Musings of a Liberal D-Bag College Student
I'm taking a class on the Civil War and Reconstruction with one of my favorite professors this semester, and one of our assignments is a book review on the gradual evolution of Lincoln's views of slavery (The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery by Eric Foner). Even though the assignment's not due until mid-February, I figured I'd get a jump on it now since it's a long book and the semester's off to a slow start.
And the book's really good, but it's kicked up some thoughts that are connecting to thoughts leftover from past classes with Dr. Jay (Museum Anthropology and Historic Heritage of the Northshore). The Civil War period just has so many direct ramifications on how we live today, and I don't think the legacies and potential lessons of the period are fully appreciated by people, since we're taught oversimplified, watered down versions of what happened for propaganda purposes, and for the sake of respecting the "feelings" (*cough* bigotry, embarassment and guilt, *cough-cough*) some white southerners still hold.
In the book, I bumped into an argument against slavery that really shouldn't be new to me. Foner described a possible early impression Lincoln held against slavery, not on moral grounds, but on the grounds that it "degraded white labor, created an unequal distribution of wealth and power, and made it impossible for nonslaveholding farmers to advance" (6), perpetuating a minority white aristocracy. But with the way the American public tends to remember the Civil War, a view like this would never be mentioned. For those who are able to admit that the Civil War was about slavery, not states' rights (well...states' rights to enslave black people, anyway), abolitionists are always cast in a role of moral superiority, but the truth seems to be much more nuanced than that, which shouldn't surprise me. After all, white abolitionists were racist as fuck. We covered that in North Shore class. In my hometown (and elsewhere, but it really struck me when we looked at a Danvers Abolitionist society's charter), the abolitionist societies were white only, they wouldn't speak to free blacks, and they were not interested in helping or even acknowledging the blacks in their communities.
This is a little Marxist of me, but it seems like all the big conflicts in American society can be boiled down to economic crises. The Southern economy stunted itself by relying so heavily on slave labor. While the Northern economy modernized as a result of the Industrial Revolution, the South (whose cotton was fueling the Industrial Revolution) remained economically stagnant, and according to Foner, attempted to perpetuate their economy and culture into the new territories and states that were emerging in the early to mid 19th century. The empancipation of the slaves forced the South into an economic crisis that they're still recovering from over a hundred years later, because people can't equitably distribute wealth.
What's really bothering me now, and where I see the parallels between the Civil War and today, is the complicity of the North in the entire system. As I just stated, the Industrial Revolution was fueled by southern cotton. In fact, the American Industrial Revolution was COMPLETELY DEPENDENT upon slavery for its development. The North Shore of Massachusetts is textile-mill country, and the mills spun southern cotton into cheap cloth which was then sold down south to clothe slaves (whites preferring the higher quality mill cloth of Europe for their own clothes). Not only that, but the shoes produced in this area (almost all of the historical plaques in Danvers proclaiming the profession of the person who built the house are shoemakers) were cheaply made and went to the feet of black southern slaves. Some historians argue that the American Revoultion wouldn't have happened without slavery, because in the North, one or two slaves went a long way, freeing up enough time for pondering on the works of John Locke and other enlightenment thinkers. I find it a convincing argument.
Now let's look at what our current consumer culture is fueled by, and how it got this way. After slavery was abolished, brutal economic systems that were all-but slavery such as sharecropping were introduced, keeping the poor hella poor (though the rich weren't quite as rich as before). In the North, workers slowly started making gains such as the right to form unions, the occasional pay raise, and shorter work days. As a result, the incredibly rich were slightly less rich than before, so they moved their factories and mills south, where there were people literally starving to death for want of work, and these people were willing to suffer the brutal conditions that people in the North had worked hard to eliminate. I'm not sure about the Northern economy at large, but my particular chunk of it switched from a mill economy to an intellectual economy, which is where we're at now. We sell ideas, technology, and education. And some former industrial towns have turned to tourism (Salem being a particularly prominent example). The cycle repeated itself in the South, where eventually workers made gains and the rich were slightly less rich than before, but there was nowhere else to move the factories within the United States, since by this point everyone had laws to give some level of protection to the working class.
So the factories moved overseas. People complain about this, and yet, they don't seem to understand why it happened. The people in other countries manufacturing the goods we buy are working under deplorable conditions, and our country's economic evolution is directly responsible. The people in China manufacturing our electronics and clothing (mostly luxury items) inherited the disparate conditions we set up trying to recover from an economy dependent upon racial slavery.
I'd always liked to think that if I'd lived during the 18th or 19th century, wherever I happened to be, that I wouldn't be complicit in slavery. But it was all pervading. People in Danvers who'd never seen a slave in their life might leave Danvers to work at a mill in Lowell, where they'd spin slave-grown cotton into cloth to clothe more slaves. Danvers women were highly likely to bind shoes together for the slaves lucky enough to be able to wear them. And today I wear clothes produced in sweatshops and read on a Kindle manufactured in a factory known for employee suicides.
Well, I've had a problem with spending money I don't really have. The next time I'm tempted to throw away potential rent money on something frivolous, I'll try to remember all this brooding and maybe that'll help me.