This story came to me as I was thinking about how much automation and artificial intelligence and robotics was growing in our society.
The president felt that it was important to send an ordinary citizen to experience the excitement of space travel as a representative for all Americans.
Christa McAuliffe
In spite of the opinions of certain narrow-minded people who would shut up the human race upon this globe, we shall one day travel to the Moon, the planets, and the stars with the same facility, rapidity and certainty as we now make the ocean voyage from Liverpool to New York.
Jules Verne
Don’t tell me that man doesn’t belong out there. Man belongs wherever he wants to go – and he’ll do plenty well when he gets there.
Wernher von Braun
I think of space not as the final frontier but as the next frontier. Not as something to be conquered but to be explored.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.
Dr. Ian Malcolm, fictional character, Jurassic Park.
The story began a long time ago, in the minds of fiction writers like Jules Verne and other early science fiction authors who pushed the boundaries of imagination. Writers like Larry Niven and Arthur C. Clark spoke of giant space stations and other fantastic travels. Clark wrote a short story in 1948 called The Sentinel for a competition, in 1968 he and Stanley Kubrick expanded it into 2001:A Space Odyssey, telling of a future in space. Humans have been looking to the horizon and beyond since the days of the Serengeti.
In 1903, the Russian scientist Konstantin Eduadovich Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935) developed the theory of rocketry as a supplement to his philosophical studies. He developed an equation for rockets called the Tsiolkovsky (or classical or ideal) equation and spoke of stations were people lived and worked in space. Tsiolkovsky would greatly influence the German rocket scientist Werner Von Braun, and others. Yugoslav Herman “Noordung” Potocnik (1892-1929) wrote a book, in 1928, on the subject called Das Problem der Befahrung des Weltraums – der Raketen-Motor (The Problem of Space Travel – The Rocket Motor) . In it he detailed what many have called the architecture of space station. Herman Julius Oberth (1984-1989) also wrote of space stations in his book, Problem der Befahrung des Weltraums (The Problem of Space Travel), as well as supporting the existence of aliens and UFOs. Werner von Braun and Willy Ley updated his work and spoke of a giant wheel in space with a diameter of 75 meters in the early fifties.
The idea of space stations percolated through the NASA programs with Nautilus X centrifuge demonstrative project and the International Space Station. Others dreamed of the Axion Space Station by 2024, the Gateway in 2023, and the Atemis, which would combine a moon base and the Mars mission between 2024 and the mid 2030s. Two ideas soon pushed their way to the top, one called the Stanford torus, which had a doughnut shaped ring with giant tubes to a hub. The Russians called it the Bublik City and in the US it was called von Braun’s wheel. It would create artificial gravity, 0.9g to 1.0 g, by centrifugal force which would create rotational gravity, or artificial gravity, through a process of centipedal acceleration. this according to theory would produce the gravitational acceleration of Earth and solve the problems of microgravity on humans in long term space flight. The ring would rotate around a zero gravity hub which would as a dock and a place for zero gravity experiments.
The other concept was the O’Neil cylinder, which was proposed by Gerald K. O’Neil (1927-1992) in his book, The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space in 1976. This consisted of two giant counter rotating cylinders, to cancel any gyroscopic effects that would make it almost impossible to keep them pointed at the sun. Each would be 5 miles (8.0 km) in diameter and 20 miles (32 km) long, connected at each end by a rod via a bearing system. They would rotate so as to provide artificial gravity via centrifugal force on their inner surfaces It would look like this:
O’Neil cylinder
The Stanford tour would look like this:
Stanford tour
In 2038, with many buzzing about the celebration of the 100 year anniversary of World War II that would occur in the next year, two scientist, American Robert Cruz and the Russian Alexis Malykhin, from the Palmer Institute designed and launched their great space station. Funding came from both Washington and Moscow, as many were looking at the space program with renews interest since the Mars landing in 2035. Combining the two modules the new Neil deGrasse Tyson Space Station and Research Facility now orbited the sun half way between Earth and Mars. The great outer ring that circled around the two cylinders bore the great scientist’s name and the flags of the United States, Russia, China, Great Britain, France, India, Japan, Germany, and Israel. On one cylinder was the American Eagle and the Russian Bear was on the second. In January of 1939, to kick off the celebration of the Second World War, the famous picture of Earth and Mars from the other side of the sun, hovering just over the Sun’s horizon was published to celebrate the new year. While this was going on, in the ring, two other scientist, Austin Baker and Skylar Wilson, two pediatric doctors, were making another advance. This would almost become the sensation of the mid century.
One of the reasons the Palmer Institute had been created by Thomas Harris and James Alexander was to find a way to achieve interstellar flight. It was one of the reasons behind the construction of this great space station, and Dr. Baker and Dr. Wilson were working in a section that was trying to find a solution to the problem of the long journeys one had to make to get to the stars. The group they worked in was the Space Colonization and Long Term Travel Laboratory. (SCLTTL) They were working in a division, called the Embryo and Brain Research Division, (EBRD) that was looking into two things, one was the idea of embryo colonization, sending embryos to the stars that would later be brought to term when the distance to a star was within a human lifespan. The other was whole brain emulation (WBE), the downloading of a brain and conscious into a computer and later put back into a body. This path was not favored, especially after the problems of the Biobot incident.
In their research, the pair had perfected, at least it looked like they had perfected, an artificial womb for humans. Building on research done in the Philadelphia Children’s Hospital in 2017, the pair had overcome many of the problems that had plagued the program in the intervening years. Mimicking the gestational immune tolerance of a natural womb, they had perfected an environment that allowed the fetus could developed in a very normal fashion. A surprisingly simple dialysis apparatus allowed them to remove all waste from the fetus and also kept the environment in the container free of any virus and other pollutants. The trick was oxidation of the fetus, the extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) was not viable for fetus under 32 weeks, so they combined the Liquid ventilation with the ECMO to produce an apparatus that not only delivered oxygen, but nutrition as well, all while moving the waste and carbon dioxide to the dialysis apparatus for removal. These were all incorporated in an artificial uterine wall. The wall surrounded the whole womb and gave it the look of a first tank. Inside, like a artificial ammonic sac, filled with an improved Lactated Ringer’s solution, replacing the ammonic fluid, the fetus was connect to an artificial umbilical cord that attached to the natural one that was in the fetus. The entire womb was only eighteen inches by twelve inches and they had constructed seventy of them along the wall of the their lab. It looked like the fish tank display in many pet stores. They estimated they had room for one thousand of these wombs, but felt the seventy was enough for the final trials.
The problem was simple, where to obtain fetus to conduct an experiment and how does the Institution get around laws that do not allow a fetus to be kept alive for more than fourteen days. The second was easy, or rather, looked easy. Whose judication the station was under was a thing in limbo, built by a private company with funds from several nations and in unclaimed, and by some treaties, unable to be claimed space, nobody knew what laws applied the entire facility. The United Nations was working on this as was the United States and Russia, along with several other nations, but negotiations were long, complicated and nowhere near an end. As for the fetus, three couples had volunteered, as the women had wombs that would not hold a pregnancy and were willing to risk the experiment being a failure. The problem was the other sixty seven, and asking for more volunteers was not something anyone wished to do, it had too many legal complications.
Dr. Wilson one day sighed, “Guys, with all the aborted fetus in the country, it’s a shame we could not get some of them. I mean there is so many.”
“Well, that is…” Dr. Baker began then stopped. he went on, “But maybe, you hit on something.”
Dr. Baker went on the say he knew some doctors in Planned Parenthood and maybe, for a fee, he could get some. Corruption ran rampant in the world in the late 2030s and early 2040s, and it had become almost expected. The head engineer of the lab, Bill Bradley spoke up, and told everyone he did have some relations in Planned Parenthood, and might be able to arrange something. His cousin was a director at a clinic in Miami, and he might be able to make an arrangement. They sat there a moment, would they do this, or not? The question hung in the air, there were a lot of reasons not to, both legal and ethical, but this was a great advancement, and they believed they could not turn it down. They agreed and the Bill said he make the contacts and arrangements.
Bill contacted his cousin and the deal was surprising easy, as once again the disposal of aborted fetus had become a target of the anti-abortion coalitions. He need sixty seven fetus, and they all had to be early in the pregnancy and viable. In na effort to reflect the population on Earth, as PC people were really going wild over this stuff and the fallout from the cloning scandal was still hanging over the Institution, this was the ethnic breakdown that the clinic got.
Hispanic – 14
African American – 10
Asian – 7
Caucasian- 35
Native American – 1
With a breakdown that in many ways mirrored the ethic makeup of the United states, the group felt they had a good chance of seeing any differences in the different groups to the artificial womb. This was done for statistical purposes only, as in theory the parental background of any fetus would not matter in the birth process. The cost was not as great as first thought by Bill, only fifty dollars a fetus, for a total of $3,350.00, an amount easily hid in the budget of the womb lab, (as the station people called it) or the Extracorporeal Viability Laboratory and Division. (officially the EVLD) The three fetus that were voluntarily give to the lab came from three pairs of officers who remined anonymous for the purposes of privacy. Bill transported the fetus in a cold package labeled “Bio-Material,” under the weapons division so they would not be inspected by customs. That added another two hundred to the price for what Bill called “inspection fees.
Bill did have the lab on Earth screen the fetus for any genetic problems, he only had to reject four with some anomalies. When received in the lab, Austin and Skyler quickly inserted them into the wombs and watched as the process began and blossomed. The procedure exceed the most optimistic predictions and none of the problems that many had predicted came about, and the fetus proceed on the path to birth with no problems. The wombs preformed way above what many had thought, and some feared. They did have to correct a couple of minor hiccups along the way, such as keeping the umbilical cords from cutting off air supply, but the nine month gestation went off without a hitch. They had started in January of 2040 and by September of the year they had seventy healthy babies delivered over a two week period. The birth process, which some felt would be trouble, tuned out to be the easiest of all the procedures to perform. Once the computer indicated the process was to begin, one just drained the womb and removed the baby through the same tube the drainage took place in, a simple procedure that culminated a great success.
The three volunteers, were so happy they allowed themselves to be identified and took pictures with Austin and Skyler in front of the wombs. They were, Major Thomas McKenzie and his wife Jenny, Captain Lamar Otis and his wife Latrisha, and Major Sheila Billings and her partner Anna Mead. As for the sixty seven, well, the station had 130,000 assigned to the base, finding parents for the children was no problem. The base attracted many people, as automation had taken thousands of jobs on Earth and many felt the need to find some new horizon to live a meaningful life. It was decided early on the tell the children just where they came from and explain things to them as they grew and asked. As for the abortion origins, however, it was felt that should be the last thing told to them.
The experiment went so well, they got several more to volunteer to give their fetus to the artificial womb, these were all who had problems conceiving or carrying a baby to term. It could also be used to intervene if a babe looked to becoming a premature birth, it was easier to just transfer the mover and allow the baby to be born as a full term child. The lab, over a two year period, expanded to one thousand units, as some wished to maybe use it as a financial source, and increasingly Bill delivered more and more fetus from the abortion clinics. By 2043 the lab was turning out, or producing, depending on the division that wrote of it, one thousand babies a year. As the Institute was still conscious of the cloud of scandal that the cloning controversy caused, along with the biobot incident, little advertising was done of the project.
Hiding the cost of cloning to make huge profits, almost destroyed the Institute, only the leadership of Najash Jackson had kept the Institute from total disaster after several of the founders almost went to prison. In Institute circles, the less said of the biobot, the better. That incident was now handled by the military and Dr. Jackson, nobody ever mentioned it publicly.
In 2051, on the first of September, the Station held a huge birthday party for the original seventy, or as they were called, the “Seventy pioneers.” The celebration of their tenth birthdays was special, as it was considered the best time to tell them of the connection with the abortion clinics. Each parent waited for the child to ask and them about it, as stories were common in the station. The families then took them to see Austin and Skyler to explain the entire event. This seemed to work well, and only a very few children seemed upset or the least bit concerned about the connection. The next year, it was four hundred who celebrated their tenth, they called themselves the “Seconds'” and were very proud of the designation. In January or 2053, there was few plans for the third generation, who did not name themselves as the whole thing was seen as a natural process, it was the dawning of a new era. It was the year that could have caused great problems, but events intervened and other things become more important.
It began innocently enough, Jackie Beverly, a reporter with the New York Times, was doing a story of the space station, as it was becoming an institution that many were inspired by in the nation. Not all in Washington, however, were not as giddy about the station as they once had been. It was part of the new space colony that was slowly developing over the last decade. A group of officials in Washington were grumbling over the lack of control that seemed to be in place in the colonies. There was 300,000 people living in the lunar bases, the American bases were called Tranquility and Armstrong, the Russian was Gagarin, and the Chinese was called Sun Yet-Sun. there were two Mars bases, the American called New Canaveral, with a population of 32,000 and the British base called Elizabethtown, after Queen Elizabeth II, with a population of 15,000. The Russian base, called New St. Petersburg, was on Phobos, and had a population of 25,000. there were plans for Russian and Chinese Space stations, but they were still a few years away. While this excited many, a few were not pleased.
The opposition was led by Carl Abram, and they voiced the concern over the cost and the future of the new colonies. Abram voiced much concern that the colonies were getting too independent. The old argument of why are we in space when their are so many problems on Earth was raised, plus Abram had a new concern. He had been pursuing some legislation to put more controls over the populations of the space colonies. he railed that they were not diverse enough and there were too few regulations over those who were there. The colonies pushed back, one they said they could not force anyone to come there, all the people in the colonies were volunteers. When Abram suggested that some be forced, Vice President Lamar Marquiss asked if he meant like the forced immigration of Africans to America in the 1600s. Like so many of the political conversation of the time, it quickly degenerated in polar camps and no compromises were to be seen. One of Abram’s allies and the fiercest critic of the space colonies was James W. Townsell, a second term Congressman from San Francisco. He was looking for a cause that could push him into the Senate in the 54 election and then on to the national scene.
The Institute had set up as series of interviews with several news outlets to show off the Tyson Space Station. Jackie Beverly was doing an article on the EBRD, and was finding much of her research to be boring. So much theory and math, she thought, nothing exciting, like her colleges covering the Mars base or the space travel divisions. She did not get to see the surface of Mars or ride in various space craft and view the solar system from places no human had ever seen. She just got top talk to scientist about theory and look at statistics, no big story for her, she thought. Then she noticed the many children in the area, and asked Skyler why they were there.
“Oh, well, they are the third generation and some have asked why they were adopted so we are showing them the womb room,” Skyler nonchalantly replied, as it was no secret.
“Womb room?” Jackie asked hesitantly.
Skyler explained the entire project other and how they were having such great success. The division was very proud of the once experiment that was now a normal procedure. She told of how they were able to detect and reverse any genetic deformity or problem and bring preterm babies to term, avoiding many of the problems of early birth. She spoke of how many couples, who were infertile or where the mother could not bring a baby to term, were having the families they had always wanted. She even explained how they had used some of the cloning technology to allow infertile couples to have genetic babies. She told her of how the Russians, Germans, and British were interested in the technology and how the Chinese had told them they had enough population. Earth’s population at the time was reaching over the nine billion mark, and a large portion of them lived in China.
“So I see you got one thousand wombs, are all of the fetus coming from parents, or voluntary donations?” Jackie asked as a fear began to creep over her, which went unnoticed by Skyler.
“No, actually we have another source, but that is confidential,” Skyler replied with the company line. The idea was to cite privacy concerns to keep the abortion source a secret, as it was slowly becoming the majority source of new fetus.
Jackie furiously wrote down a lot of notes and thanked Skyler for her cooperation, she then returned to her cabin. There on a secure line the paper had set up for her, she contacted some of the private investigators to look into the “confidential sources.” It did not take them long to discover the connections Bill had with the abortion clinics, as he really did not try to hide much. Jackie was very concerned, she had covered the cloning scandal and had a very different view of Palmer than many in the nation did. To her is was not the forward thinking contributor to the new science of artificial intelligence and space flight, but a slow growing cancer on society. Her mentor, Alvin Toffler, a descendant of the famous futurist, was warning many of the dangers in the new artificial intelligence technology that was exploding all over the world. He was warning of the quantum computers, like the Michelle, the main frame of the Palmer, could develop into a life form that may want to eradicate or enslave humans. Palmer denied that Michelle was a quantum computer and many held to belief that such technology was still years in the future. Toffler pushed back and cited many unnamed sources, he even published stories about the biobot, which Palmer strenuously denied even existed. Jackie wrote her story, not one of a breakthrough that could help people have children, but a much darker tale.
On April 6, 2053, this article appeared in the New York Times and was run on several news outlets:
Palmer Creating A Private Army From Aborted Fetus
Instead of telling of the parents raising the children in families, and the option any of the children had to opt out of staying at the Station after they turned eighteen, it painted a dark picture of an army of fanatical, totally loyal to the Palmer Institute, clones. It estimated that over one hundred thousand, the real number was 11,700, of these future soldiers whose only loyalty was to the Palmer Institute and the military people who Jackie claimed controlled the place. One of the most interested readers of the piece was James W. Townsell.
On April 11, Townsell held a news conference in Washington. He combined Jackie’s article with the many rumors that swirled about Palmer in social media, to paint a dire picture of the events. The number of soldiers grew from 100,000 to a half a million, and from the average age of 7 to all over 21. Like Joe McCarthy, Townsell waved a large folder full of blank papers, of what he claimed was proof, as he railed against Palmer and the entire idea. Palmer shot back denying all the charges and put out all the information of the experiment and offered to make it available to any who wished to try it. Townsell condemned the move as nothing more than a public relations scheme to try and cover up the real purpose of the operation, the enslaving of the world under the auspices of Palmer. He also claimed the millions more were being produced by the Russians , Chinese, British, and Germans.
Across the nation the response was not what Townsell had hoped, instead of outrage, the nation seemed to just shrug it off. The corruption and scandal of the last fifteen years had jaded the nation, plus many did not believe the trolls who painted the dark picture of Palmer and instead saw them as a force for good. Townsell, after a meeting with Abram in June, now claimed that Lamar Marquiss was also involved, which did not have much traction. Marquiss had just been appointed Vice President after the resignation of yet another scandal ridden politician, and was the leader of what was becoming a very popular reform movement with Thomas Montgomery, that was pushing back against much of the corruption that had permeated the nation. Townsell demanded both Marquiss and President Johnson resign and Carl Abram be elevated to the top spot of the nation. On June 20, Townsell held another press conference in which he laid out his plans.
Abram had pulled strings and gotten him to be chainman of a new House Committee of Outer Space Activities, (HCOSP) and Townsell claimed that they were tasked to investigate this whole affair and recommend charges to the Justice Department after they made their conclusions. Townsell ranted for almost two hours laying out all the charges and accusations. He said he had proof and witnesses, who were bravely coming forward to stop this evil plot by the Palmer Institution. Najash Jackson, himself, told the people on the station to just stay there, Townsell had nothing, and Palmer knew it. The witness were all bribed to lie under oath and the evidence had been fabricated. It was the typical pre-Collapse set up. While all of this was going on Townsell had another appointment. Using the new found publicity he had gotten from the accusations, he wanted to push another agenda item of his, the renaming of Washington D.C. to Wilberforce.
The hearing was to begin at 9:00 am on Monday morning July 7, 2053, and Townsell wanted to do another new conference to announce his other plan. He would do it on the top of the Washington Monument on Sunday the 6th of July. Here with the window that looked down on the Capital, he would give his stock speech condemning Washington as a slaveholder and demanding his name be erased from the city and replaced with the great abolitionist, William Wilberforce, who in actually, he did not know was British. He saw that William Lloyd Garrison had said when the crimes of Washington were known the people would demand the name change. He assumed Wilberforce was an abolitionist in the Revolutionary War. That morning he was giddy with excitement as he ascended the monument and prepared to give his speech. In his eyes he could see the White House in his future, he was bragging to all around how this was his moment to become great.
Just as he began, just as the cameras were rolling, the ground shook. The monument jolted and rocked, when the Park Rangers asked all to exit via the stairs, as an earthquake had just happened, Townsell exploded in anger.
