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Percival Everett’s “James.” A classic within a classic.  Literacy and Democracy: The Pygmalion Problem. Overreaching for irony/Undercutting the message?

Percival Everett’s James. A classic within a classic.

Literacy and Democracy: The Pygmalion Problem

Overreaching for irony/Undercutting the message?

Burton Weltman

“The children said together ‘And the better they feel, the safer we are.’

‘February, translate that.’ ‘Da mo’ betta dey feels, da mo’ safer we be’ ’Nice.’”

 James teaching a group of enslaved children how to act and speak black as

a means of survival when in the presence of white people.

Huck and Jim/James and Huck.

Percival Everett’s novel James is a brilliant book.  The reviews are in and it is being hailed as an instant classic, which may be going a bit far, but not by much.[1]  A retelling of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of Jim the enslaved companion of Huck, Everett’s novel makes Huck the companion of Jim, now self-renamed James.  In James, their joint adventures become James’ story, not merely because he is the narrator and fictionally the author of the book, but because he is the driving force and determining intelligence behind the adventures of the two companions.

In its basic outline, James follows the story in Huckleberry Finn, as the two protagonists escape from Widow Douglass’ farm in fictional St. Petersburg, Missouri, and make their way down the Mississippi River towards New Orleans.  There are some deviations in James from the plot of Huckleberry Finn, but nothing that detracts from Huck’s story or demeans Twain’s novel. The main difference between the books is that James in James is literate and can speak better English than any of the white people in his book.  It is a secret that James has kept from white people for many years, mumbling a bumbling version of slave-speak in the presence of whites, and that he keeps from Huck until late in the story.

Technically, James is a brilliant complement to Huckleberry Finn.  Thematically, it is an impelling supplement.  The plot of Everett’s book is for the most part inserted into the open spaces of Huck’s narrative in Twain’s book.  Initially, James’ story follows along behind Huckleberry Finn, with James’ narrative complementing Huck’s.  But eventually, James’ story takes the lead, with Huck’s story complementing his.  Everett has turned the drama around so that Huckleberry Finn becomes a complement to James.  James’ is the main story.  Huck’s becomes the background.

It is a remarkable turnaround.  Huck’s story in Huckleberry Finn is engrossing and we feel for him.  But James’ story in James is compelling and we hurt with him.  Huck’s problems are real but pale in comparison with those of James.  Huck is a free and fairly affluent white boy who is fleeing domestication.  If he is caught, he will have to go to school and church and eat with a fork.  James is fleeing enslavement and permanent separation from his family, and he faces torture and death if he is captured.  Given James’ predicament, Huck’s problems seem secondary. 

All kudos to Everett.  It is no mean feat to take a book that is often acclaimed as the “Great American Novel” and successfully make it into the background for your book.  Not to demean Huckleberry Finn, an all-time classic, but Everett’s novel is a remarkable achievement and a contender for classic status.   

For one thing, James is unforgettable.  It grips you while you are reading it and haunts you thereafter.  Its power stems in part from the description of events and characters in the book, but even more from the feelings that it leaves you with.  Everett is a black American.  His book is a chilling description of the pressure that blacks have historically been under in this country to behave in a submissive way toward whites, and often are to this day. 

The book is specifically about enslaved blacks in the ante-bellum South for whom any action that could be conceived by a white person as being uppity might lead to horrible consequences.  Unintendedly saying the wrong thing, glancing the wrong way, almost anything might offend a white person and result in humiliation and beating at the least, torture and lynching at the worst. 

The book makes you feel the chronic anxiety that enslaved people must have felt and that people of color must often feel today, especially in encounters with white police officers.  It did not, I must add, leave me with feelings of guilt or self-loathing as a white person.  It left me with horror, sorrow, anxiety and anger.  There should be no question of the book being banned from schools on account of guilt-tripping white kids.  It does not demean them and should energize them instead.

James is a political book, albeit not in any partisan way.  To the contrary, it is a reminder that the antebellum Republican Party was anti-slavery, the Democratic Party pro-slavery.  And that until the 1960’s, the segregationist South was solidly Democratic.  It is, however, political in the sense of the slogan that “The personal is political,” that treating people with respect is the goal of a humane politics, and that we should respect the respectful but disrespect the disrespectful.

The main thrust of the book is the way James is treated by different people in different contexts along the way downriver.  At one point, he has to put on blackface makeup to pretend he is a white person pretending to be a black person.  Which is something he can do because he can speak English better than any of the whites.  Poignant and hilarious.  One of the surprises in the book, and a source of laugh-out-loud humor, is that James and other blacks can speak perfect English and that they only feign a garbled slave-speak to fool while people.          

As brilliant as the book is, I think that it was a misstep to have James able to speak better English than any of the white people.  It was unnecessarily reaching too far for contrasts and comedy.  And it exemplifies the widespread attitude that the ability to speak textbook English is a prerequisite for high social standing.  That is an elitist attitude that I think is undemocratic and that works against the overall democratic message of James.

