In 2016 my brave and insightful friend Ilana Mercer published a book The Trump Revolution. She praised the appearance of a leader independent of the entrenched Establishment and its phony ideas and policies. Trump, she wrote, presented the possibility of real reform, though not the certainty. Cautious hope has proved to be warranted because many of the hopes of his supporters have disappointingly failed of implementation. His statesmanlike inaugural address is far from becoming his reality in office.


Trump seems to have attacked the immense problem of illegal immigration. Without this enforcement of law the America future is doomed. It remains to be seen whether present efforts will be enough. And why Trump’s strange exemption of subcontinental ID people and Chinese students from immigration restriction, something certainly not of benefit to the American people?


Democratic leaders and Woke populations are determined that the immigration law not be enforced. They are creating violent obstruction of law enforcement that is sure to lead to sensational events that will create sympathy for the protestors. The media, as in the BLM burning of cities and battles with police, is reporting “peaceful protests.”


Minnesota, when it had a 2% black population, was in the forefront of “Civil Rights” enforcement in the South and had no problem sending paratroopers to the South - even to enforce not legitimate laws but dubious court orders. Now the vile attorney general of Minnesota is talking about the 10th Amendment, something that was discarded long ago. Would be ridiculous if not so stupid and dishonest. Forceful federal intervention in States has been a long, well-established practice.


Trump seems to have taken considerable measures to defund and delegitimanise entrenched institutions of the Deep State. We have no clear idea of how far this has reached. I suspect there are still tens or hundreds of thousands of Woke federal officials and contractors enjoying lush salaries and continuing to subvert sane government.


I wrote some time back that the greatest obstacle to Trumpian reforms is the Republican Party, the leadership of which is committed to the Deep State. Democrat Congresspersons often actually believe what they say, false and wicked as it is. Republican Congresspersons, with few exceptions, are intellectually and ethically shallow poster boys, interested in maintaining their comfortable status quo.


They are ignorant of history and of the world and their positions are slogans invented by party advertising men. How much the Republican party has changed in a Trumpian direction remains uncertain and doubtful. Trump’s attacks on the best of his earliest supporters like Massie and Greene is extremely discouraging to the base.


The most important Trump promise was to end the disastrous interference in foreign regimes that has been a permanent policy of the Deep State, of no relevance to the welfare of the American people. Here we have our greatest disappointment.

​
In general, his cowboy diplomacy is not a good thing. He has violated his promise in extreme ways, difficult to understand. The Ukrainian war should have been ended long ago, as promised. Surely the Greenland matter could have been peacefully arranged.


I understand why the Israelis want the U.S. to go to war against Russia, Iran, and Venezuela. But why Greenland? It is suggested that Trump’s Greenland adventure will destroy NATO. In that case we can enjoy it. He has made some gestures to warn the Europeans about their decadence but it is not likely to do any good.


Trump has recreated the U.S. imperial policies of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when we sent troops to take over and administer China, Haiti, Nicaragua, Cuba and other countries. And mostly for the benefit of U.S. corporations. Here’s something we did not expect. His subservience to Israel and promotion of the blatantly phony “peace” for Gaza has deteriorated the moral reputation of the U.S. severely and lastingly.



What shall we do with Trump? Who knows? At least he still invokes the hatred of all the right people. All we can do is wait and nourish a hope that grows weaker by the day. And hope to be spared those “interesting times” that good people are always wary of.

Historians have found as a useful periodisation “the New South,” beginning with the withdrawal of the last federal occupation troops and the end of Reconstruction and ending with World War I and the election as President Woodrow Wilson, Southern-born and bred, although not very Southern in most of his thinking.


Speaking broadly of this period we can lay out some important characteristics.


Southerners regained political power in their own States, though this in part involved limiting the black voting population that had been used by the carpetbaggers. Toward the end of the period, segregation became more and more legalised and prevalent as it had long been in the North. With the rise of new black and white generations that had not known the ties of slavery, Southerners the races became less familiar and cooperative and tensions more evident.


