Showing posts with label william tecumseh sherman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label william tecumseh sherman. Show all posts

Thursday, July 04, 2019

In Honor Of John Brown Late Of Harpers Ferry-1859- *The Civil War: The Second American Revolution- Honor Abraham Lincoln!-A Guest Commentary

*The Civil War: The Second American Revolution- Honor Abraham Lincoln!-A Guest Commentary
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22750

Click On Title To Link To Gary Wills' "New York Review Of Books" Article Entitled "Lincoln's Black History" For A Different Take on Mr. Lincoln.

Guest Commentary

Workers Vanguard No. 938
5 June 2009


The Civil War: The Second American Revolution

Honor Abraham Lincoln!

By Bert Mason


The following was written as a contribution for a Spartacist League internal educational series.

February 12 marked the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth. Since the days of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the founders of scientific socialism, revolutionaries have held Lincoln in high esteem. His world-historic achievement—the single most important event in American history
—was to lead the North in a horrendously bloody civil war that smashed the Southern Confederacy and abolished slavery in the United States. In “Comments on the North American Events” (7 October 1862), Marx wrote with characteristic eloquence:

“Lincoln is a sui generis figure in the annals of history. He has no initiative, no idealistic impetus, no cothurnus [dignified, somewhat stilted style of ancient tragedy], no historical trappings. He gives his most important actions always the most commonplace form. Other people claim to be ‘fighting for an idea,’ when it is for them a matter of square feet of land. Lincoln, even when he is motivated by an idea, talks about ‘square feet.’ He sings the bravura aria of his part hesitatively, reluctantly and unwillingly, as though apologising for being compelled by circumstances ‘to act the lion.’…

“Lincoln is not the product of a popular revolution. This plebeian, who worked his way up from stone-breaker to Senator in Illinois, without intellectual brilliance, without a particularly outstanding character, without exceptional importance—an average person of good will, was placed at the top by the interplay of the forces of universal suffrage unaware of the great issues at stake. The new world has never achieved a greater triumph than by this demonstration that, given its political and social organisation, ordinary people of good will can accomplish feats which only heroes could accomplish in the old world!”

Many opponents of revolutionary Marxism, from black nationalists to reformist leftists, have made a virtual cottage industry out of the slander that “Honest Abe” was a racist or even a white-supremacist. The reformist who impugns Lincoln for his bourgeois conceptions, which in fact reflected his time, place and position, does not hesitate for a moment to ally with unctuous “progressives” today who praise “diversity” while fighting tooth and nail to maintain the racial oppression and anti-immigrant chauvinism that are endemic to this most brutal of imperialist countries.

Take the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). In Cold Truth, Liberating Truth: How This System Has Always Oppressed Black People, And How All Oppression Can Finally Be Ended, a pamphlet originally published in 1989 and reprinted in Revolution (17 February 2008), the RCP writes:

“It is a lie that ‘Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves’ because he was morally outraged over slavery. Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation freeing the slaves (and not all the slaves at first, but only those in the states that had joined the southern Confederacy) because he saw that it would be impossible to win the Civil War against that southern Confederacy without freeing these slaves and allowing them to fight in the Union army.

“Lincoln spoke and acted for the bourgeoisie—the factory-owners, railroad-owners, and other capitalists centered in the North—and he conducted the war in their interests” (emphasis in original).

Aside from the scurrilous suggestion that Lincoln was not an opponent of slavery who abhorred that “peculiar institution,” the RCP rejects Marxist materialism in favor of liberal moralizing, denying that against the reactionary class of slaveholders and the antiquated slave system, the Northern capitalists represented a revolutionary class whose victory was in the interests of historical progress. Presenting the goals of the North and South as equally rapacious, the RCP neither sides with the North nor characterizes its victory as the consummation of a social revolution.

Indeed, the Civil War—the Second American Revolution—was the last of the great bourgeois revolutions, which began with the English Civil War of the 17th century and found their culmination in the French Revolution of the 18th. For the RCP, however, there is no contradiction whatsoever in condemning Lincoln as a representative of the 19th-century American bourgeoisie while doing everything in its power to embrace bourgeois liberalism today—from its antiwar coalitions with capitalist spokesmen to its implicit support for the Democratic Party and Barack Obama in the name of “drive out the Bush regime.”

Abraham Lincoln: Bourgeois Revolutionary

In the preface to his 1859 book, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Karl Marx wrote that in studying the transformation of the whole immense superstructure that arises from revolutionary changes in the economic foundation:

“It is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic—in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production. No social formation is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.”

The American Civil War was a bourgeois revolution, and Lincoln was both bourgeois and revolutionary at the same time—with all the contradictions this implies. Because the task of the Second American Revolution was to eradicate an antiquated social system based on chattel slavery and erect in its place the dominion of industrial capitalism based on wage labor from one end of the North American landmass to the other, it could not eradicate every form of class and social oppression—the hallmark of all propertied classes throughout the history of class society. As materialists, Marxists do not judge historical figures primarily based on the ideas in their heads but on how well they fulfilled the tasks of their epoch. While Lincoln had bourgeois conceptions—how could it be otherwise!—he was uniquely qualified to carry out the task before him, and in the last analysis he rose to the occasion as no other. That is the essence of his historical greatness.

While bestowing begrudging praise on Lincoln’s achievements with the left hand, the leftist critic often takes it back with the right. Lincoln, the critic will admit, opposed slavery; he came to see that a hard war was necessary and prepared to issue his Emancipation Proclamation. However, the critic is more concerned with Lincoln’s attitudes than his deeds: Lincoln was not John Brown, he was not Frederick Douglass, he was not Marx and Engels, he was not even as left-wing as his Treasury secretary Salmon P. Chase. For example, while Lincoln agreed with John Brown in thinking slavery wrong, he could not excuse Brown’s violence, bloodshed and “acts of treason” in attempting to seize the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry to spark a slave rebellion on the eve of the Civil War. Finally, the critic will argue, while Marx and Engels from 3,000 miles away knew that the American Civil War was about slavery, Lincoln and the Republicans sought to ignore the root of the problem and wage the conflict on constitutional grounds to save the Union. Such facts are indisputable, but they must be seen in their historical context.