“Stairs, you realize that their is like 900 stairs to the bottom, I have a condition,” he screamed at the Ranger, then went on, “Do you know who I am, we will……”
He never finished, the cameras caught his last words and acts as another jolt hit and the great monument toppled over into the tidal basin. It would remine there until reunification, six hundred years later. The Great Earthquake rocked the entire globe that day, doing untold damage and killing billions of people. The world population over the next ten years went from nine billion to just over six hundred million. Almost seventy percent of those killed were killed in the next three days. The world wide movement of almost all of the earth’s plates changed the geography of all the continents. It created the Great Nile Seaway where the Nile River once was, It ripped the Horn of Africa away from the continent and created the Sahara Sea. It tore the coast of California from San Francisco to the Baja Peninsula away from the Rocky Mountains creating the Baja Seaway and it saw the Atlantic and the Pacific wash up against the Andes Mountains in South America.
As America fell into the Second Middle Ages, breaking up in to several feudal nations, the great Tyson station when on, it spent a few years contacting relatives of those on the station and taking in many refugees. By 2060, the Tyson declared itself independent from Earth, as did the bases on Mars and the Moon. They followed the lead of King John I of Palm Beach and King Howard I of Pittsburgh. The did not join the reunifications that occurred on Earth in the twenty seventh century and today are still sovereign entities. Many on the bases and station did not see themselves as people of Earth, but as Lunar citizens, Martians and Tysoncans. Today only about ten to fifteen percent of the people in the solar nations, as they are called, come from the artificial wombs. The original ones are now a museum to the entire experiment, and portable ones exist in many places. Still one wonders, what would have happed had the Great Earthquake not occurred?
Article by C. Douglas Kinnear appearing in the Historical Quarterly, June 3001
To conclude my three part essays on how the modern American society came to be, I look at the political and cultural aspects of modern America.
Steal from one and it’s plagiarism, steal from three it’s research.
Wilson Mizer
All Congresses and Parliaments have a kindly feeling for idiots, and a compassion for them, on account of personal experience and heredity.
Mark Twain
Brass shines as fair to the ignorant as gold to the goldsmiths.
Elizabeth I
Nothing is permanent in this world, not even your troubles.
Charlie Chaplin
He knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career. George Bernard Shaw
Our political system is not very old in the world of political systems. The nation is 244 years old, which is a tiny blip in the history of nations. Egypt is close to five thousand years old, in some places in the nation the new building may have been created a thousand years ago. The British monarchy of Elizabeth II will be a thousand years old in 2066, forty six years from now. There has been a France for close to 1600 years, and Paris was first settled by the Parisii, a Celtic Senones group, around 250 to 225 BC. The Romans called it Lutetia and became e Paris in the fourth century AD. The city of London is even older, with signs of settlements dating back to 5000 BC. According to myth it was settled by Brutus of Troy in 1000 or 1100 BC. Under Rome it was called Londinium and served as the capital of Roman Britain until 410 AD. It was the capital of Angle Saxon Britain until 1066, when William the Conquer established the monarchy of today. In contrast the oldest settlement in North America is St Augustine, founded in 1565, and the oldest British built city was Jamestown founded in 1607. The American capital, Washington DC was not founded until 1790.
While America is relatively young, the ideas and concepts, the mindsets of the land date far back into history. Martin Luther King once said that people do not make history, it makes them. For America this is very true. The mindsets and ideas of the the American land are centuries old and many date back to its motherland, Great Britain. One of the biggest ideas is that of how the poor are seen. Europeans believed that all the heavens, from God to the dirt on the ground were part of a great hierarchical system called the Great Chain of Being.
The Great Chain of Being is a strict hierarchal structure of all matter and life that was decreed by God. This idea came from the writings of Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, and Proclus and became codified in the Neoplatonism of the Middle Ages. In Latin it was called the Scala Nature or the “Ladder of Being.” It was based on the belief that the cosmos had been given order by God in the creation. Chaos was of Satan, and to be avoided at all cost. They would have seen our choosing a leader every four years as only an invitation to chaos. Everything had its place in the hierarchy that had been ordained by God in the beginning. With God at the head and under Him were first the archangels, angels, humans, animals, plants, and minerals in that order. Each group had its own hierarchy, the hierarchy of the angelic world was put together in a work by Pseudo Dionysius the Areopagite in the work Corpus Areopagite, which for many years was attributed to an Athenian converted by St Paul in Acts 17:24. It was later adopted by many Christian writers, such as St Thomas Aquinas. It was as follows: Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones (Ophanim) Dominions, Virtues, Powers, Principalities, Archangels, and finally angels.
When applied to human society, with the belief that God knew everything that a society need to function well, he placed at the head, the king, then the ruling aristocratic lords and clergy, followed by the peasants. Each person was placed by birth in the station that was need to have the society function in a well ordered manner. One was then born into one’s occupation, whether it was king or blacksmith, the only occupation outside of this hierarchy was the clergy, thus it got the name “A Calling.” The idea that a person could be born in a log cabin to a small farmer and rise to rule the nation was seen as impossible to these people, as they would say, “A cod fish cannot become a whale and a peasant could not be a king.” Using this idea and the words of St. Paul in Romans 13, the idea of the divine right of kings was born. This idea was also applied to the family, in which the father was the natural head and under him came first the eldest son, the mother, then the male children then the female ones all in descending order by age. It was under this idea that the nine year old Edward VI was crowned ahead of his sister Mary (who was 31) and his sister Elizabeth I (then19).
People were also ranked, with the the king and the royal family on top followed by the peer or hereditary aristocracy (Duke, marquess, earl, viscount and baron), nonpeer or not heredity Baronet, Knight, merchant or professional, gentry, clergy yeoman (midsize landowner), husbandman (small landowner or renter) cottage or laborer. The bottom class, cottage or laborer worked for wages, as slavery in England died out by the early 1200s. Many of these were servants to the upper classes or tenet farmers. Beneath them were the other outcast, the vagabonds, drifters, criminals and other people of little worth. These were homeless people, of whom the the entire group was labeled vagabond, who basically wandered the country side looking for food and shelter. People entered this class when many landowners in the early to mid 1500s began enclosing lands to raise sheep as the wool market became very profitable. They also made up a large portion of the debtors prisons in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They were seen as a problem in England and many were shipped to the American colonies in the early 1600s. Of them, King Edward VI would write, “Also that those vagabonds that take children and teach them to beg should, according to their demerits, be worthily punished.” (The Chronicle and Political Papers of King Edward VI. Ed by W.K. Jordan. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. 1966. 166)
The young king would go on to say that the passing of good laws and providing a good education would, “This shall well ease and remedy the deceitful working of things, disobedience of the lower sort, casting of seditious bills, and will clearly take away the idleness of people.” (Ibid) For the English, these people were not in their situation because of the enclosure of lands, although at times young Edward sounds like Franklin Roosevelt as he comments on the idea that some pocessed too much wealth in the land, but through morel failings. Thus they became waste people to the elites in England and were seen as a danger to the society. It prompted them to construct debtors prisons and run these people out of small towns and finally to dump them into the great wasteland called America. Nancy Isenberg sums up just what the British goals in America were concerning the poor. “In the most literal terms, as we shall see, British colonist promoted a duel agenda: one involved reducing poverty back in England, and the other called for transporting the idle and unproductive to the New World.” (Nancy Isenberg. White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America. New York: Viking. 2016. 1) She goes on to say, “The language of class that America embraced played off English attitudes toward vagrancy, and marked a transatlantic fixation with animal husbandry., demography, and pedigree. The poor were not only described as waste, but as inferior animal stocks too.” (Ibid. xv) The first decryptions of America by the English was not as some grand land of opportunity, but as a giant trash bin that could be transformed into productive terrain. All they had to do was collect the waste people and deposit them into the waste land were they would be forced to work and thus would become good Englishman. As she describes it, “Before it became the fabled ‘City on the Hill,’ America was in the eyes of sixteenth century adventures a foul, weedy wilderness – a ‘sinke hole’ suited to ill-bred commoners.” (Ibid. 3) Only when we allow class and cultural dissonance to magically disappear can the American origin story become a utopian tale of love.
Another factor was were most of the original colonist came from and what ideas did they bring with them. David Hackett Fischer in his book, Albion’s Seed, argues that the four waves of immigrants from Britain brought with them the seeds of what became America. He begins his book with this description:
During the very long period from 1629 to 1775, the present area of the United States was settled by at least four large waves of English-speaking immigrants. The first was an exodus of Puritans from the east of England to Massachusetts during a period of eleven years from 1629 to 1640. The second was the migration of a small Royalist élite and large numbers of indentured servants from the South of England to Virginia (ca.1642-75). The third was a movement from the North Midlands of England and Wales to the Delaware Valley (ca. 1675-1725). The forth was a flow of English-speaking people from the borders of North Britain and Northern Ireland to the Appalachian backcountry mostly during the half-century from 1718 to 1775.
(David Hackett Fischer. Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1989. 6)
New England
God Almighty in his most holy and wise providence, hath so disposed of the Condition of mankind, as in all times some must be rich some poor, some high and eminent in power and dignity; others mean and in subjection.
John Winthrop
(Ibid. 174)
The wave of immigrants to New England in the period of 1629 to 1640 mainly came from East Angelica, located in the eastern part of England in an area that was a base for Mary I when she overthrew Queen Jane in 1553. It was a land of inequality in the highest degree. On the top, and owning the most land, was the nobility, who lived on very large estates and many were well connected with the royal family. Two third of the population was made up of renters and landless laborers with a large population of vagrants beneath them who many times were treated with extreme brutality. Stuck in the middle was a small middle class of lesser gentry, yeoman and small, but prosperous farmers and tradesman. It was from this middle class of people that the immigrants to New England came. It was the taxes of these people that supported both the top and bottom social strata of the area.
“The experience of social oppression in England caused the founders of Massachusetts to modify the ranking system in their society.” (Ibid. 177) They in effect eliminated the top and bottom section of the East Angelica society and created a middling direction for their colony. Their social and religious ideas created the social revolution’ historians said came from the crossing of the Atlantic, but in reality was caused by the conscious choice of the elites of the colony. In 1636 the Puritans of the colony were approached by noble Puritans who asked if they could keep their titles and honors they had in England. The colony denied their request and excluded an aristocracy from their ranking system. As they did this they passed poor laws that would in effect keep the lowest people in society from immigrating to the colony. Thus the colony had the lowest percent of poor people in the American colonies.
This left the colony with three ranks, lesser gentry, yeoman, and cottagers, in a society that was still stratified, but on a much lesser degree. It was a society that had a narrow range of inequality and where age was one of the most powerful determiners of rank. “Second, the importance of material differences was qualified by age and moral standing, for which the Puritans entertained high respect.” (Ibid. 180) While still a stratified society, the lines were not as strictly drawn as in other areas of the nation, servants and slaves were usually called “help” a word that came over from England in the seventeenth century. Many from other areas said the New Englanders were to familiar with their servants, allowing the eat with them and become to close.
The most curious paradox of the New England area was its system of social order. It was the most orderly part of the British colonies and very violent in its ordering act. In individuals there was a great sense of private order, but institutionally, the colony used savage and brutal acts to maintain such order. These acts for example were the burning of rebellious servants, hanging Quakers and the persecution of witches. For the Puritans order was an obsession, one that even allowed the innocent to be punished to maintain. Order, the putting in the proper place of all things, was the goal of the society in the colony. It was a condition of organic unity, an order that preserves the whole. The idea of order as organic unity was deeply imbedded in English Calvinism, and caused them to eliminate many of the unpopular officials they had been under in the old country. This led to a small percent of criminal acts, but many were charged with violations of order. The towns became the basis for most government and many times was more important than the colony as a whole.
The area also had a particular idea of liberty, as a thing that belonged to the community and not the individual. It was an idea of collective liberty, called “publick liberty,” and placed many restraints on the individual. While the people accepted the restraints they demanded they be constant with written law. These were referred to as the “fundamentals of the commonwealth,” and the people demanded that the restraints be placed on them in their own ways. Interference by outsiders was met with fierce and determined resistance, as the British discovered in 1775. The exceptions of the liberty , called liberties, were understood to be specific exceptions to a condition of prior restraint. The Bay Colony granted some liberties to all men, some to free men, and only a few to gentleman. They also had a concept of “soul liberty,” which was freedom to order one’s own acts in a godly way, but not in any other. It was freedom for the true, or Puritan, faith.
The finale way the New Englanders saw liberty or freedom was to describe a collective obligation of the government to protect a person from the tyranny of circumstances. It was an idea to protect individual liberty and was the basis for Franklin Roosevelt’s concept of the Four Freedoms. These were fused into the Puritan idea of ordered liberty, and it was deeply embedded into Massachusetts culture. It still exist in many parts of the United States today, and is opposed to other libertarian ideas that grew up in other areas of the colonies.
The South
The gentleman called cavaliers are greatly esteemed and respected, and are very courteous and honorable. They hold most of the offices in the country.
Durand of Dauphine on Virginia 1687
In 1641 Sir William Berkeley was appointed Royal Governor of Virginia. He was the son of powerful West Country family that had occupied the massive Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire since the eleventh century. Hackett says of this man, “At a critical moment, he bent the young sapling of its social system and made it grown the in direction he wished. The cultural history of an American region is in many ways the long shadow of this extraordinary man.” (Ibid. 207-208) He was not a nice individual, one who bullied those beneath him as he fawned on those above. He enriched himself from his position and set a sad precedent for the entire region. He did pocessed some virtues, he had a fidelity to family and was loyal to a cause, as well as being courageous, and having a strong sense of candor. His values were as highly developed as those of the Puritans, but in a very different way. He loved Virginia and devoted himself to the colony for close to forty years. He took over a colony that had only 8,000 people and had an evil reputation and was more of a military camp or lumber company than a colony. Nancy Isenberg describes early Virginia in the following passage:
Virginia was even less a place of hope. Here were England’s rowdy and undisciplined, men willing to gamble their lives away but not ready to work for a living. England perceived them as “manure” for a marginal land. All that these men understood was a cruel discipline when it was imposed upon them in the manner of mercenary John Smith, and the last thing they wanted to do was work to improve the land. All that kept the fledging colony alive was a military-style labor camp meant to protect England’s interest in the ongoing competition with equally designing Spanish, French, and Dutch governments. That a small fraction of colonist survived the first twenty years of settlement came as no surprise back home – nor did London’s elites much care. The investment was not in people, whose already unrefined habits declined over time, whose rudeness magnified in relation to their brutal encounters with Indians. The colonist were meant to find gold, and to line the pockets of the investor class back in England. The people sent to accomplish this task were by definition expendable.
(Isenberg. 10-11)
This is further shown in the treatment of John Smith, who as a commoner was not deemed as to have the right to rule. He left the colony soon after a boat he was sleeping in blew up, replaced by Thomas West, 3rd Baron De La Ware, Lord Delaware, (1577-1618). He was the grandson of Mary Boleyn,(and rumored to be an illegiamte grandson of Henry VIII. Since he was a noble, his orders, which were the same as Smith’s, were followed to the letter. He gave the name Delaware to a native American tribe (Lenape) and the state. In 1641, Berkeley took this desperate outpost and transformed it into a profitable colony of 40,000 inhabitants by the end of his forty year term. He also imposed a coherent social order, a functioning economic system and a strong sense of their own identity and folkways. Above all he created a governing élite that Berkeley described as having come from as good of families as any in Europe.
As in New England, the social order did not spring up spontaneously, but was a conscious creation of human will and purpose, the will and purpose of William Berkeley. He governed through what he called a long assembly, one totally under his control and he refused to call an election from 1662 to 1676. The first published laws of Virginia were dedicated to him and he wrote many of them as well. He shaped the process of immigration to the colony and defined its culture and influenced the colony for generations. He encourage Caviler immigration and sought out Royalist elites to come to the colony and gave them large land grants and created a ruling oligarchy. Many were allies of Charles I, and supporters of his son Charles II, while New England was populated by those who had supported Oliver Cromwell. It is also seen in the Bibles that were read, New England used the radically Protestant Geneva Bible, while Virginia held to the Authorized King James Bible.
Berkeley was the younger son of a great family, and he recruited other younger sons to come to Virginia and recrate the social system they had known in England, only with them in charge and not older brothers. Thus the majority of Virginia’s upper elites came from families in the upper echelons of English society. Many had served Charles I in the Civil War and attended Oxford University, and held strong to the Anglican faith, as strong as the Puritans held to theirs. The majority came from the area stretching from the Weld of Kent to Devon and north to Warwickshire, along with a large group from London. They were usually acquainted with others in the area before immigrating and intermarriage between them and elites from England was common. They would control the Council of Virginia through the Revolution and beyond.
As for the poor who came, they were basically servant tenet farmers who would make up a large lower class. They were more male dominated, stratified, and more rural, less literate, and less skilled than those in New England. This was not a happenstance, but the result of the policy of the government as it sought to recreate the old Manor lifestyle that they had know in England. They came from the south and west of England and were close to their ancestors, the West Saxons. It was an area that slavery reached the proportions larger than existed in the Antebellum South. Serfdom had also been strong in the area and it stayed loyal to King John in 1215 (the Baron’s revolt that resulted in the Magna Carta) and later Richard II in 1381 ( the Peasant’s or Wat Tyler Revolt). They stood by the Tudors and later the Stuarts in the English Civil War, and was not welcoming of any of the other churches and stood with the Anglicans.
This combined with the environment of the area, one that produced many diseases that discourage much immigration from Europe. The fertile land was attractive to the ruling élite, and the diseases were a problem, especially malaria, one of the more fatal strains came from the importation of African slaves. It created a very conservative ruling elite that was hostile to any change. It was also one that looked back on the life they had known in nostalgia, often seeing a mythical England and not the reality that had existed. They referred to England as the mother land, unlike the German habit of calling Germany the fatherland. Even the servant class, felt as if they were cultural exiles of the the mother country. ” this consciousness of cultural exile created a curious mélange of feelings: chief among them, an obsessive sense of colonial inferiority.” (Fischer. 254) It also created a hatred of any foreigners, or any group that was not English. Along with this was a obsessive idea of looming disaster on the horizon, which caused them to cling even more strongly to old ways. In this effort to preserve their cultural hegemony, the institution of race slavery on a large scale, that was a radical innovation, came into being.
While in New England there developed a truncated system of social orders, with no top or bottom, just a narrow middle, the Virginia held the full array of English social orders and reinforced them. Called orders or degrees, based on race and blood. One was born into a social order, and did not rise above it, but could fall with a loss of honor. “Social rank in Virginia was an extend hierarchy of deferential relationships.” (Ibid. 585) Each was expected to defer to one of a higher rank, with the slaves having to defer to all. It also created a contempt for the poor and weak and the unlucky. To the ridged stratification that existed in the south and west of England, Virginia added the more rigid category of race slavery. To the ruling élite in Virginia this stratified and hierarchical state of affairs was the natural way that Englishman would build society. the believed that they had constructed society alone the lines totally in line with the “laws and customs” of England and any other structure was seen as inconceivable.