This was not pervasive, as peaceful and friendly ties remained for many. The Southern black leader Booker T. Washington (autobiography UP FROM SLAVERY) urged his people to cooperate with whites and devote themselves to work to better their economic condition. Much white leadership reciprocated, supporting schools and colleges despite their own impoverished condition.


Some black people achieved prosperity, but most did not accomplish Washington’s hope. (See THE AMERICAN NEGRO, 1901, by William Hannibal Thomas.) During this period radical protest came only from a few mixed race people in the North. While wealthy Northerners liked black servants from the South, most black people were still to be found below the Potomac and Ohio rivers.


By far the most important aspect of this period was the continued poverty of the South. The destruction of invasion and the looting of Reconstruction left the once prosperous South the most impoverished region of the country, and it remains so to this day. (See PUNISHED WITH POVERTY by Donald and Ronald Kennedy.)


The majority of the black population and great numbers of the white population were reduced to farm tenantry and sharecropping - meaning they had to borrow from the landowners to get through the year till harvest, and often remained in permanent debt. For capital to get agriculture going, landowners were dependent on and in debt to Northern capital.


The capitalist lenders wanted cash crops like cotton. So the land was worked hard to produce cotton. This was no solution for the farmers because the more cotton that was produced the lower the price, the proceeds often not covering the debt. Only in a few years was the sale of cotton profitable and soil exhaustion became a problem.


On top of this was continual exploitation by the capitalists. The South was in fact a colony of the North - exploited for its abundant natural resources and cheap labour. There was some beginning of industry, but this was hampered by federal policy. There was the tariff. Railroad rates were rigged so that steel could be shipped more cheaply from Pittsburgh to Atlanta than from Birmingham.


At least some of the South regained prosperity in this period. The independent farmer and small businessman remained in considerable numbers. Oil and cattle brought some wealth to Texas and Oklahoma.


An important aspect of this period was a considerable reconciliation between North and South as Northerners began to realize the excesses of Reconstruction and to look for native allies in the light of the North being overrun by new ethnic immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe and labour unrest.


Southerners began to feel and act in good faith as Americans. Northerners accepted Southerners as Americans, although of a different kind and agreed to respect the Confederacy’s heroism and sincerity, a compromise that remained dominant until the 1980s. Southerners remained more conservative in religion, manners, and attitudes.


This reconciliation can be demonstrated in many ways. Joint reunion of Union and Confederate veterans at Gettysburg in 1903. Southerners volunteering for the Spanish-American War and World War I. The President attending the inauguration of the Confederate Monument at Arlington. Confederate battle flags returned the States. Personal friendships and family connections were restored. Theodore Roosevelt, after all, had a Confederate uncle.


Reconciliation on the cultural level was strong. Writers like Augusta Jane Evans Wilson, Joel Chandler Harris, Thomas Nelson Page, Grace King, and Mary Johnston, who portrayed the Southern experience favourably but in a spirit of sectional reconciliation, became popular with Northern readers. The Philadelphia aristocrat Owen Wister called his epic Western novel THE VIRGINIAN, and wrote an admiring book about old Charleston called LADY BALTIMORE. In 1914, D.W. Griffith, son of a Confederate soldier, produced the first great American film, BIRTH OF A NATION. It portrayed both a sympathetic view of Southerners and an admiring view of Lincoln. Jazz and ragtime began their popular movement from New Orleans north up the Mississippi river.


A common historical interpretation is that the leaders of the New South for their own profit collaborated with the corrupt corporate interests that controlled the country. There was some of that, but there remained a strong Jeffersonian undercurrent in Southern politics. Many leaders continued to be strongly against the tariff, favoured regulation of corporate power, and opposed U.S. imperialism. Populism is usually considered a Midwestern movement, but its membership in the South was strong and produced its greatest national leaders, like Tom Watson of GA and Leonidas Lafayette Polk of NC.


​The New South was a period of often uncomfortable change for the South, creating conditions that became the basis of continuing Southern history. There is still a lot to be learned about if it is to be researched by fair and talented historians.