Cultural Literacy: Aristocracy, Meritocracy, and Democracy.

Lincoln famously described democracy as government of, by and for the people.  It is a wonderful description, but it begs the questions of who is to be considered part of the people.  Democracy depends on people being literate within their own culture, being able to understand what are the public issues, evaluate alternate options for dealing with those issues, and work with others to deal with the issues.  If the whole of the population of a society isn’t capable of that, then a democracy of all the populace might not work for that society.   

In the so-called democracies of the ancient Greeks, about one-third of the populace was considered citizens, about one-third was foreign non-citizens, and about one-third was enslaved persons.  It was the citizens for whom government was of, by and for.  And even among the citizens, there were class and status differences in the political rights, duties and powers of individuals.  An elite portion of the populace held the effective power.  Foreigners, slaves and women had no governmental power and had to be satisfied with whatever rights they were given. 

This state of affairs could be rationalized as being as democratic as was possible under the circumstances.  In ancient Greece, language skills were of primary importance.  Many cities were governed by an assembly of the whole citizenry.  Ability to participate in the assembly was largely based on oratorical skill.  One could, therefore, rationalize limiting the citizenry, “the people,” to a small enough number of persons able to meet all together, and to empower only those persons who had sufficient language skills to debate effectively in the assembly.

In Medieval Europe in which most people were serfs and were effectively owned by the neighborhood nobleman, many peasant villages were effectively democratic.  Except for the dues and duties that they owed to the lord, the peasants collectively managed their own affairs on an “of, by and for the people” basis. The villagers elected headmen and allocated tasks and lands based on collective agreements.  It was a democratic base within an aristocratic superstructure.

Being able to read, write and orate was not significant in the medieval village.  The peasants’ problems were unlikely to involve reading and writing, and the villagers’ discussions and negotiations were unlikely to require dramatic oratorical skills.  In sum, the skills required to function as a democracy depend upon the situation.  People who cannot read or write may have cultural literacy in dealing with plants, animals, people and other things that enable them to comprehend and contribute to the discussion of their society’s issues.

The idea of democracy in which “the people” meant everyone is essentially a late-eighteenth century development in Europe and among European Americans.  Previous theories of government, both liberal and conservative, assumed that only some of the people were capable of participating in the social and political system, and many theories still do. 

Conservatives have historically promoted aristocracy, even when the social and political system has been superficially democratic.  Aristocracy is based on the idea that the inheritance of genetic and/or social advantages qualifies a person to belong to the class of leaders and rulers in a society, and hold a status to which others should defer.  Liberals have generally countered with meritocracy.  Meritocracy is based on the idea that having developed and displayed certain abilities, especially high levels of language literacy, qualifies a person to belong to a class of the most competent people who should lead and rule society. 

Neither idea is genuinely democratic. Neither promotes government of and by all of the people even if it promotes government that is ostensibly for the people.  Both doctrines culminate in an elite class of special persons that rules over the mass of ordinary persons.  Slavery was an extreme version of these doctrines.  It rationalized a combination of aristocratic and meritocratic theories taken to an extreme at which point they rebounded on themselves and justified a slave society that was neither conservative nor liberal. 

The theory of racial slavery in this country held that white people were genetically superior to black people and that whites, thereby, justifiably inherited their dominance over blacks.  At the same time, the theory held that the culture of white people, and especially its foundation in English language skills, was superior to the culture of black Africans and their descendant slaves, so that whites were deemed capable of social and political participation whereas blacks were not.

Developments in genetics and in the history of African cultures have long since given the lie to these theories of white superiority.  Scientists have determined that there are no significant biological differences among the so-called races which, in any case, are social-constructions and not genetic distinctions.  In turn, anthropologists have explained that different cultures develop different ways and means in response to different situations, and that so long as different cultures deal adequately with their different circumstances, there is no basis for considering one culture superior to the others.  That goes for slave cultures like that of the enslaved African Americans.

One of the greatest achievements in human history is the culture of freedom developed in slavery by African Americans.  It was a culture that dealt with the fact of their enslavement and their need to protect themselves against brutality from white people.  As a result, blacks developed both a camouflage bumbling English to make themselves seem stupid in front of white people, and also an in-group slang lingo that enabled them to communicate with each other without being understood by their masters.  Enslaved blacks were effectively trilingual.  In this way, they developed behavioral defense mechanisms to keep white people from accusing them of insubordination while allowing them to exercise a degree of independence and insubordination.    

