In
conjunction with the sesquicentennial of the recent unpleasantness which is now
upon us, the New York Times has set up a special series on the web following
the course of events as they unfolded in late 1860 and flowed across the next
four and half years. The ol' Bloviator sent them the following
little piece, pointing out that the secession crisis facing the nation at the
end of 1860 had been building for quite a while and that it was actually
northerners who had first begun to practice the politics of sectionalism,
albeit under the guise of a nationalist agenda.
You can read the posted version here or slog through the O.B's virginal prose below:
Historians
once routinely blamed southerners for introducing the virus of sectionalism
into the American body politic while praising their northern adversaries for
their selfless devotion to the Union. More recently, however, Peter Onuf and
others have argued that New Englanders were actually the nation's most
"precocious sectionalists," even though their sectionalism was often cloaked in
the soaring rhetoric of early American
nationalism. writers like geographer Jedediah Morse shamelessly touted their native New England
as the quintessential model for American national identity and character,
pointedly contrasting its Yankee "industry . . . frugality .[and] piety" with
the slothful, irreligious southern slaveholding culture of "luxury, dissipation
and extravagance." "O, New England!" How
superior are thy inhabitants in morals, literature, civility and industry."
Employing similar juxtapositions of New England virtues and southern vices,
later writers, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, helped to inspire and nurture
what would eventually become a broader "northern" vision in which the northern
states became synonymous with America while the southern ones stood as its
complete antithesis.
By 1823 New Yorker Gerrit Smith could already remark on the
almost "national difference of character between the people of the Northern and
the people of the Southern states." Lost in translation here, as historian
Joyce Appleby noted, was the sense that by that point "Northerners
imaginatively thought of their 'nation' as the United States, leaving the South
with its peculiar institution and a particular regional culture."
Before the talk of secession at the Hartford Convention of
1814 blew their cover, New England Federalists had succeeded in using a nationalistic façade to conceal a sectional
political agenda that could best be served by a central government powerful
enough to protect and advance their trade and shipping interests at home and
abroad. In the years to follow, New England's eloquent champion, Daniel
Webster, consistently cloaked his support for sectional policies such as
protective tariffs and internal improvements in the language of national
interest. By the middle of the nineteenth century though, Webster made no
secret of his hope for a politically cohesive "North" rooted in a coalition of
northeastern and western free states (settled in part by New England émigrés)
intent on protecting the interests of free labor and halting the spread of
slavery. Webster's wishes were realized in the meteoric ascent of the
Republican Party whose strikingly concentrated northern support base made it,
as historian David Potter observed, "totally sectional in its constituency."
Yet with their party's strength centered
in some of the nation's fastest growing states, Republican leaders
realized that northern interests might soon be calling the shots in national
politics. Thus, as Potter noted, they could "support the Union for sectional
reasons," while southerners clearly could not.
Although they were relative Johnny-Rebs-come-lately to the
business of what might today be called regional "branding," as they scrambled
to find a legitimate, unifying antecedent and symbol for their increasingly
particularized and embattled region, southern writers and orators threw
themselves into the politics of sectional identity with determination and
verve. Some, like George Fitzhugh and Thomas R. Dew, invoked the slave society
of ancient Greece as a laudable analog, but, as cultural icons go, an Athenian
in toga and sandals is no match for a dashing English Cavalier.
Gaining
currency amid mounting criticism of the South in the 1830s, the Cavalier legend held that white
southerners were actually far superior in breeding to their northern
detractors. After all, southerners could trace their bloodlines back to
the old Norman barons through the Cavalier-aristocrats who had emigrated to the
southern colonies after losing out in the English Civil War to the middle-class
Puritan "Roundheads" or "Saxons" whose kinsmen had ultimately settled the North.
Although outside Virginia few southerners could show evidence of Cavalier ties
and even fewer Cavaliers likely had Norman ties, as early as 1835 Louis
Phillipe was warning that the Puritan North-Cavalier South cultural divide
meant that Americans, "as a people, have conflicting interests and ambitions
and unappeasable jealousies." His words seemed prophetic indeed in light of a
Virginian's assertion in 1863 that "the Saxonized maw-worms creeping from the
Mayflower" could claim no "kinship" whatsoever with "the whole-souled Norman
British planters of a gallant race." Zeal for the Cavalier legend had also been
stoked by the enormously popular writings of Sir Walter Scott, whose tales of
Scotland's struggles against English oppression seemed to evoke the South's
struggles against the North so effectively that Mark Twain would later blame
the Civil War primarily on southerners' affliction with "the Sir Walter
disease."
If, however, the Cavalier legend had become what James
McPherson called "the central myth of Southern ethnic nationalism" among more
affluent or literate southerners by the 1850s, efforts to promulgate it more
widely ran afoul of such regional realities as a relatively small urban
population, a per capita circulation for newspapers and magazines that was less
than half the northern rate, and an illiteracy figure roughly three times the
northern average. Finally, there was also reason to doubt the resonance of the
Cavalier ideal among the white yeomanry which had grown politically restive
during the 1850s as soaring slave prices dashed their aspirations to climb into
the planter class. Indeed, a rather clueless proposal to feature the figure of
a "Cavalier" on the official seal of the Confederacy was ultimately derailed by
concerns that the slaveless two-thirds of the South's free population might be
less than enthusiastic about taking up the cause of an institution in which
they had no immediate stake if the symbol of said cause bluntly reminded them
of precisely that fact.