I claim to be a historian, but I was fortunate early on to realise that understanding past times and people involved more than politics and economics, as important as they are. The great creative writers give us true insight into peoples and times. What would we know about Elizabethan England without Shakespeare? Of the great days (alas, gone) of Britain without Walter Scott, Dickens, Austen, and Kipling?


This is especially true about the South. Southern literature will be, in the long run, the most lasting achievement of American civilisation (such as it is). In our literature, Southerners speak for ourselves without the imposition of hostile outsiders. Southern constitutional thinking will also be an important legacy.


Here a few treasures of Southern fiction that might be worth your attention if you care about such things. They are intimate accounts of the real life of the Southern people. If you like an author, you can usually find other worthwhile works of theirs to continue with. And note the predominance of women writers.


William Gilmore Simms, Woodcraft: A Story of the South at the Close of the Revolution


George Washington Harris, Sut Lovingood: Yarns Spun By a Nat’ral Born Durn’d Fool


Mary Johnston, The Long Roll


Elizabeth Madox Roberts, The Time of Man


Andrew Lytle, The Long Night


Caroline Gordon, None Shall Look Back


Harriette Arnow, The Dollmaker


Walker Percy, The Thanatos Syndrome


Wendell Berry, The Memory of Old Jack


Mary Lee Settle, O Beulah Land


Fred Chappell, I Am One of You Forever


E.B. Penrose (penname of Electra Briggs), Athens


Faulkner. Many readers find Faulkner challenging. Start with The Unvanquished and Intruder in the Dust. After that, you might be ready for Go Down Moses, and then the Snopes trilogy.

Every time I get disappointed with President Trump, which is quite often, I remember the alternative that the U.S. political system gives us.


No question that Trump has disappointed his earliest and most faithful supporters. He has even attacked some of them. His use of the military violates what we all saw as an important part of his platform. I don’t think many of his supporters like his extreme Zionism. His economic policies puzzle us.


All this certainly needs explanation.


I think one explanation is that the U.S. Presidency is simply beyond the strength of any one person. Psychopaths like Clinton and Obama and irresponsible adolescents like George W. Bush can coast along and enjoy the White House. Unlike these worthies, I think Trump actually cares about the American people, which subjects him to great stress.


His buccaneering personality is a problem, and like his predecessors he has succumbed to the glamour of doing whatever is necessary to secure lasting fame. The quest for lasting fame is an illusion that never meets the payroll.


Trump’s greatest failure is his involvement with the Republican party, an organisation of intellectually and ethically shallow self-promoters, who can’t wait to get rid of Trump and his ideas and return to safe pablum politics. These people are not capable of caring about the future beyond the next brown bag of money. Their idea of America is a few abstract slogans borrowed from Lincoln.


The Democrats are a political party - they know what they want and whose interests they represent. The Republican party is an advertising agency selling candidates and slogans. The latest ad campaign is hostility to China. I would bet that most Republican spokesmen can’t read or speak Chinese and know less than nothing about Chinese history.


I have never shared any enthusiasm for Vance. He trashed his own mother in his novel and he is too tightly tied in with the AI oligarchs. He may trump the organisation Republicans for the Presidential nomination but that promises nothing good.


It was a sad day when the old Southern Democrats became Republicans. The old Southern Democrats were tough and cynical but they were rooted in a real America. They were the only real conservative force in our politics, the only effective restraint on bad “progressive” notions becoming law. The South is now mostly represented by photogenic products of the Republican ad agency.


The most rabid blue Democratic areas of today are exactly the same regions that were Radical Republican in earlier times. The red areas are parts of American once inhabited by conservative Democrats. A great change that is hardly noticed.


I have always enjoyed attacking Yankees, but lately it has started to resemble beating a dead horse.


Readers of my scribblings know that by “Yankee” I do not mean all you good Northern folk, but a lapsed Puritan breed of the Deep North which every generation or so considers itself possessor the revolutionary truth and disrupts and damages American society. In the 1850s their unconstructive fanaticism brought on the War between the States. Exactly he same Radical Republican people and regions flourished, along with other elements, in the 1960s-70s. They now occupy the Deep North with their virtue signaling and hatred for the real America. 