But black culture was not merely a defense mechanism.  It was also a way of living that tapped the energy and creativity of enslaved black people to produce a wealth of stories that became a keystone of American literature and a torrent of songs that became the foundation of American music – the Gospel, blues and jazz which are America’s major contribution to world music.[2]  And they did this despite being largely illiterate.  It has been estimated that some ten percent of enslaved blacks could read and write as compared with some eighty percent of ante-bellum whites.  But that did not stop blacks from developing a high level of their own cultural literacy.  A culture of freedom and free expression, albeit often disguised.      

Open rebellion by enslaved blacks was rare.  Although there were some heroic uprisings, there were very few attempted rebellions and they failed badly.  There was, in reality, almost no chance that a slave revolution could succeed in the United States given the relatively small number of enslaved blacks compared to white freemen.  Violent resistance would have been deadly to the blacks. 

At the same time, the relatively peaceful response of blacks to slavery should not be seen as a passive response and somehow a weakness in the enslaved people.  The paucity of slave uprisings should instead, I think, be seen as largely a result of the success of enslaved people in building their own cultures and communities within slavery.  This should not be seen as a failure but as a tremendous achievement.  It is for this reason that I think it was a misstep for Everett to have portrayed James and other blacks as being secretly more perfectly literate than their masters.  It isn’t plausible.  It isn’t democratic.  And it diminishes the actual achievements of the enslaved people.   

The Pygmalion Problem.

In George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, Professor Higgins believes that he is doing the flower girl Eliza a favor by teaching her to abandon her hackneyed lower class Cockney English and speak the King’s English, the idiom spoken by the upper classes.  But having taught her to speak and behave like a princess, he has essentially turned her into a fish out of water.  She is not recognized as a colleague by her lower-class former comrades and she is not actually a member of the upper classes that she now resembles.  She belongs nowhere and to no one.  It is a conundrum that Shaw does not actually resolve at the end of the play.  The same seems to go for James in James. 

Irony goes best when it is plausible.  James is clearly the most intelligent and resourceful person in the book, which is quite plausible.  The seemingly submissive slave who pretends to be dumb, but is really smarter than the fools to whom he bows, is plausible, ironic, and very funny.  James will occasionally forget himself and say something in correct English, sometimes even correcting a white person, rather than mumbling in slave-talk.  The white characters will do a double-take at what they just heard and James will have to double back to slave-talk in order to save the situation.  It is hilarious and it highlights the contrast between him and the white people. 

It is a brilliant stroke and it is plausible up to a point.  It is plausible that James could speak as well as the best-spoken whites in the book and better than most of the whites.  But it is not plausible that he could secretly speak English better than any of the whites.  From whom could James have learned this perfect English?  And given the frequent lapses he has in the course of the book, how is it plausible that he could have kept his language proficiency a secret for his whole life? 

I think Everett has unnecessarily gone too far in search of contrast and comedy.  The extent of this trope is not necessary to establish that the slaves are more intelligent and more knowledgeable about the world than their masters.  It is perfectly plausible that since the slaves do almost everything that needs doing, they would be more capable and competent, when they wanted to be, than their masters.  But inflating James’ knowledge of English seems to equate English language literacy with intelligence and competence, and this invites blowback from the fact that most slaves did not in reality have better language skills than their masters.  

In portraying enslaved people as conventionally literate, Everett seems to be implying that if a person was not conventionally literate, the person was inferior.  And since we know that most enslaved blacks were not literate, Everett, in equating language skills with intelligence and competence, seems, despite himself, to be implying that real-life enslaved blacks were inferior. 

The focus on conventional literacy undermines the point that enslaved blacks could be considered more knowledgeable than whites about things that were important in their society.  They did the work.  They were the ones who most deserved to be fully empowered members of the society.  They were the ones most capable of living in a democracy, unlike the autocratic and ignorant whites who reveled in ordering blacks around, cheating each other, and fighting duels.

Making the world safer for whites and blacks: An Irony.

I think that both the best of the book and what I think is a misstep by Everett are exemplified in the short dialogue from James that I have included above as the epilogue to this essay and that I repeat here below.  In this early scene in the book, James is conducting a class for enslaved black children in the neighborhood of Widow Douglass’ farm.  He is teaching them how to avoid antagonizing white people, including how to mumble in slave-speak.  The goal is to appear as stupid and unthreatening as possible.  For these kids, this lesson is not a game.  It is a lesson in survival strategies.  If a white person feels threatened or upstaged in any way by an enslaved person, even by a child, it can be a disaster for that enslaved person.  Safety through the appearance of subservience is the curriculum for this lesson.

The dialogue goes as follows: 

The children said together ‘And the better they feel, the safer we are.’

‘February, translate that.’

‘Da mo’ betta dey feels, da mo’ safer we be’

’Nice.’

There are at least two key aspects of this bit of dialogue.  First, it is heartbreakingly plausible that such classes would have existed then, and it is chilling to realize that parents of color often feel they have to teach similar things to their kids today.  “Having the Conversation” is what some people call it today.  The contrast is stark between what going to school means for Huck, a lot of useless book-learning, and the schooling in life and death tactics that these kids are getting from James.   