In his Abraham Lincoln (2009), James M. McPherson remarks:

“Only after years of studying the powerful crosscurrents of political and military pressures on Lincoln did I come to appreciate the skill with which he steered between the numerous shoals of conservatism and radicalism, free states and slave states, abolitionists, Republicans, Democrats, and border-state Unionists to maintain a steady course that brought the nation to victory—and the abolition of slavery—in the end. If he had moved decisively against slavery in the war’s first year, as radicals pressed him to do, he might well have fractured his war coalition, driven border-state Unionists over to the Confederacy, lost the war, and witnessed the survival of slavery for at least another generation.”

Facing innumerable pressures when the war broke out in April 1861, Lincoln grappled with how to respond to them. But the pressures—as intense as they were—were not merely strategic in nature. As the president of a constitutional republic, Lincoln believed that it was his duty to uphold the Constitution and the rule of law. While he detested slavery, he believed it was not his right to abolish it. That ideology flowed from the whole bourgeois constitutional framework of the United States.

In the first year of the war, Lincoln pursued a policy of conciliating the four border slave states—Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri—in an effort to retain their loyalty to the Union. Marx and Engels criticized this policy because it weakened the Union’s war effort and emboldened the slaveholders. However, did this policy stem from disdain for the enslaved black masses or from a desire on Lincoln’s part to let bygones be bygones—i.e., coexist with the slave South? No. It flowed from the whole previous history of the United States. In 1776, 1800 and even as late as 1820, the North and South had similar values and institutions. With the Industrial Revolution, however, the North surged ahead in virtually every area—railroads, canals, literacy, inventions—while the South stagnated. Yet the two regions remained part of the same nation, setting the stage for compromise after compromise. For a whole historical period, Lincoln was hardly alone in seeking détente. In 1848, even the more left-wing Salmon Chase rejected the view espoused by radicals in his Liberty Party that the Constitution empowered the government to abolish slavery in the states, preferring a bloc with antislavery Whigs and Democrats that would agitate merely for keeping slavery out of the territories.

While he conciliated the border states for a time, Lincoln stood firm against secession, countering his cabinet members’ willingness to compromise in the face of the Confederacy’s belligerence. After his fateful election in 1860, which set the stage for the secession of the Southern states and the Civil War, Lincoln reined in his future secretary of state William H. Seward for advocating support to the Crittenden Compromise, an attempt to allow slavery to flourish anywhere south of 36°30'. Then Lincoln rejected Seward’s proposal to abandon Fort Sumter in the Charleston, South Carolina, harbor. Had it not been for Lincoln’s relentless efforts to goad his officers to fight and his stubborn support for Ulysses S. Grant in the face of substantial Northern opposition, the North might not have vanquished the slavocracy in that time and place. Lincoln’s resoluteness, his iron determination to achieve victory and his refusal to stand down to the Confederacy are hallmarks of his revolutionary role and enduring testaments to his greatness.

Borrowing from today’s terminology, one could argue that Lincoln began as a reformist, believing that the reactionary social system in the South could be pressured into change and that the institution of slavery would eventually wither on the vine. But he underwent a radical shift when bloody experience in the crucible of war—combined with the mass flight of the slaves to the Union lines—taught him that the nation could be preserved only by means of social revolution. In contrast to this remarkable personal transformation, the Great French Revolution required a series of tumultuous stages to reach its revolutionary climax, a protracted process that was marked by the domination of different and antagonistic groupings—from the Girondins to the Montagnards to the Committee of Public Safety. The Mensheviks were also reformists, but they didn’t become revolutionaries but counterrevolutionaries.

Was Lincoln a Racist?

Although it is beyond dispute that Lincoln occasionally appealed to racist consciousness and expressed racist opinions, the record is not as cut-and-dried as the typical liberal moralist or his leftist cousin will assert. Before a proslavery crowd in Charleston, Illinois, during the fourth debate with Stephen A. Douglas on 18 September 1858, Lincoln declared:

“I will say, then, that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races; that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say, in addition to this, that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And in as much as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I, as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”

Yet two months earlier in Chicago, Lincoln had insisted, “Let us discard all this quibbling about this man and the other man, this race and that race and the other race being inferior, and therefore they must be placed in an inferior position; discarding our standard that we have left us. Let us discard all these things, and unite as one people throughout this land, until we shall once more stand up declaring that all men are created equal.”

However, more important than these words were Lincoln’s actions in defense of the slaves, the freedmen and the black troops in the Union Army. For example, in the autumn of 1864, pressure mounted for Lincoln to consummate a prisoner exchange that would exclude black soldiers. Some Republican leaders warned that Union men “will work and vote against the President, because they think sympathy with a few negroes, also captured, is the cause of a refusal” to exchange prisoners. Ignoring these threats, Lincoln’s agent in the exchange negotiations asserted, “The wrongs, indignities, and privations suffered by our soldiers would move me to consent to anything to procure their exchange, except to barter away the honor and the faith of the Government of the United States, which has been so solemnly pledged to the colored soldiers in its ranks” (James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom [1988]).