Fischer says of the colony, “‘How is it,” Dr. Samuel Johnson asked, “that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” That famous question captured a striking paradox in the history of Virginia. Like most other British colonist in British America, the gentleman of Virginia possessed an exceptionally strong consciousness of their English liberties, even as they took away the liberty of others.” (Ibid. 410) While the Puritans of New England embraced a system of common restraints imposed upon themselves, the Virginians had a radically different concept of liberty. “In place of New England’s distinctive idea of ordered liberty, the Virginians thought of liberty as a hegemonic condition of dominion over others – equally important – dominion over oneself.” (Ibid. 411)
Hegemonic liberty is the freedom to rule over others and not be ruled over by anyone. Its opposite was slavery, were one descended when one lost the power to rule. To them the right to rule was governed by the “charter of the land” and if one surrendered that charter, one became a slave. For the English settlers in Virginia, the charter had been granted to England by God in Heaven. The Native Americans had not dominated the land, according to God’s command in Genesis, they had not turn it into the farms and manors of Europe, and thus had forfeited their right to the land. Liberty, in their view, did not belong to everyone, but was a special birthright of free born Englishman, set apart by God to rule over the less fortunate of the world. Status in Virginia was determined by what liberties one pocessed, the men of high estate had the most, servants had very few and slaves had none at all. This liberty had nothing to do with equity, as John Randolph of Roanoke would say,” I am an aristocrat, I love liberty; I hate equality.” (Ibid. 412)
Under this concept the institution of slavery was entirely consistent with their view of liberty. Under this idea one in a high position had the right, the liberty, to take away the liberty of another. It was his right, the right of laisser asservir, (let enslave) and the growth of race slavery deepened the culture of hegemonic liberty and added to a man’s rank and set him apart from those of lesser rank. Fischer says of this:
The world thus became a hierarchy in which people were ranked according to many degrees of unfreedom, and they received their rank by the operation of fortune, which played so large a part in the thinking of Virginians. At the same time, hegemony over others allowed them to enlarge the sphere of their own personal liberty, and to create the conditions within which there special sort of libertarian consciousness flourished.
(Ibid)
Even Edmund Burke saw this idea as one shared by many Englishman in the eighteenth century. He saw that in Virginia this was a source of pride and contradictions, one might be the idea of self-government or minimal government. The state under this idea was regulated to a basic protective role and limited to that minimal role in their lives. It was a policy that demand light taxation and minimal restraint on the individual, and led to the idea that taxation could only be imposed when the people, the elites, had representation and that there must be equal assessments of wealth to be taxed. It also gave the colony a strong sense of the rule of law, one that dominated Virginia for two centuries.
Another concept that came from this idea was the idea of social independence. Originally a hierarchical idea, the higher one was the more independent one was, and caused many to comment that in Virginia each plantation owner was a lord unto himself. It morphed into the idea that each man had to be the master of his thoughts and acts. Because of this every gentleman became the servant of his of his duty, and a master of himself. It forced one to pursue this ideal their entire lives, and a duty that was placed on each generation, producing the likes of George Washington and George Marshall. Their character was not a product of historical myth, but of a cultural idea. The idea of hegemonic liberty had three stages, first it was the Royalist cause in the English Civil War, then the Whiggish policies of individual independence and in modern times it took on a more equalitarian view. While the idea of a ruling élite may have faded, the idea of the autonomous individual, in command of oneself, still flourishes.
No study of the development of Virginia colony, or for the South as Virginia was the module for all southern colonies and later states, can be done without looking at the institution of slavery that would dominate the South through the Civil War. Slavery as an institution predates even the Middle Ages and existed in Biblical times. Valerie Hansen says of the slave trade:
The captain’s assessment of the resale value of the king and his entourage chills the modern reader: he might as well be estimating the value of a load of elephant tusks or gold, the other common exports from East Africa. The captain has no guilt about selling his fellow human beings or betraying that ruler who facilitated his purchase of slaves.
Yet in retrospect, it is tempting to condemn those – here in the Omani ship and the African king prior to his abduction – who profited from the slave trade. But we must realize that , in the preindustrial world, the constant demand for labor meant that the slave trade existed almost everywhere. The first abolitionist critics of slavery spoke up only in the 1750s. For much of human history, slavery was a big business.
(Valerie Hansen. The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World – and Globalization Began. New York: Scribner. 2020. 115)
She goes on to say:
Often the places with the fewest natural resources ended up exporting their own as slaves. No single place provided most of the world’s slaves. The richest urban centers imported slaves from poorer regions that had few exportable commodities besides human labor: West and East Africa, Central Asia, and Eastern Europe. (So many slaves came from Eastern Europe our word “slave” is derived from “Slav.”
(Ibid. 5-6)
Slavery was a thriving institution before the first slaves came to Virginia in 1619. The Spanish and Portuguese had been dealing in African slaves since 1441 with the Spanish bringing slaves to St Augustine in 1565. Hundreds of thousands of Africans were working in mines and fields in Mexico, Central and South America and in the West Indies. North American natives deal in slaves for centuries, and only their lack of immunity of European sickness kept them from being enslaved by the Europeans and may have been why Africans were used in the first place. Thomas Fleming says of the institution, “Few people criticized or objected to slavery; it was one of the oldest social institutions, with roots in ancient Babylon, Greece, and Rome. Greece, the proud forerunner of rule by democracy, found no contradictions in insisting that slavery was essential to a thriving republic.” (Thomas Fleming. A Disease of the Public Mind: A New Understanding of Why We Fought the Civil War. New York: Da Capo. 2013. 15) In his great book, Utopia, Sir Thomas More ,the great English humanist, spoke of slavery as the proper condition for those convicted of crimes. While both Islam and Christianity frowned and forbid the selling of their own into slavery, what was called infidels, mainly pagans, were open to being enslaved.
In the Middle Ages many slaves came from the Balkans and Central Asia. Central Asian slaves were renown as soldiers and formed the base of many slave armies in the Near East. The most famous of these were the Bakriyyah Mamluks in Egypt. they were made-up of slave soldiers and freed slaves from Turkic origins, Egyptian Coptics, Circassians, Abkhazians, Georgians and several Balkan countries. They defeated the forces of Louis IX and the 7th Crusade and took power in Egypt overthrowing the Ayyub dynasty set up by Saladin in Egypt. Dan Jones describes them his book, Crusaders, “Thus, under Aybeg and his successors there was quickly established a Mamluk sultanate, in which the slave-soldier caste, for so long limited to the status of bodyguards, and stormtroopers, imposed themselves as the dominate force in Egypt and far beyond.” (Dan Jones. Crusaders: The Epic History of the Wars for the Holy Lands. London: Viking. 2019. 324) They would go on to the end the Crusades in 1302 by pushing all the Crusaders out of the Near East and at the Battle of Ain Julut in 1260, they defeated the Mongols and their leader Huleyu Ulus, the grandson of Genghis Kahn and pushed the Mongols out of the Near East. While the Mamluks faded, the idea of slave armies did not, the last one being the Janissaries. Founded by Sultan Murad I during his reign. (1362-1382) they are considered the first modern European standing army. Made up mostly from child salves from the Balkans they formed a formable military force for much of the time of the Ottomans.
Slaves usually were captured from nearby territories, thus the Balkans and Central Asia along with Russia was a fertile ground for slaves for those in Constantinople and Bagdad. Africa also supplied many slaves as areas that pocessed few natural resources used their people to produce wealth. One reason that slavery was associated to black people was the story of Ham. He was cursed for seeing his father, Noah, naked while he was sleeping. Noah cursed Ham descendants, one being Kush who was considered the father of Africans, to the lowest form of slavery. Also the closeness of the pagan East African, since both Islam and Christianity forbid the enslavement of the followers of those religions, to the coast to South America was geographic element in the trade of African slaves to the New World. In the end 89% of all African slaves were taken to Brazil and the West Indies to work on sugar plantations. 4.4 % went to Spanish colonies and 5.6 % to British North America. Fischer says of the development of slavery in Virginia:
The development of slavery in Virginia was a complex process – one that cannot be explained simply by an economic imperative. A system of plantation agriculture resting on slave labor was not the only road to riches for Virginia’s royalist élite. With a little imagination, one may discern a road not taken in southern history. In purely material terms, Virginia might have flourished as did her northern neighbors, solely by complex speculations in land and trade, and by an expansive system of freehold farming. But Virginia’s élite had other aims in mind. For its social purposes, it required an underclass that would reman firmly fixed in its condition of subordination. The culture of the English countryside could not be reproduced in the New World without a rural proletariat. In short, slavery in Virginia had a cultural imperative. Bertram Wyatt-Brown writes, “…the South was not founded to create slavery; slavery was recruited to perpetuate the South.”
(Fischer. 388)
For Europeans slavery was the total and absolute state of unfreedom. The slave had forfeited his life because of a crime or becoming a captive in war, and thus bondage became an act of mercy by the enslaver. Thomas Paine disputed this in an anonymous article printed on March 8,1775 in the Pennsylvania Journal and the Weekly Advisor, where he said:
Our Traders in MEN (an unnatural commodity!) must know the wickedness of that SLAVE-TRADE, if they attend to reasoning, or the dictates of their own hearts; and such as shun and stiffle all these, wilfully sacrifice Conscience, and the character of integrity to that golden Idol.
The Managers of that Trade themselves, and others, testify, that many of these African nations inhabit fertile countries, are industrious farmers, enjoy plenty, and lived quietly, averse to war, before the Europeans debauched them with liquors, and bribing them against one another; and that these inoffensive people are brought into slavery, by stealing them, tempting Kings to sell subjects, which they can have no right to do, and hiring one tribe to war against another, in order to catch prisoners. By such wicked and inhuman ways the English are said to enslave towards one hundred thousand yearly; of which thirty thousand are supposed to die by barbarous treatment in the first year; besides all that are slain in the unnatural wars excited to take them. So much innocent blood have the Managers and Supporters of this inhuman Trade to answer for to the common Lord of all!
Paine accuses the slave traders of making up the crimes and wars that they used to justify the enslavement of Africans. Yet John Locke in his TwoTreatise of Government called slavery a facet of nature and not in conflict with the social contract that claimed the rights of life, liberty, and property. Under Lock’s rule the slave had forfeited his natural rights and the protection of the state by either his crimes or being a captive in war. Yet no slave society, even Virginia, could ignore the fact that a slave was a human being with a will of his own, despite the legal niceties used to justify the institution. The other claim that because they were pagans, it was justifiable in enslaving them, this posed the question of what happened if the slave converts. In New England they were granted limited rights and and created a very different institution that existed in the South. George Fredrickson argues that while it was more the cultural vulnerability that caused the enslavement of Africans and other nonwhite peoples by the Europeans, since many Europeans felt that God had ordained them to rule over others, he cites another reason for the rise of white supremacy. He argues:
But he account already provided of the social circumstances surrounding the rise of racial slavery suggest a major theme of this study- that one cannot understand crucial developments in the history of white supremacy in the United States and South Africa without assigning a major causal role to tensions or divisions within the social structure. The degradation of non whites frequently served to bind together the white population, or some segment of it, to create a sense of community or solidarity that could become a way of life and not simply a cover for economic exploitation.
(George M. Fredrickson. White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1981. 70)
What existed in Virginia, and North Carolina, were two main classes. the plantation elites, royalist who believed they were ordained to rule, and a large class of poor whites. “During the 1600s, far from being ranked as a valued British subjects, the great majority of early colonist were classified as surplus population and expendable ‘rubbish,’ a rude rather than a robust population.” (Isenberg. 12) The keep a supply of this expendable population, children were rounded up in London and sold to planters in an act called “Spiriting.” In 1676, Nathaniel Bacon rose up, in the first revolt in America, along with frontiersmen to challenge the elites under William Berkeley. It was known as Bacon’s Rebellion and resulted in the burning of Jamestown, as many called for a government that favored more than just the elite. Bacon died and the rebellion fizzled and Berkeley retuned, but his hard actions after got him recalled to England. Many historians feel the fact that the indentured servants and slaves had quickly allied themselves in the revolt was one of the factors that led to a hardening of the race slavery in Virginia.
Bacon challenged the vison Berkeley and the élite had for Virginia, and the insurrection caused the upper class much discomfort and made them more determined to bring their vison to reality. What Berkeley and the elite wished to recreate was the manorial rural setting they imagined existed in the England of their youth and that of their ancestors. One in which a fatherly lord ruled over his contented serfs on a peaceful manor in a paternalistic society of order and strict class divisions. It was a nostalgic look at Old England, an England that never existed except in the minds of the Virginia élite. Since they saw the poor whites as rubbish and of little value they turned to the slaves, who they saw worked in the West Indies and Brazil, to create the permanent servant class, or to replace the serfs in their nostalgic vison of rural England. The realities of slavery slammed into this idyllic image and resulted in Virginians using many subterfuges to convince themselves, but few others, their peculiar institution was not much different from the medieval manor farm of England. Slaves were seldom called slaves by Virginians, who used the terms “my people,” “my hands,” “my workers,” “the help,” but never were they called slaves. It did not even convince Virginians, many came to called the institution a great evil, more for it was seen to make the white elites lazy by relying on slave to do the work and not the brutal realities of the institution.
The African slaves were part of the Triangle trade system between England, Africa and the Americas. In this system materials flowed from the British colonies in America to England who sent goods to Africa in exchange for slaves who then were sent to America. The big cash crops of the trade were sugar, in the form of rum and tobacco. Tons of West Indies sugar were moved to New England were it was refined into rum and sent to Britain with large shipments of tobacco from Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina. Food was shipped from America to the West Indies to feed the overpopulated islands. Slave populations by 1750 numbered about one half million, mainly in the South, but a substantial number were held in the north. The environment in the north, which Africans from the tropics tended to not do well in, along with a small farm economy and the presence of the Quakers and other abolitionist groups led to its extinction in the north by 1840. Vermont passed the first abolition laws in 1777.
Virginia owed its existence to the tobacco crop which saved Jamestown and gave the colonist huge profits. Tobacco had been grown in the Americas since 6000BC and was cultivated by the Mayans in 3000BC. It had been presented to Columbus in 1492 by natives of the first islands he landed on, and quickly became a favorite habit in Europe. It was the crop Sir Walter Raleigh intended to plant in Roanoke, and was later planted in Jamestown in 1612 by John Rolfe with seeds from Trinidad. Smoking of tobacco was first championed in Europe by Thomas Harriet in 1588, he later died of nose cancer. It was also opposed by King James I, who banned it at his court. Plantations in Virginia, Maryland , and North Carolina soon became highly prosperous by cultivating and exporting the crop. In 1619,when slaves were brought to Jamestown, using them for tobacco farming would have been seen as a normal endeavor, as they were used to farm sugar in the Indies, as the supply of indentured servants was lessening and the elites of the colonies saw the poor whites as useless waste people who did not wish to work anyway. Other cash crops in the south were indigo and rice, grown in South Carolina and later Georgia.
In colonial America there was another crop, cotton, whose name comes from the Arabic qutu or qutun. It had been cultivated in Huaca Prieto in Peru in 6000BC and in India in 5000BC. It is written about in Romance languages in the 12th century and in English in the 13th, and was known in Rome. The Greek historian Herodotus mentioned it the 5th century BC and Alexander the Great’s troops were known to wear cotton clothes after he invaded India. In 1556 it was being grown by the Spanish in Florida and in 17981 close to 2000 pound was produced yearly in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. The problem was the processing of the cotton balls, it was a labor intensive job that was long and painful and made the crop unprofitable, even with the English textile mills opening in the 1730s. The only cotton that could be easily processed was the long staple type grown along the coast of South Carolina and Georgia. The short staple cotton, which could be grown inland was too costly to produce.
Because of this slavery in the South was confined mainly to the eastern parts of the colonies, were the tobacco was grown, and in South Carolina and Georgia, to the coastlines. With close to 500,000 slaves in the British colonies by the mid 1700s, slavery was a profitable, but still small business. If one researches slave numbers, one finds that most charts start with 1790, and the first American census. During the colonial time the lands that one day would be Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas, were the domain of the Cherokee and most whites looked at the lands north of the Ohio as a place to settle, especially after the French and Indian Wars. Closed off by the Proclamation of 1763, they were opened up after the Revolution and under the Northwest Ordinances, slavery was outlawed. An event in 1793 would change all of that.
In 1792 Eli Whitney (1765-1825) had graduated from Yale and headed south to take a job as a tutor. He stopped at the Mulberry Plantation to visit Revolutionary War general Nathaniel Greene’s widow Catherine. There she and her overseer, Phineas Miller, explained the problem with trying to process short staple cotton. A slave would spend and entire day to process one pound of cotton. Whitney looked at the problem and came up with a solution, a small device that had a wooden drum with hooks to pull the seed out of the cotton. The device called a cotton gin (gin being a derivate of engine) would revolutionize cotton production in the South, as it could produce 55 pound of cotton in a day. Whitney would see few profits from his machine, it was too easy to make and he fought patent cases the rest of his life, he did make a fortune by making guns on an assembly line and selling them to the army. For the South, with the profitability of tobacco, rice and indigo falling, it was a godsend. It would turn the South into the forth largest economy in the world with a revenue of four billion dollars by the 1850s. It fueled the textile industry of New England and caused the Trail of Tears as the Alabama land rush opened the coast of the Gulf of Mexico and led to the annexation of Florida. King Cotton turned the South into the land of myth and because slave labor was so cheap, it increased the slave population and ensured their bondage in the Antebellum South.
Delaware Valley and Pennsylvania
In 1677 the ship Kent under Captain Gregory Marlow set sail from London with 320 immigrants bound for the colonies in America. They passed the great yacht of King Charles II, who greeted them and wished them well on their journey. Months later the ship docked on the Delaware River and the immigrants founded a settlement on the coast called Bridlington, after a village in Yorkshire, today the city is Burlington, New Jersey, but in 1677, it was the beginning of the Quaker or Friend’s migration. Some had come earlier but had been punished and persecuted by both the Puritans of New England and the Anglicans of Virginia. They joined an earlier ship that had founded the settlement of Salem in West Jersey in 1675. In 1682, 23 ships with 2,000 Quakers came under the leadership of William Penn and founded the colony of Pennsylvania. Between 1675 and 1715 as many as 23,000 Quakers came to the area along the Delaware in Jersey and Pennsylvania. They had come fleeing the persecutions of Quakers in England and came to the colony seeking to practice their beliefs in peace.
Quakers had rejected the Five Points of Calvinism (Total depravity of man, Limited election, Irresistible Grace, and Perseverance of the Saint) and many of the dogmas of the Anglican Church. To the Quaker the center of their belief was a God of Light and Love, a benevolent spirit that harmonized the universe. It could be summed up in the following couplet:
For love in all things doth Oneness call,
Thinking no evil, but pure good to all,
Yes, love is God and God is love and light.
Fullness of pleasure, joy and great delight.
(Caleb Raper. Commonplace Book, 1711, HAV)
Fischer describes the Puritan and Anglicans in the following:
The Puritans worshipped a very different Deity – one who was equally capable of love and wrath – a dark, mysterious power who could be terrifying in his anger and inscrutability. Anglicans, on the other hand, knelt before a great and noble Pantocrator who ruled firmly but fairly over the hierarchy of his creatures.
(Fischer. 426)
Central to Quaker theology was the doctrine of the inner light, which held that the emanation of divine goodness and virtue came from Jesus to every human being. This “light” brought salvation to any and all who became aware of its existence. They believed Christ died for all, not a select few that the Puritans believed, thus rejecting the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, and that one could deny this light if one chose. They saw salvation as something that came to one through a process of conversion, which was similar but not the same as the Calvinist. It gave the Quakers an optimistic fatalism as they journeyed in this world. They rejected what they called “hiring clergy and steeple house ways,” and repudiated all sacraments, ceremonies, churches, ordinations and tithes, and only had lay ministers and exhorters, which sometimes were called ministers as well. “The Society of Friends was organized as a complex structure of meetings – men’s meetings and woman’s meetings, meetings for worship and business, monthly meetings, quarterly meetings, and yearly meetings.” (Ibid. 428) They had leaders of elders and overseers, who were to teach counsel and support, but the authority belonged to the society itself. It was a rigorous system of collective discipline which laid down rules for marriage, sex, business ethics, dress, speech, eating and drinking, politics, and law. Special attention was paid to the rearing of the young, which was an important factor in the creation of the culture in the Delaware Valley.
Quaker beliefs were not static and changed over time, in four distinct stages. They were :
First: (1646-1666) radical, primitive, militant evangelical and messianic, it was their revolutionary stage.
Second: (1666-1750) this was the time when the society flowered, becoming more institutional, rational, progressive, optimistic, enlightened, liberal, moderate, and politically and actively engaged in the world without losing it piety and purpose.
Third: (1750-1827) they turned inward upon themselves growing increasingly sectarian, exclusive, quietist, and perfectionist.
