Secession and Racism — Northern Style Did Abraham Lincoln always hold that secession was treason? Here is something he said on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, in 1847, when he was a member of Congress: Any people, anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right, a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world. Would not Southerners qualify as being among any people, anywhere? In 1845, fifteen years before the Southern states seceded, many New Englanders were so opposed to the admission of Texas to the Union that they threatened to withdraw from it. They were led by former U.S. President John Quincy Adams. Even before that, in 1806, U.S. Senator Plumer of New Hampshire was so outraged by the admission of Louisiana that he declared: The Eastern States must and will dissolve the Union and form a separate government of their own; and the sooner they do this, the better. Plumer was joined by U.S. Senator Pickering of Massachusetts. He wrote: I rather anticipate a new Confederacy exempt from the corrupt influence of the aristocratic Democrats of the South… There will be a separation… The British provinces [of Canada], even with the consent of Great Britain, will become members of the Northern Confederacy. Sen. Pickerings talk of a Northern Confederacy is striking enough. What asks to be underlined is the reference to the corrupt influence of aristocratic Southerners on the nation. Northern leaders saw that Southern society, being agricultural and — like the Church — hierarchical, was different from their own, which had commerce for its main activity and whose leaders (themselves) were bourgeois. They did not like the difference. Eventually it would be eliminated by going to war and imposing on the South a years-long military occupation known as Reconstruction. What was reconstructed was the Southern way of life. The history of that period is its own horror story, in large part because the time was seen by many Northerners as an opportunity to make of the South a graveyard of whites, a region to be governed by blacks upheld by Northern white bayonets. One Massachusetts politician even urged that South Carolina, Georgia and Florida be set apart as the home of the Negro. These were Northerners revealed to be — as many would be again at the time of Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka in the 1950s — as segregation-minded as any Southerner during the period of Jim Crow, and much more so than any in the Old South when their agricultural labors brought Southern whites and slaves into daily and close contact. Had the Northern dream of a separate homeland for blacks been fulfilled, the suffering that could have resulted, first of all among blacks, is incalculable. Abraham Lincoln certainly was segregation-minded, but he never envisioned a separate homeland within these shores for blacks. His solution to the problem caused by slavery was more radical. He wanted to colonize blacks — back to Africa. In August, 1862, he convened a White House conference with black leaders and said to them: Why should people of your race be colonized, and where? Why should they leave this country? You and we are different races. We have between us a broader difference than exists between any other two races. Whether it is right or wrong, I need not discuss; but this physical difference is a great disadvantage to us both, as I think. Your race suffers very greatly, many of them, by living among us, while we suffer from your presence. If this is admitted, it affords a reason, at least, why we should be separated.
Posted on: Mon, 17 Nov 2014 05:16:03 +0000
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