That’s not all. Confronting growing defeatist sentiment in the North, the grim prospect of defeat in the impending 1864 presidential elections and a cacophony of demands to abandon the Emancipation Proclamation from Democrats and even staunch Republicans, Lincoln stood firm. In response to fulminations such as “Tens of thousands of white men must yet bite the dust to allay the negro mania of the President,” Lincoln responded, “If they [the black soldiers] stake their lives for us they must be prompted by the strongest motive—even the promise of freedom. And the promise being made, must be kept.” Emphasizing the point, he maintained, “There have been men who have proposed to me to return to slavery the black warriors of Port Hudson & Olustee to their masters to conciliate the South. I should be damned in time & in eternity for so doing. The world shall know that I will keep my faith to friends & enemies, come what will.”

In the last months of the war, the emancipation of the slaves began to raise broader political and economic questions. When reports filtered northward of General William Tecumseh Sherman’s indifference toward the thousands of freedmen that had attached themselves to his army, Lincoln’s war secretary Edwin Stanton traveled to Savannah, Georgia, in January 1865 to talk with Sherman and consult with black leaders. As a result of Stanton’s visit, Sherman issued “Special Field Orders, No. 15,” which granted the freed slaves rich plantation land belonging to former slaveholders.

Indignantly protesting that Lincoln valued the restoration of the Union over the emancipation of the slaves, the RCP cites his famous letter to Horace Greeley of 22 August 1862, which declared: “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.” The RCP neglects to add that a month later, on September 22, Lincoln issued the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. Commenting on this momentous event, Marx called Lincoln’s manifesto abolishing slavery “the most important document in American history since the establishment of the Union, tantamount to the tearing up of the old American Constitution.”

What was more important for Lincoln’s cause, Union or emancipation? The very question betrays a subjective idealist approach that ignores the objective reality of the time. The two tasks had become inextricably intertwined in the reality of a war that pitted a modern industrial capitalist mode of production in the North against an archaic agrarian slave system in the South. Restoration of the Union required emancipation, and emancipation required a Union victory. For embodying and melding those two great tasks, Lincoln will forever occupy an honored place in history.

Much Ado About Colonization

An oft-repeated theme among Lincoln’s detractors is that the 16th president—a racist to his bones, they assert—was dedicated above all else to deporting the freed black slaves to distant shores. The most caustic purveyor of this timeworn slander is Lerone Bennett Jr., executive editor emeritus of Ebony and the author of Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream (2000). Bennett shrieks that “Abraham Lincoln’s deepest desire was to deport all black people and create an all-white nation. It’s—sounds like a wild idea now and it is a wild idea, but from about 1852 until his death, he worked feverishly to try to create deportation plans, colonization plans to send black people either to Africa or to...South America, or to the islands of the sea” (interview with Brian Lamb, 10 September 2000, www.booknotes.org/transcript/?programID=1581).

Lincoln did not invent the idea of colonization. Schemes to remove black people from the United States went back to the American Colonization Society, which was founded in 1816. Very much a product of his times, Lincoln was long a supporter of colonization because he believed that the ideal of racial harmony in America was impossible. Although reprehensible and misguided, Lincoln’s colonization schemes were motivated not by racist antipathy toward black people but by his perceptions of enduring white racism in America. In the course of meeting with black leaders at the White House on 14 July 1862, Lincoln declared:

“You and we are different races. We have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any other two races. Whether it is right or wrong I need not discuss, but this physical difference is a great disadvantage to us both, as I think your race suffer very greatly, many of them by living among us, while ours suffer from your presence. In a word, we suffer on each side. If this is admitted, it affords a reason at least why we should be separated….

“Your race are suffering, in my judgment, the greatest wrong inflicted on any people. But even when you cease to be slaves, you are yet far removed from being placed on an equality with the white race. You are cut off from many of the advantages which the other race enjoy. The aspiration of men is to enjoy equality with the best, when free; but on this broad continent not a single man of your race is made the equal of a single man of ours. Go where you are treated the best, and the ban is still upon you.”

— cited in “Report on Colonization and Emigration, Made to the Secretary of the Interior, by the Agent of Emigration” (1862)

It is therefore not surprising that Lincoln advocated colonization most strenuously at the very moment that he was preparing his Provisional Emancipation Proclamation following the watershed Union victory at Antietam, which Marx said “decided the fate of the American Civil War.” With his colonization proposals, Lincoln sought to sweeten what many whites considered the bitter pill of black emancipation.

However indefensible the idea of colonization was, Lincoln insisted that it must be voluntary. Even then, blacks overwhelmingly rejected colonization as both racist and impractical, holding anticolonization meetings in Chicago and Springfield to protest it. Indeed, Frederick Douglass declared in September 1862: “Mr. Lincoln assumes the language and arguments of an itinerant Colonization lecturer, showing all his inconsistencies, his pride of race and blood, his contempt for Negroes and his canting hypocrisy.” One of the administration’s two concrete moves to implement colonization, the Île à Vache fiasco, led to the deaths of dozens of freed blacks. However, when Lincoln learned of the disaster, he did the honorable thing and ordered the Navy to return the survivors to the United States.

Besides free blacks and Radical Abolitionists, many other contemporaries of Lincoln were incensed at his colonization efforts. Publications like Harper’s Weekly considered the proposal to resettle millions of people to distant shores insane. In Eric Foner’s words, “For what idea was more utopian and impractical than this fantastic scheme?” (“Lincoln and Colonization,” in Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World, ed., Eric Foner [2008]).

By the waning days of the war, Lincoln’s utterances on colonization—if not his attitude—had evolved. In a diary entry dated 1 July 1864, Lincoln’s secretary John Hay remarked, “I am glad that the President has sloughed off the idea of colonization.” But much more to the point than attempts to decipher Lincoln’s attitudes is the indisputable fact that Lincoln’s policies on the ground were progressively rendering his colonization schemes a dead letter. Foner writes that in 1863 and 1864, Lincoln began to consider the role that blacks would play in a post-slavery America. He showed particular interest in efforts that were under way to establish schools for blacks in the South Carolina Sea Islands and in how former slaves were being put to work on plantations in the Mississippi Valley. In August 1863, he instructed General Nathaniel P. Banks to establish a system in Louisiana during wartime Reconstruction in which “the two races could gradually live themselves out of their old relation to each other, and both come out better prepared for the new.”

