Charles B. Dew. Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2001.
This brief study of the speeches and letters of several of the over fifty men who served as "Secession Commissioners"--essentially delegates sent as representatives of pro-secessionist state conventions to similar conventions in other states--identifies the language, rhetoric, and arguments of these men as an important indicator of the centrality of pro-slavery sentiment and a commitment to white supremacy to the secession crisis.
Dew's argument is concise and he includes the text of some of the more notable speeches in the Appendix so that the reader can read them in their entirety. Dew, who was raised in the South and was taught from an early age that the "War of Northern Aggression" was fought by his ancestors as a principled defense of Constitutional values and State's Rights--acknowledges that there were other "causes" of the war, including diverging economic systems, and a deeply-rooted (if, I would argue, possibly insecure) culture of honor in the South, but he argues that these documents provide a damning indictment of any effort to deny the degree to which the Confederacy was founded on, and fought for, a defense of slavery and the continued degradation and oppression of Black Americans.
Monday, January 16, 2017
Sunday, January 15, 2017
Awash in a Sea of Faith
Jon Butler. Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.
This concise history of some of the larger themes of American religious history up to the Civil War argues that contrary to many traditional beliefs, the United States was not born Christian, nor was its path of religious development clearly founded by the Puritans--or any other singular group. Rather, the "Christianization" of the America people was a product of antebellum forces, playing out the denominational and institutional norms established in the eighteenth century.
The European heritage was less obvious and not as deeply rooted as might be assumed. Very little of the institutional or doctrinal force of European churches survived the seventeenth-century trans-Atlantic crossing. European belief had never been as devout nor deeply rooted as ecclesiastical authorities would have liked; the fact that formal church institutions--even including the Anglican church, which was theoretically the "official" church of the polity--were lacking in the colonies only exacerbated the problem.
And for African-Americans, it was even worse--Butler refers to the experience as the "African Spiritual Holocaust", because Africans lost essentially all of their religious and spiritual traditions, and were forced to deal with the trauma of slavery and dislocation without any institutional or cultural support. When African-Americans began to create social and cultural stability in the New World, they very slowly turned to Christianity, which they borrowed from Euro-Americans wholesale, only later incorporating African elements into their practices and denominations.
Antebellum reformers and denominational growth represented an American diversion from European trends away from church membership and religiosity, but it was not until after the Civil War, roughly, that American society would move towards majority (if not universal) religious participation and explicit belief. The Christianization of America took roughly three centuries to complete.
This concise history of some of the larger themes of American religious history up to the Civil War argues that contrary to many traditional beliefs, the United States was not born Christian, nor was its path of religious development clearly founded by the Puritans--or any other singular group. Rather, the "Christianization" of the America people was a product of antebellum forces, playing out the denominational and institutional norms established in the eighteenth century.
The European heritage was less obvious and not as deeply rooted as might be assumed. Very little of the institutional or doctrinal force of European churches survived the seventeenth-century trans-Atlantic crossing. European belief had never been as devout nor deeply rooted as ecclesiastical authorities would have liked; the fact that formal church institutions--even including the Anglican church, which was theoretically the "official" church of the polity--were lacking in the colonies only exacerbated the problem.
And for African-Americans, it was even worse--Butler refers to the experience as the "African Spiritual Holocaust", because Africans lost essentially all of their religious and spiritual traditions, and were forced to deal with the trauma of slavery and dislocation without any institutional or cultural support. When African-Americans began to create social and cultural stability in the New World, they very slowly turned to Christianity, which they borrowed from Euro-Americans wholesale, only later incorporating African elements into their practices and denominations.
Antebellum reformers and denominational growth represented an American diversion from European trends away from church membership and religiosity, but it was not until after the Civil War, roughly, that American society would move towards majority (if not universal) religious participation and explicit belief. The Christianization of America took roughly three centuries to complete.
Saturday, January 7, 2017
All the World's a Fair
Robert W. Rydell. All the World's a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984.
During the forty year period covered in this study, various cities--led by prominent business leaders and capitalists, with a great deal of support from various Federal government agencies--hosted a series of International Expositions which served to both promote American industrial growth and expansion. Rydell's study analyzes the ways in which these world fairs, held over four decades in every region of the country, were ideologically unified around certain key. Most notably, the use of racial categorizing and racism sanctioned by science and governmental authority to defuse class conflict and qualms about aggressive expansion by industrial capitalism at home and abroad.
