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9780743234993: Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America
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The first comprehensive history of the Confederacy published in two decades moves beyond military events to fill in the blanks about legal structures, politics, social structures, and the economy of the South during the Civil War. Reprint.

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Recensione:
Jeffrey D. Wert author of Gettysburg: Day Three A brilliant, perceptive, and masterful study of the Confederacy. Look Away! engrosses and it enlightens. It is a splendid book.

Jay Winik National Review An important resource for students of the Civil War South...Davis makes a convincing case that the Confederacy at home, much like its northern counterpart, was often dangerously divided.

Gary W. Gallagher The Washington Post [A] solid...comprehensive history of the Confederacy.
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Chapter 1: Guiding the Whirlwind

A wag might argue that the origins of the Confederacy dated to the philosophy of Aristotle, who proposed that differences arising from race and regional origin and birth created natural distinctions between peoples and their inherent abilities. Yet there is substance in the case beyond Aristotle's speculations on human variations. Writing twenty-two centuries before the breakup of the Union, the Greek philosopher penned in his Politics a discussion of what he called "one of the true forms of government," a limited monarchy. There were four varieties, he suggested. The first was that of the Spartans, wherein the king held office, but not absolute power, by birth or election. The second more closely resembled tyranny, yet it was legal and hereditary, established by ancient ancestry, and unchallenged by the people, indeed willingly accepted by them. A third was the dictatorship elected by the people, and thus willingly imposed upon themselves, an office held sometimes for life or else only for a stated term of years. The dictator's power might be despotic, even absolute, yet still he held it at the will of the people. The last form of limited monarch was the hereditary "heroic" king, who held office by virtue of his being able to provide for the people what they could not provide for themselves: organization, land perhaps, leadership in war, community, and more.

The only difference among them was in their degree of sovereignty. All fit in with most of the ideas of the new democracy that appeared in Greece 150 years earlier. No king wielded unlimited power, yet each ruled by some democratic acknowledgment of his superior skills or accomplishments. All were elected (or at least popularly accepted) and in three of Aristotle's scenarios the kingship was hereditary, suggesting that certain families were destined to rule by bloodline and natural gifts. All of the philosopher's leaders, in short, were elective dictators either for set terms or for life, yet under their rule the people had some rights, could speak out, even remove their king if they so chose, and by legal rather than revolutionary means. Authority was questionable, and kings needed to persuade or demonstrate to their subjects that they deserved to rule. Of the four, the last, the heroic monarchs, seemed clearly Aristotle's preference, for they were benefactors of the people in return for their high status. They took command in war, and presided over the sectarian ceremonies as their societies worshipped their own household gods. "They also decided causes," said Aristotle, and "their power extended continuously to all things whatsoever, in city and country." Yet with the passage of time, the ancient heroic kings had voluntarily relinquished some of their prerogatives, while their people gradually took away others, "until in some states nothing was left to them but the sacrifices."

Virtually every founding father of the Confederacy who was educated spent his formative years poring over Aristotle's Politics, and by 1861 would have recognized the philosopher's fourth monarch as the model of the oligarchs who wielded acknowledged social and political rule in the South, elected and given power in recognition of their superior blood and ability. Four years later their power would be gone, some of it willingly ceded to their new government in the interest of its survival, and some wrested from them by an electorate no longer willing to be led by an elite who had brought them to disaster. In the end, for those "heroic monarchs" of the Confederacy, as for Aristotle's elective dictator, "nothing was left to them but the sacrifices."

A cynic would look for premonitions of the Confederacy at a slightly less distant date in antiquity, when the Roman statesman Cicero decried the civil war that broke out in 48 B.C. He blamed the rivals Pompey and Caesar as men who "put personal power and private advantage before the safety and honour of their country." After his success Caesar paid due service to the forms of republicanism, but in fact chose to rule as an autocrat. Yet he so persuaded the citizens that he was a democrat that they all but begged him to take more power as their champion. He quite happily obliged. Caesar exemplified Aristotle's fourth king, but it is more to the point that Rome tested the philosopher's musings on human inequality. Virtually all Roman citizens were members of one of thirty-five extended families or tribes, each originally the equal of the other in political decisions. But before long the wealthy and landed tribes acquired greater influence and power than the others, and soon their "colleges," the divisions whereby they voted for their consuls, were redistributed into so-called classis, literally "classes." Quickly the wealthier classes aggrandized their power, so the top two classes, though less than 46 percent of the colleges, controlled a majority of the votes in an election. At the other end of the economic spectrum, those with no property at all constituted the bottom class, the proletarii, and when it came time for their votes to be counted, they no longer mattered as the upper classes had already decided who the consuls should be. In time the proletarii simply became accustomed to following the minority upper classes without their voices even being heard. As Cicero himself argued, "when both the best and worst are given equal honours, equality itself is most unequal," something that could not happen "in states which are governed by the best people." The will of the majority was dying, and the oligarchy was born.

