A Disease in the Public Mind: A New Understanding of Why We Fought the Civil War
Books Notes #33
This is the second Thomas Fleming book I have reviewed. Fleming introduces his work with a powerful accounting of the deaths caused in the Civil War, totally around one million when one takes the highest estimates and contemplates the post-war deaths from injuries then suffered. When compared to America’s population in the 21st century as a percentage, these deaths would proportionally measure up to around ten million—which any astute reader would immediately realize equates to a small-scale nuclear exchange. Thus, the societal effects of the Civil War upon America are similar to that which would be suffered in a limited nuclear war.
Fleming opens his first chapters with a compelling history of slavery and the United States. He leads us all the way to the controversial Louisiana Purchase (p. 81-83):
“While average citizens welcomed the Louisiana Purchase with enthusiasm and began voting for Thomas Jefferson and his Republican Party (often called “Democratic Republican” by modern historians), the leaders of the defeated Federalist Party remained unreconciled. In Boston’s Columbian Centinel, a Federalist spokesman voiced an angry fear of the future. “This unexplored empire, of the size of four or five European kingdoms,” would destroy the balance of the Union. Louisiana was currently “a great waste, unpeopled with any beings besides wolves and wandering Indians.” But in coming years it would be divided into states, all of whom would follow Virginia’s political leadership.
When the treaty approving the purchase was submitted to Congress, Federalist representative Roger Griswold of Connecticut declared the Constitution had no provision for acquiring new territory, and Louisiana would have to be governed as a colony, the way the British ruled Jamaica. Senator Timothy Pickering of Massachusetts, who had been secretary of state under President John Adams, went even further. He asserted Jefferson would need the unanimous approval of every state in the Union to sign the treaty. Senator John Breckinridge of the new state of Kentucky replied that if Congress rejected the treaty, Kentucky and Tennessee would secede from the Union and form a separate country.
The Jeffersonians ignored the Federalists and the treaty was approved, thanks to the majorities they commanded in both houses of Congress. But the Federalists, led by Senator Pickering and former Congressman Fisher Ames, the party’s leader in Massachusetts, continued to condemn the purchase of Louisiana. They predicted the prospect of cheap land would depopulate the East and lure badly needed workers from the new factories that were opening in New England. The only solution, as Ames saw it, was for the Federalists “to entrench themselves in the state governments and endeavor to make state justice and state power a shelter of the wise, the good and the rich from the wild destroying rage of the Southern Jacobins.”
Pickering went further than Ames. He decided New England, and hopefully neighboring New York, to which thousands of New Englanders were emigrating, should secede from the Union, form a new country, and seek the protection and alliance of Great Britain to defend them against the Jacobinic Jeffersonians. He conferred with Vice President Aaron Burr, who had quarreled with the president and was unlikely to be on the ticket when Jefferson ran for reelection in 1804. Burr, a New Englander by blood, agreed to run for governor of New York with Federalist support. If he won, he would lead New York into the new nation.
The conspiracy again revealed the intensity of New England’s conviction that they were the predestined leaders of an independent America. Their defiance of George III and his Parliament had triggered the American Revolution. Hadn’t John Adams, the “Atlas of Independence” in the Continental Congress, selected George Washington to lead the army and Thomas Jefferson to write the Declaration of Independence? The Pilgrim fathers had seen Plymouth as “one small candle... [that] hath shone unto many, yea in some sort to our whole nation.” The Puritans who founded Boston had prophesied it would be a “city upon a hill watched by the world.” Now these arrogant Virginians were taking charge of the United States of America. It was intolerable!
Here were the seeds of a primary disease of the public mind, which would soon fuse with antislavery to create a hatred of the South and Southerners, with tragic consequences for America’s future.”
The war with England under the administration of the Republican Madison disproportionately harmed the shipping economy of New England and further divided America further between the Federalist and Republican parties. The improbable victory in the war that thwarted British desires to divide American territory undermined the Hartford Convention, which was set to demand from a weakened Madison special status for New England or else the states would call a second convention and secede. Secession was an idea floated several times before the Confederacy. It was not until after the War Between the States that the question of secession was settled.
After Madison, another Virginian, James Monroe, became the President, which destroyed the political potential of the Federalist Party.