Before the War for Southern Independence the main theme of American government was republican virtue and honour. The defeat of the Confederacy established a new main theme - making money. That was the most important result of the War. Compare Lee and Grant. Or the real characters of Jeff Davis and the corporate lawyer and tricky politician Lincoln.


That is why Richard Weaver called the South “the last nonmaterialist society.” Lee refused lucrative gifts to be head of a small college to help his people. Grant enjoyed four homes, socializing with the wealthy, and ignored the corruption of his friends and relatives.


Many Southerners accepted their defeat as a working of God’s will in history. That did not mean that they apologized for their heroic efforts for independence but that they believed in a universe where human desires were not the final authority.


The Agrarians of I’ll Take My Stand said that what they called the industrial regime was destroying humane society and living. Almost a century later, how can anyone doubt that they were correct? American culture, both folk and high, barely exists and only in fragments. Americans by and large have lost all sense of Place and history and have no roots, are cultureless beings. Real Christian faith barely survives. An adult American from the 1950s would not even recognize his country today, and would not like what he saw.


The South, changed and atrophied as it is, is the last bastion of the Western soul in a totally materialist society ruled from the top by corrupt elites - the reign of money.


The areas of the North and West that are today the most conservative received large settlements of Southerners. The formerly soulless highly Republican areas are now far left. They are still robbing the people but now the call it globalisation rather than tariffs and banking.


Tearing down our statues and memorials is not the result of an interpretation of history. Even if the South-haters were right about history - and they are not - it would make no difference. They act because they want to erase all real history and because they hate us. Their massive vanity seeks to eliminate us from a country they think is theirs and they bask in their power over us. Although their country is only some future thing that exists only in their imagination. Defending the South and its monuments defends the remnants of Western civilization in North America.


Historians and politicians continue to repeat the lie that the Founding Fathers nobly wanted to end slavery but did not because fear of losing the Southern States. This is ignorant, childish, and superficial almost beyond belief. The Founding Fathers, including the Southern ones, knew slavery was a problem but also knew that had absolutely no power to act on it and no idea of how to end it. Many Northern Founders held slaves and others were engaged profitably in the African slave trade. To say that the Founders agreed not to end slavery only to please the Southern States is to make the stupid assumption that the Union was founded by Northerners and Southerners were only a redheaded stepchild in the process of creating the United State, merely allowed along by the real Northern Founders. 

“Reconstruction,” 1865-1877


Through most of the 20th century, American historians of every stripe (except Communists) agreed that “Reconstruction” was an ugly period in our history - a regime of corruption, tyranny, bad leadership, and dangerous deviation from American principles. Honest historians found a vast treasury of evidence for this interpretation that is available but now ignored.


The most celebrated historians now present Reconstruction as a noble effort to establish equality for African Americans that failed because of violence by the supposed Southern ruling class. The standard Marxist theory of class conflict prevails.


It is worth noting that the term “Reconstruction” does not have any relation to rebuilding the South devastated by war. It refers to “reconstructing” of “the Union” on Republican Party terms.


Southerners white and black were left to rebuild a society as best they could in a land of unprecedented poverty and disruption. It is notable that hostility between black and white Southerners was not caused by the war. In the first period after the war relations were largely friendly. White Southerners accepted emancipation in good faith and often with relief. They were genuinely grateful that there had been no significant slave revolt during the war. Cooperative efforts were under way to restore economic life.


This peaceful period ended when the Republican Congress enacted Presidential Reconstruction in 1868 and dismissed Andrew Johnson’s efforts for a gentler policy. That policy (supposedly favoured by Lincoln) lacked much, resting upon restoring a State to the Union when 10% of voters swore loyalty to the U.S. government, not exactly democracy, but it was a peaceful way forward.


Presidential Reconstruction turned the Southern States into Military Districts where a general’s writ was supreme over any civil authority. Imagine: the great Commonwealth of Virginia was now Military District no. 1! Most Americans remain unaware that a large part of the country was under military occupation for a decade. President Grant was a virtual dictator over the people of the Southern States and regularly sent the army to protect corrupt regimes.