The degree to which "scientific racism" underpinned the ongoing project is remarkable--Rydell's study is organized chronologically into a neat chapter-by-chapter recounting of each fair, but there is a great deal of narrative continuity due both to the fact that many of the same "experts" from the worlds of science, public architecture, and eventually popular entertainment were repeatedly called on, but also in the ways the promoters of each fair returned to the same themes of "progress" and racial hierarchy. The "United States" which was posited as taking role on the world stage in these fairs was an explicitly Anglo-Saxon nation, one which was increasingly optimistic and assertive of the necessity and benefit of assuming the "White Man's Burden".
The degree to which the world of popular entertainment was originally shunned (the directors of the 1876 Philadelphia Exposition actually called on the city government to remove the outlying district of popular exhibits which sprung up around the official fair in order to cater to the crowds coming and going) only later to be tolerated, and then finally welcomed into the official grounds demonstrates the degree to which fair organizers grew to develop a notion of hegemony and an ability to establish the parameters of acceptable debate and rhetoric. Even as the forces of labor were often co-opted by appeals to white racial loyalty, the public at large was presented with a pageant of national progress and greatness in which racial hierarchies--and the "natural" supremacy and dominance of the White race ("whiteness" itself still being a highly contested and shifting category in the period)--seemed obvious and inarguable. The fairs were entertaining and popular, but they served the ideological ends of their promoters far beyond their limited capacity to earn dividends and profit.
During the forty year period covered in this study, various cities--led by prominent business leaders and capitalists, with a great deal of support from various Federal government agencies--hosted a series of International Expositions which served to both promote American industrial growth and expansion. Rydell's study analyzes the ways in which these world fairs, held over four decades in every region of the country, were ideologically unified around certain key. Most notably, the use of racial categorizing and racism sanctioned by science and governmental authority to defuse class conflict and qualms about aggressive expansion by industrial capitalism at home and abroad.
The degree to which "scientific racism" underpinned the ongoing project is remarkable--Rydell's study is organized chronologically into a neat chapter-by-chapter recounting of each fair, but there is a great deal of narrative continuity due both to the fact that many of the same "experts" from the worlds of science, public architecture, and eventually popular entertainment were repeatedly called on, but also in the ways the promoters of each fair returned to the same themes of "progress" and racial hierarchy. The "United States" which was posited as taking role on the world stage in these fairs was an explicitly Anglo-Saxon nation, one which was increasingly optimistic and assertive of the necessity and benefit of assuming the "White Man's Burden".
The degree to which the world of popular entertainment was originally shunned (the directors of the 1876 Philadelphia Exposition actually called on the city government to remove the outlying district of popular exhibits which sprung up around the official fair in order to cater to the crowds coming and going) only later to be tolerated, and then finally welcomed into the official grounds demonstrates the degree to which fair organizers grew to develop a notion of hegemony and an ability to establish the parameters of acceptable debate and rhetoric. Even as the forces of labor were often co-opted by appeals to white racial loyalty, the public at large was presented with a pageant of national progress and greatness in which racial hierarchies--and the "natural" supremacy and dominance of the White race ("whiteness" itself still being a highly contested and shifting category in the period)--seemed obvious and inarguable. The fairs were entertaining and popular, but they served the ideological ends of their promoters far beyond their limited capacity to earn dividends and profit.
Monday, January 2, 2017
Fighting for American Manhood
Kristin L. Hoganson. Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998.
Hoganson's book is "based on the premise that the conduct of foreign policy does not occur in a vacuum, that political decision makers are shaped by their surrounding culture." (2) Rather than a broad focus on the rather amorphous concept of "culture" at large, she focuses on political culture--specifically "on the gender convictions--meaning the ideas about the appropriate male and female roles--that did so much to define the counters of late-nineteenth-century U.S. political culture." (4)
To be clear, Hoganson is not interested in merely applying a gender-history filter to existing historiography of the war. She instead wants to go back to the sources and start over, making gender the interpretive framework. She does so partly because arguments and debate over gender and masculinity were present throughout American society and cultural institutions at the time; and partly because existing explanations for the outbreak of the war are so unsatisfying. It is not enough to say that yellow journalists were able to exploit the Maine tragedy to drum up jingoistic war fever--we must understand why those journalists wanted to do so, and why that message resonated so much.
