The Meaning of “When”

Aaron Astor

I was recently asked to join a local committee to plan the centennial celebration of our local school district. The City of Maryville, Tennessee's public system was poised to commemorate its 100th anniversary in 2013 with lots of festivities and a nice, photo-filled book fleshing out the district’s long and storied past. But then the project hit a strange snag.  It came to the attention of the centennial committee chair that 2013 might not actually be the centennial of the Maryville City School system after all.

In somewhat of a panic, the chairwoman sent me an email detailing her extensive search for the “true” date of the school system’s founding. The first schoolhouse appeared in Maryville as early as 1797.  Still, 1913 was important. It was the year Tennessee passed a compulsory education law (southern states were quite late in the game).  It was also the year that Maryville High School first planned its four-year curriculum, though the first class would not graduate until 1919.  However, the state approved a “special school district”, with taxing authority, for the city as early as 1905.  And the first major schools were not built until 1911.  Adding to the confusion is the fact that there had been some semblance of schooling on the site of Maryville High School as early as 1867. Interestingly enough, it was known as the Maryville Freedmen’s Institute, and it served the relatively small ex-slave population of the county. As a final irony, the high school’s nickname is, you guessed it, the Rebels—despite the staunchly pro-Union leanings of Maryville and East Tennessee during the Civil War. The commemorative volume will surely delve into that oft-controversial piece of history.

But the question of dates persisted.  Before we could get into the thorny questions surrounding the school’s nickname, or the warm and fuzzy memories of graduating classes in years gone by, we had to determine if this was even the right time to do it.  And if we “discovered” that 1913 was the wrong founding date, should we then change our school district seal, which has the 1913 date on it?

And so the question boiled down to the meaning of “when”—as in, when was the school system founded? And more importantly, why does that matter?

Amusingly, this very same question—the meaning of “when” —came up when an old friend and colleague from grad school—Greg Downs of City College of New York—came down to the University of Tennessee and delivered a fascinating lecture on the “Ends of the Civil War.”  As he pointed out in colorful detail, the question of “when did the Civil War end” is a very difficult one to resolve. Lee’s surrender? What about Johnston’s surrender? Or a General in Texas who surrendered? Or when President Johnson declared an end to the state of war (in 1866)? Or myriad other times in between? (See Heather Cox Richardson’s recent post on a related matter.)  As Downs pointed out, this was not a mere antiquarian question. It had real legal consequences. After all, if a state of war still existed, the US government could still apply martial law.  Local court systems could still be suspended. And so on. The question of “when” was inextricably bound to the question of “why”, “how” and, of course, “so what?”

Maryville's first school, founded in 1797

My answer to the Maryville City Schools Centennial Committee chair, then, was to declare that it is up to us, as historians, to declare “when” the school system was founded. As long as we could make a compelling argument for why that date made sense, then there was no reason we couldn’t stick with that date. The chairwoman was clearly relieved to hear from a professional historian that it was OK for us to “pick” a date. Any date, as she also concluded, would be somewhat arbitrary.

Much of the historical profession focuses on how events unfold, why they take the shape they do, what their significance is for later history, and how people of the time—and perhaps later on in the collective memory—make sense of those events. But it is quite rare that we really interrogate the “when” part of history, except insofar as we “complicate” earlier chronologies.   The reality is that every time we select a set of dates to bookend a historical phenomenon—a war, a revolution, a religious awakening, the establishment of the Maryville City School district—we are making a profoundly important argument about the very significance of the event itself.    
______________

Aaron Astor is Associate Professor of History at Maryville College in Tennessee, just a few miles from Great Smoky Mountains National Park.  He is author of Rebels on the Border: Civil War, Emancipation, and the Reconstruction of Kentucky and Missouri, 1860-1872 (LSU Press, 2012), which examines the transformation of grassroots black and white politics in the western border states during the Civil War era.  He earned his PhD in History at Northwestern University in 2006 and lives in Maryville with his wife, Samantha, and two children, Henry and Teddy.

Bertram Wyatt-Brown, 1932-2012

Randall Stephens

Like so many others, I was sad to hear that Bert Wyatt-Brown passed away over the weekend in Baltimore.  His wife Anne relayed the news on Sunday. 

Bert is best known as an accomplished writer, historian, mentor, and leader of the historical profession.

