In addition to being the birthday of Publick Occurrences 2.0′s senior proprietor, February 27 is the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s famous Cooper Union address in 1860 (making this the sesquicentennial, come to think of it).  I was actually walking near Cooper Union this past evening, which gave me the chance to reflect on great men of American history and great American historians.  A fine way to say farewell to this short month.

My students and I had fun discussing political geography today.  For instance, take a look at these two maps side by side.  First, we have the presidential electoral map from 1860, from the National Atlas of the United States:

Then we have this recent study, from Open Left, depicting how white men (the only ones eligible to vote in 1860) voted in 2008:

Now, obviously it would be very easy to overdraw an analysis from these two maps.  And indeed, I think Open Left is a bit too Whiggish (despite trying not to be Whiggish) about the links between the expansion of voting rights and the election of Progressive presidential candidates–after all, the expanded electorate has certainly elected its share of conservative Presidents.

But it’s still pretty interesting.

There was an interesting but overheated discussion at “Edge of the West” of a beloved piece of classic rock, The Band’s “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” There was contextualizin’ and politicizin’ a-plenty, and I made the following remarks way, way down in the comments:

Sorry I saw this late. I love “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” dearly, and hearing the Band’s searing, lumpy original version after growing up with the dopey, slick Joan Baez sing-along on AM radio was a formative musical experience for me: it just illustrated the difference between original popular art and dumbed-down music industry pablum. (Also, the correct lyrics actually told a story that made sense.)

That said, Robbie Robertson’s lyrics for that song and several of the others on “The Band” and “Stage Fright” partook of a fairly naive infatuation with Confederate/white southern Americana that was common in the counter culture and its offshoots circa 1969 (and after). Whilst heading back to nature and making laid-back country-rock, they loved them their doomed outlaws and rebels back in those days, and with less historical insight than we might like, the hippie songwriters and screenwriters tended to think they identified with the poor Confederate soldier, especially if he turned “social bandit” after the war. Even in the dark, revisionist westerns they turned out, the good guys were almost always ex-Confederates, just like John Wayne and Randolph Scott had always been. Blue uniforms were only seen sacking Indian villages and southern farms.

I would say it is to Robbie Robertson’s credit that, unlike a number of left-wing historians of that day, he wrote his elegiac ballad about Confederate cannon fodder rather than, say, a revanchist thug like Jesse James.

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Now playing: The Band – Rockin’ Chair
via FoxyTunes

During his recent trip to Ghana, President Obama did not discuss the brutal history of the Atlantic slave trade that began in Ghana, and only mentioned the word slavery once during his speech. Instead, the President spoke in general terms about “oppression” and “evil.” In fact, in the opening sentence that he delivered standing outside the haunting Elmina Castle, Obama likened his trip to Ghana to his visit to a concentration camp in Germany.  For decades, historians have been trying to dissuade the American public from comparing the slave trade to the Holocaust, which often leads to explosive debates on which group suffered more, and to the imminent question: would the President standing on the grounds of a former concentration camp evoke the history of slavery?

By discussing the history of the slave trade in Ghana as part of larger history of “evil” and “cruelty,” the President missed the opportunity to educate the American public (and the world for that matter) about the actual history of the slave trade: the 2 million slaves who died en route to the Americas and the millions more who suffered in the crowded, disease-ridden, dark bowels of the slave ships. He also gave up the chance to discuss the effects of the international slave trade: the destruction of African cultural traditions, languages, and religious practices by New World slaveholders; the pain felt by African families torn apart by the hands of Dutch, Spanish, and English traders and merchants; the greedy profits gained by European nations and the burgeoning colonies in the Americas; and even the transformation of West African economies; political structures; and military strategies.

