Osler's Razor

Speaking of seeing a movie, I saw American Violet airing on BET the other night.
 

Discussions like this always make me uncomfortable. Saying that the Civil War was about slavery is about like saying that the American Revolution was about stamps. It was a very complex conflict, with many complex causes. Was slavery one of them? Yes. It's hard to deny that.

But what does that even mean? That is such a broad statement that it is meaningless.

Maybe the right question is, Why were the Southern states so hellbent on preserving slavery? And why were the Northern states so hellbent on abolishing it? And what role did economics (as opposed to disinterested human rights advocacy) play in the whole thing?

All I'm saying is this: the Civil War was blue and grey, not black and white.
 

And while we're at it, can we all agree that self-righteous rehashing of the Civil War holds about as much water as "My best friend is black!"?
 

I was listening the WUNC - The State of Things on Monday (2/14). The guest was Nathan Garrett. He received his college eduction at Yale. He is a black man who grew up in Durham in the 1930's so he is now in his mid-80's. Durham was a good place for blacks to own businesses and make strides despite JIm Crow laws, segregation and the like. He said many interesting things during the hour show but his comment about Detroit was most interesting to me.

He went to Detroit in the early 1960's to get a job. He intereviewed with Bell, Chrysler and the like. Each company had a test to give applicants and the tests were skewed in such a way that educated (Yale) could not even pass. Quetions like: How many newspapers are there in the US?. Separate tests for black and white applicants.

He said in the end that it was easier to get a 'good' job as a black in the south with the Jim Crow laws in place. In the south there were rules that everyone knew; no matter how distasteful. In the north there was racism and no rules.

In the end, The North may not have had slavery but perhaps a type of cast system and in many ways that system still exists in many northern cities.

http://wunc.org/tsot/archive/
 

Currently watching Ken Burn's documentary on the Civil War on netflix. It is awesome.
 

The reason I'm glad to see today's blog entry is that it seems to me that today we are hearing the same arguments were big in 1830, 1860, and 1960...

"Nullification" and "states' rights" are getting a lot of traction, these days.
 

I consider myself a midwesterner (or perhaps a Virginian with midwestern roots). Two of my Great-great grandfathers fought for the Union. So I was a little worried when we moved to "The Deep South" when I was in third grade. And even though suburban Northern Virginia outside Washington, D.C. isn't that far south and has grown exponentially over the past 40 years, the southern influence here remains.

There are major roads just across the river from our Nation's Capital named for Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, John Mosby (who after the War became a patent examiner) and many other Confederate heroes. There are many public schools, neighborhoods and shopping centers named for Lee, Jackson, Davis, J.E.B. Stuart, Mosby and even minor deities like Wade Hampton. The prominent Civil War Statue (which does not use the hated term "Civil War," in Alexandria, VA.) features a Southern Veteran facing south, with has back to Washington, DC and the North.

It was pretty jarring for a little kid. And for those who actually have read history who visit Northern Virginia for the first time, I am sure they are shocked too.

The War was "about" slavery and the leaders of the South knew it. Especially people like John Calhoun, who although dead by the time the shooting started, provided most of the intellectual underpinnings for the South's actions. But slavery was not necessarily why people took up arms and fought. They resented being told how to live, how to act and how to think.

It's a very fine distinction, but it takes a long time to understand the independent spirit and resentment of outside control that still runs strong here.

--and following up on Christine's comments, I've met some pretty obnoxious racists who've never been south of the Mason Dixon line.
 

Randy Newman wrote a great song called "Rednecks" that pretty well sums up the point that I think Christine and IPLawguy are getting at about whether or not the north can really lay claim to any superiority on race issues. My father also tells a funny story about going to New York with two guys that he worked with in Dallas that were from NYC. They went into a bar that the two locals knew of, and my father said rather shortly after he arrived a fight broke out between an Irish guy and an Italian guy. And he said the ethnic epithets being thrown around were terms that up to that point he was unfamiliar with. To put it mildly, the south does not have a monopoly on hating people just because they're different.

The thing is, to the extent that the Civil War was about slavery (and certainly, even as a proud son of the south who grew up in a home that prominently displayed a picture of Robert E. Lee) it wasn't about slavery as a matter of hate. At least not mostly. Mostly, it was about slavery as an economic institution that allowed the southern states, and in particular the wealthy landowners in the south, to grow and prosper economically. Obviously, this is horrifying and distasteful to us now to think about people as chattel, or as an economic tool, but that was their reality, and luckily one that we are no longer tied to.

But, does it matter? It certainly does. Because the idea that the civil war was started by or perpetuated in the name or outright hatred in the form of racisim is simply wrong. And it always matters that we try our best not to let the nuance of history fade away because some historian is trying to make a political or sociological point about modern society by trying to rewrite history.
 

RRL is right on point bringing up the economic aspect of running a large plantation / farm as a pretext for the Civil War.

Have things really changed? Today, even with modern farming techniques, we employ migrant workers to do thie back breaking work. We eat fresh food and someone can line their pockets as a result of cheap labor.
 

when was the institution of slavery and owning slaves ever not about economics?
 

Most boats which were used in the Atlantic slave trade were built in Northern ports. Yankee prosperity was built in large measure upon the South's "peculiar institution." And yes, racism did not and does not begin or end at the Mason Dixon Line. Moreover, somewhere in the neighborhood of six percent of white Southerners ever owned African slaves.

Also, many Southerners actually fought for the Union; N.B. Tennessee and don't forget how West Virginia came into existence.

To say, on the other hand, that States Rights was the issue and not slavery is not really accurate either.

The North was clearly complicit in the institution of slavery (and later racism); it certainly profited from it for decades.

With all of this moral ambiguity though, I like what Jeff Daniels playing Joshua Chamberlain (commander of the 20th Maine) at Gettysburg had to say:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aw8Tm550SJ0

The Best of America. Sums it up for me.
 

Another beautiful scene from Gettysburg (For Old Virginia):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1Xu_Jni4V4

A great speech and actually something which Yankees and Southerners share in common: the English guy looks pretty silly all dandied up in his spiffy red uniform.
 

I tried in vain to persuade Ralph Wood to make a theological comment here, not on the Civil War in particular but on the South in general. He did suggest, however, that you read his book Flannery O'Conner and the Christ-Haunted South (Eerdmans, 2005). The second chapter addresses "the burden of Southern history."
 

@Scott Davis: I climbed Little Round Top around mid-day, some 8 hours before my first-ever performance of Verdi's "Requiem." Put me in the right frame of mind, for sure...

"Dies irae, dies illa," indeed!