Second, it is not plausible that the children already seem to know how to speak correct English but don’t know slave-speak.  Their opening comment that “the better they feel, the safer we are” is perfect, even eloquent, English.  How could it be that they know how to speak correct English? They could have had only very limited opportunity for hearing people speak correct English. And how could it be that they did not already know slave-speak, which James was teaching them? These kids had to have grown up hearing slave-speak from their families and friends. 

There is a plausibility problem here.  But, also, a thematic issue.  Making English literacy a measure of merit undercuts the book’s overall point about the intelligence, knowledge and skills of blacks who aren’t language literate but who are culturally literate, that is, who can effectively cope, cooperate and communicate within the dominant culture. Cultural literacy means being able to understand the traditions, regular activities and history of a group of people from a given culture, and being able to engage with these traditions and in these activities.  Cultural literacy means having sufficient knowledge, judgment and skills to be able to understand and participate in the democratic governing of a society.  Language literacy may or may not be necessary, depending on the culture.

James would have been culturally literate, and would have seemed superior to his white masters, even if he was not English language literate.  And given that he was language literate, which is plausible, he need not have known perfect English in order to make a sharp and humorous contrast with the white characters in the book.  I think that in this case “less is more.”  Everett goes too far and, in doing so, makes a mistake that undermines his argument in favor of an inclusive and expansive democracy. 

Bigots often like to demean people based on their accents and modes of speech.  At times, James seems, despite the best intentions of the author, to be doing this, albeit doing it to bigoted whites. But the book’s underlying message is that if you are making sense with what you are saying, it doesn’t matter how correctly you say it, whether you are black or white.  And if what you are saying is pernicious nonsense and lies, it doesn’t matter how well you say it.      

The overall message of the book is that whether you are black or white, slave or free, farmer or factory worker, rural resident or city dweller, educated in schools or in the fields and on the streets, filled with book learning or practical experience, you can acquire the cultural literacy to be able to participate fully as an equal among equals in your society.

Everett and Empathy.

It has been said that the function of meaningful communication is to make the strange familiar and the familiar strange.  That is, to convey something new in conventional terms to the recipient of the message, thereby making it familiar, but also to question the conventional terms and, thereby, make them strange.  It is a process that opens things up to more communications that make things familiar, then strange, then familiar, ad infinitum.  Making familiar things strange and strange things familiar is a function of fiction but also the other arts, the humanities, and the social and physical sciences.  It is a dynamic that MAGA supporters, who want to bind us all permanently in some oppressive ideology, abhor and oppose.  It is a dynamic we can see in James which challenges our complacency and makes us feel like enslaved persons.

In a similar way, it is said that fiction at its best is an exercise in empathy, an expansion of our ability to see and feel the world as others do.  This is something that can, in turn, be said of all the arts, the humanities, and the social and physical sciences.  Trying to see the world as the world sees itself.  Empathy has, however, somehow become controversial among right-wing politicians and polemicists, willful ignoramuses who reject both the creative arts and the rational sciences.  These MAGA idiots deride empathy as “woke,” as though there is something wrong with awakening yourself and understanding others.  So be it.  If the best in fiction is “woke,” then James is a classic example of the best in fiction.

                                                                                                                        BW 5/24

[1] “Huck Finn Is a Masterpiece.  This Retelling Just Might Be, Too.” Dwight Garner. New York Times. 3/29/24.   “James by Percival Everett review – A gripping reimagining of Huckelberry Finn.”  Anthony Cummins. The Guardian. 4/8/24.  “James Review: Percival Everett’s Retelling of Twain.” Sam Sacks. Wall Street Journal. 3/13/24.

[2] Eugene Genovese. Roll, Jordan, Roll. The World the Slaves Made.  New York: Vintage Books, 1974.

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Would the United States still have slavery if the South had not seceded in 1861? Part III. Conclusion: Very likely.

Would the United States still have slavery if the South had not seceded in 1861?  Part III. Conclusion: Very likely.

Burton Weltman

Slavery had been on the decline in the Western Hemisphere during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.  It had been abolished in Haiti in 1791 and Canada in 1793.  And as Latin America countries gained their independence from Spain during the early nineteenth century, they abolished slavery: Argentina in 1813; Peru in 1821; Chile, Ecuador, Columbia, Panama, and Venezuela in 1823; Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica in 1824.  Mexican revolutionaries proclaimed the abolition of slavery in Mexico in 1810 and slavery was officially abolished there in 1829, although the practice continued illegally in the area of Mexico that became Texas.  Britain abolished slavery in her colonies during the 1830’s.

