Was it about Slavery?

Ta-Nehisi Coates' blog has featured a fascinating ongoing examination of the Civil War and slavery. One of his most interesting tasks has been his thorough debunking of the idea that, for the South, 'it wasn't about slavery.'

Which, of course, raises the question: how much was slavery an issue for the North? Is it plausible that -- as some scholars have argued -- the North was fighting for "Union," with the issue of slavery a tactical afterthought.

That latter question is probably more complex -- not least because Lincoln's Republican electorate (not to mention the Northern Democrats) was an uneasy coalition between Free Soilers and Abolitionists.

But, as such, it was interesting to read snippets from Hiland Hall's inaugural address as he took the governorship of Vermont in 1858. (From Tyler Resch's biography of Hiland Hall )

(what follows are nested quotes; first Tyler Resch's commentary, then verbatim quotations from H.Hall's speech -- I'll try to get back to this post to reformat the quotes).

The rest of his address was given over to a passionate dissertation on
slavery, though he began gently:

The marked general feature of the national government
for several years past, has been its entire disregard and abandonment
of some of the most important principles, which were considered as
political axioms by the framers of the constitution, and acted upon as
such in the earlier and purer days of the government, and indeed down
to a very recent period. This has been more particularly manifested in
reference to the subject of slavery.

He picked up steam by lamenting that:

judges, of distinguished legal attainments, have often been . . .
found giving countenance to oppression and wrong by ingenious and
fanciful constructions, and that English liberty has been fixed upon its 44
present firm foundations, not by the aid of judicial efforts, but by
overcoming them.

More forcefully, he continued:

There is reason to hope that the extra-judicial opinions of
the majority of the judges in the Dred Scott case, contrary as they are
to the plain language of the constitution, to the facts of history, and to
the dictates of common humanity, will meet the fate which has
attended those of the judges in the parent country, and that liberty will
be eventually established in spite of them.

The extraordinary persevering exertions which, during
the past year, have been made by the chief magistrate of the nation to
prevent the people of Kansas from excluding slavery from their soil,
by imposing upon them a constitution which he well knew they
loathed and abhorred, furnishes new and alarming evidence of the
aggressive character of the slave power which controlled him, and
shows that the principles of justice and of popular sovereignty stand
no more in the way of its demands for political domination than do
those of the constitution. The near approach to success, by
congressional legislation, of this attempt to stifle the will of the great
majority of the people of Kansas, is calculated to excite strong distrust
in the continued success of our republican institutions; for if the
principle of right and justice, by the influence of government
patronage and party discipline, can be thus outraged and overcome,
our boasted democracy will be but another name for despotism.
It is, however, matter of just pride and congratulation,
that these efforts to impose a slave constitution on an unwilling
people, have as yet proved unsuccessful, and that the people of that
rich and growing territory, boldly defying the threats of executive
power and nobly spurning the offered bribes of government patronage
and lands, have, by an overwhelming majority, declared their love of
freedom and their abhorrence of slavery

The people of Vermont, mindful of the history of its early
settlers in their struggle against injustice and oppression from without,
have deeply sympathised in the extraordinary and protracted
sufferings of the people of Kansas in the cause of liberty and right,
and now greet them on the favorable prospect of a happy and
successful termination of their patriotic labors.

There was ample precedent for Hall's abolitionist message. The previous
governor, Ryland Fletcher of Proctorsville, had protested the evils of slavery
during his inaugural messages in 1856 and 1857, as had Governor Slade in 1845
and 1846. Governor Fletcher in two addresses compared the hardships suffered by
the Free State settlers in Kansas with those of the Vermont pioneers. Fletcher
expressed fear that the Dred Scott decision of March 6, 1857 left little hope that
"the spread of slavery will ever be stopped under our present form of government."

Later, Rodney V. Marsh, a State Representative from Brandon, Vt. would pass a bill authorizing the formation of a Committee to discuss Dredd Scott and the issue of slavery:

"

Marsh's Select Committee soon issued a report declaring that citizens of
Vermont and of the free states could be reduced to slavery with impunity and their
property could be destroyed without remedy, and that the Fugitive Slave Law of
1850 was unconstitutional. In late November the legislature adopted resolutions
presented by Marsh's committee guaranteeing the freedom of all persons in
Vermont and resolving that the Dred Scott decision had no warrant in the
Constitution or in the legislative or judicial history of the nation, and furthermore
that "these extra-judicial opinions of the Supreme Court of the United States are a
dangerous usurpation of power and have no binding authority upon Vermont or the
people of the United States."

An ironic precursor to modern right wing fulminations about 'activist judges.'

