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"Either this nation shall kill racism, or racism shall kill this nation." (S. Jonas, Aug., 2018)
First Inauguration of Abraham Lincoln, 1861. A different crowd from those who are now launching the Third Civil War.
(Image by lisby1) Details DMCA
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I have been writing on the first two elements in the title above for quite some time. More recently, others have as well. Back in 2009, in the first version of BuzzFlash, I began a column with an analysis by my friend and once and present editor, Mark Karlin (BuzzFlash, 8/25/09). It briefly and elegantly set the argument in 2009, but is also perfectly on-target (if I may use that term) for the present time:
"[I]t [the Civil War] may have been won by the North, but in truth the South never emotionally conceded. The Town Hall mobs, the birthers, the teabaggers, are all part of that long line of 'coded' agitators for the notions of white entitlement and 'conservative values.' Of course, this conservative viewpoint values cheap labor and unabated use of natural resources over technological and economic innovation."
A significant portion of this column is taken from previous ones of mine.
Of course, the North won the battles on the field, 1861-65. As a result, slavery was abolished, not only in the states of the Confederacy but also in the slave states which did not join the Secession: Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware. Further, the Western Counties of Virginia themselves seceded from that State in 1863 (but in the process of course bequeathing to us a modern representative of that kind of "Southern spirit" [except for chattel slavery], Sen, Joe Manchin).
As it happened, the Confederate States of America itself had a very interesting attitude towards secession (knowledge of which will have relevance in a subsequent column or two). As spelled out in an edition of Quora (May 12, 2022), one Nelson McKeeby tells us:
"Did the Confederacy ban secession after its formation? I was once told that the Confederacy legally deterred states from leaving, but I cannot find a source for this. The place you can find it is in the debates surround the adoption of the Confederate constitution.
"When West Virginia broke off from Virginia there was a significant paranoia that ran through the confederacy because [emphasis added] [somewhat] less than half of the land territory of the confederacy and [somewhat] less than half the adult population of the states that seceded wanted anything to do with secession. The mountain and piedmont of North Carolina, Western Virginia, East Tennessee, Central Louisiana and Mississippi, and North Georgia largely dissented on secession and wanted in turn to leave their states. This fear led to a refusal to add secession clauses to the Confederate or several state constitutions. Regions that threatened secession were militarily garrisoned, their leaders hanged, and their populations repressed not because secession was legal in the south, but because it was illegal.
"Oddly enough, the south knew their secession was illegal. That is why they did it with guns rather than in the courts. No one robs a bank they have legal money in, to get the money they have inside out. They simply present a slip to a teller and take their cash."
Of course logic and consistency did no more rule the Southern Slavocracy than does it rule their descendants in the modern Republo-fascist Party. That Party is clearly the political successor to both the racist seceders and the Jim Crow-champions who Nixon welcomed into the Republican Party with his "Southern Strategy" of 1969.
But then, did the South really lose the Civil War, over time? Well, yes and no. The North did win on the battlefield. But I have argued (2018) that in terms of its original war aims, except for just one of them, the South did win the Civil War and then some, right down to this very day. Just consider those war aims. And it is the series of events summarized just below that I am now entitling "The Second Civil War."
The South's War Aims
1. The
preservation of the institution of African and African-American chattel slavery
(through the activities of the slave-owners and the slave-masters from the time
of the arrival of the first Africans destined for slavery in 1620, there were
already many of the latter), and its uninhibited expansion into the Territories
of the Plains, the Rocky Mountain region, and the Southwest. (California had
already been established as a free state by the Compromise of 1850.)
2. The acceptance by the whole United States of the Dogma of White Supremacy on
which the institution of slavery was established. Alexander Stephens was
Vice-President of the Confederate States of America (CSA). Following the death
of John C. Calhoun in 1850, Stephens became its principal politico-economic
theoretician. At the beginning of the Civil War, Stephens has the following to say about
Southern slavery. Indeed I have posted this quote many times over the years. For it summarizes the views of the slave-masters towards their chattel, but also echoes in the views of many white supremacists down to our own time.
"Many governments have been founded upon the principle of the subordination and serfdom of certain classes of the same race. Such were, and are in violation of the laws of nature. Our system commits no such violation of nature's law. With us, all of the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye of the law. Not so with the Negro. Subordination is his place. He, by nature, or by the curse against Cain, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system. Our new government is founded on the opposite idea of the equality of the races. Its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the Negro is not equal to the White man; that slavery --- subordination to the superior race --- is his natural condition."
Thus, slavery as a general institution was immoral, according to Stephens. But for "Negroes" it was permitted, because they were considered to be "inferior beings." And indeed, to repeat, among many sectors of the population and their present political representatives, they still are. See, for example, the ever-expanding voter suppression campaigns aimed specifically at Blacks because, donchaknow, as the Republo-fascists tell us, cheating is just built into their very natures. "Evidence? Who needs evidence? We just KNOW it."
3. It was the South of course that strongly supported the theory of "States' Rights." (Gosh, doesn't that have a modern ring to it in the voices of the Republo-fascist leadership?) From the onset of the Republic, one of that doctrines' outcomes was to provide for the control of the Congress, through the control of the Senate by a minority of the national population. As well, of course there is that other provision of the original Constitutional Convention that was crafted specifically to protect the interests of the Slave States: The Electoral College. Obviously, both are playing out in major ways in current U.S. political history. (My-oh-my. The Republo-fascists might just as well not write their own speeches. They would just have to look a bunch of those delivered by the Secessionists, down through the Jim Crow-ers, right down further to their modern successors, from the White House, to the Congress, to the State Houses, and of course into the Court system (Federal and state).