Historian Richard N. Current wrote, “By the end of war, Lincoln had abandoned the idea of resettling free slaves outside the United States. He had come to accept the fact that Negroes, as a matter of justice as well as practicality, must be allowed to remain in the only homeland they knew, given education and opportunities for self-support, and started on the way to complete assimilation into American society” (cited at “Mr. Lincoln and Freedom,” www.mrlincolnandfreedom.org). Indeed, on 11 April 1865, following Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Lincoln gave a speech in which he declared that literate blacks and black Union Army veterans should have the right to vote in a reconstructed Union—an early step toward the 14th Amendment and citizenship for the freed slaves.

A dishonest charlatan that considers Lincoln no better than Hitler, Lerone Bennett brings the very concept of scholarship into disrepute. In disgust at Bennett’s diatribes, one critic, Edward Steers Jr., sarcastically titled his review, “Great Emancipator or Grand Wizard?” And McPherson wrote that while Lincoln “was not a radical abolitionist, he did consider slavery morally wrong, and seized the opportunity presented by the war to move against it. Bennett fails to appreciate the acuity and empathy that enabled Lincoln to transcend his prejudices and to preside over the greatest social revolution in American history, the liberation of four million slaves” (“Lincoln the Devil,” New York Times, 27 August 2000).

Honor Lincoln— Finish the Civil War!

At times, Frederick Douglass was highly critical of Lincoln’s moderation and his relegation of black people to the status of what he called “step-children.” But Douglass also saw another side of the 16th president. In his autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1882), the great abolitionist wrote of his meeting with Lincoln at the White House in 1864:

“The increasing opposition to the war, in the North, and the mad cry against it, because it was being made an abolition war, alarmed Mr. Lincoln, and made him apprehensive that a peace might be forced upon him which would leave still in slavery all who had not come within our lines. What he wanted was to make his proclamation as effective as possible in the event of such a peace.… What he said on this day showed a deeper moral conviction against slavery than I had ever seen before in anything spoken or written by him. I listened with the deepest interest and profoundest satisfaction, and, at his suggestion, agreed to undertake the organizing of a band of scouts, composed of colored men, whose business should be somewhat after the original plan of John Brown, to go into the rebel States, beyond the lines of our armies, and carry the news of emancipation, and urge the slaves to come within our boundaries.”

Rather than weigh the “good” Lincoln against the “bad” in search of the golden mean, Marxists must seek to understand that he was a bourgeois politician in a time of war and revolution—“a big, inconsistent, brave man,” in the words of W.E.B. Du Bois (cited in Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Was Lincoln a Racist?” The Root, available at www.theroot.com/views/was-lincoln-racist).

With the election of Barack Obama as America’s first black president, bourgeois media pundits are acting as if he is the reincarnation of Abraham Lincoln. Billboards show a huge portrait of Lincoln with Obama’s face superimposed on it. Obama takes the presidential oath on Lincoln’s Bible. Liberal students go a step further, preferring Obama over Lincoln because Lincoln, they assert, was a racist who would have disapproved of a black president. In fact, U.S. imperialism’s current Commander-in-Chief has as much in common with the bourgeois revolutionary Abraham Lincoln as British prime minister Gordon Brown has with the great English revolutionary Oliver Cromwell or French president Nicolas Sarkozy has with the French revolutionary Maximilien Robespierre.

In condemning Lincoln as a racist and besmirching his supreme role in the liquidation of slavery, fake leftists like the RCP surely must have a hard time with Marx’s November 1864 letter to Lincoln on behalf of the First International congratulating the American people for his re-election as president (see accompanying box). By declaring that the European workers saw the star-spangled banner as carrying the destiny of their class, was Marx forsaking the red flag of communism? Not at all. For Marx and the workers of the Old World, Lincoln’s re-election guaranteed the irreversibility of the Emancipation Proclamation; it meant that the Union Army—first and foremost its “black warriors”—did not fight in vain. And they understood that with the demise of the slave power, the unbridled growth of capitalism would lay the foundation for the growth of the American proletariat—capitalism’s future gravedigger.

At bottom, the impulse to denounce Lincoln and to minimize his monumental role in history denies that political people—even great ones—are constrained by objective reality. If only poor Lincoln had not lacked the necessary will to eradicate all forms of racial oppression! As Marx explained, “Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation” (A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy [1859]). The elimination of racial oppression in all its forms was not possible in 1861 or 1865 because the objective means to accomplish it were not yet present—the unfettered growth of industrial capitalism in America and the development of the working class.

Lincoln accomplished the task placed before him by history: the abolition of slavery. He could do so despite, and because of, the conceptions in his head. The task of Trotskyists—revolutionary Marxists—is different. Our aim is proletarian revolution. Our perspective is revolutionary integrationism. While opposing every manifestation of racist oppression, we underline that liberating black people from racial oppression and poverty—conditions inherent to the U.S. capitalist system—can be achieved only by establishing an egalitarian socialist society. Building such a society requires the overthrow of the capitalist system by the working class and its allies. This is possible only by forging a revolutionary, internationalist working-class party that champions the rights of all the oppressed and declares war on all manifestations of social, class and sexual oppression. That task will be fulfilled by a third American revolution—a workers revolution.

