This isn’t new (Fischer’s book has been out for years), but it may be interesting to those who haven’t encountered it previously:
It’s not hard to pick up echoes of these different “freedom ways” in today’s debates. Probably each of us finds some one of the four more attractive than the others. Very approximately speaking, modern liberalism descends from the first and third of Fischer’s styles, modern conservatism from the second and fourth.
It should also be noted that the War Between The States was a war between the Puritans and Quakers in the north against the Cavaliers and Scots-Irish in the south, though the Cavaliers were more likely to be slaveholders, and the latter were just fighting for their states and pride. Modern “liberals” are indeed descended from the Puritans — they’re just puritanical in a more secular way.
I thought the Civil War was treason in defense of slavery.
The Constitution defines treason as “levying war against them” and the stated reason for South Carolina’s seccesion was that Abraham Lincoln would abolish slavery. (See here – scroll down to the middle.
I thought the Civil War was treason in defense of slavery.
That’s a dramatic oversimplification of the cause. As I said, the red necks weren’t fighting for slavery.
As I said, the red necks weren’t fighting for slavery.
Oh, no, they weren’t fighting for slavery, they were fighting for their rights. Rights which happened to include slavery.
the red necks weren’t fighting for slavery. The smart ones, like in eastern Tennessee and then western Virginia, sat the war out.
Many of the not-so-smart ones allowed their slave-owning leadership to lead them into war for the leadership’s personal gain.
For the record, I consider myself more of a Quaker liberal than a Puritan liberal. For whatever that is worth. 😉
IMHO, Hillary Clinton is a variety of Puritan and I had great fun pointing that out (on occasion) during the Obama / Clinton primaries while also asserting that Obama is more Quaker than Puritan.
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And yes indeed, most Scots-Irish weren’t fighting for slavery but I also do not believe the Cavaliers would have relinquished slavery without significant warfare and a divided nation, part free and part slave was unsustainable.
Thus the Civil War was pretty much a war between the Cavaliers and the Quakers / Puritans with the Scots-Irish being on the border, in between.
The West Virginian Scot-Irish also demonstrate that not all of them were pro-South.
My town in Illinois has historic homes that were way stations on the Underground Railroad and when I was in Detroit in March for the CCHA hockey tournament I spent several minutes contemplating the Underground Railroad monument that faces the giant new casino across the river in Windsor.
No way would the northern Quakers/Puritans have accepted Dred Scot and mandatory return of runaway slaves and no way would the Cavaliers have remained in a Union that refused to return runaway slaves.
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Finally, Scots-Irish are exactly the kind of people we need to initiate the permanent settlement of space and that informs my belief that “a people” rather than “a nation state” is the better sub-set of humanity to undertake that mission.
Rights which happened to include slavery.
Yes, though in most of their cases, that was a theoretical right, since few of them could afford slaves.
The Scots-Irish (more accurately, the British Borderers) actually split about 50-50 Union vs. Confederate. A lot of them lives north of the Virginia border, or in West Virginia, and of the ones who lived in Confederate territory, many still fought for the Union, and many more dodged the draft, avoided Confederate taxes, and generally were a pain in the ass to the Confederate government. (Some of this was shown nicely in Frazier’s Cold Mountain — read the book, it’s better than the movie.) This was not ideological, the Scots-Irish are generally a pain in the ass to any government that tries to claim authority over them, including the ones they create themselves. Natural liberty kind of works like that.
William Frehling estimates
that for every five white southerners who fought for the Confederacy, one fought for the Union. Most of these were highland Scots-Irish. In general, they fought against whichever government was closer to them and more likely to tax them.
I always had to laugh at a point in one of the early Joan Baez live-performance albums. She sings the hillbilly moonshine classic Copper Kettle, and when she gets to the line “we ain’t paid no whiskey tax/ since 1792” the audience cheers wildly. The audence was almost certainly college and urban liberals, and the people and sentiment they are cheering are exactly those at which they have sneered for decades, most recently in regard to the Tea Parties.
Interesting. Maybe I should tell everything they’re just racist against the Scots-Irish. 😀
Or intolerant to Taoists.
I really don’t believe in sin laws or hierarchies or anything. Just say no to puritanical Confucianism! Which is what the modern democrats are all about….
There’s a fairly simple test as to what part of the Confederate cause was about slavery. The Confederate leaders were offered several chances to secure independence — in 1862, when the Lord Palmerston made it clear that Britain would recognize the Confederacy and challenge the Union blockade if and only if the Confederates would commit to a gradual, compensated emancipation of slaves. Britain had made abolition its principal moral cause throughout the 19th Century and there’s no way they could have settled for less, given their domestic politics.