White Southerners were deprived of the vote and citizenship. Republicans appeared and organized and armed the black population with secret meetings and oaths, encouraging them to provocations against real law and order. Racial hostility was deliberately created by outsiders.


Southerners were faced with trying to restore a devastated economy. Local and state government was under control of unsavory outsiders (carpetbaggers) who taxed and looted. Quite often carpetbaggers were people who had left their Northern States under indictment.


Elections were coerced and fraudulent. The defenders of Reconstruction argue that the Reconstruction regimes instituted progressive measures new to the backward South like public schools. Nice, except nearly all the money was robbed by Republican officials, many of whom became rich on looted funds. Republican officials made millions on corrupt “railroad” bonds.


South Carolina did not finish paying off those fraudulent bonds until 1955.

The Southern economy as a whole did not really begin to recover some prosperity until World War I, and today income remains below the rest of the Union. The African Americans in the end got nothing from Reconstruction except a temporary franchise and some minor graft for a selected few.


Though the Southern States were not States but military districts, they were required to ratify the 14th Amendment before they could be readmitted to the Union as States.. It would not have been ratified without the controlled Southern States. The 14th Amendment has been the source of continuing damage to the Constitution and American society and it was never legally ratified, a great and lasting legacy of “Reconstruction.”
​

The current interpretation is that a noble egalitarian reform of the South was defeated by white Southern violence. It is never mentioned who initiated violence. This is a fraudulent interpretation because there never was any Northern commitment to equality for the black people of the South. That is imaginary. The Northern stand was to use the blacks to maintain power and keep them out of the North and West. The point of “Reconstruction” was to keep the Republican party in power and provide loot for its well-connected.
​

Reconstruction ended when the last occupying troops were withdrawn in 1877. Republicans realised that electoral votes from new Western States made their rule safer and that carpetbaggers had become so corrupt that they were fighting among themselves for the spoils and could no longer be supported by the army.

Bookstores


Barbershops. Now they are all unisex beauty parlors, often staffed by immigrant Africans.


White picket fences


Comic books that were actually intended to be funny


When boys could play football in the street without fear or helmets


When a boy could explore the woods alone with a rifle (probably an old .22)


Old Fashioned service stations with 35 cent per gallon gas and air pumps that were free and actually worked


The Southern Methodist Church


I don’t miss it but it was certainly a better time when all young men went into the service instead of just poor men (and women).


A country too honourable to put women in harm’s way


Smokehouses and tobacco curing barns


Huge pots of Brunswick stew cooked and served outdoors


Old-time windup Southern orators in white suits. (My favourite was Senator Clyde R. Hoey of North Carolina.)


When abortions were done rarely and quietly and only for rape, incest, or to save the life of the mother.


When county courthouses and state buildings were not armed fortresses excluding citizens

Note: Next week we will resume the series A Short History of the South with an article about Reconstruction.

​Republican party leadership wants to keep the Deep State. After all, they collaborated with the Democrats in creating it and they find it profitable and comfortable. The Modus Operandi of Republican leadership has been for decades the avoidance of facing any difficult issues and making their positions out of advertising campaigns on short-term issues. They have picked out and groomed young congressmen to mouth the accepted PR material to get support and to avoid any real opinions.


It is hard to find any Republican Congressman does any real thinking rather than spouting the party slogans.


Republican leaders’ support for Trump is completely dishonest pretense. They can’t wait to get rid of him and his maverick populist notions and rhetoric and get back to the empty leadership of Jeb Bush.


The Founding Fathers could not have imagined a society with billionaires. In America, a dozen or so billionaires, many of them foreign, can any time call up a President, a bureaucrat, or a Congressperson and usually get what they want.


One of the many let-downs we have received from Trump is his apparent fondness for immigrants from India. We are told that we need these for IT, when many talented Americans experts are unemployed. The immigrants concerned are doubtless very bright—after all they come from a fraction of the top one percent of a huge population. Some already are holding high positions in American society.