Throughout his speech in front the 15^th century slave castle, Obama only mentioned the word slavery once and when he did invoke it, he made enormous historical leaps. He reflected on the 19^th century abolitionist movement when whites and blacks fought together to end slavery. While white and black people did eventually work together in the early to mid-nineteenth century to terminate slavery, one cannot ignore that on the ground where the President made such a comment, whites and blacks worked together during the 15^th, 16^th, 17^th and 18^th centuries to send Africans into chattel slavery in the New World. While Obama more than likely made this remark in order to illuminate a moment of interracial solidarity with the hope of improving race relations, he forfeited the opportunity for Americans to actually reflect on the horrors of the slave trade—a cultural memory that most black people acknowledge but one that most non-black Americans know little about. A more informed reflection on the actual history of the slave trade could do more to improve race relations than cherry picking a moment in history that happened after the international slave trade ended and did not even lead to the abolition of slavery. President Obama ought to know that it was not just abolitionists who ended slavery, but enslaved people themselves. Southern blacks dismantled the institution of slavery by fleeing from plantations across the Confederacy and joining the Union Army, contributing mightily to the North’s victory in the Civil War and the collapse of the slaveocracy.

Jim Downs is a history professor at Connecticut College, focusing on African-American history and 19th century U.S. History. His books include Taking Back the Academy and Why We Write. His articles have appeared in History Today, the Chicago Tribune, The Southern Historian, Prologue, History News Network, and Reviews in American History, among other places.

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Now playing: Robyn Hitchcock And The Egyptians – The President
via FoxyTunes

I imagine a lot of readers here already subscribe to H-SHEAR, the Early Republic historians’ email list, but for those who don’t, here is a notice for a bit of worthwhile historical television that is airing tonight, from Dan Feller, director of the Andrew Jackson Papers project:

This coming Monday, July 6, the PBS show “History Detectives” will air a segment featuring the work of the Andrew Jackson Papers project at the University of Tennessee Department of History.  The episode concerns a letter threatening Jackson’s assassination, signed with the name Junius Brutus Booth (a famous actor and father of Lincoln’s assassin John Wilkes Booth) and sent to Jackson on July 4, 1835.  Housed in the Library of Congress and long known to scholars, the letter has been presumed by Jackson biographers and political historians (following the lead of John Spencer Bassett, who printed it in his Correspondence of Andrew Jackson with Booth’s name in quotation marks) to be the work of a pseudonymous writer, while some Booth biographers and theater historians have accepted its authenticity but considered it a gag among friends. As “History Detectives” will show, the Jackson Papers staff were instrumental in proving that neither is correct.  Booth really wrote the letter, apparently in one of his legendary choleric rages.  He later apologized.  Killing presidents, or threatening to, seems to have run in the family.

I will be interested to see how the show handles the Booths. One of the cardinal points in my History of Conspiracy Theories course is that Lincoln’s was perhaps the only truly political assassination of all the presidential assassinations. I was not aware of the elder Booth’s threat against Jackson, but I would not have put the letter’s attribution in quotation marks. A guy named Brutus who named his son John Wilkes obviously had some extravagant, self-dramatizing ideas about fighting for freedom.

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Now playing: Mott The Hoople – Violence
via FoxyTunes

Via Matthew Yglesias (who ponders Confederate place names), Ed Kilgore discusses the “sovereignty resolutions” that have suddenly become popular, particularly (though not exclusively) in southern legislatures.  Atrios kicks in the snark.

Go read the posts, come back, discuss.

This not a real proverb, but a political principle that it does not take much of an historian to see applies to the attitudes of pretty much every colonial people or small nation whose territory has been invaded since the dawn of modern nationalism, at least. Nobody likes getting their homes bombed, their cities overrun by foreign troops, their friends, neighbors, and relatives traumatized, maimed, or killed. People remember that stuff, and they tend not to look kindly on the politicians and officials who get installed or helped into power by the invaders, perhaps especially if the officials of the new regime are natives of the invaded territory.

Shall we recall a U.S. example? Let’s. In American schools, we used to learn a name for what the defeated Confederates called those who staffed the Reconstruction regimes: “scalawags,” “carpetbaggers,” and lots of worse things.  We were not taught to admire those fellows. As we know from Eric Foner and other post-”revisionist” historians of Reconstruction, many of these officials were not grafters and traitors, but honest reformers trying to help the people of the South and improve their society and economy. Nevertheless, despite these noble intentions, the new regimes required the federal government’s protection to be stable and inspired a rather famous terrorist insurgency called the Ku Klux Klan. Once outside support was withdrawn, the South was immediately “redeemed” by the same people who started the CIvil War in the first place.

