On this day in 1868, Andrew Johnson, the disgraced president of the United States, gave the people of the former Confederacy a Christmas present: he issued blanket amnesty for anyone who had rebelled against the federal government during the Civil War. Johnson had earlier barely avoided conviction during impeachment proceedings and was about to leave office. So his pardon represented one of the last among many instances in which he thumbed his nose at congress, which, at the time, hoped to remake the South through the Reconstruction policies.
It’s easy and amusing enough to fight about the causes of the Civil War, though you’ll be unsurprised to hear that I agree entirely with Eric: beneath all of the arguments about states’ rights lurked slavery. Slavery was the reason that the nation split in two, the reason that 600,000 Americans died, the reason that North and South continue to squabble to this day about history. I also agree with Eric when he says that suggesting otherwise, though perhaps an amusing intellectual exercise, dishonors the memory of the dead — even if unintentionally.
We have these arguments, whether we know it or not, because the South won the peace. Southern Redeemers fought off efforts to upend their region’s social and economic order during the era of Reconstruction. At the same time, they won the memory fight. In the wake of the War, and especially after Reconstruction, most white Americans, regardless of whether they lived above or below the Mason-Dixon line, wanted to live peacefully, to consolidate or regain political power, or to get back to the business of doing business. They wanted no more conflict.
Reconciliation, then, seemed far more appealing — and far more profitable — than delving continually into the complicated and unresolved question of causation surrounding the War. As a result, in the same moment that Southern propagandists were producing the Myth of the Lost Cause, most Northerners accepted a narrative in which both Billy Yank and Johnny Reb had fought hard, fought bravely, and fought well during the War. What they had fought for, though, was a conversation best avoided. Heritage organizations, as David Blight and others have argued, led the charge in this memory fight. They erected monuments, published regimental histories, and gathered to remember the dead. And, to a remarkable extent, they avoided recriminations over which side bore the most repsonsiblity for the War. Again, reconciliation served the interests — economic, cultural, and political — of the majority of white Northerners and Southerners.
But, as the comments on a post I put up two days ago indicate, the fight over the meaning of the Civil War still lingers. And, it runs so deep that we can spend endless hours arguing about why we’re still fighting, going meta in other words. So let me suggest here that the blame lies, in large measure, with Andrew Johnson, easily our nation’s worst president (present company included). Johnson framed his 1868 amnesty order as a key step on the road to reconciliation. But he actually was propping up the South’s crumbling social order. Previous amnesties had been conditional, predicated on Southerners taking loyalty oaths. And while those oaths were hardly binding, they had cultural weight. The idea was: you want to rejoin the Union? Fine. But let’s first make certain that you acknowledge your rebellion.
Such an acknowledgement was important because the South at the time still might have been remade. Remade that is, had President Johnson not been such a successful obstructionist. The Christmas Amnesty, for example, included no loyalty oath, no requirement that Southerners reckon with their decision to have left the Union. Johnson’s failure of leadership, coupled with violence perpetrated by a slew of white terrorists — again, the Redeemers, who worked in service of the Southern Democratic Party — and the spineless rabble within the Republican-dominated congress, scuttled Reconstruction before it had a chance to succeed. The South retained most of its cultural institutions, continued to disfranchise its newly liberated African-American population, and reconsolidated political control of the region in the hands of a small minority of white elites, the former Slave Power.
And so, on this Christmas Day, it’s worth considering what Johnson was really up to when he issued his amnesty order in 1868 — and also when he had fought against congress earlier in his presidency. I’m not suggesting he had the coming battle over the War’s memory in mind. But the failure of Reconstruction, which, among other things, led directly to the the triumph of a reconciliationist narrative of the War, is one of the key reasons that people like Ron Paul and his supporters parrot neo-Confederate revisionist arguments. This is why they misuse the past, in other words, suggesting the we fought the Civil War over the issue of states’ rights.
The Edge of the American West 
15 comments
December 25, 2007 at 2:54 pm
Enobarbus37
One American died for every seven slaves that were freed. Other countries ended slavery without warfare.
Those facts are open to interpretation. And my interpretation is this.
Slavery was, and is, embedded in America. We have a Constitution that acknowledges and embraces slavery. Racism is a bedrock foundation of the United States. That will never change.
December 25, 2007 at 4:37 pm
ari
Yes: slavery was and is embedded in this nation. Yes and no: the Constituion may “acknowledge” slavery, but it does not mention it by name. And that silence, pretty clearly, suggests that the document does not embrace slavery. Yes: racism has been part of the American experience from the first. Does this mean that it’s part of our “bedrock foundation”? Perhaps. But let’s hope that we can move beyond that.
December 26, 2007 at 3:03 am
Enobarbus37
I am under the impression that Benjamin Franklin held slaves. Thomas Jefferson, like Strom Thurmond after him, had a black mistress whose children he refused to acknowledge. On and on. A nation founded on hypocrisy.
