps what we’ve sown. Despite the New Deal’s offensive against capital, itself revolutionary socialism in the same sense the Civil War was, the price of labor after the New Deal’s destruction heads ever toward zero. Racial tension has remained, as useful to capital as it was in 1860. A Marx letter of 1870 to friends in New York sounds as if Marx travelled forward in time to watch Fox News;

“This antagonism is kept artificially alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short by all means at the disposal of the ruling class. This antagonism is the secret of the English working class’s impotence, despite its organization. It is the secret of the maintenance of power by the capitalist class. And the latter is fully aware of this.”

Ever more eery, Marx’s warning that the “white working class” would eventually be in the cross hairs of capital is today Trump’s resentment jet fuel keeping capital soaring over the state. Today’s “identity politics” con game would be unsurprising to Marx in 1861. Purposefully divisive use of race, gender, sexual identity, ethnicity, etc., masking capital’s control over life itself is Marx’s “constitutional” war yet again eclipsing the inevitable “revolutionary” war to come.

Play it again, Uncle Sam

To arms, citizens,
Form your battalions,
Let’s march, let’s march!
Let an impure blood
Water our furrows!

For the Marseillaise scene in Casablanca, Humphrey Bogart will not have known any of this. There is, though, a certain twinkle in his eye that lets the Rick’s Cafe band know to play on. Let us hope that an actor in the next scene where La Marseillaise appears on film has read Andrew Zimmerman’s volume. If a second Civil War is coming, Zimmerman allows Marx to describe its onset with precision. To get that Bogie twinkle in his eye, the actor will need to know we Americans are far more revolutionary than we are permitted to know.

Statues Of The Traitor Robert E. Lee Are An Affront To Every Patriotic American

On the same day of alt-right/KKK violence and domestic terrorism in Charlottesville, Virginia, Jim Gray, the popular mayor of Lexington, Kentucky, announced that he's relocating the city's Confederate statues, much as Louisville had already done. The Klan and Nazi terrorists worked for months to plan a violent confrontation in Charlottesville, angered that the city had renamed Lee Park and was removing a statue of the Confederate traitor Robert E. Lee. Lee should have been hung after he led a slavers' rebellion against the United States. Statues in his honor are an ugly celebration of treason and racism. In June Adam Serwer, writing for The Atlantic, exposed the lies that have conspired to re-make the traitor Lee as some kind of a hero and patriot instead of the pile of shit he always was. "The strangest part about the continued personality cult of Robert E. Lee," wrote Serwer, "is how few of the qualities his admirers profess to see in him he actually possessed... The myth of Lee goes something like this: He was a brilliant strategist and devoted Christian man who abhorred slavery and labored tirelessly after the war to bring the country back together. There is little truth in this. Lee was a devout Christian, and historians regard him as an accomplished tactician. But despite his ability to win individual battles, his decision to fight a conventional war against the more densely populated and industrialized North is considered by many historians to have been a fatal strategic error. But even if one conceded Lee’s military prowess, he would still be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans in defense of the South’s authority to own millions of human beings as property because they are black. Lee’s elevation is a key part of a 150-year-old propaganda campaign designed to erase slavery as the cause of the war and whitewash the Confederate cause as a noble one. That ideology is known as the Lost Cause, and as historian David Blight writes, it provided a 'foundation on which Southerners built the Jim Crow system.'"

There are unwitting victims of this campaign-- those who lack the knowledge to separate history from sentiment. Then there are those whose reverence for Lee relies on replacing the actual Lee with a mythical figure who never truly existed.

In the Richmond Times Dispatch, R. David Cox wrote that “For white supremacist protesters to invoke his name violates Lee’s most fundamental convictions.” In the conservative publication Townhall,  Jack Kerwick concluded that Lee was “among the finest human beings that has ever walked the Earth.” John Daniel Davidson, in an essay for The Federalist, opposed the removal of the Lee statute in part on the grounds that Lee “arguably did more than anyone to unite the country after the war and bind up its wounds.” Praise for Lee of this sort has flowed forth from past historians and presidents alike.

This is too divorced from Lee’s actual life to even be classed as fan fiction; it is simply historical illiteracy.