Of course, the more relevant example for the present-day issues of this type would be the politics of every post-colonial nation one can think of except Canada, Australia, and New Zealand: the sure path to political popularity and power in such countries was virulent opposition to the continuing influence of the old colonial power, even if such opposition was likely to be counter-productive. There was this early American politician called Jefferson who ended up president in no small degreee because he was the leading opponent of a non-anti-British foreign policy.

So, given this sort of historical experience, why would any policy-maker expect massively destructive invasions by overwhelmingly superior forces in isolated, beaten-down places like Gaza and Iraq to result in the people of those places warmly accepting regimes that the invaders helped to install? Yet the failure of the Iraqi people to do just this is Dick Cheney’s only regret about the Iraq War — and not because he was wrong to expect it, but because of their supposedly damaged psyches.

Even more incredibly, the Israelis apparently thought that crushing Gaza was going to give their favored party, the secular Palestinian Authority, the chance to win power back from Hamas. From the New York Times:

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“OLD BUCK” AND THE POLITICAL CRISIS OF THE 1850S:
A report from the historical trenches outside Lancaster, Pa.

By Christopher Childers
Louisiana State University

James Buchanan has never enjoyed a good reputation among historians and president-raters; most people rate his presidency at or near the worst in American history. Yet even as students of the 1850s note his shortcomings, many—if not most—of the scholars of this period qualify their answer. For James Buchanan, the “Old Public Functionary,” possessed perhaps the most experience of any president in our history. Buchanan’s résumé reveals a man who had spent his life immersed in the American political system and the U.S. government. Congressman, senator, minister to the Court of St. James, minister to Russia, secretary of state — Buchanan held all these positions in a political career that spanned from the 1820s to the commencement of the Civil War. By almost any measure, James Buchanan had sterling credentials for the office of president.

Amid a sea of withering criticism, occasional ambivalence has been the best Buchanan has been able to do in the eyes of America’s leading historians . For example, Kenneth M. Stampp addressed Buchanan in two of his books: And the War Came (1950) and America in 1857: A Nation on the Brink (1990). In the earlier book, Stampp was relatively kind. One of the northern Democrats’ most sympathetic historians, Roy F. Nichols, lauded Stampp for taking a “sensible view” of Buchanan, “making him neither the villain nor the constitutional saint.” Forty years later, however, even Stampp penned a scathing portrait of Buchanan, and his most recent biographer, Jean Baker, author of two other books on the northern Democracy, largely followed suit.

Where could Old Buck’s reputation go from here? Last month, a panel of distinguished historians gathered in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, James Buchanan’s hometown, to participate in a symposium on the man and the crises he faced during his presidency. On the symposium’s first night, participants assembled on the grounds of Buchanan’s home, Wheatland, for a discussion between two of the greatest historians of the 1850s—Michael F. Holt and William Freehling. Wheatland made a marvelous setting for this wide-ranging discussion of the Buchanan years. Pennsylvania’s only presidential home is an imposing red brick building that stands well-preserved on the beautifully maintained grounds about a mile outside the Lancaster city center. Apparently, Lancaster-area brides find Wheatland an appealing place to wed despite its owner’s poor reputation; as the symposium participants met under a tent on the grounds, a couple married in the mansion.

Interestingly, the majority of the questions that Holt and Freehling fielded concerned counterfactuals—the great “what ifs?” of sectional crisis history. What if Buchanan had stuck with his earlier advocacy of extending the Missouri Compromise line rather than endorsing the Kansas-Nebraska Act? What if Buchanan had asserted national authority in the Kansas imbroglio? What if Buchanan had taken a stronger posture in the secession crisis? The Buchanan presidency seems to provoke many “what if” questions from people who cannot escape the conclusion that many things went terribly wrong between the years of 1857 and 1861.