And do not insult our intelligence: “the Constituion may “acknowledge” slavery, but it does not mention it by name”. What on earth is that supposed to mean?
The Constitution is written to promote the interests of the slave holding states. The two thirds clause may not name slavery but it an explicit measure to bolster the power of slave holders. Is that correct?
December 26, 2007 at 7:32 am
Brian
The two related posts on this topic of the Civil War are interesting, to be sure. I wonder, however, at your intent.
Certainly, the treatment of Freedmen by the unreconstructed Southerners was reprehensible, but that seems to, often in the discussion threads, be used as justification-after-the-fact, and more than a little disingenuous. Absent from the conversation has been the equally despicable treatment received by Freedmen in the North: refused suffrage, refused property ownership, employment discrimiation, etc. American blacks were given a raw deal all around, one they hadn’t done anything to merit; of course, there is argument that they received better treatment than their compatriots who remained in Africa, specifically in the last half-century or so.
I also think it’s important to point out, and I’m speaking extemporaneously here, that (and please correct me if I’m wrong) it seems I remember that the Emancipation Proclamation applied only to Confederate slaves, not those of the Union or Union-controlled territories (which would seem to give lie to the idea that Lincoln was all about the end of slavery). And the Union-Army-freed slaves of the South were usually conscripted to work and fight for the North, mistreated during conscription, and usually threatened with dire results should they choose to disobey their “new masters.”
I wonder how many of your commenters who pooh-pooh the argument that Lincoln shredded the Constitution in his “moral defense of the North” despise the current Bush administration for its hegemonic aggression in the Middle East? After all, it was Lincoln who charted the course that Dubya is pursuing. Because whether you accept the “states-rights” argument or not, the fact remains that when Lincoln committed to maintaining the Union “by any means necessary,” he also presided over the death of the Second Republic (born in 1789), and the birth of the Third Republic, one which is founded on the corporatist “soft fascism” to which Dr. Paul alluded in his media junket this past Sunday. And a slow, but steady, march towards fascism it has been. Take, for example, the current neocon argument that you can’t be an American unless you buy whole-hog the American foreign policy that has left chaos in its wake.
At any rate, I see neither racism nor inconsistency in Paul’s approach to the two issues of the ’64 Act or the Civil War: on the one hand, the Civil Rights Act did not achieve its stated goal of racial equality, but instead replaced one form of discrimination with another, and founded entirely on race, not on personal merit or the “content of… character” — exactly what Sen. Goldwater (et al.) warned against — at the expense of private citizens; on the other, though Paul’s libertarian mentors would scream at the idea of a Federally purchased manumission, it would have in the end spared the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans, and I believe that his intent was to have found a way to have spared those dead and the countless other casualties. (Whether it would have worked is another issue altogether, but it did work in other countries, so there’s some historical precedent. Also, I think it was less the offer or idea of purchasing the slaves, and more a general feeling of disenfranchisement by the North of the Southern slaveowners — only approx. 20% of Southerners, remember — that caused rejection of such offer from Buchanan and Lincoln. Again, speaking extemporaneously; I could be wrong)
I don’t know whether or how you moderate comments, but you have achieved the unthinkable: intelligent, (for the most part) rational discussion of a “hot button” issue by parties of incredibly divergent opinion. Kudos!
December 26, 2007 at 11:40 am
Ben Alpers
So how responsible should we hold Lincoln for foisting Andrew Johnson on the nation by putting him on the ticket in 1864? Was this the ultimate example of the unintended consequences of Lincoln’s extraordinary political skills, i.e. a politically brilliant choice which backfired in an extraordinary way?
December 26, 2007 at 11:46 am
ari
Eric raised the same point, Ben, in an e-mail to me after I wrote this. I don’t have a good answer other than to say: Lincoln has some culpability, particularly because the idea that he would be killed wasn’t exactly unfathomable.
December 26, 2007 at 11:47 am
ari
Also, I’ve hoisted a comment you made on the Paul post above the fold. If this isn’t okay with you, please let me know. I’ll take it down immediately
December 26, 2007 at 11:56 am
Ben Alpers
No problem, ari. Thanx.
December 27, 2007 at 11:21 am
c
Enobarbus the question is what work the term “foundation” is doing for you. John Brown and Nat Turner are as American as Thomas Jefferson. I think you can say — indeed it’s obvious — that slavery was an enormously divisive issue throughout the 19th century in the U.S. and abroad. It doesn’t mean that one can’t overcome it though the overcoming takes a lot longer and is a lot harder than many would like to acknowledge.
It’s interesting the way partisans of all sides use examples of hypocrisy to argue that principles somehow didn’t exist.
Brian, what do you mean when you say that the 1964 Act “replaced one form of discrimination with another”? Far as I remember the 1964 act simply outlawed various kinds of segregation and discrimination.
