There are times . . . this is sort of one.
I've been reading: Shelby Foote's 3-vol. The Civil War, for a second time; the new Burlingame 2-vol. biography of Lincoln; and now Eric Foner's Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution It started out as an eye thing: an "episode" last September forced me to stick to slightly larger print and history - the latter being the least taxing for my eyes. (Don't ask; I don't know.) But it also hinged on a hunch . . .
For awhile now, I've felt increasingly that the deepening cleft in American social and political life has its sources in the Civil War. Think about it: it's a conservative/progressive split; it's tinged with racial overtones; and, while the red state/blue state split isn't as geographically specific as it once was, it's still clear that the American South is the home of the attitudes underlying the conservative outlook. So I wanted to understand exactly why and how attitudes that are a century and a half old could power what I increasingly see as a cleavage that could conceivably leave America a house divided against itself, to use Lincoln's phrase.
I'm not there yet, but I've uncovered some important pieces of the puzzle, and it's time to identify a couple of them:
1) Slavery was/is an abomination we've never fully appreciated - unless we're black. People owned people, like cows or plows. You could wake up one day and see your wife sold to someone in another state - gone forever. Your kids, too. Yourself. You were forbidden by law to learn how to read. And that's only the tip of the iceberg. And all this in the good ole' US of A.
2) Slave owners in the American South were a minority - and a power elite. They were the ones threatened by the idea of slavery's end, they were the ones who lobbied for secession, and they were the ones who sent non-slaveholding whites - whom they'd convinced were upholding their state's honor - into battle to die, in the hundreds of thousands.
3) Slave owners built a culture - a whole way of doing things - around the notion that there were inferiors in the land, mostly blacks but also poor whites, and they knew that culture could be destroyed by the abolition of slavery.
4) The Civil War did not put an end to slavery or - especially - the attitudes that allowed it. Slavery was briefly ended, but it was all but reinstated when the attitudes that had allowed it were able to take over the North's botched attempt at reconstructing the South and its culture. Critical elements of slavery - the inability of former slaves to acquire land or act as free agents on the labor market, the inability to vote or hold office - were brought back within a decade of the war's end. The racism that was central to making all that possible was never challenged, it even triumphed.
You can see already the contours of what we've got today: from attitudes towards race, to conviction there are inferiors and superiors, to questions of voting rights (we all, naively, thought those were finally solved by the Civil Rights movement) . . . it's all there. But let me wait awhile before I try to put them all together. Stay tuned.