The next day, the symposium shifted to Franklin & Marshall College, where Buchanan served as president of the board of trustees from 1852 to 1866. Old Buck certainly had a few sympathizers in the crowd; one man rose at the end of the last session to praise Buchanan, lamenting the fact that he has endured ceaseless opprobrium for 150 years. Few historical figures have endured such scrutiny and disdain, the man argued. And yet, even Buchanan’s most ardent home-town supporters, eventually concede that the president’s record certainly does not merit praise. Of course, many of the panelists grappled with this very question. Buchanan biographer (and symposium participant) Jean Baker has phrased the dilemma well, asking “why such a well-trained and well-intentioned public figure could have failed so abominably”?

Most all of the panelists agreed: James Buchanan’s was a failed presidency. And when someone spoke of his strengths, they surely did not speak of the sectional crisis. John Belohlavek spoke positively of Buchanan’s skill at managing foreign policy, while William B. MacKinnon praised his decisive efforts at ending the Mormon crisis in Utah. But a strong foreign policy aimed at territorial expansion and the tamping down of rebellion in Utah did not assuage most of the scholars at this symposium, who generally viewed Old Buck’s presidency harshly. Indeed, while other panelists conceded Belohlavek’s point, they noted that Buchanan tended to flee domestic crises by attending to foreign affairs.

In all fairness, and in spite of Buchanan’s obvious shortcomings, most of the historians agreed that Buchanan inherited a terrible situation. As Nicole Etcheson pointed out, the crisis in Kansas had already spun out of control as proslavery and antislavery settlers in the territory made a mockery of Stephen Douglas’s popular sovereignty doctrine. And as Holt and Freehling—two grey giants of the field—ably discussed, the great party system that had given form and organization to political conflict was in disarray. A sectional party had risen from the ashes of the Whig Party and the short-lived Know Nothings to challenge the Democrats. And while the feckless Republican candidate John C. Fremont lost his bid for the presidency in 1856, the specter of a sectional party hostile to southern interests threatened political stability and provoked bitter recriminations from southern Democrats and northern doughfaces.

Amidst this turmoil, James Buchanan won the presidency. Yet the scholars at Lancaster generally agreed that Buchanan made a bad situation worse. As Maury Klein noted, Buchanan picked an ineffective cabinet. Secretary of State Lewis Cass had long passed his prime and served as a mere figurehead; John B. Floyd, the Secretary of War, appeared downright crooked, especially after a congressional investigation severely tarnished the Buchanan administration’s image. At the outset of his presidency, Buchanan had tried to craft a sectionally balanced Cabinet and in the end created a mess. Perhaps more notably, Buchanan’s meddling in the Dred Scott case created a firestorm in the North at the very beginning of his presidency. The president’s statement that he would “cheerfully submit” to the Supreme Court’s decision in the case followed a brief conference between Buchanan and Chief Justice Roger B. Taney moments before he took the oath of office. But this paled in comparison to allegations that Buchanan had personally encouraged his friend Justice Robert C. Grier to vote with the majority and deny Scott’s plea. Legal historian Paul Finkelman presented a compelling argument that Buchanan’s early actions immediately handicapped his administration.

By 1860, old battles over Kansas, the Dred Scott decision, and internecine struggles within the Democratic Party had weakened the American political establishment and had rendered the Buchanan administration ineffective. When Abraham Lincoln won election to the presidency in November 1860, without a single electoral vote from the South, a crisis had finally emerged that compromise would not avert. But Buchanan faced his own crisis, in what Jean Baker has called his “extraordinary contradiction” that while Buchanan believed the Union inviolable, “he held no coercive power to prevent or overturn an illegal act by a state.” Buchanan’s belief that he possessed no power to maintain the Union paralyzed his administration and seemingly limited him to a wait-and-see approach, hoping that calmer heads would prevail and the crisis would pass. Jean Baker, Daniel Crofts, and Michael Holt discussed Buchanan’s actions in the secession crisis, a course that strongly favored the South. Buchanan seemed increasingly impotent in addressing the issues that the crisis posed and even acquiescent in the course of secession, to the point where he prepared to order Major Robert Anderson from Fort Sumter back to the scuttled Fort Moultrie, a move that essentially surrendered the federal installations in South Carolina. Only when three of Buchanan’s cabinet members threatened resignation did Buchanan change his course and take a more Unionist stance. In many respects, Buchanan seemed all too willing to leave the crisis for Lincoln to manage.

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