Uncomfortable Truths for the Righteous Cause Myth

The following are uncomfortable truths for “Righteous Cause Mythologists:”

1. Africans created, organized, and supplied the international slave trade without any European involvement or direction, and Northers profited heavily from the institution.

2. Southerners established most of the early abolition societies in the United States.

3. “Jim Crow” segregation developed in Connecticut and was pervasive in New England in the 1830s.

4. Northern commitment to “anti-slavery” was mostly political and not principled.

5. The Confederate war effort would have been impossible without “Black Confederate” support.

6. Northerners espoused “white-supremacist” and “racist” attitudes more frequently and fervently than antebellum Southerners, and most Southerners rejected anthropological racism as being anti-Biblical.

7. The “Underground Railroad” was a myth created by self-righteous Northerners.

Critics might charge me with engaging in “whataboutism.” But that misses the point.

If all of the above are true, and they are, then the consistent attacks on the Southern tradition are based on a false dichotomy of American history, the “righteous” and “democratic” North upholding the “idea” of America against an “evil” and “oligarchic” South that distorted the founding tradition.

Americans on supposedly both ends of the political spectrum need this to be true, or at least want this to be true. It allows them to feel good about American history and place the blame for any supposed immoral misdeeds on the back of a defeated people, the heretics in the American story. That would be Southerners.

Progressive historians accept that America was a “racist” country because they engage in presentism, but this is an emotional rather than historical or logical charge. The terms “racism” and “white supremacy” had no context before the twentieth-century. Nineteenth-century Americans from all sections in the United States proclaimed that the United States government was for white people without batting an eye. They literally emphasized that point when they restricted naturalization to “free white persons.” This wasn’t considered odd or “racist” because it was the normal standard for people from European stock who considered assimilation into a European order to be impossible for non-Europeans. We can debate this position in the twenty-first century, but the Naturalization Act of 1790 was signed into law by George Washington and passed both houses of Congress by crushing majorities, meaning this was the accepted American view of race and culture. Both Frederick Muhlenberg of Pennsylvania and John Adams of Massachusetts supported the bill.

Yet, these same progressives would reject the notion of “Black Confederates” or that slavery should be placed on the backs of Africans instead of Europeans.

On the other hand, some “conservative” historians, particularly mainstream academics, would find the complexity of American society troubling and would argue that the above statements should be “contextualized” in order to sanitize the American story. These kind of truths undermine the “Righteous Cause.” The “Righteous Cause Myth” is more pervasive and historically inaccurate than the so-called “Lost Cause Myth.” And “conservatives” are heavily invested in the “Righteous Cause” because it offers them absolution.

According to this narrative, liberty loving Americans north of the Mason-Dixon really wanted to abolish slavery and rid the Untied States of the institution but had to compromise with racist Southerners who thought slavery was a “positive good” in the abstract in order to win independence and establish a Union. It then took a bloody war fought between the “righteous” Union soldiers and evil Confederates to end the institution and place the United States on the proper path of the “proposition” that all men are created equal as enshrined in the Declaration of Independence.

Of course, none of this is true, other than the War ended slavery, and as Lincoln emphasized, that was never the primary goal. Most Northerners were not principled anti-slavery advocates and only accepted the position when it became clear that it could drive the proper wedge between free-soil (racist) Western farmers who wanted to populate the West with free white people and white Southerners who also wanted access to Western land with their slave labor. Slavery was an expedient political tool to wins votes and usher in a Northern dominated political economy. As Horace Greeley wrote in 1854, he had “never been able to discover any strong, pervading, over-ruling Anti Slavery sentiment in the Free States.” And at the same time, he argued “that if every voter in the Free States were to have half a dozen negro slaves left him by some Georgia uncle or cousin’s will, that a decided majority would hold on to their chattels and make as much as possible out of them.”

The opening truths, however, provide real complexity to American history, a history that has always been decidedly devoid of cartoonish oversimplification.

But don’t take my word for it, the following books provide more detailed and documented support for my arguments:

John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World 1400-1800. Thornton concludes that “Africans controlled the nature of their interactions with Europe. Europeans did not possess the military power to force Africans to participate in any type of trade in which their leaders did not wish to engage. Therefore all African trade with the Atlantic, including the slave trade and the process of acquisition of slaves argues that slaves had long been used in African societies, that African political systems placed great importance on the legal relationship of slavery for political purposes, and that relatively large numbers of people were likely to be slaves at any one time. Because so much of the process of acquisition, transfer, and sale of slaves was under the control of African states and elites, they were able to protect themselves from the demographic impact and transfer the considerable social dislocations to poorer members of their own societies.” This book isn’t a “Lost Cause,” pro-Southern, or anti-black polemic. It’s published by Cambridge University Press and explicitly a pro-African work, but it dispels the progressive myth that Europeans–and more importantly Americans–kidnapped and enslaved helpless Africans.