Bert on the Maine coast, 2006

He served as President of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (1994), St. George Tucker Society (1998-99), and Southern Historical Association (2000-2001).  He was a longtime supporter of the Historical Society and regularly wrote for Historically Speaking.  (See my interview with him here on this blog.)

He was the author over 100 scholarly articles and essays and wrote a variety of acclaimed books.  His Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.  Novelist Walker Percy called the book "A remarkable achievement--a re-creation of the living reality of the antebellum South from thousands of bits and pieces of the dead past."  "Unlike so many historians who have been interested in handing down judgments, favorable or unfavorable, on the Old South," wrote Harvard historian David Herbert Donald, "Wyatt-Brown has studied Southerners much as an anthropologist would an aboriginal tribe. An important, original book which challenges so many widely held beliefs about the Old South."

True to form, Bert just completed his last book not long before his passing.  I saw him and Anne in September and he was thrilled to have completed the project.  We were emailing back and forth last week about the images to accompany the text.  Titled A Warring Nation: Honor, Race, and Humiliation at Home and Abroad, it will soon be rolled out by the University of Virginia Press.

Maybe most importantly, Bert taught and mentored numerous students at the University of Florida, Colorado State University, the University of Colorado, the University of Wisconsin, and Case Western Reserve University.

As one of his many grad students, I can attest to his generous, wonderful spirit.  With funds from the Milbauer chair he filled at the University of Florida, Bert would help students attend conferences like the Southern Historical Association, the Saint George Tucker Society, the American Historical Association, and others.  He provided research money to students as well.  Many a dissertation was sped along by his help and keen interest.  Bert was a great prose stylist, more than happy to help his charges eliminate passive voice, dangling particles, unidentified antecedents, you name it.  He was tireless in his big-picture, content edits to dissertations, conference, papers, and articles.  (I can't imagine that my first book would have ever seen the light of day without his heroic reading of so many of my bad drafts.) Even after Bert retired he continued to meet with new graduate students at Johns Hopkins and elsewhere.

Those who studied with him, knew him as a colleague, or friend will deeply miss his sense of humor, his joy for living, dinners and visits with him and Anne, and so much more.

He is survived by his wife Anne, a daughter, a son-in-law, and two grandchildren.

A Moral Man: A Eulogy for Eugene Genovese*

David Moltke-Hansen

The doorbell rang at the South Carolina Historical Society in the spring of 1987.  When I opened it, the couple standing there asked if David Moltke-Hansen were in.  Then Gene and Betsey introduced themselves and said they had just stopped by to say how much they admired something I had written and to meet me.  That night I told my wife to shoot me; it would never get better than that.

Fifteen or so years later, I was visiting with Gene and Betsey in Atlanta.  Gene was distraught, almost frantic.  It was Betsey’s birthday, and the flowers he had ordered had not come.  Betsey reassured him that she knew he was always thinking of her—except, of course, during baseball games and when he was reading and writing.  That, I thought to myself, doesn’t leave much time except in dreams, at meals, and in the car, with Betsey driving, because Gene never learned how to drive.

Until the last couple of years, when his health deteriorated even further, Gene worked incessantly.  Witness the three books he saw through the press after his beloved Betsey’s death five years and nine months ago.  In addition, he worked on the five volumes of Betsey’s selected, uncollected writings, read manuscripts, and went through four newspapers a day.  He worked like that for nearly sixty years.

That abiding drive hints at another that animated those years.  Gene always was a moralist, whether as a Marxist or as a Catholic.  He recognized the evil men and women do through the acquisition and abuse of power, and he wanted to understand and combat that evil.  At one point scientific socialism seemed the way, but then Communism failed and failed him, even as Marxism continued to influence what and how he wrote.  Last year, rereading old political pieces of his from the ‘60s and ‘70s, he noted wryly: my reasoning was impeccable, just not my premises. 

Uncompromising in his moral judgments, Gene thought it unforgivable weakness to quail from necessary action because of possible collateral damage.  And he was entirely ready to see me become such damage.  Once he told me (after just having handed me a new book that he had dedicated to me) that I should and would die at the revolution.  Which revolution, I asked?  Any worth its salt, he said.  Liberals, social democrats, and other, mealy-mouthed, intellectually flaccid temporizers, the implication was, need to be eliminated.  Or at least have power wrested or kept from them.  He was not fond of libertarians either, thinking radical individualism radically wrong in the face of the collective challenges posed by power’s corruption. 

