Day 5 Issues in Modern America January 22, 2002
1. Names. Adam on the WORTH Center prospects,
and other possibilities. You need to make a commitment and get started by the
end of this week, I think. First section of projects is due Feb. 7.
On responses: having been through them once,
a few pointers and reminders. One, be specific enough about the reading to
persuade me that you have at least a passing acquaintance with it. Two, don’t
just summarize the whole thing—I’m more interested in your response, what you
find surprising, interesting, new, striking. Don’t be afraid to take issue with
the text, or to talk about your own uncertainties or questions about the
issues, or to state your opinion, whether or not you think I’ll agree. Three,
don’t just give a web address, but talk about the site as well, how it connects
to the material you’re talking about, what new information/perspective it
provides. Look for sites with some substance, and spend at least a little time
with them.
2. Consider: fitting issues mentioned last
time together. What do terrorism, oppression, poverty, violence, crime, unequal
distribution of wealth, human rights, and energy have to do with each other?
When an administration filled with former oil men drive out the current govt.
of a country they want to build an oil pipeline across, is that just a
convenient coincidence? When an enormous energy corporation with close ties to
the current administration lobbies successfully to have its business deregulated,
then systematically and repeatedly offers deceptive information about its
financial status in order to sell shares at a higher price, and then folds when
its deceptions are revealed, what does that tell us about big business and big
government?
Etc.
3. But today I want to zero in on the Civil
War and its aftermath, to consider closely the questions that J/H ask and the
information they provide, with your supplements. Was the Civil War necessary?
How effective was it? What about our image of Lincoln as the Great Liberator?
Etc.
The standard view: the war was tragic but
inevitable, and it was effective in that it preserved the union and freed the
slaves. 105: on “revisionist” history and the possibility the war might have
been avoided.
The imagination of alternative actions.
History looks inevitable only in hindsight, yes? Not much trickier than trying
to be accurate about alternate histories, but does that mean we should assume
that no other path was possible? To pick one easily imaginable fork in the road,
what about a country where Booth failed to assassinate Lincoln? How might that
have changed the path of post-war events?
Would he have been able to steer a steadier course than A. Johnson and
Congress, come up with a plan for reconstruction that averted the worst
excesses of retribution and the violence that resulted?
http://www.althist.com/alternate_american_civil_wars.htm
Offers two alternate scenarios for the Civil War.
http://www.scifan.com/themes/themes.asp?TH_themeid=14
Lists six novels, all alternate Civil War histories. Harry Turtledove, The
Guns of the South: Just as the Confederate cause seems doomed, deliverance
arrives in
the form of 20th-century weapons. History and
science fiction merge
in this latest from Turtledove (A Different
Flesh, 1988; Agent of
Byzantium, 1987 )--something that the
publisher calls ``speculative
fiction.'' It's not bad. What if the South had
been armed with modern
repeating rifles? South African white
supremacists with access to a
time-travel machine
conclude that their own loathsome policies would
find sympathy in an independent Dixie and,
accordingly, begin historic,
large trans-shipments of the sturdy, reliable
AK-47 rifle from
21st-century Johannesburg to 19th-century
Virginia. Dazzled and
delighted by the possibilities of the weapon,
Robert E. Lee and his
troops grab the guns and turn the war and
American history around.
Acting on uncanny tips from the Afrikaners,
Lee reverses the Battle
of the Wilderness and within months the rebels
seize Washington,
D.C. A new nation is born, just the way the
Boers hoped it would be.
Or is it? The Confederate States do indeed
continue to allow slavery,
but the realities of world opinion and
economics quickly influence new
national policy. General Lee succeeds
Jefferson Davis as president
and brings his sober ethos to southern
government. The South
Africans, who have dug into their own company
town in North
Carolina, are outraged by the perversion of
what should have been an
eden of apartheid, and they bring new weapons
to bear on their
former darlings. But they have not reckoned on
southern orneriness. It
is a fatal miscalculation. Readers willing to
wink at the time travel will
find a well-researched and well-written
account of a nation that didn't
happen. Literate rebs will read it again and
again and again. --
http://www.ahtg.net/alterframe.html The Alternate History Travel Guides.
Lighthearted.
http://www.uchronia.net/
Uchronia, the “alternate history list.”
http://users.metro2000.net/~stabbott/AH.htm
Another alternate history site.
