Lit’s Contribution to the Civil War

Daniel Day Lewis in "Lincoln"

Daniel Day Lewis in “Lincoln”

Have you heard how Jim DeMint, head of the once respected Heritage Foundation, explains the end of slavery? “The move to free the slaves came from the people,” he declared recently,

 did not come from the federal government. It came from a growing movement among the people, particularly people of faith, that this was wrong. People like Wilberforce who persisted for years because of his faith and because of his love for people.

I’m not writing today’s post only to lambaste DeMint’s idiocy, however. An Adam Gopnik response to DeMint in the New Yorker has further clarified for me the role that literature played in the lead-up to the Civil War. Gopnik’s discussion of how whites had to be brought around to sympathize with the black cause draws our attention to the importance of such works as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.

First, however, a few words on DeMint. When he talks about people of faith, he’s thinking of people like himself. But many people of faith in the antebellum South didn’t oppose slavery. As I wrote last January, Harriet Beecher Stowe demonstrates in Uncle Tom’s Cabin how may used religion to justify slavery. (The cynical slave owner Augustine St. Clair lays this out quite clearly.) Furthermore, I’m pretty sure that DeMint would not be a fan of certain Christians that opposed slavery, such as John Brown, a millenarian who saw slavery as a blight on the nation that needed to be eradicated if Jesus was to return. (Thanks to Rachel Kranz for alerting me to John Stauffer’s book on this subject, The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race.)

The best response I’ve seen to DeMint’s statement is Jonathan Chait’s sarcastic quip, “Bzzt. Everybody knows the slaves were freed by Ronald Reagan, and he did it by cutting taxes.”

Gopnik is equally dismissive but goes into more detail. Here he is drawing from James Oakes’s forthcoming book The Scorpion’s Sting: Antislavery and the Coming of the Civil War:

[DeMint’s claim] is, in plain English, so ignorant that, as I say, there has been no shortage of corrections. A debate about whether big government freed the slaves is pretty much the only debate that a liberal is guaranteed to win. The Civil War was the original big-government overreach: it came from Washington, D.C.; it involved raising new taxes (in fact, it is the origin of a number of taxes); it confiscated rifles from rebels; it did special favors for minorities (in this case, the special favor of recognizing them as human beings and setting them free from lifelong bondage); and, in the end, it imposed a bureaucracy on an unwilling population (that is, it imposed the Union Army on the South). Many things can be said about the Civil War, but not that it was done with the benign neglect of the federales. The moral point was argued for decades, as it is with most issues in a democracy. But that big government freed the slaves is as sure a fact as any in history.

Oates, Gopnik reports, believes that the Civil War was caused by an unsustainable situation, which is that the North was against the South extending slavery and the South recognized that slavery could only survive if it could be extended. No middle ground was seen as possible, which is why DeMint’s home state of South Carolina seceded when an antislavery president was elected.

And now to literature. For the North to act on the behalf of the slaves, Gopnik asserts, the conscience of the ruling class needed to be appealed to. Change, he and Oates believe, does not happen because of “inexorable social or economic forces” but through vigorous top-down action by sympathetic elites. The situation required a combination of pity and politics (this is also the position of Steven Spielberg’s film Lincoln), and literature was vital in helping build that pity. Here’s Gopnik on the importance of compassion and sympathy:

[W]e want oppressed people to free themselves—we want the Israelites to have crossed the Red Sea without help from empathetic Egyptians. But pity, in the famous sense that Shakespeare evoked it in “Macbeth”—as a loud, awakening emotion, empathy on horseback [passage cited below]—is central to change. It was compassion and sympathy for the suffering of others that provoked the abolitionist movement. Sometimes this was, indeed, deeply rooted in Christianity and in the church. At other moments, as with the young, freethinking Lincoln, who was antislavery as a young man, when he was still aggressively atheist—it was not. Sometimes it was idiosyncratically American-spiritual. 

And further on:

A generation ago, it was considered the essence of wisdom to accept that vast, impersonal forces made history happen without the condescending assistance of anyone’s awakened conscience. But, today, Oakes reminds us of the essential truth that what makes human lives change is restoring agency to altruism. 

In other words, Stowe, Douglass and Jacobs were instrumental in the altruism department.

Gopnik cautions that the agency that must accompany altruism isn’t always pretty. Just as conservatives want to inveigh against big government, liberals often want to steer clear of dirty politics. Gopnik says that they need to wake up to reality:

Change is achieved, as are the victories of a government in a democracy, by way of painful coalition-building, hypocrisy, occasional violations of apparent principles, ugly if short-term violations of civil liberties, tactical duplicity and long-game strategic thinking, and, often, disingenuous dealings around the goals and the scope of an operation.

Maybe this is how we should see the civil rights achievements of the wheeler-dealer Lyndon B. Johnson, whose signing of the Civil Right Act fifty years ago we have been celebrating. In addition to admiring his agency, we should also mention works like Raisin in the Sun, To Kill a Mockingbird and James Baldwin’s fiction and essays for making the case for altruism.

 

*And pity, like a naked new-born babe,
Striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubim, horsed
Upon the sightless couriers of the air,
Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,
That tears shall drown the wind. I have no spur
To prick the sides of my intent, but only
Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself
And falls on the other. (Macbeth, I.7, ll. 21-28)

 

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