Tuesday, April 16, 2019

*On The Anniversary Of The Beginning Of The American Civil War-"GLORY II"- ALL HONOR TO THE UNION ARMY'S 1ST SOUTH CAROLINA VOLUNTEERS

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the proudly stiff-necked abolitionist, Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

BOOK REVIEW

ARMY LIFE IN A BLACK REGIMENT, THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON, BEACON PRESS, BOSTON, 1970

Those familiar with the critical role that the recruitment of black troops into the Union Armies in the American Civil War usually think about the famous Massachusetts 54th Regiment under Robert Gould Shaw which has received wide attention in book, film and sculpture. And those heroic fighters deserve those honors. Glory, indeed. However, other units were formed from other regions that are also noteworthy. And none more so than the 1st South Carolina Volunteers commanded by the arch-abolitionist Theodore Higginson one of John Brown’s fervent supporters and an early advocate of arming the slaves during the Civil War. He desperately wanted to lead armed blacks in the battle against slavery and got his wish.

I have remarked elsewhere (in a review of William Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner)
that while the slaves in the South, for a host of reasons, did not insurrect with the intensity or frequency of say Haiti, the other West Indian islands or Brazil that when the time came to show discipline, courage and honor under arms that blacks would prove not inferior to whites. And Higginson's book is prima facie evidence for that position.

One should note that, unlike the Massachusetts 54th which was made up primarily of freedman the 1st South Carolina was made up of units of fugitive and abandoned slaves. Thus, one should have assumed that it would have been harder to train and discipline uneducated and much-abused slaves. Not so. After reading a number of books on the trials and tribulations of various Union regiments, including the famous Irish Brigade, the story Higginson tells compares very favorably with those units. While Higginson's use of ‘negro’ dialect in the telling of his story may not be to the liking of some of today’s ‘politically correct’ readers of this book it is nevertheless a story worth reading told by a ‘high’ abolitionist and Civil War hero.

Monday, April 15, 2019

*Honor Gore Vidal's Abraham Lincoln On His 200th Birthday Anniversary Year

Click on title to link to Gore Vidal note on Abraham Lincoln

BOOK REVIEW

Lincoln: A Novel, Gore Vidal, Random House, New York, 1984


This first paragraph below has been used previously to introduce author Gore Vidal’s’ output of other interesting historical novels (that, however, unlike many such efforts in this genre when necessary hew pretty close to the historical record- hence their value).

Listen up! As a general proposition I like my history straight up- facts, footnotes and all. There is enough work just keeping up with that work so that historical novels don’t generally get a lot of my attention. In this space I have reviewed some works of the old American Stalinist Howard Fast around the American Revolution and the ex-Communist International official and Trotsky biographer Victor Serge about Stalinist times in Russia of the 1930’s, but not much else. However, one of the purposes of this space is to acquaint the new generation with a sense of history and an ability to draw some lessons from that history, if possible. That is particularly true for American history- the main arena that we have to glean some progressive ideas from. Thus, an occasional foray, using the historical novel in order to get a sense of the times, is warranted. Frankly, there are few better at this craft that the old bourgeois historical novelist, Norman Mailer nemesis and social commentator Gore Vidal. Although his politics are somewhere back in the Camelot/FDR period he has a very good ear for the foibles of the American experience- read him with that caveat in mind.

Vidal, as is his format in this series of expositions on the American experience, combines fictional characters and situations with the makings and doings of real characters and events in American history, here the hard Civil War days of decision of the Lincoln administration. Here the narrator is actually a real character from that history, John Hay, one of Lincoln’s two personal secretaries who later became Secretary of State in the Republican McKinley administration near the turn of the 19th century (and who appears in a the later Vidal novel Empire in that very different role). The virtue of this selection of Hays as the narrator is that one is given a bird’s eye view of the daily goings on (fictional or not) at the Lincoln White House and a very chose vantage point to observe the kind of things that weighted heavily on Lincoln’s mind and on his agenda for preserving the Union.

Interestingly, although the Lincoln persona has been viewed from every possible perspective and from every possible political view by now Vidal has contributes a very fast moving rendition of the story with his little twist. His central premise, one shared by the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin in her fairly recent book on Lincoln and his Cabinet "Team Of Rivals", is that only a sage and driven personality like Lincoln’s could have held all the diverse and generally antagonistic personalities on the coalition that he put together among pro-Unionist forces in order to save the Republic. His feigns and thrusts in all directions, seemingly after much agonizing reflection keeps one on one’s toes as one turns the pages every though the outcome is known. Certainly the main alternate contenders for power (that 1864 republican nomination was always lurking in the background) Secretary of State Seward and Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase evidently did not have that capacity and in the end seemingly reconciled themselves to that secondary role (Chase got bought off by the Supreme Court Chief Justiceship).


Vidal wrote this novel in the early 1980’s at a time that I was reading Carl Sandburg’s volumes of biography on Lincoln. If I am not mistaken Vidal owns some debt of gratitude to the Chicago poet for the musical sense of his novel. Many of the little scenarios, such as the incessant clamor for jobs from every Tom, Dick and Harry that might have voted for Lincoln in 1860 that filled the time of Hay (and Nicolay, the other Lincoln secretary) and that make this novel so compelling I remember in reading Sandburg’s Lincoln biography. Also the treatment of Lincoln’s homespun humor and proverbial storytelling powers (always with some political point on the edge of the blade). As well as Lincoln’s reactions to his household tragedies and the massive tragedies unfolding on the battlefields.