Now, when I become President, now when I become Pope, Gene would say—suggesting he should be both—things will be different.  The sad difference is that we no longer can hear him say that.  We shall remember, however, more than his humor and passion and moral drive.  We can still celebrate a brilliant interpreter of American slavery and the planter class, a tough colleague, and a generous friend.
________

*Moltke-Hansen gave this eulogy at Eugene Genovese's funeral mass on October 2nd in Atlanta, GA.

Exploring Family History

Randall Stephens

This weekend NPR featured an interesting story about one scholar's quest to learn more about his family.

Eyre Crowe, Slaves Waiting for Sale, Richmond, Virginia, ca. 1861

"Lawrence Jackson went through most of his life not knowing much about his family history," reports Guy Raz.  Continues Raz:

So he began a search, armed with only early boyhood memories, for his late grandfather's old home by the railroad tracks in Blairs, Va. Jackson describes his journey in a new book, My Father's Name: A Black Virginia Family after the Civil War.

Shortly after Jackson began a search for his roots, he found out his great-grandfather was a slave.

"If you said to me that my father's grandfather grew up in slavery and actually spent maybe the first 10 or 15 years of his life as human chattel, I wouldn't have been able to take that idea so seriously" . . . 

This short segment well illustrates how the past still impacts the present.  A course that deals with 19th century US history might make use of stories like this.  In addition programs like Henry Louis Gates' African-American Lives uncover the past in a very personal way.  What better sense could students get of the significance of history?

I'll admit, I've never incorporated a genealogy project into the curriculum.  Yet, stories like these above make me wonder if it would work.

Richard H. King on Why I Became a Historian

Randall Stephens

Why are some youngsters fascinated by the past while others don't have the slightest interest in the subject?  (Indeed, quite a few run to the hills at the mere mention of "history.")  What makes some of us into historians?

While I was at the British Association of American Studies meeting at the University of Manchester I had some time to sit down with the historian Richard H. King.  I asked King the same question I've put to other historians: "Why

did you become a historian?" 

King is a prolific author (now emeritus professor of American intellectual history, University of Nottingham). While in grad school at the University of Florida I read his engaging book A Southern Renaissance: The Cultural Awakening of the American South, 1930-1955 (Oxford University Press, 1980).  Along with that volume he is also the author of a number other influential books, including: The Party of Eros: Radical Thought and the Realm of Freedom (Delta, 1972); Civil Rights and the Idea of Freedom (University of Georgia Press, 1996); Race, Culture and the Intellectuals, 1940-1970 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); and he co-edited Dixie Debates (New York University Press, 1995) with Helen Taylor.

In the interview here, King speaks about his undergraduate experience at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in the early 1960s.  He also talks about the literary and social forces of the day that led him to study the past.

2012 Southern Historical Association Meeting

Randall Stephens

The 78th Annual Meeting of the Southern Historical Association will be in Mobile, Alabama, November 1-4, 2012. The deadline for submitting a proposal for the 2012 meeting of the Southern Historical Association is about one month away. There's still plenty of time to submit a paper or a session. Program directors Marjorie Spruill and Don Doyle hope to "create a rich and broad program for 2012 by soliciting exciting proposals."

Here's the general note about the Mobile conference:

The Program Committee for 2012 invites proposals on all topics related to the history of the American South from its pre-colonial era to today. In addition, for the 2012 meeting in Mobile, it extends a special welcome to proposals relating to:

~ Mobile and the Gulf South

~ International, transnational, or comparative approaches

~ 2012 as an anniversary of major historical events, publications, etc.

The Program Committee accepts proposals for single papers but encourages session proposals that include two or three papers. Individuals interested in using the SHA website to organize a session with complementary papers may send an e-mail to Sheree Dendy with their name, e-mail address, and proposed paper topic. She will post this information on the SHA website, which others seeking compatible co-panelists may consult. Click to view current postings of those seeking related proposals.

According to SHA policy, no one who appeared on the previous two programs, those at Charlotte and Baltimore, can be part of the program in Mobile.