But slavery still thrived during the mid-nineteenth century in Brazil, by far the largest holder of slaves in the New World, and in Cuba.  And slavery expanded in Ecuador, Peru, Colombia and Central America after 1850 in the midst of a boom in those countries in the growing and processing of rubber.  Various forms of involuntary servitude were also widely practiced in India, China and the Middle East throughout the nineteenth century.  When the South seceded from the Union in 1860-1861, slavery was still a going concern in the United States and elsewhere in the world and might have gone on further and farther but for the consequences of the Civil War.

The abolition of slavery in the United States had a profound effect on the history of slavery in the world.  If slavery had not been abolished here during the 1860’s, the United States would have emerged during the late nineteenth century as the world’s largest economy, the world’s largest and leading democracy and the world’s leading slave-holding country.  The power and prestige of the United States could have given the institution of slavery a legitimacy and impetus that could have carried the institution into and through the twentieth century.

It cannot be assumed that the development of democracy in the United States during the twentieth century, including the right to vote for women, would somehow have led to the end of slavery.  Slavery has existed alongside democracy in several societies in the world, including ancient Athens as well as the early United States.  It has even been argued that the emergence of democracy in both of those societies was a product of slavery.  Slaves performed the societies’ demeaning tasks which enabled the free men to associate with each other on the relatively equal terms necessary for democracy.

Nor can it be assumed that the industrialization of the North during the late nineteenth century was incompatible with slavery in the South.  The industrialization of the North during the early nineteenth century had been perfectly compatible with slavery in the South and even depended to some extent on slavery.  Southern slaves produced cheap cotton that was manufactured into cloth and clothes by free northern workers.  This sort of division of labor could have continued.  It also seems likely that slaves could have been used as factory labor in an industrializing South and, given the potential effects of the Dred Scott decision which seemed to have opened the whole country to slavery, possibly even in the North.

Nor, finally, can it be assumed that the refinement of morals and manners that has occurred in the United States during the twentieth century would have somehow produced an environment incompatible with the continuance of slavery.  Americans and people elsewhere have been all too able to compartmentalize separately their high-tone feelings and their low-life prejudices.  I am reminded, although it is an extreme case, of the Commandant of Auschwitz who was able to record the noblest thoughts about his family, friends and flowers in his diary alongside statistics and comments about his day’s work exterminating human beings.

There were thirty-four states in the United States in 1860 of which fifteen were slave states.  It takes the support of three-quarters of the states to approve a Constitutional Amendment.  Thirteen southern slave states seceded to form the Confederate States of America.  In their absence, anti-slavery northerners mustered enough votes in Congress and among the remaining states to ratify the 13th Amendment and abolish slavery.  When the Confederacy lost the war, the Confederate states were required to ratify the 13th Amendment as a condition of their regaining their rights and powers as members of the Union.

The bottom line is that if slaveholders in the South had not made what was for them a disastrous blunder in seceding from the Union in 1860-1861, the votes in Congress and among the states to abolish slavery would not have been there during the late nineteenth century and might still not be there today.  There are fifty states today and the negative votes of fifteen slave states would still be more than enough to squelch an amendment to abolish slavery.  In any case, the United States would almost certainly have entered the twentieth century as the world’s leading superpower with slavery as a thriving institution in an otherwise democratizing society.  And might still be today.

Note: This issue is discussed at greater length with citations and quotations in the chapter entitled “Choice #9: The Coming of the Civil War: Why Didn’t the North Secede and Why Did the South?” of my recently published book Was the American Revolution a Mistake? Reaching Students and Reinforcing Patriotism through Teaching History as Choice (AuthorHouse, 2013).

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Would the United States still have slavery if the South had not seceded in 1861? Part II: Why did the South secede?

Would the United States still have slavery if the South had not seceded in 1861?  Part II: Why did the South secede?

Burton Weltman

Conventional history has it that secessionist sentiment was rampant in the South during the 1850’s and that the election of Lincoln in 1860 was the straw that broke the camel’s back and led to a secessionist stampede.  This was not so.  Secession was not popular in the South before the attack on Fort Sumter in April, 1861 that began the Civil War.  Prior to that attack, the great majority of slave states had rejected secession and even within those states that had seceded following Lincoln’s election, large minorities of white people, and possibly even majorities, opposed secession.

Most slave owners in the South felt comfortable with the political and economic situation in 1860.  Lincoln had won the presidential election with only 40% of the vote, with 60% going to pro-slavery candidates.  Congress was effectively stalemated between pro and anti-slavery members.  The Fugitive Slave Act and the  Dred Scott decision were the laws of the land and there was very little chance of these laws being changed in the foreseeable future.  This seemed especially the case since “Cotton was King” and the North was economically dependent on Southern trade.  Most slave owners felt that the North needed the slave South economically.  They also felt that the South needed the North to help control and contain the slaves.  For most southern supporters of slavery, including prominent figures such as Alexander Stephens, who later became the vice-president of the Confederacy, the Union was slavery’s best protection.