Finally, for those who like their history in capsule form, with a sweetener if you will, this is a very good place to begin your Lincoln or Civil War studies. In quick succession you will learn about the tribulations of physically getting Lincoln inaugurated, the first reactions from the South to that fact by the various acts of secession, the South Carolina incidents, the fact of two states existing where one had been previously as far as foreign recognition was concerned, the military problems on the union beginning with Manassas and the question of competent leadership, Lincoln’s frustrations with a series of military commanders, the stalemate on the battlefield, the struggle to determine the nature of the conflict- solely for the preservation of the Union or that and the abolition of slavery, the decisive battles of Vicksburg and Gettysburg and the change in concept to “total war” with the accession of Grand and McClellan to military leadership, military victory and then assassination of Lincoln. And along the way enough political intrigue, maneuvering, cowardice and heroics by some well-known historical characters to write many novels. But that is for another day.

On the 150th Anniversary Of The Beginning Of The American Civil War- Honor Major Robert Anderson, Commanding Officer, Union Army, Fort Sumter

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for Major Robert Anderson, commanding officer, Fort Sumter, April 1861.

Markin comment:


All honor to the union defenders of Fort Sumter and their commander, Major Anderson.

Sunday, April 14, 2019

***Honor Civil War Union General William Tecumseh Sherman

Click on title to link to Wikipedia's entry for General William Tecumseh Sherman.

DVD REVIEW

Sherman's March, General Sherman and his boys, History Channel, 2004


The ultimate outcomes of the American Civil War of 1861-65 were both the preservation of the Union and the abolition of slavery. Both were worthy historical outcomes from the perspective of today’s militant leftists. The Civil War, however, went through various twists and turns socially, politically, morally and militarily before final victory. The docu-drama under review here presented by the History Channel takes a look at a big and decisive slice of the military aspect (and a little of the moral and political aspects as well along the way) - Union General Sherman’s “total” war march through Georgia (and then north through the Carolinas to join up with General Grant before Richmond) in order to break the will of the Southern population to continue the fight.

Needless to say even today there are still some very deep emotions drawn out concerning this military strategy, North and South. As my sympathies lie with the North the title of this entry pretty much says it all- Honor the General’s work. Why? As presented here the fundamental problem on the battlefield was to end the stalemate as quickly as possible by a military breakthrough. Head to head bloody encounters between the armies in the field were indecisive. That the South would at some point run out of resources, men and materials, could be projected. But at what cost in Union men and materials. Moreover a struggle to the bitter end would make political settlement that much harder (which turned out to be the case anyway). Under those circumstances bold actions like the seizure of the military and industrial depot that was Atlanta and a run to the coast at Savannah cutting off Southern supply lines (rail lines, really) was the beginning of wisdom.

Of course in Southern hagiography this strategy was beyond the pale and southerners, and particularly southern politicians from that time to this have made that point. Ironically Sherman’s own personal feelings about blacks and slavery were not that far from the southerners but as a Union man and a military man he needed to take a bold move against the odds. Moreover, his policy of having his army ‘live off the land’
(foraying, in the etiquette of the day) could be justified on purely military grounds. Any competent commander will tell you that one way to keep army morale up is to have it do useful work with few causalities unless necessary. After many, too many, bloody encounters for seemingly nebulous objectives here was an army that was basically kept intact through the Georgia campaign and then later up through the Carolinas. Nice work, “bummers”.

Much has been made, and I think correctly, that Sherman’s efforts were the first serious application of the notion of “total” war with which we have over the last century and a half become all too familiar. Simply put, this is the notion that militarily virtually nothing is off limits, including civilian populations, in the pursuit of the military/political objectives of a campaign. The real question becomes then not for or against such strategies in principle but whether the cause is just. America’s total war against the Vietnamese people in the 1960’s and 70’s is an example of the unjust use of that concept. Sherman’s use, though, is a just example. Hail General Sherman and “Uncle Billy’s boys”.



MARCHING THROUGH GEORGIA

LYRICS


Bring the good ol' Bugle boys! We'll sing another song,
Sing it with a spirit that will start the world along,
Sing it like we used to sing it fifty thousand strong,
While we were marching through Georgia

Hurrah! Hurrah! We bring the Jubilee.
Hurrah! Hurrah! The flag that makes you free,
So we sang the chorus from Atlanta to the sea,
While we were marching through Georgia.

How the darkeys shouted when they heard the joyful sound,
How the turkeys gobbled which our commissary found,
How the sweet potatoes even started from the ground,
While we were marching through Georgia.

Yes and there were Union men who wept with joyful tears,
When they saw the honored flag they had not seen for years;
Hardly could they be restrained from breaking forth in cheers,
While we were marching through Georgia.

"Sherman's dashing Yankee boys will never make the coast!"
So the saucy rebels said and 'twas a handsome boast
Had they not forgot, alas! to reckon with the Host
While we were marching through Georgia.

So we made a thoroughfare for freedom and her train,
Sixty miles of latitude, three hundred to the main;
Treason fled before us, for resistance was in vain
While we were marching through Georgia.

Saturday, April 13, 2019

***Films To While Away The Class Struggle By- American Civil War General And President U.S. Grant- A PBS Documentary

Click on the title to link to a "PBS:American Experience" Website entry for President U.S. Grant.

Recently I have begun to post entries under the headline- “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By”-that will include progressive and labor-oriented songs that might be of general interest to the radical public. I have decided to do the same for some films that may perk that same interest under the title in this entry’s headline. In the future I expect to do the same for books under a similar heading.-Markin

This year marks the 149th anniversary of the commencement of the American Civil War-and the beginning of the end of chattel slavery in the United States.

DVD Review

U.S. Grant: American Experience , PBS Productions, New York, 2003


Late year in celebrating , rightly, the military exploits of General William Tecumseh Sherman and his “bummers’ who wreaked havoc all through the Confederacy in the waning days of the American Civil War I, perhaps, slighted the organizational and strategic battle plans of his superior, the commanding general of all the Union armies, General U.S. Grant. I attempt to make amends here as we mark the 149th anniversary of the commencement of that war.