The most bitter observer of the Confederacy might advance half a millennium to the fifth century A.D., when Rome realized that it could no longer administer its empire in the West in the face of barbarian advances, and pulled back, leaving the bulk of a once united Europe to be divided and ruled by local chieftains whose allegiances had traditionally been tribal rather than political, and to kings rather than senates. To them power came by heredity and natural right, not from a popular mandate, and the place in society of the king and the nobles he sustained was unquestioned. No one could hold them to account. Aristotle's monarchs were dead.

The true family tree of the Confederacy, however, fed from much shallower tendrils, and shared a common taproot with conservatism as a political movement and philosophical idea. In Western democracies, potent political parties and ideologies emerged only in the wake of the collapse of the absolute monarchies beginning in the seventeenth century, a collapse that restless, disfranchised populations helped to bring about. Of course the shift to constitutional monarchies, especially in England, did not suddenly give real power to any more than a small percentage of the people, chiefly white male landowners. But far more important, it did remove the protection afforded by an absolute crown to an aristocracy of birth, making it vulnerable for the first time to social inroads and economic competition from the now-franchised middle class, and to the erosion of its hereditary rights to position and power. The ballot box and the suppressed aspirations of commoners posed a greater threat to the security of the landed aristocracy than anything in its history, and the further the franchise spread among the population at large, the more it endangered the rights and privileges of the upper class.

Denied the protection once afforded by an all-powerful monarch, that elite had no choice but to fight back in the same political arena that threatened its position if not its extinction. Thus was born conservatism as an active political idea, though adherents actually referred to themselves as "conservatory" until the early nineteenth century. Conservative or conservatory, the only syllable that really mattered in both was the first, for their inevitable posture in the political whirl was oppositional. From the Glorious Revolution onward, the slow spread of rights and opportunity and the growing power of national legislatures posed an ever greater danger to the aristocrats' status quo. For the protection of their class and their fortunes, their natural position was to resist change. Thus, while forces of the center and left might increasingly use parliaments as forums for active programs to spread rights and wealth -- though still only to the middle classes -- conservative parties, whatever their names, had no real platforms and no need for them. Their role was simply to oppose legislation that endangered the privileged class they represented. In England "conservatory" was eventually abandoned, to remain in vestige as Tory. The Tories were never proponents of an ideology. They had no real political philosophers, no grand ideas. Instead they represented a tradition of continuity and stability, of sensible government by those who had the greatest interest in good government, the upper classes.

This struggle came to the new colonies in America. Distance from England and slow communications made them slower to react to forces of change, and in some places allowed longer-lasting footholds of aristocratic power. Even though the king appointed royal governors in most of the colonies, still a few like South Carolina under its Lord Proprietors commenced and for some years operated almost as feudal states run by a few powerful families. For all the rhetoric about rights and freedom, the American Revolution, when it came, was largely a conservative movement to protect upper- and middle-class property, including the right to break free of British containment east of the Appalachians in order to obtain cheap or free new land to the west, and for Southerners especially to spread plantation slavery to the wide arable expanses of the Deep South. Even Edmund Burke, in seeking to alleviate the gnawing issue of taxation that helped propel the colonists to revolution, argued that the solution lay in the wisdom gleaned from past experience rather than future innovation. Indeed, genuine ideologues of liberty like Thomas Paine found the results of the Revolution dismaying in their failure to be innovative enough. A disillusioned Paine complained that any kind of government that observed some of the forms of democracy could get away with calling itself republican; he saw that in the years following independence, rights for most Americans were expanded little beyond what they had achieved before the war, the chief difference being that capital and wealth and commercial interests no longer faced the threat of onerous taxation.