So, how did it happen that almost the whole slave South seceded by the spring of 1861?

A relatively small but very vocal group of southern “Fire Eaters,” led by Robert Barnwell Rhett and James Hammond of South Carolina and James Loundes Yancey of Georgia, were convinced that the North was out to abolish slavery and that if the South did not get out of the Union soon, it would soon be too late.  Comparing their situation to that of the colonies before the American Revolution, and taking a position that mixed overwrought fear with unfounded self-confidence, they promoted secession during the 1850’s and especially after the election of 1860 as a preemptive strike to forestall the tyranny of the North before it could get started.

As bad as political developments of the 1850’s seemed to anti-slavery northerners, they seemed worse to southern Fire Eaters, almost as though the two groups were living in alternate universes and were not experiencing the same events.  From the Fire Eaters’ perspective, the pattern of significant events of the 1850’s had begun with the acrimonious debate over the Wilmot Proviso, which was intended to prohibit slavery in any new territories, had proceeded with the formation in 1854 of the Republican Party, which was dedicated to restricting and maybe even ending slavery, and had culminated in John Brown’s terrorist raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859, which was intended to start a bloody slave revolution.  The election of Lincoln in 1860 was seen as a sign they must make a move to save slavery through secession before it was too late.

Although the North had not yet done anything to overturn slavery, and was in no position to do so, the Fire Eaters stirred fears in white southerners that the North was growing faster than the South and would eventually overwhelm it.  They warned that northerners were continuously agitating among the slaves, promoting runaways and provoking rebellions.  They complained about northern assistance to runaway slaves and, ironically, thereby helped publicize the Underground Railroad to potential runaways.  Essentially feeding their own fears while trying to provoke the fears of their southern white compatriots, Fire Eaters reinforced the conclusion with which they had started: that the South must make a pre-emptive move to secede.

Fire Eaters were also afraid of the potential spread of abolitionism among southern whites if they stayed within the Union.  Most southern whites were hurt by the slave system.  Only some 25% of white southerners owned any slaves and fewer than 10% of these owned over 75% of the slaves.  This small minority of large-scale slave owners lived on big plantations and monopolized most of the best land in the South.  Given their use of slave labor and their ownership of the most fertile land, these plantation owners were able to produce larger crops at lower cost than the mass of small farmers.  As a result, small farmers were paid lower prices for their crops and made less money than if they weren’t competing against slave labor.  Similarly, southern white craftsmen and white workers earned less for their labor because they were competing against slave labor.  Southern whites before the Civil War had a lower standard of living and a lower life expectancy than both northern whites and northern blacks.

Fire Eaters countered economic arguments against slavery with racial and cultural appeals.  They stoked fears among whites of blacks taking over the South if slavery was abolished and portrayed abolitionism as a clear and present danger, especially after the election of Lincoln.  They also made the protection of slavery the focal point of a broad-based opposition to what they portrayed as liberal northern attitudes and policies that favored big government, high taxes, wasteful social and economic programs, costly public education, free speech, egalitarian gender relations, and other hot-button political and cultural issues. Fire Eaters portrayed themselves as the protectors of a romantic conservative tradition that was being undermined by northern liberalism, and they portrayed threats to the expansion of slavery as threats to this southern way of life. White people were harangued to support this heroic tradition by defending slavery.

Fire Eaters compounded their assertion of southern cultural superiority with an inflated faith in southern military prowess.  They believed that the South was better prepared militarily than the North, since southerners were a larger percentage of the officer corps of the United States Army and a larger percentage of southerners had guns and used guns both to hunt animals and to defend themselves against slaves.  So, if northerners wanted to fight against southern secession, the South would whip them.  Fire Eaters also believed that the South would get support from England in any war against the North since England was so dependent on southern cotton.

At the beginning of their campaign, Fire Eaters had hoped that the Wilmot Proviso, which prohibited slavery in territories gained in the late 1840’s from Mexico, would be enacted by Congress in 1850 because it might serve as a provocation for southern secession.  Thereafter, they sought to goad South Carolina, historically the most radically pro-slavery colony and state, into secession.  They hoped that this would provoke a northern overreaction similar to the British reaction to the Boston Tea Party and, thereby, provoke a general southern insurrection similar to the American Revolution.  With the election of Lincoln, they hysterically portrayed the situation as a now or never crisis.  This time their cries of “Wolf” worked.

With South Carolina leading the way, seven states seceded in the aftermath of the election of 1860 but even then pro-union southerners such as Senator Crittenden of Kentucky tried to propose a compromise that would bring those states back and keep others from seceding.  Those efforts were thwarted by southern radicals and finally ended with the attack engineered by Fire Eaters in secessionist South Carolina on the federal Fort Sumter.  This attack was ironically portrayed by Fire Eaters as an act of aggression by the North on the South.  With the South ostensibly under attack, other slave states seceded from the Union and the Civil War was on.