4. A major element of Southern politics was the use of the Big Lie Technique. First it was that Africans and African-Americans were inferior beings, not "human." Second it was that the Civil War, initiated by the Forces of Secession in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina on April 12, 1861, was about "Southern Freedom." Of course, that "Southern Freedom" meant the right to maintain the institution of slavery, as well to expand it into to the Western Territories, without too much in the way of limitations. Jeff Davis would make the "freedom" claim right to the very end.
5. And then, extending down to the present time, is what I am now calling the "Second Civil war." This concept goes beyond my earlier references, and that of others, to "The South Won the Civil War." For that War has in fact been continued, not with guns, but with laws and a wide variety of segregationist institutions, like "red-lining." "Jim Crow" in the South, the civil extension-of-slavery-without-bondage, lasted in a formalized system, from "no blacks allowed" to lynching, into the 1960s. But major elements still survive, and indeed thrive, in many parts of the country. Just look at the data on Black education, employment, home ownership, annual income, and so on and so forth. (See the "Key Points" in that reference.) And rights that had been granted, starting with Brown v. Board of Education (1954) have been gradually taken away (see "Shelby," 2013). And of course, most importantly we once again have one of the two leading parties running on racism.
So, where does this all leave us now? I no longer think that The South Won the Civil War and what has happened since is simply an extension of that victory. I am characterizing it differently. The North clearly won The Civil War of 1861-65 that took place on the battlefield, and then proceeded to put into the Constitution certain major elements which were intended to secure that victory. But that victory didn't last long.
Former Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest was one of the founders of what became the Ku Klux Klan in 1867. Its explicit purpose was to prevent Blacks from voting. (Sound familiar?) The famous "40 Acres and a Mule" plan, issued as an order late in the War by Union general William Tecumseh Sherman, which would have transformed Southern Society from the ground (literally) up, was overturned by the (former) slave-holding President Andrew Johnson, Lincoln's successor when he was assassinated. The post-Civil War period, known as Reconstruction (see Eric Foner's classic book on this one), during which major changes beyond the end of chattel slavery were supposed to occur, didn't last long.
For example, as a practical matter, concerning the everyday lives of the freed slaves was the XVth Amendment, sometime known as the Civil Rights Amendment:
"Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by ap pro priate legislation."
In the last days of the Grant Administration Congress did indeed pass "appropriate legislation," sometimes referred to as the first civil rights act. The Supreme Court (surprise, surprise) declared it unconstitutional in 1883. Actually, it was as a result of the Deal of 1877 that put a Republican, Rutherford B. Hayes, in the White House in return for his promise to withdraw Federal troops from the former Confederacy that Reconstruction came to a formal end.
And then, all of the events that occurred from then on, from the formal "Jim Crow" (named after a character in a Black minstrel show) in the South --- from laws to lynchings --- to the informal Jim Crow which still exists in many parts of the country, take us down to the present. I am now characterizing this period, from 1877 not as "How the South won the Civil War" (which, to repeat, was won on the battlefield by the North, and then for a short period time in the Federal government level [after the horrible Andrew Johnson]), but rather as the Second Civil War. Which the "South," in terms of the extension of its ideology, politics, and economics, to the modern Republo-fascist Party, clearly running on racism, has clearly won.
And now, in my formulation, our benighted country is entering the start of its Third Civil War. This one is of course over the matter of the bodily autonomy of women when it comes to pregnancy and childbirth. I have written regularly on this issue as well. As is well-known, we have an impending Supreme Court decision which will apparently reverse the famous "Roe v. Wade" decision (oh you know those Republican devotees of "stare decisis" ---- when it suits them [see Scalia, Heller, and the 2nd Amendment), which gave women the "right to choose" whether, if pregnant, up to a certain time, they could choose to terminate the pregnancy.
Based entirely on the totally religious notion that life begins at the moment of conception and that therefore any abortion amounts to murder. (See the repetitive claims of the anti-abortion-rights rights forces which makes that clear over-and-over again.) Well, many of us do not believe that life begins then, but rather, for example as in Roe v. Wade, it begins at the time of viability-outside-the-womb. But further, our position (religious with some folk, non-religious with atheists like me) is that it is un-Constitutional (see the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment) to establish this doctrine with the force of law at any level of government.
The repeal of Roe and the subsequent enactment (some immediately, as is well-known) of total abortion bans will begin the political process in certain states. Then, although he is being somewhat cagey about it (so what else is new[?]) Mitch McConnell does seem to be making it clear that if the Republo-fascists take control of both Houses of Congress, with a Republo-fascist President he will get a national abortion ban law through the Congress. Then of course this Supreme Court would up-hold it against any legal challenges to come. This is what we face folks. The suppression by the law, of the rights (and in this case also the beliefs, religious as well as non-religious) of a very significant sector of the population (in this case, slightly more than half).
The first Civil War was fought over the issue of chattel slavery and indeed states' rights --- that is the rights of states to maintain the institution of chattel slavery through the force of law. The Second has been fought over the matter of how much of the suppression of Blacks, short of chattel slavery, could be maintained by the force of law as well as of custom. The Third, which I see coming, will be over the repression of the civil ---- and religious --- rights of women, and indeed the men to whom they are related. Indeed, there will be more thoughts forthcoming on this one.
(Article changed on May 17, 2022 at 11:41 AM EDT)