The admission of Missouri as a slave state was another flashpoint. The aging Jefferson believe the Missouri Compromise was “like a fire bell in the night, signaling the death knell of the Union.” Jefferson was not the first nor the the only founder who recognized the criticality of the slavery issue to the survival of the Union as far back as when it was still being founded.
Real terror afflicted Southerners as events such the uprising planned by the free black man Denmark Vesey, mimicking the violence of the slave revolution in Haiti were discovered and thwarted by militia. To white Southerners, the freeing of all slaves was an existential threat that they took seriously. Thomas Jefferson wrote “Are our slaves to be presented with freedom and a dagger?” Haiti would haunt the minds of Southerners for generations.
Beginning in 1831, William Lloyd Garrison began publishing The Liberator, whose rhetoric provoked confrontation. The paper instigated one Nat Turner, self-appointed black preacher, to violence. He organized a band of more than fifty black slaves, and they went on a murder spree across Virginia.
The reaction in the north by Garrison is typical of leftist ideologues:
In Boston and elsewhere throughout the nation, newspaper headlines bellowed the story of Nat Turner: “INSURRECTION IN VIRGINIA!” William Lloyd Garrison pronounced himself “horror-struck.” Looking back to the poem about coming violence he had published in his first issue, he wrote: “What was poetry—imagination—in January is now a bloody reality.” Garrison invoked his professed pacifism to condemn the massacre, but he reminded his readers of the reason for it. “In his fury against the revolters, who will remember the wrongs?” he asked.
The answer to that question soon became evident: almost no one. Many of Turner’s followers were beheaded on the spot when captured. Any slave suspected of collusion with them was likely to suffer a painful death. Over a hundred blacks died in the next month in a reaction marred by hysteria and cruelty in many ways worse than the insurrectionists had displayed. Garrison privately welcomed this retaliation. On October 19, 1831, he told one correspondent that he was pleased the “disturbances at the South still continue. The slaveholders are given over to destruction. They are determined to shut out the light.”
Here was a signal revelation of the fundamental flaw in William Lloyd Garrison’s character, a flaw that permeated the New England view of the rest of America: an almost total lack of empathy. Fellow Americans had just been exposed to an awful experience—a tragedy that dramatized in horrendous terms the problem of Southern slavery. Did Garrison express even a hint of sympathy or pity for these stunned, grieving families and their terrified neighbors? Did he confess that his immediate emancipation slogan was wrong, or at least in need of amendment? The only emotion Garrison permitted himself was thinly disguised gloating—and a call for sympathy for the slaves. No matter how much they deserved this emotion, was this the time to demand it?
Garrison soon found that slaveholders and many other people were determined to shut out his light. The National Intelligencer of Washington, DC, the closest thing the federal government had to a journalistic voice, accused him of “poisoning the waters of life” everywhere. The Intelligencer urged Boston authorities to shut down The Liberator. Garrison called this proof of “southern mendacity and folly.”
Garrison visited England, wherein he witnessed the end of slavery in the West Indies by Parliament through compensation.
This is the exact type of article written today whenever something terrible is inflicted on white Americans—thinly veiled or outright gloating. We can remember the Biden Administration’s reaction to the transexual school shooter, where they openly took the side of the shooter and spoke of imaginary violence against transexuals. Additionally, like Garrison, they love it when they can provoke whites into misbehaving so that further punishment can be inflicted on them.
(p. 110):
“Here was a moment when a different man—or a different reaction from Garrison—might have altered the course of American history. If Garrison had become a supporter of compensated emancipation, he might have found thousands of reasonable men agreeing with him. Instead he remained locked in his religious fervor, unaware that his New England-induced hatred of the South was distorting his crusade.
Unfortunately, this hostility was reinforced by British antislavery crusader George Thompson. He was about Garrison’s age, and like him was largely self-educated. Thompson had been one of the youthful leaders in the 1831 decision to take a more aggressive attitude toward West Indies slave owners. Like Garrison, he had been converted to the cause by an evangelical experience and was convinced that “sin will lie at our door if we do not agitate, agitate, agitate.” He swiftly became famous for his slashing platform style and the vituperation he flung at the slaveholders. Garrison considered him a soul brother and talked of inviting him to America.”