VOLUME XVI, NUMBER 2, SPRING 2016

A Journal of Political Thought and Statesmanship

Bradley C.S. R. Shep Watson: Melnick: Ending Extreme Michael Poverty Nelson: Political Sex Allen C. Scandals Guelzo: Did the Angelo M. Slaves Free Codevilla: emselves? John Quincy Adams Robert K. Faulkner: James V. Heroes, Schall, S.J.: Old & Modern New Catholic ought Anthony Esolen: James W. e Iliad Ceaser: Scruton vs. Mark the Left Helprin: Defense Is Missing in Action

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Book Review by Allen C. Guelzo Up from Slavery The Long Emancipation: The Demise of Slavery in the United States, by Ira Berlin. Harvard University Press, 240 pages, $22.95

Eighty-Eight Years: The Long Death of Slavery in the United States, 1777–1865, by Patrick Rael. University of Georgia Press, 400 pages, $89.95 (cloth), $32.95 (paper)

elf-help has a long tradition in free-market narcissists like Robert Ringer in t is odd, however, to see over the American life. In its earliest form, Pu- his bestseller Looking Out for Number One last 25 years the emergence of a similar Sritan self-help manuals offered guid- (1977): “Life is like a giant pinspotter in a go- Ibrand of self-help in the midst of the his- ance to the spiritual pilgrim in detecting the liath’s bowling alley. Over the long haul, most tory of slave emancipation. We may think we signs of grace and whether one was on the people end up exactly where they deserve to know the outlines of emancipation’s history, path to heaven. The Enlightenment replaced be.” So the best advice is “work hard to look beginning with the long slough of slavery in the attainment of grace with the attainment after your own best interests. Leave others colonial America, then the rise of abolition of prosperity, but the titles that charted the to sort themselves out.” But we also get it in movements, and then finally the Civil War, new path to Mammon were still cast from the a more sophisticated form from Karl Marx. the Emancipation Proclamation, and the 13th original self-help mold. As “The emancipation of the working class must Amendment. But this is the old history, and republic shuffled off its aristocratic British be the act of the working class itself,” he in- that history is now understood as a history connections, self-help took the form of books sisted. This is self-help fired by the determi- besotted with exactly the sort of cooperative of manners, teaching the American middle nation to remain free from any taint of the condescension that allows emancipation to class how to attain gentility by keeping up ap- impure. The Nazis, in just the same way, an- be a story of what white people did for black pearances. But the original impulse remained nounced that “the road to emancipation” for people. The implication of the old history is the same: you must find grace yourself, you Germany can only come from a “war of libera- that black people were passive; they accepted must acquire success yourself, you must ab- tion” which “draws together the consciously freedom from the hands of generous-spirited sorb gentility yourself. German members of every occupation and whites; and they are thereafter expected to tug There is, however, a darker tradition of self- rank.” Whether the struggle is a proletarian at their caps, express gratitude, and conform help, built not on the improvement of the self or an Aryan one, no assistance is welcomed to the expectations of white bourgeois society. but on the running down of others. This is from others, since such assistance could only Not incidentally, it was a Marxist, Her- what we get in a fairly unvarnished way from diminish the purity of the final result. bert Aptheker, and a convert to Marxism,

Claremont Review of Books w Spring 2016 Page 45 A Distinctively AmericAn conservAtism