Forth: was a stage of denominational division ad maturity that followed the Hicksite separation of 1827.
The most important stage in American history is the second stage, when they were not the radical ones of the first or the inward looking ones of the third, it was this stage that created the cultural of the Delaware Valley. It was the time when thy were exceptionally open and outgoing, and in the eighteenth century sense, liberal. They embraced religious freedom and social pluralism, with a weak polity and a strong communal group. While they had a contempt of higher learning, they wished all to have basic literacy. “They also accepted Quaker ideas of the sanctity of property, equality of manners, simplicity of taste, as well as their ethic of work, their ideal of worldly asceticism, their belief in the importance o family and their habits of sexual prudery. All of these attitudes became exceptionally strong in the folkways of an American region.” (Ibid. 429) After 1750, the group distanced itself from others and its own past and became unyielding pacifist, withdrew from politics, had extreme sectarian discipline and practiced extravagant ways of going plain in the world. The Second stage of the Quakers survived in the region, apart from the Friends.
Unlike their brothers in New England and Virginia, the Quakers were confrontable with ethic pluralism, as their were many different peoples settled in the Delaware Valley. The Quakers themselves were an ethnically diverse group made of of people from serval different locations and England and from different nations in Europe. By 1715, many immigrants who were non-Quakers were also living in the Valley, making it a mosaic of high complexity. Many shared the ideals of the Quakers and had been recruited by William Penn himself, and they remand there as they were congenial to the Quaker ways. The Quakers created in the Valley a coherent cultural framework that allowed pluralism to flourish while they remined in control of the colony. It gave the colony an image of a melting pot for many groups, but until the 1800s, the Quakers were the ones in charge.
Pennsylvania’s Quakers were basically from the lower middle ranks of English society, much as most Quakers in England were. A middle ground between New England and Virginia, they attracted man poor who found the other colonies hostile to them. Without the hostility to servants that existed in the other colonies, Pennsylvania attracted many of the poorer immigrants and Quaker ways tended to push out the high born of England. Most Quakers did come from the North Midlands of England, which is seen in many of the place names given to cities and towns in the colony. The North had been the scene of Viking raids and the most brutal parts of the Norman Conquest. The Vikings may have given them their love of meetings and their love of individual ownership of houses and fields. The resentment old Norman feudal manors also influenced the area. The largest revolt against the Tudors came under Henry VIII as the north revolted against his break with Rome in the Pilgrimage of Grace. They were also a seat of loyalty to Richard III, and many of the tent framers felt separate from the noble landlords. Feeling alien to the religious and political institutions in England, it became a tent of their faith.
As William Berkeley set up the culture of Virginia, William Penn did the same in Pennsylvania and the Delaware Valley. Penn was the son of an admiral who became a pacifist, a member of the noble class of England who became a Quaker, a man of property who devoted himself to helping the poor, a friend of English kings who became a radicle Whig, and one of Christianity’s greatest spiritual leaders. Unlike many other European colonist, he treated native Americans with dignity and respect, this resulted in peace with native tribes from 1682 to 1755. This was done by treaty without an army to enforce it, as tribes were encouraged to come to Philadelphia if they had any grievances. Penn tolerated slavery in his colony and it existed for many years, but the Quakers were one of the first groups to argue for its abolition. Pennsylvania abolished slavery in 1780. In many way, Penn may have been the opposite of Berkeley.
Penn saw his colony as a place were many different groups could live in peace, not unity, but harmony. He did see people as living in a hierarchical society, and some of his laws were harsher than anything in New England or Virginia. He wished not for an agrarian utopia in Pennsylvania, but a center of commerce and industry, yet he despised the growing material and secular impulses growing around him. He dreamed of a land in which all Christians could live in love and peace, but he also looked to the primitive church and the ancient constitution of England as a ideal and blueprint for this land. These were not modern ideas, but maybe forerunners of them. He did not believe in social equity, but in an élite that naturally arose from his group. One that would control Pennsylvania politics almost into the 1800s. “Its social hegemony in Philadelphia ahs survived even to our time.” (Ibid. 467) Here too existed a nostalgia for the old country and caused many to be social conservatives.
The Quakers were one who encouraged industry and work and condemned idleness. Many of the abolitionist would condemn slavery as they said the reliance on slaves had made southerners lazy and idle. It was why industries developed in the Valley much quicker and earlier than they did in either New England or Virginia. With international ties and an interest in banking, the Quakers turned the Valley into a economic center of the nation. This created a paradox in the area, the Quakers were committed to spiritual equality, but their ways were creating economic inequity. It created a cultural system of wealth and poverty in the area that survives to the modern time.
In 1751 the Pennsylvania Assembly decided to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of The Charter of Privileges which William Penn had granted to settlers in1701. To do this they ordered a great bell to be placed in the Pennsylvania State House, today the place is known as Independence Hall and the bell is called the Liberty Bell. The Quaker speaker picked a verse from Leviticus (25:10) to speak of the liberty God gave to all his children and just a chosen few. It reads:
Ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof: and ye shall return every man unto his procession, and ye shall return every man unto his family.
(Ibid. 595)
It proclaims a liberty much different from the ordered liberty for the chosen few of the Puritans or the hierarchical liberty of the cavaliers in Virginia. The Quakers believed in reciprocal liberty one that embraced all of humankind and came from the Golden Rule. It was reinforced by the exceptional strong sense of English liberty and to emphasize this Penn had reprinted the Magna Carta and other constitutional documents to remind the settlers of the liberties of their British birthright. The colonist did not need such reminders, no subject was ever discussed without a reference to rights and liberties. While looking similar to what was spoken of in New England and Virginia, it a one great difference, that was in religious freedom.
While both the Anglicans and Puritans believed one had the liberty to do what is right, the Quakers believed one also had the liberty to do what was wrong. This idea of “soul freedom” was one that protected every Christian conscious. William Penn himself was the greatest proponent of this liberty of conscious and wrote many pamphlets and papers defending the right. He wrote:
Conscience is God’s throne in man, and the power of it his prerogative.
Liberty of conscience is every man’s natural right, and he who is deprived of it is a slave in the midst of the greatest liberty.
There is no reason to persecute any man in this world about anything that belongs to the next.
No man is so accountable to his fellow creatures as to be imposed upon, restrained or persecuted for any matter of conscience whatever.
For the matters of liberty and privilege, I purpose … to leave myself and successors no power of doing mischief, that the will of one man may not hinder the good of the whole country.
(Ibid. 598)
These ideas came from Penn’s faith and he believed the light in each soul would keep one from descending into error. This is not a secular liberalism which would value liberty for liberty’s sake, but the idea that it would facilitate the triumph of Christian truth in the world. It was not just Penn that believed this, this was the belief that Quakers had been imprisoned and killed for in England. Liberty of conscience was one of many liberties that Penn and the Quakers extended equally to others. Penn recognized three secular liberties as “rights of Englishman.” These were the right and title to one’s life, estate, liberties,; second a right to a representative government, and third the right to a trial by jury. Pennsylvania took these rights far beyond either New England or Virginia, and even England itself.
Penn believed every free born Englishman had the right to a jury of his peers who could decide law and fact and that the state could not punish a jury for the verdict it delivered. Pennsylvania law guaranteed a one a speedy trial and a jury picked by lot in a criminal case. It also gave the same rights and privileges to the counsel and witnesses as it did the prosecution. These went far beyond anything doe in either America or England. This was true about property rights, another right highly valued by the Quakers. they also prohibited any taxing without representation in Pennsylvania, these and other laws went far beyond even Britain itself. The Quakers granted to all the rights they had been demanding for themselves.
In the case of slavery, within ten years of settlement many in the Valley began to argue that it violated the Golden Rule itself. Between 1681 and 1705 70% of the leadership owned slaves, by 1756 it had dropped to ten percent. Pennsylvania tried to ban the import of slaves in 1712, but was overruled by London, insisting it was morally corrupt slavery was slowly being eradicated from the Pennsylvania colony. The believed it was a receptacle thing, since they did not wish to be slaves, they should not make others slaves. In 1758 the Philadelphia Yearly meeting recorded its unanimous concern against any aspect of slavery, and they made measures to help the former slaves. In this the Quakers did not believe they were doing a new thing, but reaffirming the ancient rights of old. They fervently believed that any rights one granted oneself should be extended to others. The idea of reciprocal liberty was a hallmark of the Quakers and is still functioning, maybe in a more secular way, even today.
The Backcountry
In the summer of 1717 a new wave of immigrants began coming to America, and they came in waves. They came from Northern Ireland, lowland Scotland and Northern England. From a trickle in the sixteen hundreds after the end of Queen Anne’s War in 1713, they began to come in waves. Peaks occurred in 1718, 1729, 1741 ,1755, 1767, and 1774, with two thirds coming in the years 1765 to 1775 with almost a third coming in the four years prior to the Revolution. Mainly families came and they came looking for material betterment, no holy experiments, cities on the hill, it was purely economic. They fled the overbearing landlords and food shortages, not religious persecution or some vison of merry old England. They came in response to letters from those who came before them, speaking of a new land and a new start. Many were victimized by greedy shipping agents, much like many immigrants in the modern era. The voyage in the eighteenth century was more dangerous than in the seventeenth, and mortality in ships approached that of the slave ships. Once here these Scot-Irish immigrants faced prejudice from a population that saw them as as savage as many of the native Americans, but conditions in the old county were so bad few chose to return.
The social status of the immigrants was varied, a few, many of whom were destined for greatness in later American history, were from the upper ranks of society. There was a group of yeoman who had achieved independence from the landlords of the north, and the vast majority were those at the bottom of the English and Irish social scales. While a few were servants, but the majority was free. The Irish faced particular prejudice as many of the settlers in the colonies considered them the worst of the bunch. They came with a pride in what they had that many already in America did not understand, they demanded to be treated with respect, no matter what their status was in society. “This fierce and stubborn pride would be a cultural fact of high importance in the American region which they came to dominate.” (Ibid. 615)
A combination of mainly Anglican and Presbyterian with a scattering of Roman Catholic, the religious ties of the region were very different from the ones along the coast. Many of the Presbyterians in the group were of the People of the New Light, ones who believed in free grace and commonly held field meetings and prayer societies in the backcountry of the colonies. Like the Quakers they were hostile to what they called “hirling clergy,” or mainly the Anglican clergy that the church in England had imposed on them. they are were joining the new Methodist and Baptist sects that were emerging at the time. Another group were connect to the militant “Society People” or “Cameronians,” named for their leader Richard Cameron. they peached an uncompromising covenant religion were strong in south and west Scotland. In 1689 the English recruited them into the army in the Cameronionans, and used them to fight the Roman Catholic Jacobites of the Highlands. Reorganized as the Reformed Presbyterian Church, many of them made their way to America in this period. Because of local prejudice, these people were pushed into the backcountry of the colonies and the Presbyterian dominations soon dominated the area. Extremely militant, they caused much sectarian strife and when not fighting with coastal authorities, they fought with the Native Americans.
While many called the group Scot Irish, they were mainly Scot, as those from Ireland had once lived in Scotland before immigrating to Ulster. This immigration would cause much trouble in Britain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While they had differences, they were all boarder people, and the product of a culture along to boarder that would influence the culture of what will be called Appalachia. It was a culture that had been formed by the almost unending wars between English dynasties (the north was a bastion for the supporters of Richard III and the place of the Pilgrimage of Grace against Henry VIII) and those between Scotland and England. The violence produced an area in which family ties, called clans, was extremely important, even above national allegiance. It also produced little trust in national institutions and created an area were people tended to take care of things themselves. Fischer says this of the immigrants:
These people were refugees from a great historical transformation which ad caught them in its complex coils. Some wished only to keep their own customs; others thought more of the future that the past. For both groups the New World held the promise of happiness which eluded them at home. In their teeming thousands they fled to America.
(Ibid. 632)
Nancy Isenberg details how they were seen by the other settlers of America, “The image of the typical poor white resident of the frontier was pathetic and striking to observers, but it wasn’t new at all. He was an updated version of William Byrd’s lazy lubber. he was the English vagrant wandering the countryside.” (Isenberg. 105) They were seen as squatters or crackers, not the noble Leatherstocking of John Fennimore Cooper’s and America’s nostalgic image of the frontiersman, but a unwholesome brute living in squalor. They were landless migrants, who stayed one step ahead of real framers. They became the American equivalent of the British notion of idleness and vagrancy, in effect the vagabond. Isenberg says of these people:
The plight of the squatter was defined by his static nature and transient existence. With no guarantee of social mobility, the only gift he received from his country was the liberty to keep moving. Kris Kristofferson’s classic lyrics resonates here: when it came to the cracker or squatter, freedom was just another qword for nothing left to lose.
(Ibid. 107)
To solve the “problem” of these new immigrants, they were encourage to settle in the backcountry of the colonies, far from the “civilized” people. They moved into the highlands of Appalachia, and later to the Mississippi, and Arkansas, and finally into Texas and the Old West. In colonial times they were concentrated in southwestern Pennsylvania, western Maryland and Virginia, western North and South Carolina, along with Georgia, Kentucky and Tennessee. Germans made up the largest of the non-English speaking groups with some French Huguenots, Swiss Protestants, Walsh Baptist, West Indians and even a small colony of Greeks. Ninety percent of the population were either Scot, English or Irish, from Ulster. The cultural hegemony of these people came mainly from the American environment that was well matched with the British borderlands.
Like the borderlands of Britain, they were not friendly, though the land was fertile and the temperature was moderate. It was the home of some of the strongest and warlike of the native tribes. The Shawnee , the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, and Chickasaw were proud people that did not give up the land easily. Some of the nation’s most fierce Indian wars occurred in the valleys and wood of the backcountry. The greatest of these Native leaders was the Shawnee leader Tecumseh (1768-1813) and his brother Tenokwatawa (He who opens the door) led a coalition of native American forces against Americans in the Ohio Valley in the early 1800s.
During Tecumseh’s War or Rebellion, he was defeated by William Henry Harrison at the Battle of Tippecanoe in 1811. He was later killed fighting in the War of 1812, were he allied with the British, at the Battle of Thames (or Moraviatown) in 1813. According to legend he cursed Harrison and all presidents who were elected in the year divisible by 20, or ending a 0, to die in office. After Harrison’s death in 1841 (elected in 1840) the next six Presidents that fit into the curse died in office. They were, Abraham Lincoln (elected 1860), James Garfield (elected 1880), William McKinley (elected 1900), Warren Harding (elected 1920), Franklin D. Roosevelt (elected 1940), and John F Kennedy (elected 1960). Ronald Reagan survived an assassination attempt in 1980, but without modern medicine he may have died as Garfield did. George W. Bush had an assassination attempt on his life in 2005, but it failed. The pattern was first noted by Ripley’s Believe it or Not in 1931 and later in 1948. The curse was also noted in a cartoon by John Hix in 1940, and in articles by Ed Kolerba in 1960 and Lloyd Shearer in 1980. The only President who died in office that did not fit the curse was Zachery Taylor in 1850, (Elected in 1848) Also elected in a year ending zero was Thomas Jefferson (1800) and James Monroe, (1820) but both were before the curse.
The backcountry also had a upper class that produced some of America’s most famous and consequential leaders . First was Andrew Jackson, His grandfather was Hugh Jackson, a rich man from Carrickfergus, Ireland and his father, also named Andrew, was the leader of the party of immigrants from Castlereagh in 1765. His experiences on the frontier with the British and natives left his with a visceral hated of both. He would expel the Native Americans from east of the Mississippi in the infamous Trail of Tears and may have been the first American populist to occupy the White House. He is the first of many who would claim to be of the people and born in log cabin. The next is James K. Polk, whose family also was in the upper ranks of Ulster society. Polk was a adherent of the Manifest Destiny of the United States to expand its borders to the Pacific Ocean. He first expressed his belief in this in 1823 while addressing Congress and warning European nation not to interfere with the American westward expansion.
Manifest Destiny was the belief that God himself had ordained American westward expansion. Journalist John O’Sullivan in 1839 wrote in an article that because of American values of equality, rights of consciences, and personal enfranchisement had a divine destiny to spread across the continent. He predicted that the United States would be one of many republics sharing these values. In 1845 in an essay, published anonymously, he called for the annexation of the Republic of Texas, the first time the term Manifest Destiny was used. (July August 1845. “Annexation.” United States Magazine and Democratic Review. 17 (1). 5-11) In the article he said it of America that, “our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” He had to overcome the opposition of Whigs, Abraham Lincoln among them, to annex Texas. Author Linda Hudson contended in her book, Mistress of Manifest Destiny, (2001) that it was Jane Maria Cazneau, a journalist who was America’s first war correspondent, who wrote the article, others contend it was O’Sullivan. O’Sullivan also urged that the United States annex all of the Oregon Territory in December of that year.
Manifest Destiny would cause the United States to start the Mexican American War and push to annex Texas, New Mexico Territory (where New Mexico and Arizona are today ) as well as California. It almost caused a war with Britain over the Oregon Territory, an incident in Oregon over the boundary dispute resulted in a 13 year war called the Pig War in which mainly insults were exchanged, settled by Kaiser Wilhelm I of Germany and involved George Pickett who late lead Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg. Democrats under Polk insisted that they had divine inspiration for Manifest Destiny, Whigs countered that it was just a ploy to gain more land for slavery. In the end though it would not stop the Pacific Ocean and may have driven American expansionism into the Pacific and on to Asia. Her is the idealized version of Manifest Destiny in John Gast’s painting.
Lady Columbia’s Journeys. 1872
The great Senator and orator John Calhoun was also an example of the elite of the backcountry. His influence in America is controversial, as he was a big slavery proponent, but his image looms large in pre-Civil War history.
The culture of the backcountry was famous for their intense xenophobic feelings and violent expressions. They fought both union and Confederate forces at times during the Civil War and were intensely negrophobic and anti-Semitic by the early twentieth century. In present times they are simultaneously hostile to both capitalists and communist. “The people of the southern highlands have been remarkably even-handed in their antipathies – which they have applied to all strangers without regard to race, religion, of nationality.” (Fischer. 650) Because of the uncertainties of the area, with its violence and judgment from others, a strong mood of cultural conservatism developed in the backcountry that encouraged these anti feelings toward many outsiders.
The religious views of the backcountry was intensely hostile to organized churches and established clergy, but had an abiding interest in religion as well. The British however wished to see the backcountry as a bastion of Anglicism in the colonies. By 1770, the British believed they had lost the area to what they called, “”illiterate enthusiasm.” Presbyterianism dominated the area by the eighteenth century, along with many other dissenting sects. One thing did unite all the sects, an intense hatred for state churches and their taxes and clergy. “there was, however, no hostility to learned and pious ministers of acceptable opinion.” (Ibid. 705) Especially loved were preachers who combined appeals to reason with strong emotions, usually done in the open in great field meetings. These were introduced to the area by Robert Witherspoon as early as 1734, and outdoor assemblies were popular with both Presbyterians and Baptist. The Methodist also were great proponents of such assemblies. Also popular in the region was the “love feast,” where the participants were able to drink and eat as they heard the preachers speak.
The backcountry was also a place were the belief in magic and witches was common, even to the present. Stories of witches, wizards, sorcerers and other magical creatures colored the tales of the area. Many settlements had one who was a master of such tales, called a “Witchmaster,” and was expected to make house calls and perform magical first aid. The folk culture had another type of magic, an experimental sorcery or secular superstition that called for the pragmatic use of spells, omens, good luck charms, popular astrology, and other arts to cure sickness (in both people and animals) , change the course of events, or any other imagined or real troubles that afflicted the people in the area. Many of these beliefs originated in Scotland, Ireland and Northern England, but the people also borrowed from Africans, Native Americans and other cultures that lived in the area.