White supremacy does not “violate” Lee’s “most fundamental convictions.” White supremacy was one of Lee’s most fundamental convictions.

Lee was a slaveowner-- his own views on slavery were explicated in an 1856 letter that it often misquoted to give the impression that Lee was some kind of an abolitionist. In the letter, he describes slavery as “a moral & political evil,” but goes on to explain that:

I think it however a greater evil to the white man than to the black race, & while my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more strong for the former. The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially & physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race, & I hope will prepare & lead them to better things. How long their subjugation may be necessary is known & ordered by a wise Merciful Providence. Their emancipation will sooner result from the mild & melting influence of Christianity, than the storms & tempests of fiery Controversy.

The argument here is that slavery is bad for white people, good for black people, and most importantly, it is better than abolitionism; emancipation must wait for divine intervention. That black people might not want to be slaves does not enter into the equation; their opinion on the subject of their own bondage is not even an afterthought to Lee.

Lee’s cruelty as a slavemaster was not confined to physical punishment. In Reading the Man, the historian Elizabeth Brown Pryor’s portrait of Lee through his writings, Pryor writes that “Lee ruptured the Washington and Custis tradition of respecting slave families,” by hiring them off to other plantations, and that “by 1860 he had broken up every family but one on the estate, some of whom had been together since Mount Vernon days.” The separation of slave families was one of the most unfathomably devastating aspects of slavery, and Pryor wrote that Lee’s slaves regarded him as “the worst man I ever see.”

The trauma of rupturing families lasted lifetimes for the enslaved-- it was, as my colleague Ta-Nehisi Coates described it, “a kind of murder.” After the war, thousands of the emancipated searched desperately for kin lost to the market for human flesh, fruitlessly for most. In Reconstruction, the historian Eric Foner quotes a Freedmen’s Bureau agent who notes of the emancipated, “in their eyes, the work of emancipation was incomplete until the families which had been dispersed by slavery were reunited.”

Lee’s heavy hand on the Arlington plantation, Pryor writes, nearly led to a slave revolt, in part because the enslaved had been expected to be freed upon their previous master’s death, and Lee had engaged in a dubious legal interpretation of his will in order to keep them as his property, one that lasted until a Virginia court forced him to free them.

...Every state that seceded mentioned slavery as the cause in their declarations of secession. Lee’s beloved Virginia was no different, accusing the federal government of “perverting” its powers “not only to the injury of the people of Virginia, but to the oppression of the Southern Slaveholding States.” Lee’s decision to fight for the South can only be described as a choice to fight for the continued existence of human bondage in America-- even though for the Union, it was not at first a war for emancipation.

During his invasion of Pennsylvania, Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia enslaved free blacks and brought them back to the South as property. Pryor writes that “evidence links virtually every infantry and cavalry unit in Lee’s army” with the abduction of free black Americans, “with the activity under the supervision of senior officers.”

Soldiers under Lee’s command at the Battle of the Crater in 1864 massacred black Union soldiers who tried to surrender. Then, in a spectacle hatched by Lee’s senior corps commander A.P. Hill, the Confederates paraded the Union survivors through the streets of Petersburg to the slurs and jeers of the southern crowd. Lee never discouraged such behavior. As the historian Richard Slotkin wrote in No Quarter: The Battle of the Crater, “his silence was permissive.”

The presence of black soldiers on the field of battle shattered every myth the South’s slave empire was built on: the happy docility of slaves, their intellectual inferiority, their cowardice, their inability to compete with whites. As Pryor writes, “fighting against brave and competent African Americans challenged every underlying tenet of southern society.” The Confederate response to this challenge was to visit every possible atrocity and cruelty upon black soldiers whenever possible, from enslavement to execution.