Note: A New Policy for the 2012 Program Committee: Those submitting proposals should include suggestions of people who would be appropriate as commentators/chairs but not issue invitations. The Program Committee will select and invite a chair and usually two commentators. No two people from the same institution can be on the same session.

All 2012 proposals must be submitted online.

If you are interested in submitting a session for the Latin American and Caribbean Section, please visit their web site.

Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, and Festschrift

Randall Stephens

I was in Boothbay Harbor, Maine, last week visiting with Bertram and Anne Wyatt-Brown. Both have been longtime members and supporters of the Historical Society and have participated in our national conferences. Bert has contributed several essays to Historically Speaking the Journal of the Historical Society, and this blog.

Before I left Boothbay and made my way back down to a sweltering Boston, I asked Bert some questions about his classic book Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South and his research into how honor continues to shape the world today. (Listen to audio of interview here.)

As some readers of this blog might know, Wyatt-Brown is the author of over 100 scholarly articles and essays and has written a variety of acclaimed books. Southern Honor was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The study of masculinity, gender, violence, and southern culture has thrived in the years since Bert wrote his book. Not long after its publication the it won high praise. Novelist Walker Percy called it "A remarkable achievement--a re-creation of the living reality of the antebellum South from thousands of bits and pieces of the dead past." And David Herbert Donald observed that, "Unlike so many historians who have been interested in handing down judgments, favorable or unfavorable, on the Old South, Wyatt-Brown has studied Southerners much as an anthropologist would an aboriginal tribe. An important, original book which challenges so many widely held beliefs about the Old South."

In celebration of Bert's long career and his impact, the University Press of Florida will soon publish a Festschrift to honor him. Edited by Daniel Kilbride and Lisa Tendrich Frank, the volume includes essays by a number of Bert's students and others on which he had a significant influence. It will be out just in time for the Southern Historical Association meeting in October.

What on Earth was a “Bourbon Democrat?”

Heather Cox Richardson

Recently, I went over the importance of the Paris Commune in American politics in the 1870s with a group of teachers. As we examined James S. Pike’s 1874 The Prostrate State, written by a man consumed with concern over the Commune, one of them noticed Pike’s reference to “the Southern Bourbon.” With France firmly in mind, he asked if Pike had been referring to the French aristocracy when he used that term.

I’ve studied nineteenth-century American politics for almost thirty years, and have written extensively on the importance of the Paris Commune to American political thought, but this had never occurred to me. To the degree I even thought about it, I honestly thought the Bourbon Democrats were dubbed that because they drank bourbon.

So as soon as I got home, I set out to track down where, exactly, the name “Bourbon Democrat” came from. That search yielded an answer—of sorts—and it also revealed just how much work historians can now do on the internet.

Most general histories on-line and scholarly articles (available on JSTOR), where I started, examined the Bourbon Democrats themselves rather than their name, and dated their importance from 1875 or 1876 to the turn of the century. They noted that the Bourbons were straight-out, old-fashioned Southern Democrats who stood against black rights.

But Pike used the term in his book in 1874. Where did he get it?

To find out, I started where I almost always start a nineteenth-century search: with the New York Times (available at the Historical New York Times). That turned up surprising little from this continent. There were a large number of stories from the very beginning of the newspaper’s publication in 1851, though, referring to the Bourbons of France and Spain. Obviously, “Bourbon” was a term with which Americans would have been very comfortable, and which they would have associated with the European aristocrats. (There were also a few advertisements for bourbon whiskey).

The first time I found a reference to “Bourbon Democrats” in the New York Times was in 1872. It was in an article that looked to the upcoming presidential election and attacked the Democrats by arguing that the “Bourbon Democrats” were the same men who had in 1864 been strong advocates of peace with the South and a return to pre-war conditions. They were essentially unchanged, still firm Confederates. (New York Times, May 8. 1872, p. 4.)

From the New York Times I went to the Chicago Tribune, where I found the term “bourbons” used in an editorial in May 1872. There, though, the term was used for extremists on both sides. The editorial complained about how “bourbons” in both parties were hurting the nation. (Chicago Tribune, May 31, 1872, p. 4).

So far I had discovered that, in the same month, the New York Times had used the term as if its meaning were established and the Chicago Tribune had used it as if its meaning were still malleable. Clearly, it had emerged shortly before May 1872.