Young, white men in the United States of America in the late 1890's knew a few things about their society. It was beginning to offer more professional and vocational opportunities to women, even as it increasingly moved middle-class white men away from physical labor and economic autonomy towards office work in large, impersonal organizations. They also knew that their elders had fought and "proved" themselves in the Civil War, while they were denied the "opportunity" to do likewise. And they were also dimly aware that the United States was becoming more intertwined into a growing global economy and policy makers and business leaders were interested in finding overseas markets, yet there was some sense that the U.S. was not yet regarded as a true peer by the Great Powers of Europe.
Hoganson deftly finds connecting threads of gender anxiety in what many perceived as a crisis of American masculinity running through all these issues, and more. The ways in which McKinley, for example, was somewhat forced into a more belligerent foreign policy at least in part to demonstrate his "manliness" is one of many examples of how gender shaped the terms by which foreign policy decisions were framed and made.
This outburst of hyper-masculinity would not last, however. In the end, qualms about the Philippine insurrection would dampen any enthusiasm for further overtly imperialist adventures, and America's aggressive drive to acquire an overseas empire came to a premature halt. Hoganson's thesis not only helps explain the outbreak of the war against Spain, it also helps explain why in retrospect it would look like an anomaly which historians and students still puzzle over.
Hoganson's book is "based on the premise that the conduct of foreign policy does not occur in a vacuum, that political decision makers are shaped by their surrounding culture." (2) Rather than a broad focus on the rather amorphous concept of "culture" at large, she focuses on political culture--specifically "on the gender convictions--meaning the ideas about the appropriate male and female roles--that did so much to define the counters of late-nineteenth-century U.S. political culture." (4)
To be clear, Hoganson is not interested in merely applying a gender-history filter to existing historiography of the war. She instead wants to go back to the sources and start over, making gender the interpretive framework. She does so partly because arguments and debate over gender and masculinity were present throughout American society and cultural institutions at the time; and partly because existing explanations for the outbreak of the war are so unsatisfying. It is not enough to say that yellow journalists were able to exploit the Maine tragedy to drum up jingoistic war fever--we must understand why those journalists wanted to do so, and why that message resonated so much.
Young, white men in the United States of America in the late 1890's knew a few things about their society. It was beginning to offer more professional and vocational opportunities to women, even as it increasingly moved middle-class white men away from physical labor and economic autonomy towards office work in large, impersonal organizations. They also knew that their elders had fought and "proved" themselves in the Civil War, while they were denied the "opportunity" to do likewise. And they were also dimly aware that the United States was becoming more intertwined into a growing global economy and policy makers and business leaders were interested in finding overseas markets, yet there was some sense that the U.S. was not yet regarded as a true peer by the Great Powers of Europe.
Hoganson deftly finds connecting threads of gender anxiety in what many perceived as a crisis of American masculinity running through all these issues, and more. The ways in which McKinley, for example, was somewhat forced into a more belligerent foreign policy at least in part to demonstrate his "manliness" is one of many examples of how gender shaped the terms by which foreign policy decisions were framed and made.
This outburst of hyper-masculinity would not last, however. In the end, qualms about the Philippine insurrection would dampen any enthusiasm for further overtly imperialist adventures, and America's aggressive drive to acquire an overseas empire came to a premature halt. Hoganson's thesis not only helps explain the outbreak of the war against Spain, it also helps explain why in retrospect it would look like an anomaly which historians and students still puzzle over.
Sunday, January 1, 2017
Crooked Paths to Allotment
C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa. Crooked Paths to Allotment: The Fight Over Federal Indian Policy after the Civil War. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2012.
This short study focuses on the public careers of two men--Ely Parker, and Thomas Bland--who worked in the late Nineteenth-century Indian reform movement. Parker--an American Indian who had served as Ulysses S Grant's aide in the Civil War--served as the head of the Office of Indian Affairs for a few years following the war. Bland, a white man who also served in the war as a physician, founded the National Indian Defense Association, a private organization that combated the forced assimilationist policies of the Indian Rights Association. The latter group was led by white reformers who believed strongly that the government needed to take a firm, paternalist role in forcing Indians to adopt white American modes of living, including giving up tribal identities and collective land ownership. Leading up to the passage of the Dawes Act and the implementation of the "allotment period", this is a story about two leaders who tried--and largely failed--to stem the tide of Federal Indian policy.
