Book Review: American Nations

Well, I wrapped up Colin Woodard’s American Nations: A History of the Eleven Regional Cultures of North America over the weekend.  It’s been only about a month since I even learned of the book, and given that I’ve already made reference to it a half-dozen times on this blog, it is fairly safe to say that I really enjoyed reading it, although that is not to say that I was necessarily persuaded of the entirety of the book’s premise.

As usual, so as not to spoil the book for anyone who intends to read it for themselves and draw their own conclusions, my thoughts on American Nations are below the fold.

Aristocracy and Slavery vs. Democracy and Freedom

In The Atlantic’s special issue commemorating the 150^th anniversary of the Civil War, Ta-Nehisi Coates has an article titled “Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War?”  Coates is an amateur Civil War scholar and he devotes the article in large part to refuting the convenient fiction that the Civil War was fought over anything other than the issue of slavery.  It really is very good and I highly recommend clicking over to read it. 

This passage in particular caught my attention:

The Civil War marks the first great defense of democracy and the modern West.  Its legacy lies in everything from women’s suffrage to the revolutions now sweeping the Middle East.  It was during the Civil War that the heady principles of the Enlightenment were first, and most spectacularly, called fully to account.

In our present time, to express the view of the enslaved – to say that the Civil War was a significant battle in the long war against bondage and for government by the people – is to compromise the comfortable narrative.  It is to remind us that some of our own forefathers once explicitly rejected the republic to which they’d pledged themselves, and dreamed up another country, with slavery not merely as a bug, but as its very premise.  (emphasis added)

No doubt that this resonated with me because I am still working my way through Colin Woodard’s American Nations. 

AsI mentioned when I first started reading the book, Woodard argues that from the very start the country was divided by the northern states’ Germanic idea of “Freiheit” and the southern states’ Latin idea of “libertas.”  Essentially, Freiheit (“freedom”) held that all people are born free and equal before the law, that they all possess at least certain minimal rights that have to be mutually respected, and that they are capable of self-governance.  Conversely, libertas (“liberty”) held that most people are born into bondage, that liberties are granted as a privilege, that most people are not capable of self-governance, and that only a very few, governing elite could or should enjoy the full blessings of liberty.

Woodard returns to this theme in his chapter outlining how the states subsequently split over the issue of slavery.  Woodard shows that the secessionist states most wedded to the concept of libertas had embraced it in order to justify their slaveholding, and this embrace inexorably led them to the idea that even more people should be enslaved:

There is no question that the Deep South seceded and fought the Civil War to defend slavery, and its leaders made no secret of this motive.  Slavery, they argued ad nauseum, was the foundation for a virtuous, biblically sanctioned social system superior to that of the free states.

When nineteenth-century Deep Southerners spoke of defending their “traditions,” “heritage,” and “way of life,” they proudly identified the enslavement of others as the centerpiece of all three.  Indeed, many of their leaders even argued that all lower-class people should be enslaved, regardless of race, for their own good.

. . . .  James Henry Hammond, former governor of South Carolina, published  a seminal book arguing that enslaved laborers were happier, fitter, and better looked after than their “free” counterparts in Britain and the North, who were ruthlessly exploited by industrial capitalists.  Free societies were therefore unstable, as there was always a danger that the exploited would rise up, creating “a fearful crisis in Republican institutions.”  Slaves, by contrast, were kept in their place by violent means and denied the right to vote, resist, or testify, ensuring the “foundation of every well-designed and durable” republic.  Enslavement of the white working class would be, in his words, “a most glorious act of emancipation.”

[snip]

George Fitzhugh, scion of one of Virginia’s oldest families, became the [Tidewater] region’s proslavery standard-bearer.  In his voluminous writings, Fitzhugh endorsed and expanded upon Hammond’s argument to enslave all poor people.  Aristocrats, he explained, were really “the nation’s magna carta” because they owned so much and had the “affection which all men feel for what belongs to them,” which naturally led them to protect and provide for “wives, children, and slaves.”  Fitzhugh, whose books were enormously popular, declared he was “quite as intent on abolishing Free Society as you [Northerners] are on abolishing slavery.”