The second chance came in 1864-65 when Lincoln’s re-election and the outcomes of Gettysburg and Vicksburg made it obvious that defeat was getting hard to avoid. General Patrick Cleburne, an authentic Southern cultural-nationalist, made detailed, realistic proposal to raise a large army of slaves which would have greatly improved the South’s chances of winning or at least negotiating an outcome more to its liking. Of course, this also would have resulted in the end of slavery, again gradual and emancipated. The proposal was circulated widely but secretly within Confederate army and government circles, and the answer was, again, no. Too many high Confederates felt that slavery was, at a minimum, an integral part of what they were fighting for. Cleburne was killed in action and the Confederacy suffered its fate, although a small number of black troops were deployed in defense of Richmond at the very end of the war.
Jim,
Divided families, with some brothers donning the Blue and others the Gray, is (was?) a common theme taught with respect to the American Civil War.
How many Puritans and/or Quakers fought for the South and how many Cavaliers remained loyal to the North? My understanding is that few among those groups crossed to the “other side”
On the other hand, would it be fair to assert that the Scots-Irish were the group most divided internally by the war?
Jim – Lincoln also met with the Confederacy in 1864, and offered peace with compensation for slavery – see here.
The offer was rejected out-of-hand.
Any attempted defense of the Civil War must include a defense of slavery, because slavery was a key and critical reason for the war.
On the other hand, would it be fair to assert that the Scots-Irish were the group most divided internally by the war? Probably.
Very few Puritans and Quakers fought for the South, but some of the coastal communities in Virginia (mainly, around Norfolk) remained Unionist, probably because they were heavily tied into the Eastern coastal trade and relatively cut off from the inland South. More Southern-origin Naval officers stayed in the Union service than Army, I believe. New Orleans and Texas also had pockets of loyalists, including Texas Germans, and Sam Houston, who put up an American flag on his lawn and, pistols in hand, defied anybody to take it down. (Nobody did.)
It’s absolutely true that the Scots-Irish were the most divided — most of the “brother-vs.-brother” stories come from the border. My own family legends include a story of that sort — they were living in the Cumberland, MD – Bedford County, PA area at that time. Hard to verify, though.
Freehling’s numbers suggest that the Scots-Irish numbers in the south alone come close to a 50-50 split.
Any attempted defense of the Civil War must include a defense of slavery, because slavery was a key and critical reason for the war.
I agree with that, but your initial post was a trite simplication of what was going on. For example, what would happen to the South’s economy when slavery is outlawed and all those former slaves become voters? It took them more than a century to recover when that did happen. Now maybe the recovery would have been a whole lot faster without a total war and the racist backlash of the post-Reformation, “Jim Crow” era, but it still would have been a rocky road.
No matter how wrong they were, my belief is that many of them saw any compromise on slavery as the end of their society.
I suppose that has some interesting parallels to modern society. There must be some people who take stances opposite what they believe in because they think the preservation of society is more important at least in the short term.
Karl – considering the southern political class refused to consider gradual abolition, I have no sympathy for them or their society.
What does it mean that I find the 3rd and to some extent the 4th of the listed liberties attractive, but the first, and second abhorrent?
The Quakers, at least in Virginia, had been doctrinally opposed to slavery for 100 years before the Civil War began. I had ancestors who were Quakers at that time — though some of their kin were kicked out of the Quaker community for keeping slaves.
That your cultural heritage derives from someplace between, roughly, Pennsylvania and Kansas; think William Penn -> William Allen White … my own reading through the detailed lists of folkways in Albion’s Seed had me nodding in near-perfect agreement with the Quakers and shaking my head in disgust or exasperation with the others. The important thing to get out of Fischer, of course, is that there are a whole bunch of people out there who think differently, and it’s very important to understand them even if you think they’re nuts. ;^)
“The important thing to get out of Fischer, of course, is that there are a whole bunch of people out there who think differently, and it’s very important to understand them even if you think they’re nuts”
And of course, the political lesson is that the Founders chose a strongly federalist framework for the constitution because they knew that there could never be a Union-wide consensus on many significant issues. Their memory of the English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution – closer in time to them than the American Civil War is to us – taught them that for one side to attempt to shove their beliefs down the throat of the other (the sides were pretty much the same as here) is disastrous. These differences are deep-seated.
The current administration seems to be bent on ignoring this lesson. “Don’t know much about history” seems to be their theme song.
After reading a lot of newspapers from that time period, it seems to me that they just wanted to fight, both sides. After four years and three quarters of a million dead, they got tired of fighting.