As the historian James McPherson recounts in Battle Cry of Freedom, in October of that same year, Lee proposed an exchange of prisoners with the Union general Ulysses S. Grant. “Grant agreed, on condition that blacks be exchanged ‘the same as white soldiers.’” Lee’s response was that “negroes belonging to our citizens are not considered subjects of exchange and were not included in my proposition.” Because slavery was the cause for which Lee fought, he could hardly be expected to easily concede, even at the cost of the freedom of his own men, that blacks could be treated as soldiers and not things. Grant refused the offer, telling Lee that “Government is bound to secure to all persons received into her armies the rights due to soldiers.” Despite its desperate need for soldiers, the Confederacy did not relent from this position until a few months before Lee’s surrender.

After the war, Lee did counsel defeated southerners against rising up against the North. Lee might have become a rebel once more, and urged the South to resume fighting-- as many of his former comrades wanted him to. But even in this task Grant, in 1866, regarded his former rival as falling short, saying that Lee was “setting an example of forced acquiescence so grudging and pernicious in its effects as to be hardly realized.”

Nor did Lee’s defeat lead to an embrace of racial egalitarianism. The war was not about slavery, Lee insisted later, but if it was about slavery, it was only out of Christian devotion that white southerners fought to keep blacks enslaved. Lee told a New York Herald reporter, in the midst of arguing in favor of somehow removing blacks from the South (“disposed of,” in his words), “that unless some humane course is adopted, based on wisdom and Christian principles you do a gross wrong and injustice to the whole negro race in setting them free. And it is only this consideration that has led the wisdom, intelligence and Christianity of the South to support and defend the institution up to this time.”

Lee had beaten or ordered his own slaves to be beaten for the crime of wanting to be free, he fought for the preservation of slavery, his army kidnapped free blacks at gunpoint and made them unfree-- but all of this, he insisted, had occurred only because of the great Christian love the South held for blacks. Here we truly understand Frederick Douglass’s admonition that "between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference."

Privately, according to the correspondence collected by his own family, Lee counseled others to hire white labor instead of the freedmen, observing “that wherever you find the negro, everything is going down around him, and wherever you find a white man, you see everything around him improving.”

In another letter, Lee wrote “You will never prosper with blacks, and it is abhorrent to a reflecting mind to be supporting and cherishing those who are plotting and working for your injury, and all of whose sympathies and associations are antagonistic to yours. I wish them no evil in the world-- on the contrary, will do them every good in my power, and know that they are misled by those to whom they have given their confidence; but our material, social, and political interests are naturally with the whites.”

Publicly, Lee argued against the enfranchisement of blacks, and raged against Republican efforts to enforce racial equality on the South. Lee told Congress that blacks lacked the intellectual capacity of whites and “could not vote intelligently,” and that granting them suffrage would “excite unfriendly feelings between the two races.” Lee explained that “the negroes have neither the intelligence nor the other qualifications which are necessary to make them safe depositories of political power.” To the extent that Lee believed in reconciliation, it was between white people, and only on the precondition that black people would be denied political power and therefore the ability to shape their own fate.

Lee is not remembered as an educator, but his life as president of Washington College (later Washington and Lee) is tainted as well. According to Pryor, students at Washington formed their own chapter of the KKK, and were known by the local Freedmen’s Bureau to attempt to abduct and rape black schoolgirls from the nearby black schools.

There were at least two attempted lynchings by Washington students during Lee’s tenure, and Pryor writes that “the number of accusations against Washington College boys indicates that he either punished the racial harassment more laxly than other misdemeanors, or turned a blind eye to it,” adding that he “did not exercise the near imperial control he had at the school, as he did for more trivial matters, such as when the boys threatened to take unofficial Christmas holidays.” In short, Lee was as indifferent to crimes of violence toward blacks carried out by his students as he was when they were carried out by his soldiers.

Lee died in 1870, as Democrats and ex-Confederates were commencing a wave of terrorist violence that would ultimately reimpose their domination over the Southern states. The Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1866; there is no evidence Lee ever spoke up against it. On the contrary, he darkly intimated in his interview with the Herald that the South might be moved to violence again if peace did not proceed on its terms. That was prescient.

...Lee, whose devotion to white supremacy outshone his loyalty to his country, is the embodiment of everything they stand for. Tribe and race over country is the core of white nationalism, and racists can embrace Lee in good conscience.

The question is why anyone else would.

Especially the illegitimate current occupant of the White House.