Alice Dana Adams, The Neglected Period of Anti-Slavery in America 1808-1831. This classic 1908 work explains that Southerners led the way in anti-slavery activity in the early nineteenth century. As she notes, “…it is interesting to read that of the one hundred and thirty abolition societies in the United States in 1827, one hundred and six were in the slave states, while but four were in New England and New York.” This book is largely ignored by modern academics both on the left and right.

C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow. Woodward was a Southern progressive, but the key word is “Southern.” His conclusions deserve scrutiny and reflection, but Woodward correctly castigated Northerners for their blatant hypocrisy over race relations in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. “Jim Crow” was born in New England. Even the term describing segregation originated there in the 1830s. Anyone who believes that the South “created” segregation needs to read this book.

Larry Tise, Proslavery. Eugene Genovese wasn’t convinced by Tise’s argument that the North developed American pro-slavery ideology, but Tise shows that New England theologians made arguments that mirrored those of Southerners long before the zenith of Southern pro-slavery literature in the 1850s. Slavery, he emphasizes, was a national, not sectional, problem. This recent paper published by the Schuyler Mansion State Historic Site shows that Alexander Hamilton both bought and sold slaves and was never a principled abolitionist.

James H. Brewer, The Confederate Negro: Virginia’s Craftsmen and Military Laborers, 1861-1865.  What defines a “Black Confederate”? According to Kevin Levin, “Black Confederates” were a myth. He’s become popular with the anti-“Lost Cause” establishment historian class because they believe he conclusively proved that “Black Confederates” did not exist. Levin relies on semantics to prove his thesis, including inventing a phrase that no one used at the time of the War, “camp slave.” The Confederate government did not officially recognize any black Confederate military personnel until 1865, but black Southerners were vital to the war effort and were as much “Confederates” as any other Southern participant in the conflict. As Brewer concludes in his exhaustively researched book, something Levin’s polemic does not match, “Today, in a lonely unmarked grave, forgotten and unknown, lies the Confederate Negro–a casualty of history.” He wrote that in 1969. If anyone is a “history denier,” it’s Levin, and nothing has changed in over fifty years.

James A. Rawley, Race and Politics: “Bleeding Kansas” and the Coming of the Civil War. While an uneven book, Rawley does a nice job punching holes in the moral righteousness of the North. Other historians have accomplished the same task, particularly in relation to race and “racism” in the Midwest, but Rawley understood that Northerners and Southerners shared the same views on race. He writes, “…an antipodal record of race attitudes is quite clear. Southerners and Northerners, in the crucial years before the outbreak of the Civil War, shared a conviction of Negro inferiority. The testimony of the times–in Congressional debates, in state papers, in newspapers, in private correspondence, in statues, in court decisions, in state constitutions, in sermons, in tombstones, and elsewhere–is overwhelming. It was a rare American who doubted the anthropological assumption of African inequality, an occasional one who favored legal equality, a nearly nonexistent one who favored social equality. Even most abolitionists seemed ambivalent about racial equality. Negro Americans, both slave and free, were denied equal opportunities for education, employment, and with some exceptions for electing government officials.”

Larry Gara, The Liberty Line: The Legend of the Underground Railroad. Gara found little evidence that the “Underground Railroad” existed, if any. Instead, he writes that the legend was crafted by abolitionists to enhance their role in defining American history. The War had to be righteous cause because losing one million men to preserve a Union would not have been morally acceptable. The legend grew as Americans moved further away from the War. And today, Americans firmly believe, without any evidence, that thousands of Northern crusaders guided miserable and terrified slaves to freedom in Northern towns through a series of safe houses. It makes us feel better about the past, but “feel good” history based on legend isn’t history. It’s propaganda. That is the very essence of the “Righteous Cause Myth.”

The views expressed at AbbevilleInstitute.org are not necessarily those of the Abbeville Institute.

Brion McClanahan

Brion McClanahan is the President of the Abbeville Institute

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