Despite a large amount of land and an image of an area of many small formers working individual plots, the reality was , and still is, a small percentage of elites owned much of the land. In many ways it mirrored the conditions the settlers had left behind in Great Britain. Without a strong sense of order and unity, or social peace, a system of retributive justice developed in the area. It was the rule of Lax Talionis, or the rule of retaliation. “It held that a good man must seek to do right in the world, but when was wrong was done to him he must punish the wrongdoer himself by an act of retribution that resorted order and justice to the world.” (Ibid. 765) It rested on a strong sense of self -sovereignty, that like in the Tidewater, was based on the idea that one’s home was one’s castle and one could defend it at all cost. It was based on the principal of self autonomy and autarchy. Autarchy is a political philosophy that promotes the principals of individualism and the moral ideology of individual liberty and self-reliance. It is the rejection of compulsory government and supports the elimination of government and rule by anyone over oneself. It left things like law enforcement to self appointed groups of citizens, later called vigilantes or night riders. It was much the same system that exited in the northern boundaries of England.
The legitimacy of this system rested on the doctrine called “Lynch’s Law,” taking its name from Captain William Lynch (1742-1820). As a resident of Pittsylvania County in 1811, he forged an agreement with to deal with outlaws in a corporate and swift manner. Punishment was quick, violent and sometimes deadly. Graves in the area can have the inscription, “hung by mistake.” It was based on the principal that order was a system of retribution and each person was responsible for maintaining it. Another man, named Charles Lynch also claimed credit for the term, but he may have only given it the name. It came to mean punishment without trial and would become a staple in American justice in the backcountry. The area was also known for blood feuds between families or groups. As a part of the retribution justice they could have many starts, but often were violent and deadly, the most famous was between the Hatfields and McCoys.
Because of this system crimes were more often against people that property, and courts were very server in any crime against property. The courts tended to be lenient in crimes against persons, this created a culture of violence in the region that persist to the modern era. It was a culture that glorified fighting to win, not just to fight, with much violence occurring inside the family. This culture created a sense of liberty that did not exist in New England, Pennsylvania, or Virginia. It was much more libertarian than in any of these colonies, which recognized the need of a central order to uphold the community. The ordered liberty of New England that asked that all take care of their neighbors, the hierarchical liberty of Virginia that held the view that some were born to rule, or the reciprocal liberty of Pennsylvania that hinged on one does to others as one wished to be treated themselves. It was a natural freedom, one in which each individual supported what ever power that gave one the most freedom.
Fischer describes it in the following:
This idea of “natural freedom” was widespread throughout the southern back settlements. But it was not a reflexive response to the “frontier” environment, nor was it “merely wild” as Shoepf believed. The backcountry idea of natural liberty was created by a complex interaction between the American environment and a European folk couture. It derived in part from the British boarder country, where anarchic violence had long been a condition of life. The natural liberty of the borderers was an idea once more radically libertarian, more strenuously hostile to ordering institutions than were the were in other cultures of British America.
(Ibid. 777)
This ideas of natural liberty was in decay in the northern English border area, but was reborn in the wide expanse of the backcountry. The remote location from any central government of the area along with little need of a centralized large scale organization government led to this concept flourishing in the backcountry. . It was an idea that looked to limited taxation, minimal government and the right of armed resistance to any governmental interference with liberties. The most famous advocate of this was Virginian Patrick Henry. He was famous for arguing against what he called the “spirit of favoritism that existed in the Tidewater elites. It is where his great proclamation of “Give me liberty or give me death,” originated.
The idea also did not tolerate dissent or disagreement of cultural norms. Like in many of Andrew Jackson’s actions, any deviance from the culture norms were met with violence. It was also the origin of the idea of one looking for “elbow room,” as frontiersman Daniel Boone often said of his journeys. It was very far from the ordered freedom of New England towns, or the hegemonic freedom of Virginia’s county oligarchs, and the receptacle freedom of Pennsylvania’s Quakers, but it became rooted in the coulter of the backcountry and flourished there to the present day.
The Revolution and Independence did not end the cultures of England in the colonies, now the United States. the history of the United states is a history of the interactions of these cultures. Many of the major conflicts arose from the differences in the cultures. These differences are in some ways greater than those between European nations. The period between 1770 and 1840 also saw a change in the way classes of society were formed. The change was from birth, as it was in the 1500 and 1600s to the idea that material possession determined class. It was the time that the idea of upper, middle, lower, and working class became to be the ranking instead of the old nobility, merchant, gentry, peasantry. Nancy Isenberg describes the class in America as a real thing that exited despite the mythology of the history that America was classless. She begins her book, White Trash with this:
We know what class is. Or think we do: economic stratification created by wealth and privilege. The problem is that popular American history is most commonly told – dramatized – without reference to the existence of social classes. It is as though in separating from Great Britain, the United States somehow magically escaped the bonds of class and derived a higher consciousness of enriched possibility.
(Isenberg. 1)
Fischer explains the change of class definition from birth to possessions in the following:
Here was the modern class model in which people were assigned a place according to material possessions. Thereafter, this idea developed steadily through the eighteenth century. Raymond Williams writes that the “development of class in its modern social sense, with relatively fixed names for particular classes (lower class, middle class, upper class, working class) belongs essentially to the period between 1770 and 1840″
This transformation had important consequences for American history. The four waves of British emigrants came not only from different ranks, but from different periods in the history of ranking systems. The older system of orders came to Massachusetts where it survived in a truncated form, and also to Virginia where it was extended by the development of servitude and slavery. But the founders of the Quaker colonies and especially the back settlements came from a later era in which orders and estates were yielding to social classes. This fact made a difference in the development of regional cultures throughout British America.
(Fischer. 802. quote Raymond Williams. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. New York: Croom Helm. 1976. 51)
The four cultures were very aware of the Native Americans and the cultures of the indigenous peoples. Much of the interaction depend on at least four casual variables, Indian culture and Indian demography, white culture and white demography, which resulted in regional differences in a complex web of cause and consequences. These go beyond the scope of this essay.
Another factor in the development of the American colonies was the imperial policies that Great Britain used to try and govern the colonies. They were much different than those of France and Spain, while Madrid and Paris maintained firm and strong centralized control over coloanal policy, London many times left its colonies alone to do as they pleased. Charles I tried to set up a commission to do this, but during the English Civil War neither Parliament or Royalist governments could do much of anything in the colonies. During the Commonwealth, first under Parliament and later Oliver Cromwell attempts were made, but political winds wreaked all of them. Attempts by Charles II and James II also met with mixed results and the colonies were able to maintain an independence that was unheard of in either New France or New Spain. By 1714 Britain was under the Hannovers, and they had little interest in America. The situation gave the colonies an unparalleled autonomy and in many ways set up the Revolution as George III was maybe the first Hanoverian king who took much of an interest in the colonies, and that was not until the end of the French and Indian Wars in 1763.
The immigration patters were also a factor in colonel development. In the beginning most colonist who came to America came voluntarily, with few exceptions. In the eighteenth century is when a large amount of involuntary migrants appeared, mainly felons, soldiers and about 250,000 African slaves. In New France and New Spain, the European powers kept strict control over colonial population. This allowed a religious diversity to arise in the American colonies that did not exist anywhere else in the New World. This left emigration in the colonies under local control which strengthen the regional differences and gave the communities the power to shape their regions as they desired.
The racial composition of the colonies was also effected by this local autonomy. Slaves were imported to all the colonies, but in very different proportions. In the New England colonies slaves were never more than one percent of the population before 1760, while in southern coastal regions by the same date they made up the majority of the population in the region. Fischer says of race slavery:
To understand the relationship between race and regional culture in British America, one must study carefully the timing and sequence of historical change. An important and neglected fact about race slavery in British America is the it developed slowly. Africans did not begin to arrive in large numbers until late seventeenth century. The presence of blacks did not have a major cultural impact on British America until the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. Then, the impact was profound. The problem of race relations moved rapidly to the center of cultural history in the plantation colonies. African slavery began to transform, the language and culture of Europeans and the “peculiar institution” of slavery created new folkways of its own.
(Ibid. 812)
The basic thing one can see in the creation of race slavery is that it did not create the culture of the South, the culture of the South created slavery. As Isenberg asserts,
Independence did not magically erase the British class system, nor did it root out long entrenched beliefs about poverty and willful exploitation of human labor. An unfavored population, widely thought of as waste or “rubbish,” remined deposable well into the modern times.
(Isenberg. 14)
In the South they were looking for a population to take the place of the serfs in their nostalgic image of old rural England. The poor whites of the area were seen as useless, but they knew the blacks would work, as they did in the West Indies and Brazil. The Indians were classified as savages, the whites as basic white trash, but the Africans were useful in their vison of the perfect society. A class that would be forever subservient to their new noble class.
Thus was created the dominant four cultures of colonial America, there were many others but these are the dominate ones. They also did not get along well. The Virginians hated the Puritans of New England, who returned their hated in spades. Both despises the Quakers, who tended to see Virginia and New England as being the decedents of Cain. All three regarded the backcountry as a region full of savages, both red and white. The backcountry reciprocated these feelings toward the coastal regions. Fighting often broke out between the regions, and only the vastness of the American region prevented more violence between them. There was room enough for the four cultures to protect themselves, in many ways British America was an open land with many closed enclaves.
In 1763 the British won what has been called the Seven Years War, (1756-1763), in the American colonies it was known as the French and Indian War, (1754-1763) . French Canadians call it the Guerre de la Conquete, or the War of the Conquest. In the end the British under George III and William Pitt won a massive victory over the French and gained not only French Canada, but India as well. Louisiana went to their Spanish allies, in what may have been the last great expansion of New Spain. In September of 1759, James Wolfe defeated Montcalm in the Battle of the Plains of Abraham to take Quebec and secure the victory in America for the British. Both Montcalm and Wolfe were killed in the battle and it won both French Canada and Acadia to the British. The Acadians were exiled to Louisiana, this would be immortalized in 1847 by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his epic poem, Evangeline.
Acadia was located in what is now New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward island an parts of Maine to the Kennebec River. The inhabitants were moved to Louisiana, but way of New Orleans soon after the war. In French their name was Acadien or Cadien, which soon became Cajun in the Louisiana buoys. It was done to move out French Catholics from English territories.
After the war London found itself with a great empire, it may have been the first time one could say the sun did not set on the British empire. It was larger than the Mongol Empire and would be until the early part of the twentieth century. The also had large debts from the war, especially in British America. To ease the debts and a series of taxes were placed on the American colonies, as well as drawing a line down the Appalachians forbidding any more westward expansion. This was the Proclamation of 1763 and it was to avoid endless wars with the Native Americans. It was intended to consolidate his empire, but all George III did was united the four cultures in colonial America to seek independence from their former British brothers.
After the Revolution British secret agent, or spy, Paul Wentworth wrote to London that America was actually three republics whose differences were greater than those that existed between European nations. He said one was an eastern republic of independents both church and state, a middle republic of toleration in church and state , and a southern republic that was close to the system that existed in Britain at the time. The Constitution of 1787 was a compromise between the four cultures in which each could agree to respect the differences between them. “In the Great Convention itself, some of the most important compromises were not between states of sections or ideologies, but between cultural regions.” (Ibid. 829) For example while many teach that the compromise between the delegates that produced the House and Senate was a compromise between big states and little states. Actually it was to reconcile the culture of representation in Pennsylvania and New England to that of Virginia. One of frequent elections by popular vote and the infrequent and long tenured offices that were in Virginia.
The backcountry was basically not represented at the Constitution Convention and the document was a compromise between the Delaware Valley, New England and Virginia. The Bill of Rights was to protect the cultural differences that existed in the new nation. The First Amendment protected the religious freedom of Pennsylvania and Virginia, and protect the religious establishments of New England. Later it morphed into a basis for national libertarianism. The backcountry would oppose much of the Constitution’s authority and this can be seen in such events as the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794. Other rebellions existed in the backcountry and many feared it could lead to the destruction of the Republic in its early days. It was not resolved until Andrew Jackson, the first backcountry leader, was elected President in 1828. Jackson ran on principals many in the country supported, but his personal behavior appalled many of the élites of the nation.
In the Nullification crisis he challenge the hegemonic liberty of the South, his refusal to respect the ruling of the Supreme Court in Webster V Georgia and his treatment of the Indians appalled the moralist in New England. He demanded total personal loyalty of all his supporters, even breaking with Davy Crockett over Indian Removal. His battles over the National bank frightened the elites of Philadelphia, and his personal behavior, seen as normal in the backcountry , was seen as barbaric and savage in the east. Despite all of this he and Thomas Jefferson are seen as the founders of the modern Democratic party. His opposition became the Whig party, which alter gave birth to the modern Republican party.
Fischer finished his book, (for a detailed and complete discussion of the four folkways and their effects on American history see: David Hackett Fischer. Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1989) with following:
Each of these four freedom ways still preserves its separate existence in the United States. The most important fact about American liberty is that it has never been a single idea, but a set of different and even contrary traditions in creative tension with one another. This diversity of libertarian ideas has created a culture of freedom which is more open and expansive than any unitary tradition alone could possibly be. It has been the most powerful determinant of a voluntary society in the United States. In time, this plurality of freedoms may prove to be that nation’s most enduring legacy to the world.
(Ibid. 898)
These four folkways can be seen in the modern society. The ordered liberty, that ask for one to take care of one’s neighbors, and the reciprocal liberty of the Quakers, which says one should do to others as one would wish to be treated oneself, is the base of the modern liberal thought in many Democratic circles. It is no accident that one of the most liberal Democratic bases is in the Boston to Washington D.C. corridor. To find the Republican’s conservative base, one must look to the South and its ideas of hemogenic liberty and conservative culture. The ideas of natural liberty and individualism of the backcountry can be found in two opposing camps, the Alt Right and Antifa. The ideas of anarchy and individual rights over community rights fits the old idea of natural liberty well.
While these folkways still effect American history, events also played a part in the modern political and cultural landscape. One event that still dogs at the soul of America is slavery, with the first slaves coming to America in 1619 at Jamestown. Of the African experience in America W.E.B. DuBois said:
Like Nemesis of Greek tragedy, the central problem of America after the Civil War, as before, was the black man: those four million souls whom the nation had used and degraded, and on whom the South had built an oligarchy similar to the colonial imperialism of today, erected on cheap colored labor and raising raw material for manufacture.
To create their vison of rural England the élite class in Virginia used the slaves to replace the serfs. This was a conscience choice by William Berkeley and the Virginia elites. They saw many of the indentured servants and poor whites in the colony as waste people, to morally deficient to work and allow them to create their new Eden in this vast wilderness. At first it was to have been all these poor whites, or Englishmen, that were to do this work. In one sense many of the first colonist saw America a one giant workhouse. they held the wives and children of poor men accountable for debts, using the Roman model of slavery, made abandoned children and debtors into slaves. “Virginia planters felt entitled to their flash and blood in forms of innocent spouses and offspring of dead servants.” (Isenberg. 27) It id not take long for a small privileged group of large landowners to not only impose strict class divisions, but place themselves on the top tier of the society.
In 1662 Virginia passed a law that said the children of slaves were to be slaves themselves. It was based on the Roman law that said slave children were the property of their master, as much as the calf of a cow belonged to the owner of the cow, and not the bull. “Slavery was thus a logical outgrowth of the colonial class system imagined by Hakluyt. It emerged from three interrelated phenomena: harsh labor conditions, the treatment of indentured servants as commodities, and, most of all, the deliberate choice to breed children so that they should become an exploitable pool of workers.” (Ibid. 41) It created a land in which waste people were an expendable supply of labors who made colonization possible. It allowed the land to be fertilized, but gave no one any social mobility.
For the poor whites in the area, landless and without any means of support, they were treated to the English distain that had exited for centuries in the mother land. John Locke warned his fellow investors that these poor squatters would drag their colonial enterprises down. The oligarchy had create a land in which they now were the new nobility. The poor whites were driven off land and out into the outer regions, usually the backcountry of the colonies. Since these poor whites were considered waste people and beyond redemption, African slaves replaced them on the plantations. The well ordered society that was created based on slavery, allowed the elites to indulge in their pastoral dreams and keep poor whites out of the way. It may have been the one of the main results of Bacon’s Rebellion, keeping the poor whites and African slave apart and both sides made easier to control.
While the differences between the sections could case many problems, it may only have been slavery and the southern hegemonic mindset that would break up the union. The Constitution was a compromise between the three coastal regions and after Jackson the backcountry had found its place in the nation. As the backcountry of colonial days became settled, the culture was surviving in those regions, but it also moved west, across the Mississippi. Two things drove this, first was the backcountry’s desire to find “elbow room” and the fact that cotton was hard on the land. The cotton plant took a lot of nutrients from the land and need constant rotation, plus it need new land to expand. With the cotton gin making the South the four largest economic region and fueling the textile industries in New England, many in the backcountry looked west for more land to grow King Cotton. It lead to the annexation of Florida, the Trail of Tears and the forming of what today is the Deep South (Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana) , and the annexation of Texas and California.
Within this area was a band of about 200 southern counties whose rich black soil made the production of cotton, and some tobacco, extremely profitable. It was also the area in which the most African slaves were held, thus it was called the Black Belt. It would be from here in the late forties the Great Migration of African Americans to other regions would come. It was also the area that Jim Crow was the strongest. The following is a map of the Black Belt.
It was this region that inspired W.E.B. DuBois’ book, The Soul of Black Folks, which was the inspiration for the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. It was in this area that the cotton gin turned the south into the legendary Antebellum South of myth.
The American Civil War was an event that Thomas Barnet would call a vertical shock, or “the meteor that separates the dinosaurs from the mammals,” an event that changes everything in a society. (Thomas Barnett. The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons. 2004. 259.) Before the war Americans many times referred to America as these United States, but after, it was The United States. Civil wars tend to be the most bloody and cruel of conflicts with results of the war affecting a nation for very long periods of time. Many historians will argue the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s may have been the last battles of the American Civil War.
The English Civil War produced two of the four cultures in colonial America. The English Civil War was between the Parliamentarians, the Roundheads, and the Cavaliers, the Royalist, and was the culmination of a struggle between king and Parliament that had been brewing in England for centuries. It was a struggle over the power of the king and the power of the Parliament, that may have started when the barons revolted against King John in 1215, and forced him to sign the Magna Carta. In the waning days of the War of the Roses, the Yorkist kings (Edward IV and Richard III) had used Parliament to justify their rule. In 1485 King Henry VII used Parliament to cement and justify his rule and his son , Henry VIII used it to make his reformation look popular. King Edward VI and Queen Mary I used it to further their religious aims in the mid-Tudor period and Elizabeth I used it to justify and reinforce her rule. By the time of Charles I, Parliament began to exercise the powers that these rulers had given them, and the English Civil War began.
The English Civil War lasted from1642 to 1651 and resulted it the execution of Charles I and the founding of the Commonwealth of England under Oliver Cromwell and his son Richard. (16523-1659). The Restoration, 1660, saw Charles II return as King and later his brother James II, who was a Catholic, was overthrown, because he was a Catholic, and his sister and her husband were installed on the throne. (William III and Mary II) They both died childless which led to the reign of Anna , who had seventeen children, none survived their second birthday, and after her death came the Hanoverians, under George I, his grandson was George III. Colonial America was being settled at this time with the Roundheads, the Puritans, fleeing the Restoration to New England and the Cavaliers, fleeing the Commonwealth to Virginia.
In some ways the siding of New England abolitionist and Virginian Cavaliers in the American Civil War was a replay of this in the 1860s. The hemogenic mindset the South was ingrained into every soul living in the South, from plantation elites to poor white dirt farmers. In New England there was the mindset that they had been the ones who defied George III and started the Revolution, so they should be the ones to lead the nation. They feared the arrogant southerners that seemed to be taking over the nation since Jefferson which infected the region when combined with abolitionism to create a hatred for the south and its institutions, which they called the Slave Powers. Their attitude can best be seen in William Lloyd Garrison, publisher of the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator, who religion and politics as opposites and believed Washington would burn in hell for being a slaveholder. He even suggest that when his Christian principals won, the people would change the capital’s name from Washington to Wilberforce, after British absolutist William Wilberforce. This stood in contrast to the Founders idea to keep religion and politics separate, as they knew how religion had torn Europe apart after the Reformation and the many religious wars of the seventeenth century and feared such a thing would doom the union in America.