December 27, 2007 at 3:24 pm
Brian
c:
The text of the legislation did just that (outlawed discrimination); but in its implementation, it was somehow derailed. Within a few years, the non-discrimination of the Act was transliterated into a system of federally forced quotas for minorities, with race, not ability, becoming the focal point of “lawful” hiring practices, backed by the full weight of judicial decree.
Over time, it became the “law of the land” that quotas were unconstitutional, but organizations such as the EEOC police businesses and other organizations to ensure they are still enforced, and woe to the rebel that tries to hire individuals based on merit alone. I know several people who have been passed over for jobs, etc., because they were — while supremely qualified — too late to get the last available slot for their particular ethnicity.
Groups like the ACLU and NAACP fight long and hard for such “opportunities” to be made available. But I haven’t yet met a woman person of color who would proudly admit that race alone, not ability or expertise, won them their job, education, or position.
Ergo, “replaced one form of discrimination with another.” Not to mention the concurrent incentivizing of poverty and familial dissolution with such winning strategies as welfare, public housing, etc.
ari:
My apologies; I’d intended to post my above comment to the previous article.
December 27, 2007 at 6:35 pm
c
“the non-discrimination of the Act was transliterated into a system of federally forced quotas for minorities”
There are two questions here. One is whether your account of federally-mandated quotas is accurate. I don’t think it is and would like to see more *systematic* evidence than 2nd-hand anecdote. If you want anecdote, I’ve somehow gotten numerous jobs despite being a white fellow, and I’ve been involved in dozens of public-organization and private-business hiring decisions over 25 years, and never once even *heard* about quotas, let alone been asked to fill one. I suspect this is mainly a myth that is understandably popular among white men who don’t get the jobs they think they deserve.
The more important logical point is that even if it were true that a monstrously intrusive quota-enforcing Federal bureaucracy arose post-1964, you still can’t show that the text of the 1964 enabled that. You rely heavily on terms like “somehow derailed” and “transliterated.”
You want to make a broad critique of Great Society social policy, get in line. But the 1964 act seems pretty much blameless and it’s not a logical defense of someone’s opposition to *that act* to argue against totally different law.
December 28, 2007 at 11:18 am
silbey
“And do not insult our intelligence: “the Constituion may “acknowledge” slavery, but it does not mention it by name”. What on earth is that supposed to mean?”
Uh, that the Constitution acknowledges slavery but doesn’t mention it by name? This has been one in a continuing series of Easy Answers to Easy Questions.
But more seriously, the point is that it is clear from the way that slavery is treated by the Constitution that many of the founding fathers were deeply uncomfortable with the issue and the institution and were looking for ways to handle it without causing schism and Civil War. They failed.
Finally, and more on Ari’s point in this post: I think one of the issues of using history in political arguments is that people frequently seek _simplicity_ in their explanations and arguments. They are not patient with a historian’s sense of “yes, but” or “no, but” that tries to bring in a scholarly sense of the complexity of just about any situation.
My students love conspiracy theories, and I suspect that one of the reasons is that–in many appealing ways–such theories are *simple*.
December 28, 2007 at 12:35 pm
silbey
I somehow managed to combine two comments: one a response to the issue of slavery in the Constitution, and one that was intended for ari’s post on Pool Side Guy. As it stands, the above makes only a limited amount of sense in this thread. My students might say that this is not actually an unusual occurrence.
December 28, 2007 at 12:55 pm
Brian
I didn”t mean to imply the text of the legislation enabled it; I’m sorry if I gave that impression. (Tho’ I don’t see where you could have deduced that) Implementation of the law, and subsequent legal challenges to the hiring practices of many employers in the ensuing years is what led to the practice of hiring quotas. The EEOC is typically the culprit, though they no longer refer to the requisite racial/ethnic mixes as “quotas” due to the SCOTUS habit of patently striking down any practice of quotas, while giving winking approval of them under other names: diversity, goals, points systems.
Some sources for my position on this topic, and other related reading: A B C D E F G H I J
Please let me be clear: I do not support discriminatory hiring or selection practices. But I think that “colorblindness” should cut both ways, as was, I think, the original intent of the ’64 Act. It has been my experience that, when one pursues excellence — e.g., finding the best-qualified candidate for a given position, regardless of any other considerations — and demands same from employees, one will usually arrive at diversity without having to seek it out. (And usually ends up being saddled with fewer incompetents in the bargain)
I guess my problem with “that act” was less with it than with what it became the harbinger of. The “colorblind” society it was assumed to usher in, has instead become so Balkanized along ethnic and racial lines that it’s hard to imagine there was ever a law passed to cause the practical erasure of those lines; often hard to believe that we’re all living in the same country, with any common heritage whatsoever.
December 28, 2007 at 4:30 pm
“if the politicians were as clever as they thought they were….” « The Edge of the American West
[…] 28, 2007 in raw material by eric In the spirit of Professor Silbey’s observation that students are “not patient with a historian’s sense of ‘yes, but’ or […]