This three hour plus PBS “American Experience” documentary tells the average viewer probably much more than they would ever want to know about the career, with all its successes and failures, of one Ulysses S. Grant. As always in a PBS production there are the “talking heads”, mainly historians here, who try to flesh the meaning of Grant’s career, the fistful of attributes that led him to successful military achievements and also helped shed light on his less than stellar presidency. And as always there is plenty of still photography, much of it not previously familiar to this reviewer, and re-enactments of the major events in Grant’s life.

There are few surprises here, although to my surprise a number of commentators noted that Grant, not Lincoln was the most popular American figure of the 19th century. As the recent bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth demonstrates that is clearly not verdict of history, at least for latter centuries. That said, there is a compelling argument to make, and that is made by some of the commentators here, that Grant was the prototype for the successful modern warfare commanding general once the increase in industrial production provided the massive resources necessary to wage such war and create widespread devastation. I would only add that only in the context of the sacred Union cause and its adjunct, the abolition of slavery does his rise make sense.

The documentary painstakingly takes us through Grant’s rough and tumble childhood; his early not very glamorous military career, including service in the Mexican War a touchstone for all later military leadership on both sides of the Civil war; his various business failures prior to the war; his slow emergence as the decisive military leader and strategist in the Western campaign culminating in the massive Union victory at Vicksburg; his subsequent elevation by an admiring Lincoln to commander of all the Union armies, including the decisive and costly final marches, like Cold Harbor, that haunted him and later historians and that marred his overall achievement particularly when the Southern school of Civil War historical interpretation was in its ascendancy; his post-Civil War actions as a military commander which tried to recreate a single nation; his two term presidency, including the various financial scandals that are forever attached to his terms of office; his earnest, and unsuccessful, attempts to integrate the newly liberated freedman into the Southern society, including his forthright actions against the Klan in the early 1870s; and, finally, his post-presidential life including a worldwide grand tour and the writing of his memoirs.

Nothing here will contribute to an argument for his outstripping of Lincoln as the decisive figure of the American 19th century. But know this: all labor militants and other progressives honor General Grant, and his subordinate General Sherman, for their military leadership in ending chattel slavery in this country. That was no mean task as this documentary amply demonstrates.

Monday, December 07, 2015

As The 150th Anniversary Of The Union Victory In The American Civil War Closes-Marching Through Georgia-For Billy’s Bummers


As The 150th Anniversary Of The Union Victory In The American Civil War Closes-Marching Through Georgia-For Billy’s Bummers

 
 
 
 
 
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Sam Lowell knew in his blood-stained heart, his Vietnam War blood-stained heart that as much as he had come to hate and oppose that war as a participant, as an unwilling and unwitting tool of forces in the government who were clueless about ‘Nam, about people who had done them, and him no harm, about people with which he had no quarrel he could never go all the way in his opposition to wars. Although after the fact, after his service, he had spent a fair amount of time in the streets with fellow veterans trying to get the word out that a monster was on the loose, the American government, a government that had made him, made his war buddies nothing but savages, trying to work the anti-war veteran point of view which had some “cred” to all who would listen, half-listen anyway, he would never really be able to fully make himself a pacifist. Never make himself a solid almost biblical in the wilderness turning the other cheek man of peace for all seasons. Go the distance on some “Gandhi trip” as he called it talking to his old high school friend Bart Webber one night years later when they were mulling over the question of how far they were willing to go in the search for what the Quakers called the “peace witness.”  Not when in his head he knew there were causes, just causes that could not be resolved short of blood and iron if humankind was to roll the rock of progress up the hill a little, hell, to even get a little justice in this wicked old world. He favored not that “Gandhi trip” but an idea of some long-bearded robe sheet-clothed Jehovah all fire and brimstone come seeking vengeance against the night-takers until the world was gotten rid of night-takers. 

That is why Sam, despite his misgivings about the Vietnam War had never really opposed it personally via some application for conscientious objector status. Never saw himself as the friendly Quaker, Mennonite, Amish man of good cheer and no grudges. Never had been around such people when it counted as he was growing up although he had heard about their gentility and had seen it in action down in Pennsylvania Amish country. Even a serious attempt later after Vietnam had taken so much out of him, had depleted his abstract  hates, to become more Quakerly when he had had a Quaker girlfriend, Susan Rich, failed to his own hubris and sense that fixing even the small woes of the world required more fire that the “inner light.” (They would quarrel endlessly if civilly about such matters to no good end and they eventually kind of drifted apart once each realized that there was no longer enough glue holing them together.)

What Sam came to believe, or maybe believed all along and Vietnam and that lovely quiet Quaker girl just brought his notions to a head, was that his whole blessed life was stacked against such gentility. He asked himself, and asked Bart as well since they came from the same poor as church mice neighborhood although Bart had not faced the ultimate induction crisis since due to a severe childhood injury to his right leg he was declared by his friends and neighbors at the local draft board to be 4-F, unfit for military duty, where in his, their growing up ethos was their room for such thoughts having grown up in working class Carver. Carver a town where guys volunteered for military service in droves if for no other reason than to get out of the hick town, get away from being boggers, cranberry bog workers when Carver was something like the cranberry capital of the world or else accepted quietly and without rancor induction if drafted. He would have received no support, from family, friends, including Bart who held all the same support the government without question at the time and had only come around when their corner boy friend Jeff Mullins was killed in the Central Highlands and after Sam had come back to the “real” world to  give the real story of the murderous assault on human dignity he had taken part in, and neighbors. Neighbors who had, as he recalled to Bart, looked askance at him when in 1966 he had expressed some reservations about the carpet-bombing of Vietnam back to the Stone Age which was the effective policy of the military doctrine of the day. Sam frankly said to Bart that talking night that he would not have known even how to go about doing such a thing as filing an application for CO status. And if he had known under the conditions existing in 1966 to obtain CO status, although not a few years later when though court decisions and changes in draft board policy such applications were not denied out of hand except for historically recognized objectors, he would not have been granted that status since he had been raised a Catholic, a church organization which held to a just war theology rather than an absolute opposition to war like the Quakers and Mennonites, people who held such historic pacifist positions.