My next stop was the New York Daily Tribune. Its editor, Horace Greeley, was a political animal and could even have invented the term, I figured. The New York Daily Tribune is on that incredible Library of Congress website, Chronicling America. On March 5, 1872, Greeley published the first salvo in James Pike’s attack on Republican Reconstruction policies in the South. In this article, titled “A State in Ruins,” Pike referred to South Carolina’s antebellum leaders as an “aristocracy,” before going on to argue that those leaders were now being trodden underfoot by black upstarts. This was the same part of his argument that used the term “Southern Bourbons” in his book—the one the teacher identified. This put aristocracy and “Bourbons” together.

Was there an earlier reference to “Bourbons” that might clarify why Pike used the term?

Perhaps. In May 1871, an editorial in the New York Daily Tribune identified as Bourbon Democrats a faction of the Democratic Party in Bourbon County, Kentucky. According to the editorial, the faction was made up of ex-Rebels who had not fought in the war, and who still spouted extremism. They refused to recognize the 14th or the 15th Amendments to the Constitution, and abhorred black voting. Gaye Keller Bland, in The Kentucky Encyclopedia—where I went next—had a slightly different take on this group, saying they took their name not from Bourbon County (although they were centered there) but from the House of Bourbon that “held to royal tradition after the French Revolution.” Bourbon County, though, according to the article above Bland’s in the encyclopedia, was named for the French royal family.

So was it a county political faction or the French Bourbons who prompted the name Bourbon Democrat? A final newspaper article might provide the answer. On September 20, 1871, the Louisiana Democrat (also at Chronicling America) stood firm against the Democrats who wanted to accept the Reconstruction amendments and move forward. It made the term a symbol of the entire Old South when it said “. . . we believe that when the old Bourbon banner, torn, tattered and fragrant with the blood of a hundred thousand heroes, kisses the sunlight again, victory will nestle in its folds.” (Louisiana Democrat, September 20, 1871, p. 3)

So my best guess is that the term began by identifying a Democratic faction in Kentucky, but quickly got picked up as a reference to the French royal family that stood against the French Revolution. In 1871, Southern Democrats described themselves as the bastions of old tradition and culture, standing in the storm of socialism unleashed by the dregs of society. It only made sense to pick up the limited Kentucky name and use it more widely to describe those who held to the Old South as Bourbons. This was precisely the sentiment of Pike’s The Prostrate State.

So, in answer to that teacher’s question: while Pike’s work in general referenced the Paris Commune, in The Prostrate State he used the term “Bourbons” to invoke those who stood against the French Revolution. (Of course, the two French events tended to run together in Americans’ minds.) Two things are even more certain: that many of the Bourbon Democrats drank bourbon was clearly incidental, and that you can do more research now from home than you could do even a few years ago in most libraries.

Naming Names and So-and-So the So-and-So

Randall Stephens

James Davidson's essay last month in the London Review of Books got me thinking about names. ("Flat-Nose, Stocky and Beautugly," LRB, 23 September 2010.) He spans over English history, coming away with nuggets like this: "Boys’ names remain less susceptible to fashion – Jack has been number one for many years now, while Olivia has had to contend for top spot with Emily, Jessica and Grace – and there remains a tendency towards the classics. But the classics have been redefined more classically."

The ancients, writes Davidson, had a real flare for descriptive, colorful names: "Ancient Greek names were much closer to those of pre-Conquest than post-Conquest England. Just as we translate Native American names such as Tashunka Witko (‘Crazy Horse’), Tatanka Iyotake (‘Sitting Bull’), Woqini (‘Hook Nose’) and Tashunka Kokipapi (‘Young Man Afraid of His Horses’), and even those of the ancient Maya (King ‘Jaguar Paw II’, ‘Smoking Frog’, now renamed ‘Fire Is Born’), so we could refer to famous Greeks as ‘He Who Loves Horses’ (Philip), ‘Masters (with) Horses’ (Hippocrates), ‘Flat-Nose’ (Simon), ‘Stocky’ (Plato), ‘Famed as Wise’ (Sophocles)."

It reminded me of some of the fun, bizarre, or just downright interesting names I've encountered in the American South. One spring some years back my wife and I were on an Appalachian work trip with our Episcopal church. We heard of a local with the mouth-full name: El Canaan Lonson Tonson Tiny Buster Dobson. I hope he had a nickname. (You can read about the kudzu-like profusion of Billy Bobs, Peggy Sues, and Bobbie Joes in Dixie in The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Volume 5: Language, eds., Michael Montgomery and Ellen Johnson.)