As an interesting footnote, Hiland Hall would spend many of his later years as a historian of the state of Vermont. In that role he was a fervent retrospective advocate of secession -- Vermont's secession from New York and New Hampshire, that is.

In honor of Mr. Camping

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Zouaves and Darwin

In the American Civil War, I've always thought that the uniform of the Zouaves -- a flamboyant 'oriental' uniform worn by self-styled elite troops in the early war -- expressed much about the curious intellectual milieu in which Darwin wrote and in which the Civil War was fought. Ironically, even as Confederates debate whether African slaves could be soldiers and fight, their Zouave's uniforms paid homage -- presumably unwittingly -- to Algerians' fighting spirit and martial prowess. (One suspects they didn't think to wonder who the French were copying when they adopted the red bloomers and fezes.)

It's a neat illustration of a larger point about the evolution of European self-image and self- perception, of which Darwin was a significant part. Darwin wrote in the midst of a watershed period for Europeans' view of themselves and their place in the world, most particularly their growing acceptance of a view that history could be seen as a story of 'progress.'

A half-century later, Conrad would remind Europeans that 'this too was one of the dark places in the earth' -- among its other meanings a marker of the European sense that they had emerged from 'darkness' to enlightenment. (Heart of Darkness, whatever other meanings it carried, was also a fairly prophetic reminder of Europeans' ability to devolve into -- mechanized -- savagery).

A half-century to a century earlier, the Ottoman Empire would be a near-equal player in European power politics, with fairly fresh memories of the wars of religion, the Ottoman siege of Vienna, and a shadowier memory of threat/pressure from Islam and the 'East.' 'Progress' would have been an alien concept in a world that was extremely uncertain.

In short, Darwin writes at a very particular time, when 'guns, germs, and steel' had clearly shifted the balance of power fairly decisively toward Europeans, and when Europeans were increasingly aware of the fact.This is important because ideologies of 'white supremacy' become -- briefly -- plausible in a way they are not half a century before, say when Napoleon's army is starving and dying in Egypt, or when European coastal installations are mere-fingernail grip claims to territory in Africa or India.

Daniel Defoe's 1703 poem. From
http://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2009/10/-that-het-rsquo-rogeneous-thing-an-englishman/195126/

A true-born Englishman’s a contradiction,
In speech an irony, in fact a fiction.

The whole wonderful thing:

Thus from a mixture of all kinds began,
That het’rogeneous thing, an Englishman:
In eager rapes, and furious lust begot,
Betwixt a painted Britain and a Scot.
Whose gend’ring off-spring quickly learn’d to bow,
And yoke their heifers to the Roman plough:
From whence a mongrel half-bred race there came,
With neither name, nor nation, speech nor fame.
In whose hot veins new mixtures quickly ran,
Infus’d betwixt a Saxon and a Dane.
While their rank daughters, to their parents just,
Receiv’d all nations with promiscuous lust.
This nauseous brood directly did contain
The well-extracted blood of Englishmen.


Which medly canton’d in a heptarchy,
A rhapsody of nations to supply,
Among themselves maintain’d eternal wars,
And still the ladies lov’d the conquerors.

The western Angles all the rest subdu’d;
A bloody nation, barbarous and rude:
Who by the tenure of the sword possest
One part of Britain, and subdu’d the rest
And as great things denominate the small,
The conqu’ring part gave title to the whole.
The Scot, Pict, Britain, Roman, Dane, submit,
And with the English-Saxon all unite:
And these the mixture have so close pursu’d,
The very name and memory’s subdu’d:
No Roman now, no Britain does remain;
Wales strove to separate, but strove in vain:
The silent nations undistinguish’d fall,
And Englishman’s the common name for all.
Fate jumbled them together, God knows how;
What e’er they were they’re true-born English now.

The wonder which remains is at our pride,
To value that which all wise men deride.
For Englishmen to boast of generation,
Cancels their knowledge, and lampoons the nation.
A true-born Englishman’s a contradiction,
In speech an irony, in fact a fiction.
A banter made to be a test of fools,
Which those that use it justly ridicules.
A metaphor invented to express
A man a-kin to all the universe.

For as the Scots, as learned men ha’ said,
Throughout the world their wand’ring seed ha’ spread;
So open-handed England, ’tis believ’d,
Has all the gleanings of the world receiv’d.

Some think of England ’twas our Saviour meant,
The Gospel should to all the world be sent:
Since, when the blessed sound did hither reach,
They to all nations might be said to preach.

’Tis well that virtue gives nobility,
How shall we else the want of birth and blood supply?
Since scarce one family is left alive,
Which does not from some foreigner derive.