Although after Vietnam Sam went through a crisis on the question of war and peace in which he came to err on the “side of the angels” and he abandoned the Catholic Church and its version of the just war theory which seemed to more often, much more often than not, justify all of Caesar’s wars without fail, he still held to a secular version of that just war theory. When thinking about the matter of just wars then in the late 1960s and early 1970s the Spanish Civil War had come to mind since he had been something of a buff about that event as far back as freshman year in high school when he had written a term paper for a history class on the subject. In that desperate 1930s conflict which pre-figured World War III whose struggles enflamed his dreams he saw himself obviously fighting, arms in hand, whatever arms they had which at times were scanty, for the Republican side against the Nazi-backed Franco forces. He had dreamed as well that he would have, if he had been around then, signed up as a volunteer for the Abraham Lincoln Battalion of the International Brigades, the famous Abraham Lincolns who did heroic battle around the Jarama and in other tough spots when it counted.

Sam knew from his readings that those organizations were controlled by the Communists of that age but while in high school he was as fervent an anti-communist as anybody in town he would give them a pass for the duration of the war, would have joined the united front even if he was not sure that he would have supported the “revolution and war” ideas expressed by those to the left of the Communists and Socialists, mostly Trotskyists and anarchists of one stripe or another. He was still bitter, always would be, when the U.S. under the liberal oligarch Roosevelt called for hands-off, for neutrality in the conflict and the British and French sat on their hands while Spain died a thousand deaths. It would not be until later when he had to deal with the American progeny of Joe Stalin in the anti-Vietnam War movement that he would come to curse Uncle Joe’s withdrawal of the International Brigades while there was still some fight left in the Republican forces. No, Sam would not have sat on his hands on that one.      

Later, several years later in the late 1970s when the turmoil which had beset America had settled down and an ebb tide had taken over in the land postponing to the indefinite future the question of whether a 1960s-type “new breeze” was going to come again, a time when he was beginning to make a small name for himself in the legal profession around the South Shore of Boston he developed a strong interest in the American Civil War, a strong interest in the importance of the Union victory and the abolition of slavery. This interest had been kick-started one day as a result of his going into Boston on a legal matter at the Suffolk County Courthouse on Beacon Hill and passing what was then a much neglected frieze of the heroic Colonel Robert Gould Shaw-led Massachusetts 54th Black Volunteers in front of the State House who did themselves proud down before Fort Wagner and later in 1865 would march into the citadel of the Confederacy Charleston, South Carolina singing the John Brown song.     

Sam had in high school based on admittedly sketchy information rather grudgingly admired that Captain John Brown, late of Harper’s Ferry, and the exploits of his small multi-racial band of brothers in trying to break the back of slavery by a military expedition to free the slave and create an insurrection. Once Sam delved into Civil War history, read more in depth about Brown and what history would have looked like if he had had a modicum of success Sam saw Brown as the Calvinist “avenging angel” high Jehovah scourge of the night-takers of his day. In short, that same thought that he had long held in his mind concerning the righteous agents of just wars like his Lincolns in Spain. [Interesting to Sam then the cosmic link of Brown in the 19th century and the Lincolns in the 20th as the epitome of American just causes revolving around key Civil War names.] While Sam held such thoughts about Brown and men of action like Brown in ante-bellum times who were not afraid to rankle feathers he admitted to himself that he would, unlike with the Internationals, not have very likely joined such an expedition. 

As Sam studied the military situations, the military strategy and tactics that one must invariable do to catch any idea of why men, brothers and cousins in many cases, would get their blood lusts rising so savagely, he did find himself drawn to the General William Tecumseh Sherman-led march through Georgia to the seas. A relentless organized march to break the will, break the communications, break the supply routes, to deny the Confederacy the capacity to produce much of anything. So in his imagination he could see himself as one of “Billy’s bummers” marching sore-footed through Georgia, making Jeff Davis squeal, making Robert E. Lee reach for the white flag. Make old Captain Brown a man ahead of his times. Yeah, Sam would not have sat on his hands on that freedom fight either.

Thursday, April 02, 2009

*On The Road With Uncle Billie's "Bummers"-"Marching Through Georgia"

Click on title to link to YouTube's film clip of Uncle Billy Sherman's "bummers" route song-"Marching Through Georgia".

MARCHING THROUGH GEORGIA
LYRICS


Bring the good ol' Bugle boys! We'll sing another song,
Sing it with a spirit that will start the world along,
Sing it like we used to sing it fifty thousand strong,
While we were marching through Georgia

Hurrah! Hurrah! We bring the Jubilee.
Hurrah! Hurrah! The flag that makes you free,
So we sang the chorus from Atlanta to the sea,
While we were marching through Georgia.

How the darkeys shouted when they heard the joyful sound,
How the turkeys gobbled which our commissary found,
How the sweet potatoes even started from the ground,
While we were marching through Georgia.

Yes and there were Union men who wept with joyful tears,
When they saw the honored flag they had not seen for years;
Hardly could they be restrained from breaking forth in cheers,
While we were marching through Georgia.

"Sherman's dashing Yankee boys will never make the coast!"
So the saucy rebels said and 'twas a handsome boast
Had they not forgot, alas! to reckon with the Host
While we were marching through Georgia.

So we made a thoroughfare for freedom and her train,
Sixty miles of latitude, three hundred to the main;
Treason fled before us, for resistance was in vain
While we were marching through Georgia.