My local phone book, the last time there was one, had an entire page of Patels and there seems to be a swarm of them in my area. They seem to own hotels even in small towns. I don’t think these are brilliant IT people. Sorry, but I don’t think this is a good thing. They are not a very attractive people. They seem to lack the potential for cordiality and sense of humour that are common in the West. They are big in internet crime, and even in legitimate companies one quickly tires of barely comprehensible sing-song English.


Why don’t they stay home and help their own struggling people? They have no loyalty to their homeland. Why expect them to have any loyalty to us? In justice, I admit that I have met two outstanding young men who are better than my general criticisms.


Trump is greatly discouraging his supporters with his preoccupation with foreign matters. This is probably caused by the Republican establishment, which is unable to learn anything, by Zionist influence, and by his own showbiz personality. He has not succeeded in any of his noisy foreign ventures - Ukraine and the phony Gaza ceasefire, and now the proposed attack on Venezuela. All these are failures and contrary to the program upon which he was elected.


And Trump is mostly ignoring the domestic situation which is vital to his voters. He is on the road to wrecking his administration. As a friend recently remarked, alas, he is the best we have and remains our only and last hope. His failure may mean there will never appear another populist President. His failure will doom the survival of the United States of America. One is tempted to think that is perhaps a good thing if some better things can be erected out of the rubble.


(“A Short History of the South” will resume in future weeks.)

The War for Southern Independence, 1861-1865 


Americans generally miss the point in considering the great war of 1861-1865. The simple fact is that it was an unprovoked war of invasion, conquest, and exploitation of some Americans by a minority party in control of the federal machine. The invasion does not fit any of the requirements of a “just war.” It destroyed, probably forever, the founding American principle of “consent of the governed,” Despite all the noise about saving a vaguely understood “Union” and freeing the slaves, it did not begin with the intention of emancipating slaves and it replaced “Union” with unappealable centralized authority. Ending or preserving African American slavery was not the primary motive of either side and Americans did not kill each other over them.

 
It is impossible to over-estimate the importance of this period in American and especially Southern history. Warfare was waged almost entirely on Southern soil. Let’s think of it in terms of the experience of the Southern people. In the Confederacy Southerners mobilized nearly their entire manpower to a degree no large group of Americans has ever done. They fought harder and longer, most often outnumbered in men and materiel, and took more casualties (nearly a fourth of the white men dead) than any large group of Americans has ever done, saw much of their territory overrun and civilian lives and property threatened and destroyed on a vast scale unknown in modern warfare at that time.

 
Supposedly backward Southerners carried out miracles of innovation and industrialism - ironclad ships, torpedoes, submarines, blockade runners, production of cannon and gunpowder. Northern victory depended on things the South did not have - a blockading fleet, gunboats to control the rivers, and a large industry (although it was shot through with corruption). A suppressed aspect of the War is that Northern opponents were always much stronger and more respectable than is assumed. Lincoln had to resort to illegal arrests of his critics, suppression of newspapers, army control of elections, military coup and occupation of the Border States, to fielding an army with 1/4th of its men foreigners, and total war against civilians. The Confederate people were as unified as was possible under extreme conditions.

 
The Southern people fought a defensive war against a power with four times the population and resources. The party in control in Washington regarded the Southern states as conquered provinces to be exploited. The invading Union army did not treat black Southerners with friendship or equality. Many thousands were driven from their homes and means of living and others forcibly recruited as labour or soldiers. It has recently been estimated that a million African Americans died of disease, hardship, and starvation in the disruption of war, an astonishing revelation about what Americans boast of as a holy crusade.

 
The struggle of the South for independence is a heroic epic in human history, admired by civilised people over many generations. Despite masses of false history by the victors, The Confederate epic and its outstanding leaders are permanently admirable symbols for the world, not just for their descendants.
 