As with the American Revolution, the war known in the North as the Civil War but in the South as the War for Southern Independence was the result of an assiduous campaign by a determined minority that believed it knew better than the majority what was best for their country.  But the results of this attempted revolution were very different from those of the last and the war to save slavery became the war that ended slavery.    

Note: This issue is discussed at greater length with citations and quotations in the chapter entitled “Choice #9: The Coming of the Civil War: Why Didn’t the North Secede and Why Did the South?” of my recently published book Was the American Revolution a Mistake? Reaching Students and Reinforcing Patriotism through Teaching History as Choice (AuthorHouse, 2013).

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Would the United States still have slavery if the South had not seceded in 1861? Part I: Shouldn’t the North have seceded from the Union instead of the South?

Would the United States still have slavery if the South had not seceded in 1861?  Part I: Shouldn’t the North have seceded from the Union instead of the South?

Burton Weltman

Conventional histories invariably portray the secession of the South from the Union as an almost inevitable response to Abraham Lincoln’s election as President in 1860.  In fact, there was a stronger argument for the North to secede in 1861 and very little reason for the South to do so.

The decade of the 1850’s was an almost complete disaster from the point of view of anti-slavery northerners, starting with what they saw as an infamous appeasement of the South in the so-called Compromise of 1850 and ending with a complete abdication to slavery in the Dred Scott Case of 1857.  As a result of these laws and legal decisions, anti-slavery northerners felt that no one, white or black, was safe from enslavement and no place would be free from slavery.

The Compromise of 1850 both expanded the territory within which slavery could legally exist and contained a Fugitive Slave Act.  This Act provided that anyone could be accused by a slave-catcher of being a fugitive slave and then had to prove that he or she was not a slave.  If the person could not present this proof, he or she could be taken away as a slave.  Since many “black” slaves were the product of sexual relations between white masters and slave women, many “blacks” had complexions that were as light, and even lighter, than those of “whites.”  As a result, a free white person could be accused of being an escaped black slave and if the person could not prove that he or she was not a slave, the person could be taken away as a slave.

The safeguards provided in the Fugitive Slave Act against mistakenly identifying a freeman as a slave were not very safe.  If someone was accused of being a fugitive slave, the person had the right to a hearing in which the person could try to prove that he or she was not a slave.  Those hearings were not, however, conducted in a regular court with a judge but in front of a special United States Commissioner who would be paid five dollars for each case in which a person was found to be a freeman and ten dollars for every case in which a person was found to be a slave.  As such, the system encouraged Commissioners to find that people were slaves.

Finally, under the Fugitive Slave Act, every northern free person was required to help capture fugitive slaves, and was thereby required to be a participant in and a supporter of the slave system.  The law made every northerner a servant of southern slave owners for purposes of keeping the southerners’ slaves in captivity.

The Compromise of 1850 was seen by anti-slavery northerners as the subjugation of the North by the South.  In subjecting white people to the possibility of being taken as fugitive slaves, and making every northerner an accomplice in the slave system, the law was seen by northerners, even by many who were not against slavery, as an incursion of the slave system into the North.

If the Compromise of 1850 represented an incursion of slavery into the free states, the Dred Scott decision of 1857 represented an invasion of slavery into the North and an end to freedom in the United States.  In striking down the Missouri Compromise and holding as a matter of constitutional law that a person may take his property, including his slave property, anywhere in the United States, the Supreme Court effectively held that there was no such thing as a free state.

If, as the Supreme Court held, a southern slave owner could take his slaves into a northern “free” state and retain title and control of them as slaves, then slavery was seemingly legal and protected by the Constitution everywhere in the United States.  In sum, the United States was a slave country in its entirety and only a Constitutional amendment overturning the Dred Scott decision could change the situation.

While the election of Lincoln as President in 1860 was a victory for anti-slavery advocates, it was a hollow victory that could have had no effect on the status of slavery in the country and that provided no hope whatsoever that slavery could be limited in the country let alone eliminated.

Lincoln got only some 40% of the votes in the election of 1860, almost all from the North.  The other 60% of  the votes were divided among three other pro-slavery candidates.  Since Lincoln’s Republican Party was a regional party that was strong only in the North, there was little hope that it could become a national party that could influence slavery politics in the country as a whole.

The South had a big advantage in national politics because under the Constitution each slave was counted as three-fifths of a person for purposes of allocating members of the House of Representatives and presidential votes in the Electoral College.  Under this system, eight of the first fifteen presidents of the United States were from the South and the others were essentially elected by the South.  Five of the nine Supreme Court Justices during the 1850’s were southerners which meant that the Constitution was firmly controlled by proponents of slavery.  Despite Lincoln’s election, there was no reason to believe that this would change.

