Such incendiary literature
Speaking of Andrew Jackson and slavery and the Civil War…here’s some background.
Jackson’s presidency coincided with the formation of state and national antislavery societies, the publication of William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator , and the expansion of abolitionist efforts to awaken the nation’s conscience. Although abolitionists focused primarily on nonpolitical tactics, their activities inevitably intruded into politics. During the last two years of the Jackson administration, therefore, the slavery issue was reintroduced to American politics for the first time since the fiery Missouri debates of 1819–1821.
In the summer of 1835, shortly after the Democratic convention adjourned, antislavery forces organized a campaign to distribute propaganda tracts through the mails to the South. The southern response was predictable. Southern state legislatures passed laws to keep out such “incendiary literature,” and many southern postmasters refused to deliver abolitionist mail. At Charleston, South Carolina, on 29 July, a mob of some three hundred incensed citizens stormed the post office to seize abolitionist material. Although persuaded to disperse, a few Carolinians returned that night and took possession of the literature, which they burned the following evening on the Charleston parade grounds.
The Jackson administration’s handling of this controversy has generally been interpreted as evidence of its southern orientation. According to one account, the Democratic party’s pro-South and pro-slavery bias was the “darker side to Jacksonian Democracy.” The Jackson administration certainly was hostile to abolitionism and any efforts to disturb the South’s “peculiar institution.” It showed a continuing solicitude for southern opinion and interests, and it embraced the racial tenets of “herrenvolk democracy,” which affirmed the equality of whites and their superiority over non-whites. Jackson himself was a substantial planter, owning many slaves, and while he insisted that they be treated “humanely,” he showed no disposition to disturb the legal and constitutional arrangements that maintained the slave system. Yet Jackson’s position on the slavery issue was more complex than this.
The Democratic party was a national organization, and northern attitudes about slavery and civil liberties had to be given weight. Moreover, Jackson’s denunciation of abolitionism did not signify that he considered slavery a positive or permanent good. Rather, he thought that by maintaining sectional calm, Providence would, in time, somehow eradicate the evil.
Maybe that’s what Trump is trying to think of when he says Jackson was “angry” about all this pre-Civil War controversy: he wanted everybody to stop fighting over it and just kick back and relax, because Providence would end slavery in its own good time.
Easy for him, of course, since he wasn’t a slave and wasn’t in any danger of becoming a slave. It may be that the issue was more urgent for people who were slaves.
Upon learning of the situation in Charleston, Jackson angrily denounced the abolitionists as “monsters” and suggested that those who subscribed to the papers have their names recorded by the postmaster and exposed in the public newspapers. Yet Jackson did not justify mob action or the complete interdiction of abolitionist mailings. He denounced the “spirit of mob-law” as evidenced in Charleston and thought that the instigators should be “checked and punished.” Reminding Kendall that federal officials had “no power to prohibit anything from being transported in the mails that is authorized by the law,” he suggested that the papers be delivered only to those who were “really subscribers.”
The mails controversy became a leading question when Congress convened in December 1835. In his annual message, Jackson noted the “painful excitement” caused by the abolitionist tracts and recommended that Congress prohibit their circulation in the South.
If the abolitionists had just shut up, there never would have been a Civil War. There might still be slavery, but there wouldn’t have been a civil war.
Jackson deplored the increased sectional bitterness that marked national politics during his presidency. He urged Americans to remember that the foundations of the Constitution and the Union were laid in the “affections of the people” and in their “fraternal attachment” as members of one political family. His sentiments were heartfelt, but time would demonstrate that his appeals for moderation, for unionism, and for patience in awaiting Providence’s will were ineffectual nostrums for the great moral and legal issues posed by slavery.
The increased sectional bitterness was over the issue of slavery. The South was not about to end slavery, gradually or otherwise. A happy-clappy solution wasn’t available.
God, this sounds familiar. The abolitionist tracts upset and offended people, so they were controversial and incendiary, and caused the excitement. Sort of like cartoons today…or saying something negative about the hijab…or having a nuanced conversation around trans issues…
Who the hell decided that only those who have the “right” opinions are entitled to speak, and the rest are “monsters”? I don’t think it was Jackson – that attitude certainly pre-exists his rather incendiary presidency.