Here is a comment on the history of the war by an honest Union General, Don Carlos Buell. Here is what he told Northerners to keep in mind when tempted to boast about their victory:

 
“It required a naval fleet and 15,000 troops to advance against a fort, manned by less than 100 men, at Fort Henry; 35,000 with naval cooperation, to overcome 12,000 at Fort Donelson; 60,000 to secure victory over 40,000 at Shiloh; 120,000 to enforce the retreat of 65,000 after a month’s fighting and maneuvering at Corinth; 100,000 were repelled by 60,000 in the first campaign against Richmond; 70,000 with a powerful naval force to inspire the campaign which lasted nine months against 40,000 at Vicksburg; 90,000 to barely withstand the assault of 60,000 at Gettysburg; 115,000 sustaining a frightening repulse from 60,000 at Fredericksburg; 100,000 attacked and defeated by 50,000 at Chancellorsville; 85,000 held in check for two days by 40,000 at Antietam; 70,000 defeated at Chattanooga, and beleaguered by 40,000 at Chattanooga to Atlanta; . . . and finally 120,000 to overcome 60,000 with exhaustion by a struggle of a year in Virginia.”

 

​When the war was over, they had to face the reality of defeat despite having exerted such effort and sacrifice in what they believed to be a very American struggle for liberty. Forty per cent of the value of property was gone, not counting slave property. They were under military occupation—meaning all civil law and rights could be disregarded by any army officer. Far from a restored “Union,” the States were now occupied territories under military dictatorship and their people without citizenship.
 
 

Most Confederates never felt that they had been wrong. Richmond editor and historian Edward Pollard observed that Southerners surrendered in good faith, but still believed that they were the better men. 

Middle Period, 1789—1860


We can only paint in very broad strokes a period that was marked by a vast expansion of the South and the U.S. in territory, population, economy, and culture. The Era of Expansion is an apt name.

 
A major aspect of this period is the westward movement. New States admitted to the Union: 1790s: TN and KY; 1810s: LA, MS, and ALA; 1820s: MO; 1830s: AR; 1840s: FL and TX. The South moved west and re-established itself constantly in new lands. In 1860, half the people born in the Carolinas, black and white, were living somewhere further south or west. Southerners played a major role also in the early settlement and government of OH, IN and IL until they were outnumbered in the 1850s by northeastern and German incomers.


 
So the westward experience, settling a raw land and bringing it into settled Southern civilization was a widespread experience. This is really what the work of the talented “Southwestern humourists,” much of William Gilmore Simms’s work, and other Southern literature of the time is all about. Southerners were pioneering realistic American literature while New Englanders like Longfellow, Bryant, etc. were writing about brooks and rills and sleigh rides to Grandma’s house; or like Emerson, egotistical essays explaining the universe. The Southerner Poe was certainly the first great creative genius of American literature.


 
This was also a period, at least to the 1850s, when Southerners dominated national politics, the most honourable and uncorrupt period of the U.S. government. Southerners were responsible for the Louisiana Purchase and the Mexican Cession. Southerners thought of the Union in terms of republican virtue. Northerners thought of it as a source of profit. Eight of the first twelve Presidents were Southern plantation owners, and another, Harrison, though elected from the Midwest, was Virginia-born. Most of the prominent statesmen and soldiers and explorers, as well as the leaders and bulk of the rank and file of Jeffersonian and Jacksonian Democracy were Southern.


 
During the period 1815-1860, Southern cotton and other products made up 60 per cent or more of the value of exports from the United States. The foreign commerce of the U.S. was Southern. New York enjoyed the shipping, financing, and insuring of Southern agricultural products and enjoyed good relations with the South. There was some industry in the South but not a lot—not because Southerners were too stupid and lazy to imitate New Englanders but because they didn’t need to. They could enjoy more prosperity and a better way of life without it. Some Northerners liked to claim then and now that the South was impoverished and dominated by a small elite of the wealthiest planters, which they called “the Slave Power.” This is not true. The South had universal white male voting and widespread property ownership and prosperity. The large planters had less power than the bankers and industrialists did in the North and they were often non-political.

 
Slavery
 

Slavery died out gradually in the North, though this did not indicate any benevolence toward the black people. In fact, free blacks in the North had almost no rights and some States, like Lincoln’s IL, refused even to allow them to settle there. There were more black people living in freedom in the South than the North in 1860. The foreign importation of slaves was forbidden after 1808, which Southerners favoured and forwarded. The black population grew greatly by natural increase almost equal to the white, more than anywhere else in the world. The slaves in the Caribbean and South America did not naturally increase and more were constantly imported right up to the Civil War and after. New England ship owners engaged extensively in this trade to Cuba and Brazil though it was illegal for Americans.

