The Road to Disunion, Volume II: Secessionists Triumphant 1854-1861
Here is history in the grand manner, a powerful narrative peopled with dozens of memorable portraits, telling this important story with skill and relish. Freehling highlights all the key moments on the road to war, including the violence in Bleeding Kansas, Preston Brooks’s beating of Charles Sumner in the Senate chambers, the Dred Scott Decision, John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, and much more. As Freehling shows, the election of Abraham Lincoln sparked a political crisis, but at first most
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Wonderful part 2,
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|Professor’s Prose Style Makes “Road” a Difficult Journey,
One has to actually experience Professor Freehling’s sentences and paragraphs to appreciate the difficulty of grasping some of them. He seems never to have met a suffix–and few prefixes–which he did not like. Social and political factions, groups, and sub-groups are inevitably named and labelled resulting in an exponential proliferation of nouns such as Secessionists, Unionists, Dis-unionists, Separatists, Cooperationists, Abolitionists, Borderites, Paternalists, Egalitarianists, Nativists, ex-Whigs, anti-slavery Democrats, Calhounism, Van Burenites, etc., ad infinitum. More than a few casual readers will likely find that a glossary, however sophomoric it might seem to Professor Freehling, would be helpful. I found myself reading many sentences two, three, even four times before feeling satisfied that I had grasped the intended meaning. Several entire paragraphs, after being subjected to similar scrutiny, were simply abandoned as I moved on through the work, resigned that, if I should ever be able to digest them, it simply would not be worth the effort.
On a substantive note, Professor Freehling, especially in Volume II, appears to conclude that the proponents of slavery, in their efforts to defend and protect their “peculiar institution” infringed and trampled upon the “Republicanism” of other whites, and tended thereby even to enslave such whites. He seems to offer this conclusion as an explanation for the fervor which opponents of slavery brought to the struggle against it. The primary example offered of such infringement of “Republican” rights is that for a number of years, the Democratic Party was controlled by a minority centered in the lower south, and that through the Democratic Party, then the major party in the nation, this southern minority in effect exercised control over a nationwide majority, thereby infringing upon the “Republican” right of majority rule. Other more concrete examples of infringement of “rights” were southern efforts to “gag” and censor abolitionist communication designed to agitate and incite resistance to slavery in the south, and actual violence offered to those inclined to go in person among slaves and non-slaveholding whites for such purposes. Southerners felt justified in such action by the basic necessity of self-preservation due to the omnipresent threat of slave violence, a threat which would be exacerbated if violent tendencies should be inflamed by agitation.
It is unimaginable to me that any Yankee soldier–indeed anyone opposed to the South and/or slavery–in the Civil War ever said or thought that his (or her) “Republicanism” was threatened by the South or that any white person was in danger of enslavement by the South. Even if Professor Freehling’s conclusion is considered as merely an articulation of some unspoken visceral reaction to slaveholders, what purpose is served by such a contrived articulation? Is it the result of academic pressure to forever derive and construct some new insight or theory upon one of the most studied and exposed eras of history? If the people who lived in that era did not articulate their views in such terms, and if nobody else in modern society considers the matter in such terms, what is the value of expounding upon history in such contrived fashion?
My conclusion is that Professor Freehling’s somewhat strained efforts to bring new insights to an old story have rendered his telling of the story unnecessarily difficult to follow. I do recommend reading his work, but I would not recommend that the casual reader plunge into it without some prior familiarization with the history of the era. Potter’s “The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861” may be considered one of the leading works on the subject prior to the publication of “Road to Disunion”, and the casual reader might be well-advised to take them in chronological order of publication.
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|The Slaveholding Predicament,
I don’t think it would be unfair to say that the scholarship of William Freehling is focused on an idée fixe: that the antebellum American South was deeply divided against itself, that those divisions lie at the heart of the South’s actions, and are the root of that most dramatic, momentous event in America’s 19th century – secession.
The most important divide for Freehling is the ideological rift between two conflicting American traditions: the 18th century Paternalism of America’s Aristocratic Founders, and the 19th century democratic ideology of the revolution they’ve created. This is why Freehling’s magnum opus, The Road to Disunion, started in 1776: With the American Revolution, a new conception of liberty and equality rose to prominence side-by-side with the older tradition. It would be an exaggeration, but only a modest one, to say that, for Freehling, the Civil War was the final confrontation between these ideologies.
Freehling’s description of the clash of ideologies, 18th century Paternalism versus 19th century Herrenvolk Democracy, is most explicitly made in his brilliant essay collection, The Reintegration of American History: Slavery and the Civil War. But although the conflict is less explicitly described in the present volume (I don’t think Freehling uses the word “Herrenvolk” anywhere in the text), it is actually made much clearer. To put it simply, the 19th century conception of Democracy was based on the idea that all white men were equal; but in a slaveholding Society, Slaveholders were more equal than non slaveholders.
The point is not merely the by now familiar one that White Northerners found themselves threatened by the “Slave Power”. The more interesting thesis is that the same dynamic was working itself out in the South. Although ostensibly the defender of slavery and the South, the democratic ideology, heralded by Jefferson’s declaration of Independence and consolidated in Andrew Jackson’s Democratic Party, actually threatened it. The Democracy was built around the ideology of race: All White Men were created equal. But in a slaveholding society, masters were more equal than non-slaveholding Whites. They had to be – how otherwise could they protect their precious, brittle institution?
For Slavery’s apparent strength was misleading – it was a system depending on a framework of laws and attitudes maintaining it, suppressing and controling not just Blacks but also the Whites who might wish to undermine it. Without strong actions against Fugitives, slaves would become a precarious investment. Fearing slaves’ flight, sabotage, or worse – murder of their masters – slavers could not allow “agitation” against slavery – so Speech had to be suppressed. Without laws protecting it, slavery could not be safe in the Federal Territories, and Slaveholders would not risk taking their slaves there – thus, a Federal Slave Code had to be enacted in the Territories, whether the inhabitants of those territories wanted it or not.
You may call this the Slaveholding Predicament – the “whiter” and “freer” a slaveholding state became, the less Democratic it could be. The non-slaveholding class may very well feel it had no stakes in the complicated apparatus designed to keep slavery in place, and may turn against slavery. The brittleness of slavery required suppression of Democracy to protect the Peculiar Institution.
Secession – living in a country that was blacker and more slaveholding – proved the only way Antebellum Southerners could resolve this Predicament. Freehling documents the failures of other schemes to transcend that Paradox, whether adventurism in pursuit of more slavery-friendly land in Caribbean America, the reopening of the Slave Trade, or the re-enslavement of Free Blacks (the latter two would create new slaveholders, thus giving more Southerners a stake in the Peculiar Institution). All of these projects failed. As these possible schemes for reducing the conflict between the security of slavery and the demands of democracy failed, Southerners tried to get a tighter than ever control over the White man’s democracy – leading to a series of Confrontations between the North and South. But the Southern control of the American Democracy ended with the election of Abraham Lincoln. Failing to reconcile the two ideologies, the South was now thrust into the 19th century – living in a country where the majority of non-slaveholders have finally wrestled the power away from the masters. Secession was the only way – a mad, dangerous and reckless only way, to be sure – of trying to derail slavery’s headlong march towards eventual annihilation.
By the 1850s, the North was lost to Slaveholders. But the South, too, was far from solid. I didn’t know that even…
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