Most Southerners Didn't Own Slaves, So Why...?

When Frank Hyman-- whose essay on racism in the News&Observer I want to discuss below, was in first grade, he got in trouble for calling a classmate the N-word. The classmate was Hispanic. It reminded me of a run-in with racism I once had in San Francisco when I was much younger. I met a farm boy who had run away from home in the Sacramento Delta area and hitch-hiked down to San Francisco. On our way back to my apartment in my old Ford Fairlane we drove through the Fillmore district and we stopped at a light at a corner where there were 4 or 5 black guys hanging put. My young farmer friend started cursing "the fucking Jews." He wasn't joking. I later learned he was raised by a Nazi grandfather who taught him that blacks are... "fucking Jews." A strange world we live in. (Aside: he was a lovely boy and he eventually had his Nazi tattoos removed to facilitate a closer relationship between us.)

Anyway, Mr. Hyman grew out of the racism he learned at home in a southern military family and came to understand the ugliness of the Confederate flag and what was behind that ugliness. He wrote that he "learned that for black folks the flutter of that flag felt like a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. And for the most prideful flag waivers, clearly that response was the point. I mean, come on. It’s a battle flag. What the flag symbolizes for blacks is enough reason to take it down. But there’s another reason that white southerners shouldn’t fly it. Or sport it on our state-issued license plates as some do here in North Carolina."

The Confederacy-- and the slavery that spawned it-- was also one big con job on the Southern, white, working class. A con job funded by some of the ante-bellum one-per-centers, that continues today in a similar form. 
You don’t have to be an economist to see that forcing blacks-- a third of the South’s laborers-- to work without pay drove down wages for everyone else. And not just in agriculture. A quarter of enslaved blacks worked in the construction, manufacturing and lumbering trades; cutting wages even for skilled white workers.

Thanks to the profitability of this no-wage/low-wage combination, a majority of American one-per-centers were southerners. Slavery made southern states the richest in the country. The South was richer than any other country except England. But that vast wealth was invisible outside the plantation ballrooms. With low wages and few schools, southern whites suffered a much lower land ownership rate and a far lower literacy rate than northern whites.

...[M]ost Southerners didn’t own slaves. But they were persuaded to risk their lives and limbs for the right of a few to get rich as Croesus from slavery. For their sacrifices and their votes, they earned two things before and after the Civil War. First, a very skinny slice of the immense Southern pie. And second, the thing that made those slim rations palatable then and now: the shallow satisfaction of knowing that blacks had no slice at all.

How did the plantation owners mislead so many Southern whites?

They managed this con job partly with a propaganda technique that will be familiar to modern Americans, but hasn’t received the coverage it deserves in our sesquicentennial celebrations. Starting in the 1840s wealthy Southerners supported more than 30 regional pro-slavery magazines, many pamphlets, newspapers and novels that falsely touted slave ownership as having benefits that would-- in today’s lingo-- trickle down to benefit non-slave owning whites and even blacks. The flip side of the coin of this old-is-new trickle-down propaganda is the mistaken notion that any gain by blacks in wages, schools or health care comes at the expense of the white working class.

Today’s version of this con job no longer supports slavery, but still works in the South and thrives in pro trickle-down think tanks, magazines, newspapers, talk radio and TV news shows such as the Cato Foundation, Reason magazine, Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. These sources are underwritten by pro trickle-down one-per-centers like the Koch brothers and Rupert Murdoch.

For example, a map of states that didn’t expand Medicaid-- which would actually be a boon mostly to poor whites-- resembles a map of the old Confederacy with a few other poor, rural states thrown in. Another indication that this divisive propaganda works on Southern whites came in 2012. Romney and Obama evenly split the white working class in the West, Midwest and Northeast. But in the South we went 2-1 for Romney.

Lowering the flag because of the harm done to blacks is the right thing to do. We also need to lower it because it symbolizes material harm the ideology of the Confederacy did to Southern whites that lasts even to this day.

One can love the South without flying the battle flag. But it won’t help to get rid of an old symbol if we can’t also rid ourselves of the self-destructive beliefs that go with it. Only by shedding those too, will Southern whites finally catch up to the rest of the country in wages, health and education.