In any case, a Constitutional amendment affecting slavery seemed foreclosed forever.  A Constitutional amendment must be approved by 2/3 of the House and the Senate and by 3/4 of the states.  Congress in 1860 was about evenly divided between pro-slavery and anti-slavery advocates.  This gave no hope of getting the 2/3 majorities in both the House and the Senate needed for proposing a Constitutional amendment affecting slavery.  Even more important, there were thirty-four states in the United States in 1861 of which fifteen were slave states.  There was no way that a Constitutional amendment limiting or eliminating slavery was going to be approved by 3/4 of the states in 1861 or at any time thereafter.

In the face of these facts, influential anti-slavery northerners such as William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Theodore Parker, Horace Greely and Ralph Waldo Emerson called for the separation of the North from the South in order for the North to escape what they saw as the stranglehold of “The Slave Power” over the United States.

So why didn’t the North secede?  There were probably a combination of reasons.  One reason was patriotism  — the belief in American’s preeminent role in bringing peace, prosperity, liberty and democracy to the world — of which there was an upsurge in the North during the mid-nineteenth century before the Civil War.

Economics was another reason.  Southern and northern economies were intertwined.  Southern cotton fed northern mills and northern food crops fed southern slaves.  Cotton was also the major American export which paid for goods imported from Europe.

Another reason was democratic idealism which Lincoln articulated in his Gettysburg Address: the desire to prove that democracy could work and endure.  The prevailing opinion in Europe at that time was that democracy could not last, that democratic countries would inevitably descend into factional and sectional conflicts and eventually fall apart.  Northerners needed to prove that theory was wrong.

Still another reason was geopolitical.  If the North seceded and the slave South became a separate nation, the South would likely become a dependency and ally of England.  That would leave the North surrounded by English Canada and a South dependent on England.  Since the United States and England were not on friendly terms — the United States had tried to stir up Canadian rebels for independence during the 1830’s and had engaged in a vehement dispute with England over the boundaries of the Pacific Northwest during the 1840’s — this was not a desirable prospect.

Finally, there were those who did not want to run away from the fight over slavery and thereby leave the southern slaves in the lurch.

Who do you think they had the better of the argument?  Should the North have seceded in 1861?

Note: This issue is discussed at greater length with citations and quotations in the chapter entitled “Choice #9: The Coming of the Civil War: Why Didn’t the North Secede and Why Did the South?” of my recently published book Was the American Revolution a Mistake? Reaching Students and Reinforcing Patriotism through Teaching History as Choice (AuthorHouse, 2013).

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What to think about Thomas Jefferson’s slaves?: Distinguishing between Questioning, Criticizing and Condemning People and Events in Approaching History as Choice.

Burton Weltman

In approaching history as a process of people making choices, I think it is important to distinguish between questioning, criticizing and condemning people and events.  To question is not necessarily to criticize.  To criticize is not necessarily to condemn.  And to condemn in part is not necessarily to condemn in whole.  These are distinctions that we make in our own lives and that are applicable to history as well.

Questioning is an almost automatic human response.  We are constantly evaluating and reevaluating things we have done, things other people have done, and things in general all around us.  Whether it’s a businessperson evaluating a sales campaign, a government official evaluating a public policy, or a Little League coach evaluating a strategic move, we are continually looking at decisions we have made and asking whether we could have done better.

But to question is not necessarily to criticize.  Your answer may be that the decision being questioned was right or was at least the best choice under the circumstances.  Questioning a decision is a way of clarifying the situation so that you can either reinforce your initial decision or revise it if necessary.  As such, in asking historical questions such as “Was the American Revolution a mistake,” a question that George Washington among others repeatedly asked in the aftermath of the Revolution, you are not necessarily saying that it was a mistake.  Your answer may be, as Washington’s ultimately was, “No, it was the right thing to do.”

Criticizing is not the same thing as condemning.  To criticize something as a mistake is not to condemn it or the people who supported it as bad or evil.  We all make mistakes, sometimes even when we have the best intentions, the best available information, and the greatest decision-making skills.  As such, if you were to decide, as many of the Founders did, that the American Revolution was in some respects or even entirely a mistake, you would not necessarily be condemning the Revolution or the Revolutionaries.  The Founders could have been mistaken in making the Revolution or in some aspects of making the Revolution, as Washington among other Founders sometimes thought, but could still have been good people trying to do a good thing.

You can condemn something or someone in part without condemning the thing or the person entirely.  That is, a person might do something bad or evil without being a bad or evil person.  Many Founders, for example, supported the American Revolution because they were afraid that Britain was moving toward abolishing slavery in the colonies as it had already been abolished in England.  In the opinion of almost everyone now and most people during the Revolution  (don’t forget, as most textbooks do, to include the slaves when you total up the “people” during the Revolution), slavery was evil and supporting slavery was evil.  But that doesn’t mean that everything slave owners such as Thomas Jefferson did was evil or that they were evil people.

What do you think?