Increased sectional bitterness sure seems familiar as well… I don’t think we’re headed towards civil war but*something* is gonna happen…
Something already has happened. The “increased sectional bitterness” prevents people from noticing that democracy gave way to oligarchy some time ago.
iknklast, you asked who decided that only those with the ‘right’ opinion are entitled to speak; http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2017/04/28/how-much-free-speech-do-you-want-for-free/
Clear a half-hour for the comments. You’re very welcome.
Yeah, PZ is dead to me due to that bullshit and his commenters may as well be left wing Breitbart…
BKiSA – I do still peek in on PZ, but I’ve been increasingly disgusted with his inability to do nuance on a number of issues. And this is about the only place where I actually read comments regularly, let alone would consider myself a regular poster. Even on WHTM, there is often too much virtue sigaling in the comments, and I leave it alone more often than not.
Maybe that’s what Trump is trying to think of when he says Jackson was “angry” about all this pre-Civil War controversy: he wanted everybody to stop fighting over it and just kick back and relax, because Providence would end slavery in its own good time.
This is an idea that was getting pushed on the talking-head circuit a little while back, before the primaries, actually–that the Civil War was a waste, because slavery was going to end, eventually. Sooner or later, in any case. You know, because of the Invisible Hand of the Market (no, seriously, it’s put down to market forces and the idea that slavery is woefully inefficient for anything other than plantation-style farming).
The conceit is that the suffering of the war, and the wounds inflicted upon the nation’s psyche by the “Brother’s War”, were too great a price to pay for what ‘would have happened, anyway, eventually’. It usually is accompanied by an alt-history fiction that suggests that without the animosity generated by the war, all the ugliness of white resentment and Jim Crow and segregation would’ve been avoided, too.
Of course, this assumes that someday in 1875 or so, suddenly every state in the South decided, ‘Hey, let’s ditch slavery, and we’ll make all the slaves full citizens.” It’s absurdly Pollyanna, in the way that only the most privileged can ever afford to be.
The best rebuttal I read came in the form of another alt-history short story, actually. In that world, the Civil War was actually averted. Instead, slavery was allowed to peter out slowly. The problem was, as it became too expensive to keep slaves, they weren’t so much ‘freed’ as ‘abandoned’. So you had a bunch of unpersons walking around, trying to make their way the best they could, which often means crime.
The Upright Citizens of the Old South couldn’t have that, so they passed a law stating that since slaves were property, a ‘loosed’ slave’s actions were attributable to the owner. But of course, this still left the issue of how to deal with the economics of the situation. Fortunately, a corporation came forth with a wonderful idea.
For an upfront charge from the slave-owner, and then a modest upkeep fee from the states, they would open and operate special camps, where slave-owners could off-load their unwanted property. The occupants of the camps would be segregated by sex, so that this would be the last generation, and once they all died of old age, well, the problem would be solved.
Of course, the first problem is the same one with most private/public enterprises. The corporation understated the actual expenses of feeding, caring for (and confining) the slaves, so they had to cut back on accommodations. And then there was the additional problem that these cunning slaves kept managing to figure out how to have babies. That the skin tone of these children was typically somewhere between the mothers’ and the guards’ didn’t ever get actively discussed.
So the upfront money’s run out (now that no new slaves are being off-loaded), but the state money isn’t keeping up with the actual costs. They even have a couple escapes, because guard staffing was finally cut back.
Well, that’s the last straw–something had to be done. So the states came up with a quiet solution to the problem. One might even call it a Final Solution.
The actual story takes place about 20 years later, as a photographer is going around to the old camps, before they can be destroyed, and documents evidence of the horrors that happened there. And right near the end, the narrator has a vision of the horrors of the Civil War of our timeline–of Gettysburg, and Andersonville; of the invention of the gatling gun and the metal warship–and realizes, “That would’ve been a better way.”
If I could remember the name of the story, or the anthology I read it in, I’d post it here.
iknklast, I (under the ‘nym ‘Nobody Special’) was once accused on WHTM of ‘painting virtue’. I still have no idea what it was supposed to mean, and the only reply I got when asking for clarification of the term was that not understanding it doesn’t mean I can’t be guilty of it! I don’t bother commenting there anymore; the comments section seems to have become ‘Pharyngula-lite’.