Placed within this historical context, Coates’s statement that the Civil War called the very principles of the Enlightenment into account by requiring that violent action be taken against bondage and in favor of self-governance seems all the more exact.  The Civil War was the most violent conflict in the eternal political struggle between – in Jefferson’s words – “aristocrats and democrats,” and in 1865 the idea of democracy won by sheer force of arms.

More Thoughts Re: UC-Davis Part 1

By now, this video of the UC-Davis cop pepper-spraying non-violent student protesters has become ubiquitous:

 In discussions with others about this incident, at least two people have made the same remark to me about the cop’s flourishing of the pepper-spray, right before he starts using it, for what he clearly feels is his audience:

PERSON A:   I think he was trying to get on record that he had warned the kids what was coming if they didn’t leave.

PERSON B:    You just know that his excuse is going to be that he told the protesters what he was going to do if they didn’t get up and leave, so it’s their fault that he had to pepper-spray them.

Now, I agree with these persons’ assessments of what we see in the video and what it is the cop thought he was doing.  But what I find extremely disturbing about all this is the underlying assumption that goes into the cop’s little performance.  He clearly anticipates – and is probably correct in doing so – that the average American citizen will agree that if the protesters didn’t comply with his order to clear the premises after he threatened them with violence then they deserve to get hit with pepper-spray (or maybe tazed, or perhaps beaten with nightsticks).

But this mindset is insane.  I don’t recall ever voting to give cops the right to abuse people for failure to comply with an order.  Arrest them, sure, slip the little zip-cuffs on them and haul them away to be bound before a magistrate – that is the very essence of peaceful protest, of civil disobedience.  But when did we decide that – before doing that – the police are perfectly justified in physically abusing peaceful protesters?

This seems to me an example of the idea of “liberty” – i.e., you have only the privileges society affords you, which can be taken away from you at any time by the people responsible for enforcing society’s dictates – trumping the idea of “freedom” – i.e., you have an absolute right to exercise certain prerogatives that precedes society’s dictates, and society may not abridge these rights.  (See here for more on the liberty/freedom distinction).

And that is very dangerous, because it can only work to enshrine the status quo.  While enshrining and perpetuating the status quo is the goal of any system, it cannot be the final goal of our society.  If it were, we’d still have segregation.  Hell, if it were, we might still have slavery.

Sometimes events conspire to prove that the status quo is unjust and inequitable and needs to be changed.  And that is when the freedom to challenge the status quo has to trump society’s interest in maintaining “business as usual.”

OWS: Liberty vs. Freedom

Real Life stuff and trying to keep up with what is going on with the Occupy movement has delayed me getting into American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, but I picked it up again yesterday. 

The author, Colin Woodard, begins by describing in chronological order the origin of the oldest of these cultures: El Norte (the northern portion of Spain’s American empire, essentially a 100 mile strip running along the modern U.S./Mexico border and – at the time – up into California), New France (the settlement of eastern Canada and, as an outpost and afterthought, Louisiana), Tidewater (English planters in Maryland, Virginia, southern Delaware, and northern North Carolina), and Yankeedom (the New England states, especially after the Puritans’ Massachusetts Bay Colony established dominion over them following Cromwell’s victory in the English Civil War).

In his description of the Tidewater culture, Woodard begins foreshadowing the United States’ own Civil War by offering a cultural/historical explanation for the starkly different traditions that would develop between the states.  He describes 17^th century Tidewater as essentially nothing more than a place of huge manorial estates without a single actual town to be found there.  He explains that each such estate was in essence a perfect fiefdom, in which the planter whose estate it was had complete and absolutely authority – including that of life and death – over all persons.

He then attempts to explain how a culture of such authoritarianism could produce champions of republicanism like Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and James Madison.