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/4123/ahnfbook.htm
Has a bibliography of “alternate history” texts. Summary of essay by Milton
Waldman, "If Booth had Missed Lincoln." Assassination fails because
Booth's gun misfired. Reviews a Lincoln biography which claims Lincoln's
reconstruction problems are caused by Radical Republicans instead of his
policies.
http://www.tulane.edu/~latner/Dilemmas/DGreeleyAdviceComm.html
More on Greeley’s “Go in Peace” idea.
What about this question: how important was
preserving the union? Lincoln accepted war rather than secession. What if the
deep southern states had seceded? The Churchill scenario, 106. Almost surely
slavery would not have lasted into the 20th century anyway,
according to Pfaff (107).
At any rate, it is clear that Lincoln went to war not to end slavery but to preserve the Union. See the famous letter to Greeley of 1862: “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union.” The site said this letter received “universal acclaim in the North.” Hmm.
Possibilities for compromise in 1860-61. Here J/H are pretty critical of Lincoln, as Ryan notes. What about all that? They suggest he “largely let events control him” (110) rather than taking initiative and building alliances that might have enabled compromise. The Crittenden Compromise, which might well have passed if put to popular vote, though it was opposed by Greeley and others because it might have expanded slave territory westward and it maintained current slave territories and the Fugitive Slave Act.
113: the war itself. Advances in technology made for massive deaths, more accurate muskets a big factor. Unconditional nationalism of both Lincoln and Jefferson Davis. Codes of military honor.
115 ff on Killing. Usually it’s possible, and standard practice, to dehumanize and/or demonize the enemy, to maintain that they’re not like us, not really human, don’t value life in the same way “we” do. This was more difficult in the Civil War, because it was a war among Americans.
116 on Dave Grossman’s research into the many who didn’t actually fire their weapons at all, or not at the enemy—as many as 80-85% (!) Scott had some comments on this point about “killers.”
http://www.killology.com/
On the “Killology” research group, more on Grossman and his book On Killing.
117 “militant Christian religion” and songs
like “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” The Holy War, again, the belief/hope in
redemptive violence.
Race riots, charities, the development of a
gun culture (120).
The aftermath and the transformation of
memory, from horror to glorious cause. Even Lincoln’s assassination contributes
to the mythology.
Chapter 6: “Revolution Derailed:
Reconstruction.”
What’s our standard image of reconstruction?
Carpetbaggers and scalawags trying to profit from the war, scandals and a mess,
but At Least the Slaves Were Free? Merely “a rather embarrassing footnote,” as
J/H say (123)?
124: “white dominion in the South was not
undermined, but reformed and made more lasting and durable, by the violence of
the Civil War and Reconstruction.”
The black “revitalization movement,” during and
after the war. Black soldiers, many killed of missing. The Massachusetts 54th,
memorialized in Glory.
Problems of land reform and economics, “40
acres and a mule.” But neither northerners nor southerners really wanted to set
blacks up as equals on their own land. 129: “white-controlled wage-earning
laborers.” Lincoln showed little
support for any more.
130: long interval between end of war and
congress meeting. Johnson’s reconstruction, favorable to South, created white
backlash. Congressional reconstruction was radical but unsuccessful, resisted
in South by underground violence, KKK, lynchings, etc.
133: three groups, planter aristocracy, freed
blacks, other whites; the “other south” allied eventually with the planters to
repress blacks and institute control by white Democrats.
134-5 result was sharecropping, segregation,
Jim Crow laws, essentially a new version of domination and exploitation without
the legality of slavery.
135: might it have been different? The Truth
and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa as a positive example. Again, who
can say? 137: Truth telling, Restorative justice, Forgiveness and mercy.
http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln/speeches/greeley.htm Lincoln’s famous letter to Horace Greeley, saying that his main purpose is to “save the Union.”
Brittney Selden
http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln/speeches/greeley.htm Yes, this is the same page! Great minds think alike . . .
Roxann Biberstine
http://kpearson.faculty.tcnj.edu/rhetrace/_rhetrace/0000002b.htm Review of a book about African-American revolutionary Denmark Vesey, with some broader analysis: “Since the colonial era, the idea of blacks plotting to slit the throats of their owners has generated tremendous discomfort in white America.”
Philip Whitley
http://www.civilwarpages.com/ Large site with lots of pictures, speeches, etc.
Ryan Zeman
http://ngeorgia.com/history/why.html Examines causes of the Civil War from a southern perspective. Quotes Jefferson: “...the Yankee ... is marked by a peculiar perversity of nature which makes them our (the South's) natural protagonist.”
Scott Van Eman