Something as simple as a name can tell historians, linguists, and anthropologists interesting details about a nation, a people, or a family. What do the most popular names of our day say about society? Here are the 2009 winners courtesy of the Social Security Administration: Jacob, Isabella, Ethan, Emma, Michael, Olivia, Alexander, Sophia, William, Ava, Joshua, Emily, Daniel, Madison, Jayden, Abigail, Noah, Chloe, Anthony, Mia. Signs of a neoclassical revival? A renewed interest in history? With the exception of Mia and Jayden, these have the ring of the early-19th century.

Some memorable royal nicknames:

Peter the Great
Julian the Apostate
Sigurd Magnusson the Bad
Edward the Black Prince
Coloman the Bookish
Vlad III the Impaler
Charles VI the Mad
Halfdan of Romerike the Mild
Ethelred II the Unready
Eric VIII the Pagan
Pippin III the Short
Maria II the Good Mother
Ragnar Lodbrok Hairy Breeches
Olav III the Silent
Dmitry of Tver the Terrible Eyes
Arnulf III the Unlucky
Harald Hildetand Wartooth
Afonso II the Fat
Sweyn I Forkbeard
Henry I the Fowler
Fortun I the Monk
Edgar Ætheling the Outlaw

See more: Albert Romer Frey, Sobriquets and Nicknames (Boston, 1887).

Black Confederates, the Internet, and the Teaching of History

Heather Cox Richardson

The recent flap over the Virginia grade school textbook that asserted thousands of African Americans fought for the Confederacy brings up a couple of issues of interest to history teachers (aside from the obvious historical issues of race and the Civil War).

First, it raises the question of why on earth any school system would buy a textbook written by someone without training in the subject and published by a non-academic press, but that’s about politics, not history, so I’ll skip that for now.

Another big question here, though, is the use of the internet for research. Anyone who teaches history today knows that students invariably turn to the web as their main source of information. That’s just what textbook author Joy Masoff—who has no training in history and is best known for her book Yuck! The Encyclopedia of Everything Nasty—said she had done to research the material for her textbook.

Just like Masoff, students have no idea whether what they find on the internet is true or false.

A good tool for teaching students about the perils of relying on internet sources is to show them these two photos, which happen to address the issue of black Confederate soldiers (and which almost certainly played a part in Masoff’s mistake).

In 2005, Jerome S. Handler, a senior scholar at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, and Michael L. Tuite, Jr., the former director of the University of Virginia Library Digital Media Lab, examined an image of black Confederate soldiers widespread on the web and popular among neo-Confederates. They published their conclusions on the web as “Retouching History: The Modern Falsification of a Civil War Photograph.”

In their paper, they traced how the real photograph of black Union soldiers pictured above was scanned and digitally manipulated into the fake photograph of the “1st Louisiana Native Guard.” It’s a fascinating story.

I make it a point to talk the students through these photographs early in my Civil War history class, both to show them that they can’t believe everything they find on the internet, and to indicate just how aggressively modern politically-motivated organizations have advanced false information about the Civil War. Invariably, the students like the comparison of the photographs and the discussion of why someone would want to manipulate an image in this way.

And it does seem to have some effect on the degree to which they trust the internet.

Bad Company

Heather Cox Richardson

Like Randall, I’ve been keeping bad company lately.

My unsavory companion has been South Carolina’s James Henry Hammond, a leading figure before the American Civil War, who served as a US Senator from 1857 to 1860. Hammond was one of the South’s wealthiest planters, owner of hundreds of slaves, a member of the South’s elite. He was also arrogant, clueless, and a sexual predator.

On March 4, 1858, Hammond stood up in the Senate and delivered a speech that most people know for its famous line: "Cotton is king."

Historians tend to point to this speech for its misguided conviction that, if the tensions between the sections came to war, the South would win handily. In his speech, Hammond pointed out that the South encompassed 850,000 square miles—more territory than Great Britain, France, Austria, Prussia, and Spain—with a population more than four times what the colonies had had when they successfully revolted against England. The South had fine soil and good harbors, and it grew the crop on which industrial societies depended: cotton. If the South withheld its cotton from market for a year, entire countries would fall to their knees, Hammond declared. Cotton was king, indeed, according to Hammond.