Parker, and then Bland, both pushed back against the growing consensus in post-Civil War America regarding Indians and their fate in the polity. Parker's experience with the Federal government was largely positive--he saw the Army as an efficient and well-run organization, so he was inclined to view the possibilities of harnessing governmental power favorably. He also took the view that a continued reliance on treaties was a mistake--Indian nations had declined in power dramatically, and were continuing to do so; in his view treaty-making was based on the fiction that Indian nations had the power to defend their own sovereign interests, but by the 1870's this was no longer true. For example, Parker sought to have the Office of Indian Affairs transferred back to the War Department from the Interior Department. By ending the reliance on treaties, Parker believed that the government would be compelled to take a more active and constructive role in assisting Indians in meeting their needs so they could enter American society on their own terms.
Parker was pushed out of government service before his reforms could take shape, through political jostling and institutional battles in which his opponents relied on the rhetorical language of "corruption", a charge which Genetin-Pilawa argues was often more useful as a weapon against attempts to wield governmental power on behalf of the disenfranchised than an accurate description of actual corruption as most would define it.
Thomas Bland came to Indian reform by way of his interest in other reform movements; his opposition to concentrated economic power (he seems to have been a Greenback Party member at one point, for example). Once he learned of the government policy of forced assimilation, Bland became an avowed opponent of such measures, and soon was organizing on a national scale against the better-funded and more connected leadership of the competing Indian Rights Organization (the name might be regarded as a cruel joke by many of the recipients of its intended activism).
Bland ultimately failed as did Parker, but both of their careers suggested alternate paths not taken, and therefore illustrate the ways in which the final collapse of Indian sovereignty and resistance in the final decades of the nineteenth century was anything but inevitable or uncontested.
This short study focuses on the public careers of two men--Ely Parker, and Thomas Bland--who worked in the late Nineteenth-century Indian reform movement. Parker--an American Indian who had served as Ulysses S Grant's aide in the Civil War--served as the head of the Office of Indian Affairs for a few years following the war. Bland, a white man who also served in the war as a physician, founded the National Indian Defense Association, a private organization that combated the forced assimilationist policies of the Indian Rights Association. The latter group was led by white reformers who believed strongly that the government needed to take a firm, paternalist role in forcing Indians to adopt white American modes of living, including giving up tribal identities and collective land ownership. Leading up to the passage of the Dawes Act and the implementation of the "allotment period", this is a story about two leaders who tried--and largely failed--to stem the tide of Federal Indian policy.
Parker, and then Bland, both pushed back against the growing consensus in post-Civil War America regarding Indians and their fate in the polity. Parker's experience with the Federal government was largely positive--he saw the Army as an efficient and well-run organization, so he was inclined to view the possibilities of harnessing governmental power favorably. He also took the view that a continued reliance on treaties was a mistake--Indian nations had declined in power dramatically, and were continuing to do so; in his view treaty-making was based on the fiction that Indian nations had the power to defend their own sovereign interests, but by the 1870's this was no longer true. For example, Parker sought to have the Office of Indian Affairs transferred back to the War Department from the Interior Department. By ending the reliance on treaties, Parker believed that the government would be compelled to take a more active and constructive role in assisting Indians in meeting their needs so they could enter American society on their own terms.
Parker was pushed out of government service before his reforms could take shape, through political jostling and institutional battles in which his opponents relied on the rhetorical language of "corruption", a charge which Genetin-Pilawa argues was often more useful as a weapon against attempts to wield governmental power on behalf of the disenfranchised than an accurate description of actual corruption as most would define it.
Thomas Bland came to Indian reform by way of his interest in other reform movements; his opposition to concentrated economic power (he seems to have been a Greenback Party member at one point, for example). Once he learned of the government policy of forced assimilation, Bland became an avowed opponent of such measures, and soon was organizing on a national scale against the better-funded and more connected leadership of the competing Indian Rights Organization (the name might be regarded as a cruel joke by many of the recipients of its intended activism).
Bland ultimately failed as did Parker, but both of their careers suggested alternate paths not taken, and therefore illustrate the ways in which the final collapse of Indian sovereignty and resistance in the final decades of the nineteenth century was anything but inevitable or uncontested.
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