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."