Kennan on the Tragedy of War

In the emotional world of an aroused democracy evil had always to be singular, never plural. To admit the complex and contradictory nature of error would be to admit the complex and contradictory nature of truth, as error's complement; and this was intolerable, for if there were two ways of looking at a thing, then the whole structure of war spirit fell to the ground, then the struggle had to be regarded as a tragedy, with muddled beginnings and probably a muddled end, rather than as a simple heroic encounter between good and evil; and it had to be fought, then, not in blind, righteous anger but rather in a spirit of sadness and humility at the fact that western man could involve himself in a predicament so unhappy, so tragic, so infinitely self-destructive.
-- George Frost Kennan, The Decision to Intervene, p.9.

http://earlywarn.blogspot.com/2011/04/wow-just-wow.html

On price elasticity of Oil demand.

Not surprisingly, relatively inelastic. This, of course, implies that oil prices change as a result of supply rather than demand... and respond to the actions of large suppliers.

Moving goalposts of moderation

In response to http://www.grist.org/politics/2011-04-26-ezra-klein-obama-moderate-republican-early-1990s at the Grist.

In short, Ezra Klein is commenting on how Republicans have 'moved the goalposts' of 'moderate.'

Now, one thing this does is raise a crucial question: what happens when/if the Republicans find that their strategy has failed -- i.e. Obama wins reelection.

Of course the Left must continue to worry that it is being 'lucied,' but there's a credible alternate scenario, which is that the Republican party has driven itself to the margins to find stances on which to oppose Obama.

This is certainly a problem many of the mainstream Republicans -- e.g. Mitt 'healthcare' Romney will face in both the primaries and general election.

For the Left, 2012 is probably going to be an agonizing election -- I get the sense that for many on the Left the 'abridgment of hope' has been such a personal disappointment that they won't just hold their nose and vote. Yet the alternative to Obama is likely to be one of the worst refugees from the right wing's loony bin -- with Donald Trump about the best of the lot.

Perspective on Libya

One other element to keep in mind: we know Egypt is 'interested' in Cyrenaica, and would be moreso were ??? hundred thousand Libyan refugees (as well as the estimated million Egyptian guest workers) to stream over the border. (Nb. in the event that Gaddafi had gone into Benghazi (then Tobruk, etc.) with his armor, it's a fairly safe prediction that most of the first refugees across the wire would come armed and riding Toyota technicals).

We know Egyptian 'distraction' by events in Cyrenaica would be particularly unproductive in the context of its current political turmoil.

Finally, we know just how bad 'refugee distraction' has been in the past for Egypt's political development: the '48-73 period is one where repeated refugee crises entangled themselves with war and increased military authoritarianism.

This larger context tends to justify according events in Libya far more strategic weight than would normally be merited by a small (6m people) albeit oil-rich country.* (Not clear whether the 6m figure includes the 1m (!!!) Egyptians working in Libya).

Conversely, Libya's scale (2m smaller than New York City, about 1/4 the population of 1989 Yugoslavia) does impose an upper limit on the amount of trouble we can get into in our intervention. This is, I suspect, one reason why the U.S. has -- so far -- been able to avoid bogging itself down in Libya in the past, despite 2-3 previous 'interventions' of only modest utility.

On the Balkans

There's an interesting comparison between Libya and the Balkans... probably an important one because the Balkan adventures (and the Rwanda disaster) were likely on the Clinton's mind as the Libya crisis unfolded. That basic thought I'll leave as a stub.

For my part, at the time I was in graduate school at Chicago, studying history, but being pulled gradually and reluctantly into the orbit of Chicago's arch-realists: Walt and Mearsheimer particularly.

I remember now, one thing I found particularly perplexing was their expectations about the Balkans, and particularly their carping about 'the mission,' about 'European dithering,' and, inevitably, about the inherent pusillaminity of anything French. Whatever.

The big problem I always had: people -- both the TV talking heads and Chicago's scholars -- would talk about the 'tragedy of Sarajevo,' and generally they'd be talking about how a cute little tourist town and ex-Olympic resort had become war zone. Concerned bleeding-heart that I was, I always had a hard time swallowing the term 'foreign policy disaster in the Balkans' -- a term that came bubbling up from time to time.

I am a historian, perhaps as much by avocation as profession. I could never accustom myself to thinking of a 'Tragedy of Sarajevo' as anything but the event of June 28, 1914, 'foreign policy disaster in the Balkans' as anything but the Guns of August: the onset of war that sent three generations of Europeans to -- or through -- Hell. Or, perhaps, the scenario set out in Sir John Hackett's 1982 novel, The Third World War , a novel that seemed -- by 1993 -- eerily prescient about incipient disaster in Yugoslavia.