As notable as this speech was for its assertion of Southern power, it was even more astonishing for its view of human society. It was here that Senator Hammond outlined what Abraham Lincoln later called the "mudsill" version of life. According to Hammond, all societies were made up of two classes. On the bottom were the "mudsills": drudges who were lazy, stupid, loyal, and happy with their lot. On this class rested civilization: the wealthy, educated, cultured men who advanced society—men like Hammond. This class should always lead society, for only its members knew what was best for a nation. If the mudsills ever got power, they would demand wealth redistribution, and human progress would halt.

This was, of course, the same era that saw extraordinary upward mobility in the United States. Immigrants were pouring into the North, beginning their climb to economic security or even prosperity. Young men and women were moving west, pushing Indians out of the way to improve their own lot, as well. At a time when wage workers were actually moving upward at an extraordinary rate, Hammond dismissed them as dimwits, condemned to drudgery to support the lifestyle of people like him.

Hammond’s vision was troubling enough, but his arrogant elitism was worse. When Hammond spoke, the nation was convulsed over a civil war in Kansas. Events there were very complicated, but by 1858 it was clear to everyone that the machinations of a pro-slavery legislature had enabled a rigged convention to draft a state constitution that the vast majority of settlers in Kansas loathed. This presented a legal conundrum, but while different sides argued, people died, in particularly brutal ways. Kansas was the issue of the day, and had been for almost four years.

What did sitting Senator Hammond, one of those to whom society should be trusted, say about this horror?

"The whole history of Kansas is a disgusting one, from the beginning to the end. I have avoided reading it as much as I could. Had I been a Senator before, I should have felt it my duty, perhaps, to have done so; but not expecting to be one, I am ignorant, fortunately, in a great measure, of details; and I was glad to hear [Senator Stephen Douglas's speech], since it excuses me from the duty of examining them."*

Why should he have bothered to learn anything about the major issue of the day? He already knew how a successful society should work. He didn’t have to bother about facts.

James Cobb on "The Necessary South" in Historically Speaking

_
In the Latest issue of Historically Speaking, James Cobb writes about the role the South has played on the national political stage. Read his essay on the what pundits, historians, and others have made of the South. Here's an excerpt:

James Cobb, "The Necessary South," Historically Speaking (September 2010)

Since the earliest days of the republic the South has served primarily as what Jack P. Greene called “a negative example of what America had to overcome before it could finally realize its true self.” The struggle to transcend this burdensome regional anomaly would play out over the better part of two centuries, but by the time it appeared finally to have run its course, some were beginning to complain that, in the end, it was the South that had actually overcome, and, in the process, prevented the nation from becoming all that it could be. Even before 30 million Americans outside the South chose a bona fide representative of a racially transformed and economically vibrant Dixie to lead the country out of its post-Watergate funk in 1976, liberals were bemoaning the ominous “rise of the Southern Rim” and the insidiously conservatizing effects of the “Southernization of America.” That such rhetoric is still in vogue more than a generation later suggests that not all of the resistance to integrating the South into national life has originated in the South itself. For all the evidence that a once-recalcitrant Dixie is, for better or worse, now one with the rest of the country, many outside the region and even a few within it still cling to a static vision of a defiantly unchanged, indisputably inferior South, which, in turn, provides the negative counterpoint necessary to sustain their equally rigid and decidedly idealized vision of America’s “true self.”

Pointing to critical changes in the South, a veritable slew of pundits had suggested that the perceived differences between region and nation were disappearing long before John Egerton referred in 1973 to the “Americanization of Dixie.” On the other hand, Egerton was one of the first to argue that the South’s loss of distinctiveness had actually been accelerated by the concomitant “Southernization of America,” observing that “the North, for its part, seems more overtly racist than it had been; shorn of its pretensions of moral innocence, it is exhibiting many of the attitudes that once were thought to be the exclusive possession of white Southerners.”