He believed the South was out to destroy New England for resisting their rule. He held to the belief that New Englanders were superior to every other person on Earth. He also believed that anyone opposed to his ideas was morally depraved and only a handful of people were deserving of salvation, he was in effect a Calvinist. To the South all abolitionist were William Garrison and were out to destroy the mystical Eden they had created in their Plantations. They detested the abolitionist and had another fear, that of a slave revolt.
History is filled with slave revolts, and other revolts that pitted the ruling class against the people. One such occurred in 1381, as English peasants rose up against the rule of Richard II. Dan Jones says of this revolt, “The great English rebellion of the summer of 1381, a sudden and violent uprising against the country’s richest and most powerful lords known as the Peasants’ Revolt, was one of the most astonishing events of the Middle Ages.” (Dan Jones. Summer of Blood: England’s First Revolution. New York: Penguin Books. 2009. 3) Peasants rose up from all over England, mainly from the area were the New Englanders would one day come from, and the area were the Virginians came from stayed loyal to Richard II. Led by Wat Tyler and John Ball they destroyed and executed many before Tyler’s death and the reasserting of royal power. The high point of the revolt saw Tyler struck down by the mayor of London and young Richard II, he was fourteen, ride out into the mass of peasants and call on them to bow down to the king. They did so and the revolt fizzled out, it was the high point of Richard’s reign, he later would be overthrown and executed by Henry IV and become the star of a Shakespeare play.
The idea of a slave revolt struck a deep fear into the south, many agreed with Jefferson that the evil of slavery would cause the Africans to slaughter all who enslaved them. One event crystalized this nightmare in the South, it occurred in Haiti. In 1790, the island of Haiti was a French colony whose sugar plantations with close to 500,000 slaves was one of the most prosperous ports in all of the Caribbean. When the ideals of the French Revolution reached the island, and the slaves who were kept under unspeakable brutalities, which caused many of the Africans to run into the hills and join the community of Maroons who lived deep in the hills and later inspired John Brown. In 1793, hoping to cause slave revolts in British islands and America, the French National Assembly freed all of the slaves under French control. When the decree reached Saint-Domingue it case an uprising of unbelievable ferocity combined with a British invasion with royalist whites fighting both Jacobite whites and mulattoes and slaves. Out of this chaos rose one charismatic black leader, Toussaint Louverture. Her preach a society were both blacks and white would be equal in a multiracial society.
Supported by John Adams, who urged Louverture to declare independence, he was able to rout the British army and took over the Spanish half of the island as well. He did not trust his American allies completely and never declared independence, expressing loyalty to revolutionary France who had given them freedom. Some of the former French slave owners had escaped to America and their stories of the terrors of the revolt struck a deep fear into the white southerners who heard them. Another revolt in Virginia, led by a black preacher named Gabriel also stoked these fears. These tales confirmed in Jefferson’s mind that a multiracial society was impossible.
In 1891, Napoleon, who recently had reacquired Louisiana, asked Jefferson if he would allow him to send troops to Haiti. Napoleon had recently gotten Louisiana back and was looking to create a large empire in the Caribbean between Haiti and Louisiana, Jefferson did not know this and just assumed he was wanted to reassert control over his colony. Once the Haitians found out Napoleon was going to reimpose slavery, a brutal, no quarter war broke out. The French captured Louventure and he would die in a French prison, but his followers fought on. By November of 1802, even French general Leclerc had died and with war looming in Europe, Napoleon abandoned Haiti and sold Louisiana to America. In Haiti General Jean-Jacques Dessalines took over and declared the island independent. He conducted brutal and merciless reprisals against any French citizen, and made Haiti’s birth a bloody one. Jefferson, who kept secret his allowing the return of Napoleon to the island, reacted by isolating the island and set up most of the misery that small island has suffered. The whole incident gave rise to the term race war and would co0lor southern attitudes towards abolition and the slaves in America until the modern day.
It was during this time the American Colonization Society (ACS) appeared, proposed by two Presbyterian ministers , Paul Finley and Samuel Mills, whose aim was to purchase land in Africa to relocate the American slaves back to the African continent. It came from Jefferson’s belief, reinforced by the events in Haiti, that blacks could never achieve either acceptance or equality in America and very likely would seek revenge on their former masters. They sought to make an American colony in Africa and call it Liberia. It was popular with many southern leaders and a number of free blacks, the community in Philadelphia numbered over 184,000. One of their leaders, James Forten originally went along with the idea, but soon soured on it as it only called for emancipation if the slaves agreed to leave the country. He also noted that many of the leaders of the ACS seemed too anxious to get the blacks out of the country. The ACS persisted an eventually founded Liberia, but with far fewer blacks than originally thought would go. Also the Blacks who went to Liberia tended to act just like the European colonizers towards the Africans who lived there and were several wars that often broke out between them. In 1980, members of the Armed Forces of Liberia, under Master Sargent Samuel Doe overthrew President William Tolbert and massacred him and many of his administration in a revolt against the former American slaves. Doe himself ruled the nation until 1990, when he was also murdered in a coup.
Every society that has allowed the institution of slavery to exist has had to deal with slave revolts. One of the most famous was that of Spartacus in 73-71 BC. After Spartacus was defeated the Romans crucified all of his followers along the Appian Way from Rome to Capua. in ancient Greece the Spartans kept the Helots as slaves and declared war on them parodically to allow their men to kill them on site in their effort to keep them under control. In the Antebellum South there were at least 250 documented slave revolts with ten or more slaves involved. On slave ships the number of revolts numbers 485, and in none was any mercy or compassion shown by either side. Some of the more famous revolts were led by Grabrail Prosser in Virginia, Denmark Vesey in South Carolina, and Nat Turner in Virginia. In response the South intuited slave patrols and codes to keep the population under control, and used their political power to pass fugitive slave laws to keep slaves from running away and recapture those who did. All of this while insisting, then and in the modern period, that the slaves were happy and content with their lot in life.
Slavery is an institution that has been around since the days of Sumer and Ur, and it is a brutal institution that effects both the slave and master. For the master, he must never see the slave as a fellow human being, but as a subhuman creature, or better, a commodity. A farmer will tell his children they must not make pets of the animals, because that is where one makes his income as a farmer. It is the same with the master in the institution of slavery. The slave is a commodity that is used to produce a profit, this must been seen as stock, just as a cow, horse, or even a wagon. For the slave, this is a denial of his or her humanness, and the loss of freedom and liberty will produce a rising anger that cannot be hid. The slave insurrection is thus one of the most brutal and bloodiest of human warfare.
The argument over slavery would dominate the politics of the United States from the beginning to the advent of the Civil War. The South feared as new states joined the Union that if they were free states, the nation may outlaw slavery as Great Britain had done in 1833. The British agreed to pay the slave owners for their slaves and to do borrowed fifteen million pounds from Nathan Mayer Rothchild. The loan was not paid off until 2015. While the South feared abolition, the North feared that too many slave states would then push to extend slavery to all parts of the United States. An example of this was the fear that Texas may be organized into four states to increase the power of the slave holders. Both section had one fundamental flaw, a total lack of empathy for the other. An example of this was William Garrison’s reaction to the Turner revolt, which saw slaughters on both sides. His reaction was typical of many in New England.
In Boston and elsewhere throughout the nation, newspaper headlines bellowed the story of Nat Turner: “INSURECTION IN VIRGINIA!” William Lloyd Garrison pronounced himself “horror-struck.” Looking back to the poem about the coming violence he had published in his first issue, he wrote, “What was poetry – imagination – in January is now bloody reality.” Garrison invoked his professional pacifism to condemn the massacre, but he remined his readers of the reason for it, “In his fury against the revolvers, who will remember the wrongs?” he asked.
(Thomas Fleming. A Disease in the Public Mind: A New Understanding of Why We Fought the Civil War. New York: DeCapo Press. 2013. 107)
In this Garrison gloated over the insurrection and called for sympathy for the slaves, and none for any of the whites killed. In retaliation, the state of Georgia offered to pay 5,000 dollars to anyone who would deliver Garrison to the state to be tried for seditious libel. Others called for his newspaper to be suppressed, or to have him arrested for causing the insurrection. The Mayor of Boston replied that the paper was not worth suppressing as Garrison was a penniless malcontent who never made the slightest impression on the respectable people of Boston. Instead of supported the compensative abolition that Britain offered, he demanded total abolition without any compensation. Thus maybe depriving himself and his movement of maybe gaining some allies in the South. He was also blind to another fact, the differences between American and British slavery. London freed slaves that were thousands of mile from Britain, American slaves were sometimes just down the street in the USA.
The political argument would only grow stronger in the 1850s as compromises and crisis would plague the republic. Andrew Jackson almost invaded South Carolina during the Nullification Crisis, (1832-1833) and the failure of other Congressional Compromises on slavery were threating the rip the nation apart. Meanwhile even in the South opinions differed. A rift was developing between eastern and western Virginia. In the west, were slaves were few, there was a growing feeling that abolition was necessary, this is not exist much in the eastern part, were slaves were plentiful. Sadly the word abolition had a new meaning in Virginia, it meant the destruction of their way of life, a threat to the hemogenic liberty that they had nurtured since the early days, it also meant a race war. Race War was their deepest fear. Meanwhile another fear was gripping many abolitionist.
It began to dawn on many abolitionist that America was not and never would be England. No matter how many people they converted and how many antislavery petitions they generated, they had little of no impact on the politicians in the state and federal governments. Even more daunting was the realization that hey were changing almost no minds in the South, where the power to free of not to free the slaves resided.
(Ibid. 132)
The movement was liming along by the late 1830s as many were questioning the whole idea of abolition. Some leaders dropped out and Garrison was becoming so radical he was turning many off to the cause of abolition. As this went on the Southern attitude hardened. This hardening was seen in the person of John C. Calhoun of South Carolina. He claimed that any attack on slavery in the nation’s capital, where it was legal, was a slander on half of the country. “Calhoun’s stance underscored another significant shift in the Southern attitude towards slavery. Instead of apologizing for it as an evil necessity, the South Carolina senator and many others began claiming there was nothing morally wrong with it.” (Ibid. 146) It was now not just part of Southern life, it was a vital component of Southern life. Like James Buchanan, many in the South saw abolition as a disease of the public mind, and refused to see how slavery was distorting the public minds of the South.
The abolitionist countered this with a campaign to paint the South as the evil “The Slave Power,” a corrupt and decadent society whose inequity need to be shown to the world. They believed this would cause to north to wake up and come to their senses and embrace the abolition of slavery. “It was the evangelical camp meeting on a national scale, accusing the South of four unforgivable sins: violence, drunkenness, laziness, and sexual depravity.” (Ibid. 177) A place were an erotic society had degraded work and reduced the free white labor in the South to a worthless existence of drunken debauchery.
In their own paranoia, the South soon came to the conclusion that the abolitionist, or the North, was looking to destroy their perfect way of life. they saw an unending army fleeing north despite the Fugitive Slave Laws and several decisions of the Supreme Court. The actual number of slave fleeing North was small and mainly confined to the boarder states, but in he South’s mind it was a river of slaves taking their property and lifestyle away. The admission of California as free state, with all of its gold, was another infuriating thing the South saw a an attempt to destroy their life and home. The Compromise of 1850, which was thought to have assured the South of its rights, only became another stake in the heart of the Union. It contained a revised Fugitive Slave Law that enraged the North and caused many to believe the end of the Union may be near.
Into the volatile mix a woman began writing a novel, which was published, like many books of the time, as a serial in the newspapers. The paper she chose was The National Era, a Washington DC abolitionist paper. She was the daughter of the anti-Catholic crusader, Reverend Lyman Beecher and her brother was Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, a passionate abolitionist. Her name was Harriet Beecher Stowe and her book was Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly. In 1852 it sold 300,000 copies and inspired plays on stages across America. Starring Uncle Tom, Eliza Harris and the slave owning Simon Legree, it became a hit in the North, and an anathema in the South. According to legend, provided by her son Charles who would have been 12 years old at the time, Lincoln is suppose to have said to Stowe, “So you are the little woman who wrote the book that stored this great war.” There is no documentation other than the Stowe family legend to confirm this, but it may be like my grandfather (Howard Herman Breeden) would say after one of his tales, “If its not true, it oughta be.”
Harriet Stowe expressed love for the slaves, but still thought of them like children, in need of a strong parental hand. She once said of them, “The Negro race is confessedly more simple, docile, childlike, and affectionate than any other race.” (Ibid. 188) While the book created hatred for slave owners and maybe did lead to the war, one unknown thing by many was it was based on an actual person. His name was Josiah Henson and he was born a slave in Maryland in 1789. He was an overseer on a plantation, and a very successful one as well. He slipped out of Kentucky and got to Canada were he went into the lumber business. He exhibited his wares at the 1851 London World’s Fair, and pined that he was the only black man there. He was not an exception, almost 79% of large plantations had black overseers and almost all small ones did. Blacks did many trades on the plantations and free blacks also owned plantations and slaves as well. Performing skills like blacksmith, hammer man, miner, they were not all just menial workers. (For a detailed account of Henson’s life see, Ibid. 201-207)
Fleming says this about the late 1850s:
The myths of The Salve Power and genetic black inferiority twisted in this deadly wind while the South’s unspoken fear of a race war was visible night after night in the slave patrols that continued to ride the shrouded southern roads. As the 1850s lurched towards a close, a perfect storm of deadly emotions was poised to engulf the United States of America.
(Ibid. 212)
It was an atmosphere of tension, hatred ,and fear, combined with fanaticism. “John Brown’s fanaticism seemed to be in charge North and South.” (Ibid. 248) With tensions boiling the Sixth Massachusetts arrived in Baltimore as the South was succeeding and Lincoln was preparing to send supplies to Fort Sumter. The South was succeeding over slavery, there were other problems, but without slavery there was no succession. The North was rallying for Union, which they believed was perpetual, yet some, like future President James Garfield saw abolition as a goal as well. On April 19, 1861, a young solder, Luther C. Ladd, was killed by a mob. He is considered the first casualty of the War, The Civil War, sometimes called the War Between the States, had begun. (For a complete discussion of the lead up to the Civil War see: Thomas Fleming. A Disease in the Public Mind: A New Understanding of Why We Fought the Civil War. New York: DeCapo Press. 2013)
The Civil War lasted from 1861 to 1865 and there were over 600,000 killed from both sides. The war was fought with Napoleonic tactics, and by the book by Clausewitz. The casualties sored because in Napoleon’s day the muskets were not very accurate, and the rifles of the 1860s were. Full frontal attacks with modern weapons proved to be useless and became nothing more then senseless slaughter, Grant said as much after Cold Harbor. Europe would ignore this lesson until the Frist World War. The generals in the Civil War were drilled and tested by the Napoleonic tactics and Robert E Lee was a master of them. Some fault Lee for not conducting a defensive war in the East and just waiting out the North, but under Napoleon’s way, he wanted to isolate an army, deliver a defeat that would win the war. This is why he went to Antietam and Gettysburg. Those who criticize Lee ignore that in the West the South fought a defensive war and were decisively defeated by Grant.
When Grant came East he conducted a very different war from what Lee and his staff understood, it was a war the Dwight Eisenhower would know well almost one hundred years later. Grant fought a theater war, controlling armies on three fronts. He moved into Mississippi, sent Sherman to Atlanta as he moved into northern Virginia. In effect when Atlanta fell in September of 1864, the war was over. grant used the modern tactics that would be adopted in the twentieth century to deliver the death blow to the South in a devastating manner. Even if McClelland had won the election, the South was defeated, and the egoist McClelland would have gladly rode in as the victor claiming all responsibility.
With Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Lincoln wanted to avoid he usual recriminations of civil wars and try to sew the nation back together. He may have been able to do just that, He had a black political class, a group of leading Confederates under Longstreet, along with a small white middle class that would have supported him, but most importantly he had the morale authority to challenge the hegemonic libertarian ideas that the South was founded upon. The result may have been a series of black and white counties across the back belt, much like the ethnic districts in northern cities. But it was not to be, sadly Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth on April 14,1865. Another vertical shock in American history. With Lincoln dead, the Reconstruction was left to Andrew Johnson, possibly the worst choice to lead the effort one could have made.
Over the last decades of the nineteenth century three things influenced the direction of America, the Industrial Revolution, nationalism and the rise of Jim Crow. The first we will examine is the Industrial Revolution. It is the second great revolution that affected the lives of human beings. The first was the Agricultural Revolution which occurred around 10,000 BC when humans went from foraging to farming. It saw the rise of cities and a great change in lifestyle of the former roaming tribes of humans. Did the humans gain a better life by moving from foraging to farming, actually no. Their diet was less diverse and the concentrations of many people in cities became a breeding ground for diseases. In the book, Sapiens, Yuval Harari says of this, “Paradoxically, a series of ‘improvements,’ each of which was meant to make life easier, added up to a millstone around the neck of these farmers.” (Yuval Harari. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. New York: HarperCaollins Books. 2015. 86) So why did they not go back, it was a thing called the luxury trap. Yuval Harari describes this in the following.
One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and spawn new obligations. Once people get use to a certain luxury, they take it for granted. Then they begin to count on it. Finally they reach a point where they can’t live without it.
(Ibid. 87)
Nobody plans on this, and things happen incrementally, but in the end the search for easier ways to do thing releases immense forces that transform the world, and in ways nobody ever thought they would. Eli Whitney’s simple little cotton gin, a machine designed to make the processing of cotton easier, would in the end enslave a large group of African Americans and create the Black Belt.
The first use of the term was by French envoy Louis-Guillaume Otto when he said France was joining the race to industrialize. In 1837, Jerome-Adolphe Blanqui’s use of the term to describe technological change or, “la revolution indutrielle.” Fredrick Engle in his 1844 book, The Condition of the Working Class in England, spoke of , “an industrial revolution, a revolution which at the same time changed the whole of civil society.” The term was popularized by Arnold Toynbee in series of lectures in 1881. In its first phase, mostly in Great Britain, one saw a move from hand crafting to machine crafting , chemical manufacturing and iron production, along with the introduction of coke for coal, creating a hotter fire, in the smelting process. Another first was the introduction and use of steam and water power. this was done mainly in the textile industry, which was also a large industry in New England.
Along with the cotton gin, Whitney popularized the use of interchangeable parts and an assembly line production of guns, which he sold to the army. It is were he gained his fortune as his cotton gin was such a simple machine it was easily copied and Whitney spent most of his life in courts in patent rights disputes over the machine. The assembly line would be a vital part of the second phase of the Revolution in 1870, with the production of steel, electrical grids, and the introduction of mass production. It would also create the modern capitalist economy.
Originally colonial America was place for the recreation of rural England, with small towns and farms, with maybe lager plantation is the South. Jefferson doubted a urban land could maintain a democracy and it would only thrive in a rural setting, with small farms and towns. The large coastal cities of New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Jamestown were seen as basically harbors for ships to bring in material for the farmers who would trade their wars with the world. As America industrialized, it also began the long march to urbanization, which would be achieved in the North by 1910. Except for the very beginning of the colonial period America has been a nation of the Industrial Revolution. America romanticized the early colonial days and many myths grew out of them.
The American myth of the founding was one of pilgrims and brave settlers in Jamestown, all looking for religious freedom and the right to live as they pleased. The first Thanksgiving, a holiday that did not exist until after the Civil War, and the Indian princess Pocahontas and John Smith paint a romantic picture of early life in America. It is a myth, an image of time and place, that did not exist, but many wanted it to. Once a historian critiquing the John Wayne film, The Alamo (1960) said when asked it it was historical, said it was not, it was as people thought it should have been. Myth is described by Brian Dippie in his book, Custer’s Last Stand, in the following:
In using the term “myth” here , I mean to elicit its richest connotations. For Americans, the word implies everything from hero tales of preliterate cultures through to the ideological fallacies held by advanced societies, and in its plainest sense, refers to “a notion based more on tradition or convivence than on fact: a received idea.