 
It would be good if some Southern defenders would stop saying that only 1 in 10 of Confederate soldiers owned slaves. There were plenty of sons and brothers-in-law of slaveowners in the Confederate army. The correct way to view the Old South is that about 1/4th of families held slaves. Most of them owned only a few families who lived and worked with the owners. There can be no doubt that the end of slavery would have come in due time in a form infinitely better than emancipation as a war measure.
 

 
A basic economic conflict between the North and South was evident to everybody from the early 1790s when Alexander Hamilton proposed and pushed through his national debt and national bank. The political program of many Northerners from Hamilton to Lincoln was what was called “the American System.” The American System was fought by the South from Jefferson onward because it clearly profited industry and banking at the expense of agriculture. The tariff meant that high taxes were put on manufactured goods imported from outside the country. This forced Southerners (and others) to buy from New England factories at higher prices and also discouraged foreign buyers of Southern exports. The “national bank” was not really national but was to be a cartel of government-empowered private bankers, i.e., Northern capitalists, who would have control of credit and currency expansion and contraction for the whole country. “Internal improvements” involved spending the tax money from Southerners to build up the infrastructure of the North and buy political support with patronage. These issues went back and forth for years. When the Southerners left Congress in 1861, the Republicans put in “the American System” permanently. By the 1850s the business interests of the North were determined to break the political power of the South as an obstacle to Northern “progress,” i.e., profit. Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago, which had been insignificant villages not long before, had become burgeoning industrial centers run by capitalists who demanded a helpful government.

 
The way to do that was to make sure that Southerners had no more new States to settle. Thus the issue of “free soil.” The face of this was to forbid slavery in all territories not yet States. This did not free a single slave and was also designed to keep black people out of the North whether slave or not. But it guaranteed that Southern influence would grow less and less. There were some sincere abolitionists in the North, but they were a small group. Much of the history of this period is a struggle over control of territory, which was really a struggle about political control of the federal government between opposed interests. Abolitionists filled the air with malicious hate of everything Southern with never a constructive suggestion. The Northern interest is restricting slavery had NOTHING to do with the welfare of African Americans.

 
In the midst of the economic and political conflicts the two sections became more and more aware of cultural differences, not to mention a great gap in Constitutional interpretation as well. When The U.S. was founded nobody doubted that the sovereign people of a State could decide to leave the Union just as they had decided to enter it, but the North increasingly opposed this idea—national centralization was one of the great tendencies of the 19th century, in Europe as well as America. Germany and Italy were unified by force in the same decade that the U.S. Civil War was fought. The Union meant a confederacy of States with a central government of limited powers. Lincoln did not save the Union but made the federal government eternal and all-powerful over the people and the States and the object of mystical worship. And remember, the federal government is nothing more than the instrument of the leaders of the political party that controls it.

 
The sections grew apart in other ways. The South remained overwhelmingly rural. The South, though divided into many denominations, became more and more conservative and orthodox in its Christianity, while the North moved in the opposite direction, developing Unitarianism, Mormonism, and other radical sects. The South received small and manageable immigration. After 1848 the North received immense numbers of new people from Ireland and Germany who had no sense of American traditions and Constitutional understandings and knew nothing about the South except hostile propaganda. In the North education became more utilitarian--- public schools were developed to provide a disciplined work force and to “Americanise” immigrants. In the South education remained more classical and decentralized.

 
By 1860, with Lincoln’s election, thoughtful Southern realized that they were caught in a “Union” with those, no longer fellow countrymen, who intended for the South economic exploitation and everlasting slander. Southerners were conservative in inclination and except in the Deep South were hesitant about decisive action like secession. But when Lincoln called for troops, treating the solemn acts of the people of States as some bunch of criminals to be put down, the issue became clear.
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This merely touches a few high points in a complex and interesting period of American history in order to put Southern culture and thought of the time in context.