Given my impression of the stakes involved, I tended to be far more respectful of Europeans' diplomatic efforts in the Balkans. To my mind, things were turning out well if Russians, Germans, and French were not shooting each other, or, for that matter, if Turks and Greeks remained at peace. I guess my colleagues tended to think I was not sufficiently critical.

Part of the reason this I'm thinking about this now: I find myself again at odds with most opinion about events in Libya. From my perspective, most of the commentary mis-perceives what is at stake, which is not so much the stability/democracy/welfare of Libya itself. Rather, really, the danger is that turmoil in Libya -- and particularly the threat of refugee exodus from Cyrenaica -- might disrupt and distract Egypt from the crucial chores of domestic reform and political reconstitution.

A stub, on the frivolity of American realism

From an exchange with Sorn about Clausewitz;


Carrington:
I get the sense it is very, very difficult to be a Clausewitzian in an American context.


Sorn: That's because to Americans, war is geography by other means.

Or, as a professor of mine said a couple years back war is how americans learn geography.


Carrington_Ward 0 minutes ago in reply to Sorn
:-).

That does, in many ways, get at the heart of the issue: Clausewitz wrote having seen Prussia defeated and dismembered. Machiavelli wrote The Prince as a cover lettter and resume for the prince who had ordered him imprisoned and tortured.

Not only were they pragmatists, they knew firsthand the cost of failure.

It's hard to translate that experience and background to people for whom war is a way of learning (for once) your geography.

Preempting "Mission Creep:" Debates over Libyan intervention

Much of the concern -- and much of the neocon 'excitement' -- over Libya seems to be over the prospect of 'regime change' and about deposing Qaddafi. Even President Obama, who should know better, has contributed to the chatter with an ill-advised mention of a 'tightening noose.' And, on the other hand, there is a well-founded fear that Libya might constitute yet another in our growing list of quagmires.

All the the chatter obscures the current reality of a limited war for limited political goals. And, arguably, it makes it much harder for those limits to be maintained, especially given the politicians' rhetorical taste for "wars to end all wars," "promotion of democracy," and the public's desire that the ends actually clearly justify the means.

As such, there is a fairly Bismarckian and cold-blooded point to be made in favor of NATO's current Libyan adventure, such as it is. Specifically, the real and significant danger in Libya is the potential that a bolus of armed, angry, and desperate Libyans 'rebels/refugees' might end up crossing the Tunisian and Egyptian borders and further roiling already troubled political waters. Especially in the Egyptian case, the consequences are fairly imponderable but certainly bad... much as a flood of Irish and Italian refugees (in, say, 1796) could not have helped quiet the turmoil of French politics at the end of the 18th century.

It's a difficult point to make. Essentially, it's saying that an ongoing, slow-burning Libyan Civil War is -- for the time being -- better than a bloodbath/exodus that might (re-) destabilize Tunisia and Egypt. Is this a goal worth fighting and dying for? It is hard to answer the question, but it's important to remember three things:

1) Egypt is commonly accepted as lying at the heart of the Arab world. It's a huge country with significant resources and a millenia's history as a geopolitical center of mass. What happens there matters.

2) The tragedy in Rwanda has come to an end. The tragedy in Central Africa and the Eastern Congo is ongoing, and of a terrible scale. Rwanda's displaced have played no positive role in this tragedy.

3) It's difficult to gauge whether NATO's Balkan intervention was successful or not. As with everything else, it's difficult to tell the longer-term consequences of outright failure. At the time certainly, there were reasons to worry about a conflict that could force Greece and Turkey to contend cooperatively with a refugee crisis.

Against these concerns, NATO's involvement in Libya seems fairly low-risk, at least in the immediate sense. Certainly NATO's leaders must quell public expectations that the end-game will be regime change, and maintain focus on the the fairly limited political goal -- firewalling Libyan violence from the ongoing Arab/Egyptian unrest. Further and more significantly, it would be well that Qaddafi were meditating on the fate of Idi Amin or Napoleon Bonaparte, rather than Saddam Hussein or Benito Mussolini. This especially because Libyan-sponsored terrorism would almost certainly make regime-change a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Within the this context, public realists may have a particularly important role to play in 'managing public expectations' about the Libyan conflict, but this role may involve far more cautious and nuanced critiques than produced so far.



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Responding to Stephen Walt's post on the Libyan intervention, http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/03/24/social_science_and_the_libyan_adventure, to Yoni Applebaum's post on the "Third Barbary War"
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/03/the-third-barbary-war/72749/
And to Max Fisher's "In Arming Libyan Rebels, U.S. Would Follow an Old, Dark Path"
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/03/in-arming-libyan-rebels-us-would-follow-an-old-dark-path/73019/