Henry Nash Smith, in his provocative study of the West in the American mind, Virgin Land, employed “myth” and “symbol” to designate “larger of smaller units of the same kind of thing, namely an intellectual construction that fuses concept and emotion into an image. Myths exist only in our minds. They are in effect, the fusion of what we want to see, the end product being that reality upon which we act, what we believe we see. In cultural terms, the yare ingrained beliefs shared by the whole society. As Smith defines it, myth essentially static, although capable of inspiring action. An another scholar has written, “a myth is a story, a narrative, a plot, an explanatory account; it may be historically true, legendary, or invented; but, for the believer, it is truer than truth’ and therefore highly impervious to refutation by a show of facts to the contrary. ” In short, it “conveys a poetic truth more majestic and significate than mere fact.” Such are the meanings associated with “myth.” For my purposes, the word embraces the whole concept of Custer’s Last Stand, a static image within the frame of a story. The frame can be altered to meet changing conditions, but the image is immutable.
(Brian W. Dippie. Custer’s Last Stand: The Anatomy of an American Myth. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press. 1976. 2)
The best description of a myth comes from the Disney film, or any Disney film, Pocahontas. (1995) Here the young Pocahontas is seen not as the twelve year girl she was, but a strikingly beautiful and buxom woman more the image of a modern pop culture queen than a member of the Tsenacommacah tribe. Since women in Western culture are seen as closer to nature she is able to communicate with all the animals, much like all the Disney princesses. “Communing with nature draws upon the potent romantic image of the New World as a prelapsarian classless society. Old tropes meld seemly with new cinematic forms: women in Western culture have been consistently portrayed as closer to Mother Nature, lushness and abundance, Edenic tranquility and fertility. There is no rancid swamps, no foul diseases, in this Jamestown re-creation.” (Isenberg. 9) The truth is that Pocahontas (c1596-1617) was the daughter of chief Powhatan (that actually the tribes name, his name was Wahunsenacawh) and may or may not have recued John Smith (who was an adventurer who was know to exaggerate tales), she would have been twelve at the time of the recue. She married John Rolfe in 1614 and bore him one son, Thomas Rolfe, and died in 1617 in England of unknown causes. “Class and cultural dissonance magically fade from view in order to make American origins into a utopian love story.” (Ibid. 10)
Colonial America was not the romantic frontier life of legend, that was created later, mainly in the 1820s, inspired mainly by James Fennimore Cooper. It was not a land of equal opportunity either, religious freedom in New England was only for the Puritans and in Virginia the hemogenic liberty was the rule of society. Death and harsh labor were the fate of many immigrants in a society that was firmly attached to he ridged and firmly entrenched British class ideology. Much of the ideal images were created after the Revolution as the United States began to justify and reimagine the past. American exceptionalism emerges “from a host of earlier myths of redemption and good intensions.” (Ibid. 7)
The Industrial Revolution changed the landscape of the America and may have caused the romanticizing of the rural colonial period. The effects of industrialization on America is immerse. Like in Europe industrialization caused a reordering of social classes, and the creation of aa new one. The top of the social structure went from one entered into almost exclusively by birth to one of riches and possessions. Creating an ultra rich class whose wealth and privilege far exceed the new class of working urban poor. The conditions created in many of the industrial cities were horrific, as low wages and at times brutal working and living conditions ran rampant. The conditions of the poor in these cities were the subject of Charles Dickins books, like Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol. These conditions and the lack of any action by governments to reform created a new political movement, socialism.
Socialism is a term coined by Henri de Saint-Simon, in 1817 in his “Declarations of Principals” in his manifesto L’Industie (Industry). In his work Saint-Simon championed a society run by the industrial class, or the working class. He contrasted it against the liberal doctrine of individualism, in which it was argued that the moral self worth of the individual was paramount and one should act as if one was separated from all others. He, in what later would be called utopian socialism, condemned this idea as failing to address the problems of inequity caused by the Industrial Revolution. He argued this created a society of competition that harmed the community at large. His solution was a society in which all shared in ownership of resources. Saint-Simon, who was influenced by Adam Smith, proposed economic planning, scientific administration and the application of scientific understanding to the organization of society. By contrast, Robert Owen proposed to organize production and ownership via cooperatives. Socialism is also attributed in France to Pierre Leroux and Marie Roch Louis Reybaud while in Britain it is associated to Owen, who became one of the fathers of the cooperative movement.
By 1860 the definition and usage of socialism was cemented in the society. The use of mutualism and cooperative had fallen out of style and communion was also seen as old fashion. The difference at the time between socialism and communism was that socialism was to own the production of goods while communism was to own both production and consumption, or free access, to goods. The movement was a reaction to the inequities and poverty created by the Industrial Revolution. In Charles Dicken’s books this was one of the things the author empathized in his stories of the poor of London. The argument came from the disagreement between John Locke and Jean Rousseau over the origins of civilization. Locke argued that humans gave up their prefect freedom and liberty in nature for the advantages of civilized society and the duty of government was to protect human’s natural rights. Rousseau argued that humans lost their liberty and equality to civilization and were corrupted by it. The state for Rousseau was part of ta social contract between the state and the people to protect and secure their freedom and liberty.
To achieve this early socialist called for the foundation of a society in which power and wealth was distributed by individual talent and ability and not by birth. To achieve this goal the founders of the movement came up with was the idea of community ownership is also seen in the first chapters of Acts in the Bible. These founders were called utopian socialist and were later criticized by the father of communism, Karl Marx. Marx argued that this would only lead to margination and poverty and only large scale change in the political and economic structure of society would change the plight of the poor. Marx believe in class struggle and in a process called historical materialism he describes history a a struggle between the ruling class, the bourgeoise, and the working class, the proletariat which cumulated in the establishment of a classless society of the workers. In Europe the socialist and communist participated in the Revolution of 1848 and many of the protest movements in the nineteenth century for reform, and at times were very successful and other times not.
One might think it would have broad appeal in the Ordered liberty of New England, in which one was to assist one’s neighbors, the Reciprocal Liberty of Pennsylvania, and the idea of doing to others as one wished to be treated themselves, and the Natural Liberty of the backcountry, and its love of liberty and dislike of central authority. Also one might think that because of the similarities to the first chapters of Acts it could appeal to many religious people in an America, a nation that was very religious. But that would be wrong. The ideals of Socialism and Marx did have the effect of creating the Progressive Era (1896-19116) in American politics, but neither socialism or communism took deep root in the United States, even amongst the Evangelical Pentecostals who embraced the concept in the early days of progressivism. It was from this movement the idea of Biblical literalism sprang in the nineteenth century. (Amy S. Kaufman and Paul B. Sturtevant. The Devil’s Historians: How Modern Extremists Abuse the Medieval Past. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2020. 128) But for the European socialist, and communist, there was a problem, they had reputed the church, especially the Christian Church.
The Church became the moral police of the state during the Reformation, under a doctrine called Erastian that held the Church as a department of the state and named for the German-born Swiss theologian Erastus. (Crane Brinton, The Shaping of Modern Thought, [Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall Inc. 1963:68) The Church had become part of the ruling class that Marx felt must be overthrown and Marx believed the first step in this process began with undermining the Church that supported it. Since Germany had no historic tradition of political radicalism, the socialist masked their criticism in theology and since the Church was an arm of the state, it became the enemy of the revolutionaries. (Karl Marx, The Karl Marx Library, vol. 5, xvii.) This is best exemplified by the Russian experience, where the Russian Orthodox Church was one of the fundamental principles of life in Czarist Russia. this was opposed by a militant atheism by Lenin and the communist which did not even concede the right of religion to exist. (N.S. Timasheff, “The Church in the Soviet Union,” Russian Review, Vol. I Issue I [November 1941] 20.) This hostility can be compared to the statement by John Spargo in 1909 when he said that only in the United States did the Christian socialist movement exist in complete harmony with the general socialist movement. (John Spargo, “Christian Socialism in America, “American Journal of Sociology, Volume 15, Issue 1 [July 1909]: 16) It becomes apparent that the more closely tied was the Church to the state, the more radical the atheism of socialism was.
(See my blog post: Socialism and Religon@wordpress.com)
Since European socialist and communist felt to rebel against the state, one also had to rebel against the Church, which Marx called the opiate of the people, they rejected any alliance with the fundamentalist evangelicals in America. the atheistic nature of European socialism, and Stalin’s later unwillingness to allow the American Communist Party to be American, he wished all parties to be under Moscow’s control, can, led to it begin labeled godless, and America would response to it as threat to American values with a crusader’s zeal. The activity of anarchist, with bombings and assassinations, (William McKinley’s assassin’ was an anarchist, Leon Czolgosz) and the rise of Lenin and the Soviet Union also played a role in this. America saw socialism and communism part of an anarchical threat to American values, and responded with the same crusader’s zeal it had to anything it saw as a threat. Also was the underlying prejudice against foreigners, which dated back to the beginning of the nation when Benjamin Franklin expressed concern that German immigrants may turn the nation into a Germanic country. It produced two Red Scars, the first between 1917-1920 was famous for the Palmer Raids. where Attorney General Mitchell Palmer, assisted by a young J Edgar Hoover, rounded up suspected communist, including Charlie Chaplin, and shipped them off to Russia. The second occurred between 1947 and 1957 and was the time of Joe McCarthy.
Over the years reformist in America have adopted many socialist ideas, such has the New Deal and the Great Society, as the Industrial Revolution and the capitalist economy it produced also came with many problems. Again the luxury trap sprung its trap as industrialization produced many things that people wanted and also produced great wealth. But it came with inequality, poverty and pollution, but there was no going back once the genie of industrialization was out of the bottle. Reform movements are an American tradition, but they are constantly labeled as socialistic of communistic by their opponents. One wonders what the outcome would have been if the European socialist of the late nineteenth century would have just left some of their antichurch rhetoric in Europe and embraced the evangelical Pentecostals as allies.
The myth of America is that it is a classless society in which anyone can become a millionaire of President, and in many cases both. Many nations can point opt an ancient tribe as the founders of the nation. For France it was the Germanic tribe of the Franks, who also figured greatly in the Crusades and English history. Fact many nations who claim to be indigenous, or in fact, not. Once across Europe was the Celtic tribes, from Ireland to present day Hungary, the dominated the prehistoric and ancient Europe until they were conquered by the Romans. they were replaced in many areas by Germanic tribes who brought down Rome. Turkey, who once ruled the Middle East were once a Central Asian tribe that ended the Roman Empire by taking out Constantinople in 1453. While many came from elsewhere, all have founding myths that they proclaim and celebrate, America is no different.
Isenberg describes the American myth and its effects:
The compression of history, the winnowing of history, may seem natural and neutral, but it is decidedly not. It is also the means by which out grade school history becomes our standard adult history. And so the great American saga, as taught, excludes the very pertinent fact that after the 1630s, les than half came to Massachusetts for religious reasons. The tall tales we unthinkingly absorb when young somehow remain within; the result is a narrowly conceived sense of national belonging productive of the most uncompromising of satisfying myths: “American exceptionalism.” We are unique and different, and the absence of class is out hallmark.
Exceptionalism emerges from a host of earlier myths of redemption and good intentions, Pilgrims, persecuted in the Old World, brave the Atlantic dreaming of finding religious freedom on American shores; wagon trains of hopeful pioneer families head west to start a new life. Nowhere else, we are meant to understand, was personal freedom so treasured as it was in the American experience. The very act of migration claims to equalize the people involved, molding them into a homogeneous, effectively classless society. Stories of unity tamp down our discontents and mask even out most palpable divisions. And when these divisions are class based, as they are almost always are, a pronounced form of amnesia sets in. Americans do not like to talk about class. It is not suppose to be important in our history. It is not who we are.
(Isenberg. 6-7)
Myths need heroes, and all nations have them, some are real, others imagined, but may have been based on real people. Many of the myths of the founding came to be in the 1820s and 1830s as the founders them selves were dying off and the second generation looked back on them in nostalgia. It also was the time when the American celebrity culture was born. While the founders were treated with reverence, the celebrity culture of America did not came until early in the nineteenth century.
In an article in Psychology Today (5/01/95, “the Culture of Celebrity) Jill Neimark writes this about the culture of celebrity in America:
Celebrity in America has always given us an outlet for our imagination, just as the gods and demigods of ancient Greece and Rome once did. Celebrities are our myth bearers; carriers of the divine forces of good, evil, lust, and redemption. “The wish for kings is an old and familiar wish, well-known in medieval Europe and in ancient Mesopotamia,” writes Lewis Lapham in his book The Wish For Kings, “The ancient Greeks assigned trace elements of the divine to trees and winds and stones. A river-god sulks, and the child drowns; a sky god smiles, and the corn ripens. The modern Americans assign similar powers not only to whales and spotted owls but also to individuals blessed with the aura of celebrity.”
Psychology Today (5/01/95, “the Culture of Celebrity)
The first American celebrities were war heroes and frontiersmen, later they were replaced by showmen and writers like Buffalo Bill and Mark Twain. With the advent of film, radio and TV, this aura was passed on to the entertainers that graced each of the mediums. Whether rock stars like Elvis or Sinatra, or film stars like John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart, and lastly TV stars like the droves of young actresses produced by Nickelodeon or Disney, America has fallen in love with its celebrities. Historian Daniel Boorstin says this creation of artificial fame comes from an imbalance between the limited supply of gods and heroes that come from nature and the limitless demand for their appearance on news stands. Lewis Lapham summed up celebrity in America like this, “Celebrity has become the packaging of our society’s art and politics, the framework of its commerce, and the stuff of its religion.”
(Taken from my blog Davy Crockett and the Dawn of American Celebrity Culture @wordpress. com)
The American myth was being born and it needed heroes, and the frontier supplied many, but one stands out today, and surrounded in myth, so much, that separating myth from reality is an extremely hard if not impossible job. (Ibid) From Davy Crocket, to dime novels, to Disney and the modern entertainment industry, celebrities have been produced to tell the story of American and its history. It told the myth, it told things not always as they were but as people felt they should have been. Many times the movies and TV tell more of the time they were made than the time they were produced. (a good example of this is 1939’s Gone With the Wind, which tells the Civil War in the terms of not only the Lost Cause myth, but of 1930s America) When exploring the myths one must always remember the line from the movie, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” That might just be the motto of all mythmakers.
One event provide America with one of its most enduring and maybe destructive myth, the event is the Civil War and the myth is the Myth of the Lost Cause. William Davis in his book, The Cause Lost, says this of the myth:
Most interesting of all, perhaps, is our perspective now on how that cause lost became the Lost Cause. One thing more and more Civil War historians are still learning is just how consciously former Confederates molded their story for posterity. Indeed. Southern historians today speak almost as of the loss of old friends when they talk about the latest time-honored memoir whose fictions are discovered. Mythology about the South and its leaders – and the Civil War as a whole, incidentally – commenced the moment the war ended, if not before. The growth of that mythology has been nurtured ever since thanks to the self-interest of participants, the defensiveness of their descendants, and the craving of all of use for a good story. Mortals like Stonewall Jackson have been morphed into demigods. Causes and effects of the war have been manipulated and mythologized to suit political and social agendas, past and present. And the whole story of the Confederacy and the conflict has been filtered through the camera’s lens to give us yet another view of it on the screen. The impact of all of that on the truth at the heart of Confederate experience has been profound, making it vital that we try to identify and persevere the truth, even while appreciating and enjoying the myth that encrusts it now.
William C. Davis. The Cause Lost: Myths and Realities of the Confederacy. Lawrence, Kansas: The University of Kansas Press. 1996. loc 366-496)
Mick LaSalle wrote of the Lost Cause in the San Francisco Chronicle: They say that history is written by the victors, but the Civil War has been the rare exception. Perhaps the need for the country to stay together made it necessary for the North to sit silently and accept the South’s conception of the conflict. In any case, for most of the past 150 years, the South’s version of the war and Reconstruction has held sway in our schools, our literature and, since the dawn of feature films, our movies.
(Mick LaSalle. July 24,2015. “Romancing Confederate Cause has no Place Onscreen.” San Francisco Chronicle)
Historian Shelby Foots describes the myth in Ken Burns’ PBS classic, The Civil War.
Historian Shelby Foote described the beginning of this myth as:
The Civil War, there’s a great compromise, as it’s called. It consists of Southerners admitting freely that it’s probably best that the Union wasn’t divided, and the North freely admits rather freely that the South fought bravely for a cause which it believed. That is a great compromise and we live with that and that works for us. We are now able to look at the war with some coolness, which we couldn’t do before now, and, incidentally, I very much doubt whether a history such as mine could have been written much before 100 years elapsed. it took all that time for things to cool down.
Shelby Foote
But just what was the Lost Cause? It was the Southern view of the war made in an attempt to justify the sacrifice, death, and destruction of the war to the wives, mothers, and daughters of the dead Confederates and their destroyed region. It was also the attempt of many former Confederate officials and military leaders to justify their actions to history. “The “Lost Cause ” myth can be viewed as, 1. The war was fought over succession and states rights and not slavery (which is like having wildcats in four corners of a room and a lion in the middle, then talking about the noise the cats are making and ignoring the lion); 2. Slaves stayed loyal and appreciated the South (ignoring the thousands that ran to Union troops) 3. The North overwhelmed the South with men and material (mostly true) 4. Confederate soldiers and generals fought heroically and saintly (heroism was exhibited on both sides, saintly is in short supply in war) 5. Lee was the best general of all (Lee was skilled in Napoleonic warfare, Grant knew modern warfare).” (Taken from my blog, Birth of a Nation: A look Back at the Movie that Restarted the Civil War. marktaren @wordpress.com)
The Lost Cause was immortalized in two films, one silent and the other considered one of Hollywood’s’ best. First was D. W. Griffin’s classic silent film, Birth of a Nation, (1915) which can be viewed in tis entirety online for free. Based on the works of Thomas Dixon, it shows the South a paradise in antebellum days and the Reconstruction period is seen a a time of corruption and terror, especially for white women. It was called by President Woodrow Wilson as history written by lighting at it showing a the White House. The film is considered Hollywood’s first blockbuster and is also credited for the resurgence of the Klu Klux Klan. The other is the 1939 Oscar winning film based on Margret Mitchell’s bestselling novel, Gone With the Wind. “This great event had long been marked in American art, literature and tales, with many legends and myths surrounding the event. A time when the great Republic almost split in half affected culture and politics in America down to the present day. Despite this dominance Davis comments that , “Interestingly enough, given this mammoth cultural impact, the story has been some what elusive in out most distinctive cultural form, the film.” (Ibid. 42622) In September of 1939, especially in Atlanta, this film captured the nation’s imagination and portrayed one of the biggest myths of the Civil War, the myth of the great Lost Cause of the South.” (taken from my blog post, Gone With the Wind: An Eightieth Anniversary of a Monument to a Myth. marktaren@wordpress.com) Dramatists Colton Moss said the film Birth of a Nation was a frontal assault on the African American community, while Gone With the Wind was, in effect, a rear attack on the same community.
While myths are a rich part of any culture, and are treasured and enjoyed, one must not be blind to realities. The Myth of the Lost Cause was not a true image of either the war or the later Reconstruction period. The war was fought as the South wished to maintain slavery and its hemogenic liberty idea. Many Southern soldiers believed they were being invaded by the North and their culture and lifestyle was being threated with eradication, but at the heart of the war was slavery. Other factors had led to many disagreements in the nation, but without slavery, there is no succession. Did all the Union forces fight to end slavery, no, the majority fought to preserve the Union. However, many did fight for abolition, such as future President James Garfield. The Daughters of the Confederacy began the myth, and also began placing monuments in cemeteries to the Confederate dead. There was a lot of push back from many in the North, led by the Union veterans, the Grand army of the Republic, or the GAR. So what happed by the 1890s that allowed the Lost Cause and the erections of monuments to spring up across the South and in effect take over the history of the Civil War in almost all schools and collages?