Egerton used “Southernization” merely as a figurative description of what he saw happening in the 1970s, but a host of liberal commentators quickly seized on the term as a literal explanation, in which a sudden, aggressive, nationwide contagion of southern white values became primarily responsible for America’s pronounced tilt to the right during the last quarter of the 20th century. “Southernization,” wrote George Packer, “was an attitude that spread north—suspicion of government, antielitism, racial resentment, a highly personal religiosity.”

Catering to white Southerners’ resentment of Democratic support for civil rights advances, Barry Goldwater had carried five southern states in 1964, and by 1966 Richard Nixon was already assuring Pat Buchanan that the GOP’s future lay “right here in the South.” Yet in the “Southernization” version of events it was not until George Wallace, the presumed embodiment of the southern white mentality, had expertly manipulated the race issue in 1968 that the Republican Party was seduced into its infamous, racially coded “southern strategy.” This strategy, in turn, succeeded in forging southern white racial antagonism (not unlike the violent sentiments on shocking public display at the time in Chicago or Detroit or Boston) into such a sizable and solid core of Republican support in the South that the GOP was able to win the presidency four out of five times between 1972 and 1988. To be sure, the virtual certainty of strong support from southern whites allowed Republican candidates to concentrate their resources elsewhere. Still, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan claimed at least 90% of the remaining electoral votes nationally in 1972, 1980, and 1984, and George H.W. Bush drew nearly 75% in 1988, meaning that all of them ran nearly as well outside the South as within it, and thus not a single southern vote had been essential to any of their victories. >>>

June Issue of Historically Speaking On-line

Randall Stephens

The June issue of Historically Speaking is now up at Project Muse. (We couldn't be more pleased with the terrific work the Muse people are doing. Readers can finally consistently read HS on-line. Scanning back issues is now in the works.)

The June issue includes a lively forum on Charles Joyner's classic Down by the Riverside. It also contains interviews and the usual fare of insightful essays.

In "The Art of History" popular historian Ian Mortimer throws down the gauntlet. Academic historians, in his estimation, don't care all that much about writing, narrating, and dramatic story telling. "Most professional historians do not understand the art of history," he asserts. "Quite what constitutes the 'art' seems to be the problem. Is it originality of thought, a distinct literary voice, innovative writing, sensitivity to public perceptions and assumptions about the past, or clarity of expression? Or something else entirely? Whatever the answer, these suggestions by themselves indicate that some of the activities associated with the 'art' do not figure prominently in university departments. Literary skill is almost always downgraded by academics to a supplementary role—supporting an analytical process but always subordinate to it. Originality is surprisingly rarely valued in academic circles: when it is most clearly displayed, it often proves to be the catalyst for its protagonist to be declared a 'maverick.' No historical departments (as far as I know) encourage their members to be sensitive to public perceptions and assumptions. Few historians have actively explored what drama, suspense, and literary conceits can add to a narrative. Creative writing is never discussed in historical journals, even though it is implicit in the very act of writing something new. All in all, historians seem generally oblivious to the basic fact that when expressing ideas about the past, the way one writes is as important as what one writes."

I disagree with Mortimer about some of these assumptions. Seems too broad a generalization, I think. Still I find it an interesting, provocative take. See Donald A. Yerxa's interview with Mortimer in the June issue for more on the subject.

Historically Speaking (June 2010)

"Two Historians on Defeat in War and Its Causes"
Peter Paret

"U.S. Expansion and the Woman Question, 1870-1929"
Allison Sneider

"Ian Mortimer: Making History More Meaningful to Society"

"The Art of History"
Ian Mortimer

"In Search of New Narrative Frameworks: An Interview with Ian Mortimer"
Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa

"Creolization in and Beyond Charles Joyner’s Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community A Panel Discussion"

"Introduction"
David Moltke-Hansen

"Learning from Charles Joyner"
David Hackett Fischer

"The Influence of Down by the Riverside"
Sylvia R. Frey

"Two Journeys: Honoring Charles Joyner"
James Peacock

"Creolization, Decreolization, and Being 'at Home' in the Diaspora"
Stephanie J. Shaw

"Response"
Charles Joyner

"Writing Historical Crime Novels: An Interview with Jenny White"
Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa

"Prince Henry of Portugal and the Sea Route to India"
Anthony Disney

"Faith and the Founding of Virginia"
Lorri Glover

"Letters"
Stanley Sandlar
Vivian R. Gruder

"In Grateful Memory of Max Palevsky, 1924-2010"