There's been lots of progress in Virginia, some in Florida, some in Texas. And the Deep South? That's another signal Georgia voters in the Fulton, Cobb and DeKalb county 'burbs north of Atlanta may soon be sending the rest of the country when they turn out on April 18 and June 20 for Jon Ossoff. Replacing Mick Mulvaney in South Carolina (May 2 for the primaries and also June 20 for the runoff) with a non-Confederate will be a lot harder. The Republicans are likely to run a backward-facing state Rep., Tommy Pope, and the DCCC is pimping for some Goldman Sachs guy, Archie Parnell.

Kentucky's Deplorable Governor Matt Bevin-- A Modern Day Beriah Magoffin?

Last night we looked at the "rabid" support Señor Trumpanzee is getting in some of the desperate parts of Kentucky, including in Perry County, which has the lowest life expectancy of any county in the U.S. "When you ain't got nothin'," in the words of Kris Kristofferson "you ain't got nothin' to lose." How could these people be so stupid, is not the appropriate response, at least not for many of them. Especially when the highest ranking official in the state, Governor Matt Bevin is stirring people up towards bloodshed if his man Trumpanzee loses in November. You can watch Bevin in the video above at the Values Voter Summit GOP HateFest in DC last week. As Peter Montgomery explained at RightWingWatch.org, "numerous speakers at last weekend’s Values Voter Summit suggested that the American republic might not survive a Hillary Clinton presidency. During the Obama administration it has become almost routine to hear far-right leaders talk about the possibility of armed revolution against the federal government. But it was still jarring to hear a sitting governor suggest that America might only survive the election of Hillary Clinton through bloodshed."

But Bevin, a deranged teabagger and notorious hate-monger took it to a new level for a sitting governor, actually inciting violence and murder if Trumpanzee loses, as seems likely.

Bevin recounted a story from his college days about how he confronted a professor who he said mocked Christianity, the way liberals always do: “They try to silence us. They try to get us to shut our mouths. They try to embarrass us. Don’t be embarrassed. We were not redeemed to have a spirit of timidity.” He urged young people, “Be bold. There’s enough Neville Chamberlains in the world. Be a Winston Churchill…There are quite enough sheep already. Be a shepherd.”

American freedom, Bevin said, was “purchased at an extraordinary price,” saying that one and a half million Americans have given their lives in uniform. “America is worth fighting for. America is worth fighting for, ideologically.”

“I want us to be able to fight ideologically, mentally, spiritually, economically, so that we don’t have to do it physically,” said Bevin. “But that may in fact be the case.” He explained that it might take the shedding of the blood of tyrants and patriots for America to survive a Hillary Clinton presidency.

When the Civil War broke out, Abraham Lincoln asked Kentucky's governor, pro-slave lunatic Beriah Magoffin to supply troops to help put down the rebellion. Magoffin responded that he would "send not a man nor a dollar for the wicked purpose of subduing my sister Southern states." Kentucky officially declared neutrality in the conflict but in the next elections pro-union forces elected veto-proof majorities in the legislature and 9 out of 10 congressmen. Eventually Magoffin resigned in disgrace and the South invaded Kentucky and were repulsed with much blood spilled. Do you think Bevin sees himself as a latter day Magoffin? Read his own words:

Somebody asked me yesterday, I did an interview and they said, “Do you think it’s possible, if Hillary Clinton were to win the election, do you think it’s possible that we’ll be able to survive? That we would ever be able to recover as a nation? And while there are people who have stood on this stage and said we would not, I would beg to differ. But I will tell you this: I do think it would be possible, but at what price? At what price? The roots of the tree of liberty are watered by what? The blood, of who? The tyrants to be sure, but who else? The patriots. Whose blood will be shed? It may be that of those in this room. It might be that of our children and grandchildren. I have nine children. It breaks my heart to think that it might be their blood that is needed to redeem something, to reclaim something, that we through our apathy and our indifference have given away.

Does anyone doubt Trump is a spark for divisiveness and even dissolution? Could Hillary have had Bevin's attitude in mind when she talked about the deplorables last week?