The Constitution, at least in the mind of one of its principal architects, James Madison, failed to dent the hold of the landed gentry on power in the states and in the Congress. It left the central government too weak to impose taxes or regulate commerce, unable apparently to overcome the retained sovereignty in such areas held by the states, which were themselves, in the South at least, firmly in the hands of a planter oligarchy. For all their preaching of republicanism during the Revolution, the Americans, Madison feared, had largely only succeeded in making their own aristocracy more secure, and now with the power in the states to stall the spread of real democracy. A substantial body of citizens, again in the slave states especially, had no vote because they had no significant property, and so long as the oligarchs controlled most of the land and slaves, they could contain the democratic threat. At the same time, the middle class, the lawyers and doctors and merchants, who did emerge as a political force, very quickly began to demonstrate how quickly "have-nots" can adopt the values of the "haves" when they begin to acquire a little wealth themselves.

Suddenly throughout the United States, legislatures began pandering to a host of groups promoting parochial interests. Madison complained in 1786 that state legislatures had enacted more laws in the three years since independence than had been passed in the previous hundred, a staggering number of them designed solely to serve special entrenched interests. Ideologically, he feared, the Revolution had been a failure. Republicanism in the Union, as Paine declared before abandoning America altogether, was a sham. Just as in a courtroom no man could act as a judge in his own case, argued Madison, so in politics there could be no equity when the men making the laws were the ones who benefited from them, yet in Virginia and South Carolina, as well as in the Northern states, such was precisely the case. When legislation was proposed dealing with the problem of widespread debt, the creditors who stood to gain composed one party, while the debtors belonged to the other, neither arguing for universal justice, but both pressing for personal benefit. Naively Madison had hoped that under the Constitution the new government would stand above partisan politics to act solely in the national interest. That could happen only if the Congress and president enjoyed ultimate power over the states, however, and that the Constitution failed to provide.

Indeed, had such power been on the table in Philadelphia during the framing convention, the Constitution surely never would have been ratified. By then the dominant figures in the several oligarchies who ruled the slave states especially had already adopted a certain cant of republicanism that allowed them to use the vernacular of freedom, independence, and liberty to denounce absolute authorities whether they be kings or central governments, seemingly allying themselves with the general population while they really acted only in the cause of protecting themselves. In short, they sought the best of both worlds. If they had no supreme authority like a king to protect them, neither could he infringe their own rights. If they had to live in a more democratic society, at least by preaching the religion of liberty they could attract and win the votes of the broader electorate and use them to limit the spread of real democracy, while keeping power to themselves. Instead of solving a problem, democracy, as it was being practiced, had itself become a part of the problem. No wonder that in 1808 William Jenks could see the difficulties arising in the new system, and at the same time discern through his parody the underlying desire of Southern men of property to return to a form of monarchy.

Meanwhile many people of the South, like the North, fed on the rhetoric of the Revolution and the euphoria of new independence, and embarked on the world of new possibilities presented by their ownership of a seemingly horizonless continent. The sons of the founders, growing up in an atmosphere of self-conscious independence and individualism, did not have to face the issue of severing old loyalties as had their fathers. Instead, they had before them new attachments to form, and of their own choosing. Not limited to what their old world had been, they could dream of what they might make of their new one. Though Paine and even Madison despaired, the Revolution had succeeded in unleashing an idea of a republic, an idea that would eventually overwhelm all conservatives who resisted its implications. Southern leadership stood apart by being the only oligarchs in history to hold power by means other than military might. Instead they had the strength of democracy working for them, but only so long as they could control the direction that democracy took. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, politics in almost every Southern state was dominated by a few families. In Virginia it was the Masons, the Randolphs, and other descendants of those they self-consciously referred to as the first families. In South Carolina it was the Rhetts, the Calhouns and their cousins, the Hugers and more...

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  • EditoreFree Press
  • Data di pubblicazione2003
  • ISBN 10 0743234995
  • ISBN 13 9780743234993
  • RilegaturaCopertina flessibile
  • Numero di pagine516
  • Valutazione libreria

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