Ironically
enough, the common feelings of affinity
and obligation to the Union consistently expressed by northern troops during
the Civil War may have represented a fulfillment of the adroitly concealed
sectional ambitions of their forbearers. Among the Confederates, meanwhile, the
frequently echoed sentiments of the Georgia private who declared "if I can't
fight in the name of my own state, then I don't want to fight at all" testified
to the difficulty of creating what Alabama fire-eater William Lowndes Yancey
described as a shared "southern heart." It would take a fierce
four-year conflict ending in a bitter and ignominious defeat to forge anything
approaching the sense of kinship and common cause that the white South's
leaders had tried to instill before its ill-fated struggle for independence
began.
As it turns out, the
real story here is not that a guy who reads the Dawgvent religiously and has "Waltz across Texas" for his
ringtone, actually wrote something that appeared under the New York Times
masthead. That's actually happened
before, believe it or not. For me the most striking aspect of the whole
affair was the reaction to the OB's humble little offering. This reaction, by the way, sprawls over six
pages and reflects the views of no fewer than 139 commentators. These responses go well beyond straightforward stuff like "Put a sock
in it, Redneck!" Most are in fact quite lengthy-- some are damn near
encyclopedic-- and reasonably eloquent.
What jumps out at me is the fact that now it seems it's not just
southerners who want to keep fighting the Civil War. There's also a good number of Yankees just
itching to mix it up a little more as well. At first blush, this may seem a bit
strange in that the victors are supposed to content themselves with
self-satisfied gloating while the losers whine, alibi, and demand a rematch
they really don't want. (Contrary to popular wisdom, southerners have hardly
been unique in upholding their end of this bargain. Check out the Irish and the Scots, for
example). This emergent--and, I'd say
growing--chip on northern shoulders may actually reflect a sense that whatever
their ancestors may have thought they accomplished militarily in 1865, has, a
century and a half thence, largely been neutralized by a southern cultural and
political counterattack. One of the commenters
on my piece captured this frustration quite well:
No
question that the culture of the North, based on doing your own work, was
morally and culturally superior to that of the South, based on enslaving others
and making them do your work for you. It's not as though one side wasn't in the
right, and the other wrong. Sadly, the South won the cultural "war"
in the 150 years following. Now NASCAR, religious fundamentalism,
anti-intellectualism and redneckism have infected the entire nation. Perhaps it
would have been better to just let the less-civilized South go.
In short, the spoils of war have been spirited
away. Jeb Stuart is back and raiding the Yankees' corn cribs and smoke houses
with absolute impunity. About the only
difference this time around, it seems, is that the big tussle , otherwise known
as the "irreconcilable conflict," ain't between the Blue and the Gray, but the
Blue and the Red. Consider Gerrit Smith's
1823 observation above about the "almost national
difference of character" between the northern and southern people. Then, reel forward 187 years and note the
very first observation on my disquisition, which came from a guy in St. Paul:
The North and
the South are as culturally apart as any two nations. We have little in common,
as far as I'm concerned, except our contempt for each other. One look at the
consistent Blue State / Red State map makes it very clear: we don't belong
together. That sounds radical today, but I think 150 years from now our
descendants will wonder why it wasn't obvious to us. The North was right to
emancipate human beings held as slaves; having done it, we should have not only
allowed the South to secede, but demanded it.
Lest you think this
dude represents some-ultra-pissed off Yankee lunatic fringe, note the
observations the senior
editor of Foreign Affairs Mark Strauss, who noted in 2000
that while "W" had lost the
popular vote nationally by 500,000 votes while winning in the old Confederacy
by 3.1 million votes. It was obvious, therefore, that "the North and South can
no longer claim to be one nation." Rather, they "should simply follow the
example of the Czech Republic and Slovakia: Shake hands, say it's been real and
go their separate ways." If this meant that the North wound up seceding this
time around, then so be it. Likening the South to "a gangrenous limb that
should have been lopped off decades ago," Strauss supported his indictment with a lengthy list
of particulars, including, "The flow of guns into America's Northern cities
stems largely from Southern states" and "the tobacco grown by ol' Dixie kills
nearly a half-million Americans each year."
Surely there is reason
to suppose or at least hope that Strauss was operating with tongue partially in
cheek. Not so, I think with the sociologist
who described Sarah Palin in 2008 as culturally at least, 'a snowbound
southerner" or with this commenter, reacting
not so much to my piece but to other comments on it, who served up a classic
example of liberals' to "southernize"
everything they don't like about contemporary America. Note the following and
the rejoinders it attracted:
But
how does one account for the ignorance of the South coming from the mouth of
Sarah Palin?
Ditto. And how
does one account for the ignorance of the South (hate-speech, racism, religious
intolerance) coming from the mouths of all of my Italian-American relatives and
their friends in New York? The first time I ever heard the "n-word"
as a child was in New York. What do you have to say about the urban race-riots
and hate crimes in the North during the 60's, 70's, 80's and early 90's? The
twin diseases of hate and ignorance exist in every culture, every region and
every section of the United States....As for Southern succession(sic) solving the
problem of today's political polarization: the last time I checked, Michele
Bachman was from Minnesota.
The
points I was trying to make quickly fell by the wayside as the commenters went after
each other like Grant and Lee, but when anybody bothered to notice the piece
that actually ignited this conflagration, reactions to it were fairly equally
divided between accusing me of bashing the South and charging that I was a
southern apologist. Perhaps the
unkindest cut of all, however, came from the person who asked, " "Dr Cobb, would you consider changing your thumbnail photo?
Whenever I'm scrolling down the page, I always think it's Joe Lieberman."
Regrettably, I was not the only celebrity in
attendance that evening, and I couldn't help but feel a little sorry for Samuel
L Jackson, in that my presence doubtless overshadowed his to a great extent. 