The answer is not just reconciliation, something Lincoln wanted after the war and many did as well. Something else was at work at the time, a notion that had gripped Europe for most the latter part of the nineteenth century and would color the history of the twentieth. It was the idea of nationalism, a term originated by Prussian Johan Gottfried Herder (1744-18093) in his work, “Treatise on the Origin of Language.” In his book, The Idea of Nationalism, Hans Kohn defines it as, “The growth of Nationalism is the process of integration of the masses of people into a common political form. Nationalism there fore presupposes the existence, in fact or as an idea, a centralized form of government over a large distinct territory.” (Hans Kohn. The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in its Origins and Background. London: Transaction Publishers. 2008 4)) Kohn argues that the idea was created by the absolute monarchs of the sixteenth century and infused with a new purpose, centralization ,and inspiration by the French Revolution. It was using the most primitive urges of humans to form social groups, he contents is was not possible before the creation of the modern state. Since one will take pride in one’s home and family, one will also take pride in a nation and see it as superior to all others. He contends this process grew over a long period of time and was an artificial and abstract idea, not just the growth of love of family and home being naturally applied to a larger society. It can be seen in England in an beginning form under the Tudors and by the nineteenth century it had bloomed into a dominant force in the Western world. The best examples of this is the unification of Germany under the Prussians in 1871 and Italy in under the Risorgmento or Resurgence, between 1848 and 1871. The Industrial Revolution put this idea on steroids and created the high point of the British Empire, who, at the time, ruled more lands than the Mongols did. America, led by people like Theodore Roosevelt, also wanted the United States to expand and take its place on the world stage.
In his book, The True Flag, Stephen Kinzer tells of this effort in the following:
In 1898, Americans plunged into the farthest-reaching debate in out history. It was arguably even more momentous than the debate over slavery, because its outcome affected many countries, not just one. Never has the question of intervention – how the United States should face the world – been so trenchantly argued. In in history of American foreign policy, this is the mother of all debates.
As the twentieth century dawned, the United States faced a fateful choice. It had to decide whether to join the race for colonies, territories, and dependences that gripped European powers. Americans understood what was at stake. The United States had been a colony. It was founded on the principal that every nation must be ruled by “the consent of the governed.” Yet it found itself with the chance to rule faraway lands.
This prospect thrilled some Americans. It horrified others. Their debate gripped the United State. The country’s best known political and intellectual leaders took sides. Only once before- in the period when the United States was founded – have so many brilliant Americans so eloquently debated a question so fraught with meaning for all humanity.
The two sides in this debate matched halves of the divided American soul. Should the United States project power into faraway lands? Yes, to guarantee our prosperity, save lives, liberate the oppressed, and confront danger before it reaches our shores. No, intervention brings suffering and creates enemies!
(Stephen Kinzer. The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain and the Birth of American Empire. New York: Henry Holt and Co.: 2017. 2-4)
President McKinley had decided to take the first step to push its power into the Pacific, seizing the Hawaiian Islands under the idea of extending Manifest Destiny. Thus, a nation that once was a colony became an imperial power, a first in history. Thus despite Jefferson’s words, Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground? If there be one principal more deeply written than any other in the mind of every American, it is that we should have nothing to do with conquest.” Abraham Lincoln added, “No man is good enough to govern another man without the other’s consent.” The imperialist argued back that times had changed and America need to control foreign markets to keep the home front markets stable. Plus the race for colonies by the European powers might leave America vulnerable to foreign domination as Europeans would control the markets. “Expansionist in Congress and beyond were visionaries seized by a radically new idea of what America could and should be.” (Ibid. 10) To them America represented progress and their opponents were just standing in the way of progress.
The expansionist wished to see the blessings of American democracy spread to the entire world. The opponents saw themselves defending freedom by allowing others to rule themselves and not by Americans. The expansionist counted that concepts of freedom and democracy along with self-government, could only be applied to the more civilized and developed states, the ones ruled by white people. This the other nations could only be free when they were ruled by white people. Native resistance to the rule of a white nation was proof of the backwardness of the people. The biggest proponent of this view was then assistant Secretary of hat Navy, Theodore Roosevelt. Unlike his cousin Franklin, who said he hated war, and who wished to see decolonization after the Second World War, Theodore had different views on both. Of war Theodore said, “If there is not the war, you don’t get the great general; if there is not a great occasion, you don’t get a great statesman; if Lincoln had lived in a time of peace, no one would have known his name.” Theodore Roosevelt became the embodiment of the American drive to empire.
Mark Twain on the other hand, opposed America becoming an imperial power, as he felt that it would destroy the United States. He had seen the treatment of natives by many colonial powers and it had appalled him, and he admired many of the cultures he had visited in his many travels overseas. Twain believed that imperial power had corrupted many of the European powers and would corrupt America as well. “that way, he warned, lay war, oligarchy, militarism, and the suppression of freedom at home and abroad.” (Ibid. 12) Twain’s view of war is seen here, “Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, War. He is the only one that gathers his brethren about him and goes forth in cold blood and calm pulse to exterminate his kind.” “Roosevelt considered colonialism a form of ‘Christian charity.” Twain pictured Christendom as ‘a matron in flowing robes drenched with blood.'” (Ibid.) The ideas of national unity, race liberty, and the place the United States would play in history and the world were in this debate, sadly, Roosevelt won. Kinzer concludes his book (which gives a complete and detailed study of the debate) with this:
A truism holds that any story can be happy or sad depending on where you end it. That perfectly describes the history of American intervention. Overwhelming power had allowed the United States to impose its will on many peoples. Often, however, these successes have bene short-lived. Americans have been forced to learn and ancient lesson: nations dominated by foreign powers eventually seek to throw it off.
(Ibid. 230)
What the supporters of expansion need, to move onto the world stage, was proof the nation had gotten over the wounds of the Civil War. The Lost Cause had been opposed by the GAR and many in the North, who called the war the War of Southern Rebellion. This article appeared in the papers on October 24, 1889 (Pittsburg Dispatch)
Pittsburg Dispatch, October 24, 1889. page 6 image 6
In an article for Pennsylvania in the Civil War, Codie Eash says:
Most attendees agreed with these generally positive assessments and counted the Pennsylvania Day festivities among their most rewarding post-Civil War experiences. However, despite the gratification of reuniting with old comrades and consecrating military markers, one realization deeply troubled many of these aging warriors: Three years earlier, veterans of the First Maryland Battalion (renamed the Second Maryland Infantry) dedicated a monument on Culp’s Hill—the first memorial erected by Confederate veterans on the Gettysburg battlefield.
(Codie Eash. “The Pennsylvania Veterans Who Opposed Gettysburg’s First Confederate Monument.” Pennsylvania in the Civil War. October 24, 2019)
The Veterans, represented by the GAR, proclaimed that no monuments should be raised to traitors, and any subsequent attempt at rising a monument anywhere was tantamount to treason. They claimed that any Confederate monument was in effect making treason honorable, and must be opposed. they were opposed by many who wished to see reconciliation between the North and South, and it is not an accident this occurred in the 1890s. The Confederate monument movement had its first spike between 1890 and 1920, precisely when Jim Crow laws were solidified in the South. It was also the time that the move to make America an empire was also at its height. To become a world power, America needed to be one nation, it needed to reconcile the combatants of the Civil War and make an understanding that both sides would accept, that was done with the Lost Cause. It allowed both sides to agree that the soldiers fought for what they believed in and it was a good thing the North won. The troops in the Spanish American War were under former Confederate general Joseph Wheeler, who at times did tell huis troops to go and get the Yankees. It was to symbolize that the Civil War was over and America was one nation.
Jim Crow was a set of local laws passed in the South by Southern Democrats to reverse the Reconstruction. After the Civil War the thirteenth amendment prohibits slavery, except for those who had committed a crime, and the fourteenth amendment guaranteed equal protection under the law. After the election of 1876, were Rutherford B. Hayes agreed to remove federal troops in the South in exchange for support in the electoral college, the Supreme Court in a series of decisions effectively gutted these amendments and erased the Civil Rights Act of 1875. In 1873 in the Slaughter House Cases, a case brought by New Orleans slaughter houses opposing anti trust laws in Louisiana, the court ruled that the fourteenth amendment only applied to federal citizens rights and not those rights of the states. In the Civil Rights Cases of 1883, the Court ruled that these amendments only applied to public discrimination, and could not outlaw discriminatory practices by private individuals. In 1896 the Court in the Plessy v Ferguson case ruled that “separate but equal ” accommodations were Constitutional. In reaction to these cases, southern states sought to reimpose the old hegemonic liberty by strictly segregating the races, and thus keeping the former slaves as the replacements for the serval serfs of old England.
To re-enslave the blacks the South used the penal system, as the thirteenth amendment allowed one to be placed in involuntary servitude if one was convicted of a crime, to place the blacks back under the control of the élites in the South. The system reached its high point when Woodrow Wilson segregated the federal government in 1913 shortly after taking office and promising blacks in the election he would give them a fair shake. The system would survive all attempts of destroying through the Second World War and the advent of the Civil Rights movement in the fifties and sixties. Another factor its demise was Japanese, during the Second World War, and Soviet, during the Cold War, propaganda which called out the United States for its treatment of minorities.
Douglas Blackmon’s book, Slavery by Another Name, details the rise and fall of this system and the rule of Jim Crow. Jim Crow was a character played by Thomas “Daddy” Rice, a white theater actor and singer. He was famous for this character, a country bumpkin type (the city equivalent was known as Zip Coon) and even preformed in from of Queen Victoria. The origin of the name is lost in legend but some believe it came form a minstrel song, “Jumping Jim Crow.” The song and Rice’s portrayal were very popular so southern legislators used the name for the series of segregation laws.
To describe this system, Douglas Blackmon begins his book, Slavery by Another Name, (which gives a detailed history of the methods and politics behind the re-enslavement of blacks in the South) with this story of Green Cottenham:
On March 30,1908, Green Cottenham was arrested by the sheriff of Shelby County, Alabama, and was charged with “vagrancy.”
Cottenham had committed no true crime. Vagrancy, the offense of a person not being able to prove at a given moment that he or she is employed, was a new and flimsy concoction dredged up from legal obscurity at the end of the nineteenth century by the state legislature of Alabama and other southern states. It was capriciously enforced by local sheriffs and constables, adjudicated by mayors and notaries public, recorded haphazardly or not at all in court records, and, most tellingly in a time of massive unemployment among all Sothern men, was reserved almost exclusively for black men. Cottenham’s offense was blackness.
(Douglas Blackmon. Slavery by Another Name: the Re-enslavement of black Americans From the Civil War to World War II. New York: Anchor Books. 2008. loc 51)
Using the penal code and other barely legal means the Southerners isolated blacks and poor whites and created the Jim Crow South. Yuval Harari says of this isolation of a people or race:
Throughout history, and in almost all societies, concepts of pollution and purity have played a leading role in enforcing social and political divisions and have been exploited by numerous ruling classes to maintain their privileges. The fear of pollution is not a complete fabrication of priest and princes, however. It probably has its roots in biological survival mechanism that make humans feel instinctive revulsion towards potential disease carriers, such as sick persons and dead bodies. If you want to keep any human group isolated – women, Jews, Roma, gays, blacks – the best way to do it is convince everyone that those people are a source of pollution.
(Harari. 138-139)
In America it was the Africans who suffered this isolation. The Europeans went to east Africa for slaves because it was closer than Asia or West Africa, along with the prohibitions of enslaving Christians. The power of the Ottoman Empire kept them from enslaving Arabs, and some historians argue that had the Irish been pagan, the English may have enslaved them. Also Africa had an existing slave market that was well over one thousand years old, and the genetic immunities the Africans had to malaria and yellow fever made them the perfect group for the colonies in Virginia, Haiti and Brazil. To justify using the Africans as slaves, religious and scientific arguments were made for the institution. The religious argument was the curse placed on Ham by Noah that all his offspring would be slaves. The scientific one would be the foundation of white supremacy.
Swiss born scientist Jean Louis Rudolphe Agassiz (1807-1873) would play a role in the creation of this theory. He was noted in the fields of ichthyological studies, he classified the megalodon, and invented the field of glaciology. He did animal classification and was an opponent of Darwin, believing in creationism. He extended his animal classification to humans by 1846 in a series lectures , “The Plan of Creation as Shown in the Animal Kingdom,” in Boston. He was heavily influenced by Philadelphia scientist George Morton, who studied human skulls and their cranium capacity. They saw humans as a collection of races, each coming from a different source and rated them in a hierarchy, in descending order they were , Caucasian, Mongoloid, Malay, Native Americans, and Negro. On the top of the Caucasians were the Germans, English and Anglo -Americans, with the negroes at the bottom of the list.
Agassiz argued against intermarriage and that the races in Europe and Africa were two separate types of humans who were never to have intermixed. He described Africans as having the brains of a seven month old child in the womb. To him any intermarriage was as bad as incest, but said that they should be free. To his surprise his arguments, along with events in the West Indies, where blacks had refused to return to the plantations after emancipation, were used by Southerners to defend the institution of slavery. “by 1865 whites. as well as many blacks, took it to be simple matter of fact that blacks were less intelligent, more violent, and sexually dissolute, lazier and less concerned about personal cleanliness than whites. They were thus the agents of violence, theft, rape, and disease – in other words pollution.” (Ibid. 141) After the Civil War this perception in the South grew stronger and morphed into the system of Jim Crow laws. “By the mid-twentieth century, segregation in the former Confederate states was probably worse than in the late ninetieth century.” (Ibid. 142)
In 1883 Sir Francis Galton took the earlier ideas and formed them into a new science, eugenics. Eugenics was a child of Darwinism, mainly Social Darwinism, and argued that the greatness of a race was in the genes. The main duty of a society was to provide a away for the superior genes to procreate and the inferior ones to go extinct. It was most popular in the United States and can be seen in much of the progressive politics of the early twentieth century, it was another support for the idea of white supremacy. It only goes out of favor when the Nazis under Adolph Hitler carried it to its logical extreme in the Holocaust. The creation of the Jim Crow South was the reaffirmation of the hemogenic liberty the elites of the region believed they had inherited from the first colonist of Virginia. “Most sociopolitical hierarchies lack a logical or biological basis – they are nothing but the perpetuation of chance events supported by myths. That is one good reason to study history.” (Ibid. 144) It was the reestablishment of the society that William Berkeley had envisioned in the beginning, the vison of the manor in rural medieval England that itself never existed.
Jim Crow had regulated blacks to the lower levels of the American class system, and they should have found allies in the backcountry culture of Appalachia and the frontier. Sadly Jim Crow segregation and the the quiet segregation of races in the North prevented this alliance. To the elites of Boston, Philadelphia, and Virginia in the early days the most morally degenerate and worst bred group was the backcountry settlers. The reason they settled in the backcountry was they were forced out of the coastal settlements. Of them Frank Rich said, “A lot of it is about the long running class and culture wars in which coastal elites square off against the aggrieved who resent and disperse them.” (Frank Rich. “The Republicans will Learn Nothing From a Trump Defeat.” The National Circus. November 4, 2020) The aggrieved he speaks of are the backcountry people, or flyover country, those not in the coastal civilized places of colonial America. they were forced from the coast then, and looked down on ever since.
Isenberg describes them in the following:
The white poor have been with us in various guises, as the names they have been given across the nation can attest: Waste people. Offscourings. Lubbers. Bogtrotters. Rascals. Squatters. Crackers. Clay-eaters. Tackies. Mudsills. Scalawags. Briar hoppers. Hillbillies. Low-downers. White niggers. Degenerates. White Trash. Rednecks. Trailer Trash. Swamp people.
They are blamed for living on bad land, as though they had other choices. From the beginning, they have existed in the minds of rural or urban elites and the middle class as extrusions of the weedy, unproductive soil. They are depicted as slothful, rootless vagrants, physically scarred by their poverty.
(Isenberg. 320)
While race has been a long time theme of America, so has class, and the backcountry region was the place the early colonist sent those they deemed to be unworthy. To make an individual seem ignorant or violent, give him either a black or southern accent. To see how they are seen by the elites, those who have taken the place of the old Boston, Philadelphia, Virginia, see how Hilary Clinton described them in 2016:
, “You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. (Laughter/applause) Right? (Laughter/applause) They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people – now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks – they are irredeemable, but thankfully, they are not America.
William Berkeley would have said the same, as would have many in the coastal regions of colonial America. (To see a good discussion on the problems of the modern backcountry, see J. D. Vance. Hillbilly Elergy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. New York: Harper. 2016)
With all of these streams going into the history of America, how did we get to this point today. In 1960 we may have been at the height of our power and confidence. We were the victory in the Second World War and the leading power in the world. In the election between Vice President Richard Nixon and Senator John F. Kennedy there was a feeling that both men were up to the job, and the nation looked forward in confidence and pride. It was a close election because of this, and we were a nation ready to march to the distant drummer and bring freedom to the world, but what happened? It starts November 22, 1963 with the assassinations of John Kennedy. Larry Sabato details the effect in his book, here is an excerpt from my blog, (Images From Another Time: the Fiftieth Anniversary of the JFK Assassination. Mr B’s Blog @wordpress,com):
Sabato details the effects of Kennedy’s ghost had on all administrations between 1974 and 1980, except for Ford, who basically helped the nation heal from the Nixon resignation, basically dealt with the fallout from that event. Jimmy Carter, whose inability to assume the mantel of Kennedy and his conflicts with the Kennedy family led his failed administration into a legacy of doom and gloom. In 1980, Ronald Reagan came the closest of any of Kennedy’s successors to assume the mantle that fell when Kennedy died. They much in common, as they were from the same generation, mostly traditionalist and hardline Cold Warriors who advocated a hardline against the communist. Reagan’s tax cuts were molded on Kennedy’s and used much of Kennedy’s language to push them through Congress. The difference was mainly that while Kennedy was a pragmatic and generic Democrat, Reagan was the leader of an ideological crusade that had taken over the Republican party and now wished to extend that control to the entire nation. George H. W. Bush won the presidency by wrapping himself around Reagan, and his distancing from that cost him a second term. Bill Clinton worshipped the image of JFK and was able to capitalize on Kennedy’s style and rhetoric to win two terms, but he was much more liberal than JFK. George W. Bush used the a Kennedy (with JFK’s brother Ted) alliance to gain his educational policies and his foreign policy had the aggressiveness that JFK displayed in the 1960s, but they were in opposite camps ideologically. By 2008 the Kennedy legacy was going dim, when it was revived by Barack Obama. While Obama used comparisons to Kennedy to boost his popularity and gain votes, his presidency was much different from anything JFK would have imagined. But, Kennedy had not lived through the cultural unrest of the times and, thus, nobody really knows what he may have thought about the young senator from Illinois. Pierson in his book, Camelot and the Cultural Revolution, he argues that the idealization of Kennedy led the left to change from progressive liberalism to punitive liberalism.
The assassination shook America to the core and the nation was never the same. Place on top of that was Lyndon Johnson’s War in Vietnam that became a cancer that further destroyed the American confidence and faith in all intuitions. One could say much of today’s problems stem for that war. In the first part of this series I looked at how the Industrial Revolution’ which created mass production that demanded mass consumption created through advertising the consumer culture of today. In the second I looked at the rise of the internet and how it affected today’s world. Advertisers were charged with the mission to bring America into a consumer culture to support the and the economy. To do this they conducted polls and research to find just what people wanted to buy and encourage them to buy what they thought they needed. When presented, social media, and the chance to look at every individual, of course they jumped at it. Also the creators of social media, who were looking to change the world and make it a better, never thought their creations would be used by those of lesser integrity. Today we may be on the verge of another great revolution, the Artificial Intelligence Revolution, and unlike the Agricultural and Industrial, it may be more sudden than we know.
What happens when computers and robots do almost all of out jobs, from dispensing food to transportation? How will we handle the newest revolution of the sapiens, we might look and say, like John Hammond did in Jurassic Park,” Don’t worry, I’m not making the same mistakes again.” To which our Dr. Ian Malcolm will respond “No, you’re making all new ones.”
Another luxury trap may be waiting to spring on humanity, so just wait and see what happens next.
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