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W.E.B. Du Bois, who first questioned the sources on slavery’s end in Freedom: A Docu- Pedro Marques, whose The Sounds of Silence: Great White Emancipator history of slavery’s mentary History of Emancipation (1982, 1985, Nineteenth-Century Portugal and the Abolition end in the 1930s and attributed emancipa- 1990, 1993). He is, nevertheless, a true believ- of the Slave Trade in 2006 set off an unholy tion instead to what Du Bois called a “general er in the self-emancipation thesis. Emancipa- scurry amongst the self-emancipationists. strike” staged by the slaves. In this scenario, tion, he begins cautiously, “was not so much a Marques, who surveyed a vast sample of enslaved blacks seized the opportunity of the proclamation as a movement; not so much an slave revolts throughout the New World, Civil War’s outbreak as the requisite moment occasion as a complex history with multiple concluded that slave revolts were essentially of “crisis” to sabotage the internal economy players and narratives.” Opened up, however, self-centered—that is, they were conducted of the Confederacy and eventually bring it what Berlin means by this complexity is that by slaves seeking freedom for themselves (but face-down in the dust. It is the story, Du Bois not for others) who frequently organized wrote, of “how the black worker won the war • “primacy” in the story of emancipation be- “maroon” colonies which held slaves them- by a general strike which transferred his labor longs to “black people, free and slave,” with- selves. More recently, in her essay “Dodging from the Confederate planter to the North- out whose “resistance to captivity…there Rebellion: Politics and Gender in the Berbice ern invader, in whose army lines workers be- could be no movement against slavery.” Slave Uprising of 1763,” (American Historical gan to be organized as a new labor force.” • The aim of the slaves was freedom, not just Review, February 2016), Marjoleine Kars has But this “self-emancipation thesis” did not amelioration, and slaves were conscious examined slave rebels in Dutch Guyana and achieve popular status until the work of Vin- political actors striving toward the politi- discovered that large portions of the slave cent Harding and Barbara J. Fields (the lat- cal goal of freedom. population “struggled to dodge all combat- ter through her appearances in Ken Burns’s • Once emancipated, they “not only raised ants, whether the Dutch, their Amerindian documentary series The Civil War in 1990). the question of their post-emancipation allies, or the rebels.” Far from challenging Self-emancipation now became more than standing,” but “answered it as well” with the legitimacy of slavery as an institution, just work-stoppages. Slaves used the disrup- the demand for equality as well as freedom. Marques’s and Kars’s insurgents were simply tions of the war to subtract themselves entire- • Undoing slavery required violence, and looking out for their own interests, and were ly from the Confederacy by fleeing to Union could not have been accomplished in any perfectly willing to cut deals with whites, military lines, by becoming the Union Army’s other, less bloody, fashion. whether those deals helped any other slaves logistical corps, and by eventually exerting so or not. This was self-help of a decidedly un- much pressure on the Lincoln Administra- Thus, in Berlin’s brief survey of emancipa- revolutionary sort (although it could be just tion that the president was forced to issue an tion, slaves undermined slavery by their own as violent) and neither these revolts nor up- emancipation proclamation and throw open initiative, and did so by revolutionary violence, risings on slave ships in the notorious Middle army recruitment to blacks. At its zenith, covering a full spectrum from simple flight Passage had any larger impact on slavery. To self-emancipation has come to mean that the to armed resistance. In the first case, Berlin the contrary, says Marques, slaves actually started “the war themselves” claims, “by the middle years of the nineteenth rather than “simply waiting for either the century the slave South was leaking like a The main concern of slaves who achieved Lord or the Yankees to give them freedom,” sieve,” at a rate of 1,000 to 5,000 fugitives a individual freedom by escape or rebel- until “[b]y 1863, there was a full-blown inner year between 1830 and 1860. In the second, lion was not to free other slaves, and civil war going on within the South.” Indeed, Berlin believes that slave revolts created “a they often ended up creating a social agrees Steven Hahn in Lincoln’s Proclamation guerrilla war against slavery,” turning the an- structure that involved the enslavement (2009), “the slaves’ rebellion in the South... tebellum South into “a war zone.” Free blacks of other Negro and half-breed popula- was by far the largest of them all.” These are also had a role to play, holding up the side by tion groups…. Their struggle was for statements of good intentions and, perhaps rallying in solidarity with the fugitives, and revenge, for land, and for individual or more to the point, great imagination. using appeals to the courts to mount a judicial group freedom. But they did not seek war on slavery. Although white abolitionists freedom for all, a goal that is indispens- he self-emancipation thesis runs could become allies, Berlin insists that white able in the anti-slavery conception of like a gold thread through these two sympathies for blacks were invariably limited, human relations. Tnew historical surveys—one very short although that limitation had the unlooked- and one very long—of slavery’s end. This is not for benefit of forcing black leaders to become erlin is clearly bothered by a surprise, since Patrick Rael was a student of more assertive and less deferential. Finally, Marques’s “long, contentious essay,” Ira Berlin at the University of Maryland and, when Southern secession brought war to Bbut he does not have Marques’s wide- when they found themselves both embarked Southern doorsteps, slave runaways “forced ranging transnational grasp of slave resis- on these projects, they “swapped manuscripts” federal soldiers at the lowest level to recognize tance, and he does little beyond mere asser- to let each see where the other was going. their importance to the Union’s cause,” while tion to disprove Marques’s significance for the Despite its title, Berlin’s The Long Eman- those still in slavery “did what they could to American context. One can hardly blame him, cipation is the shorter path; it is simply the undermine the Southern war effort.” In so do- though. There is an element of feel-good and expanded text of the Nathan I. Huggins Lec- ing, the slaves “drove the issue of emancipa- a passion to promote “black agency” in the tures at the Du Bois Institute at Harvard in tion to the top of the wartime agenda.” self-emancipation thesis which makes it dif- 2014. But short as they are, Berlin’s lectures ficult to dismiss out of hand. But the study of are backed by a substantial amount of schol- erlin’s pattern conforms nicely history is not about the search for what feels arly heft. He has (until 1991) directed the to the expectations of self-help. But good. Self-emancipation, in fact, faces three Freedmen and Southern Society Project at Blurking behind his confident asser- credibility hurdles before it can be taken se- the University of Maryland and overseen the tions about self-emancipation is the spectre riously and, to date, no one has managed to publication of a landmark series of primary of the Portuguese historian of abolition, João surmount them.

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(1) How many slaves actually liberated them- since not even Northern free blacks were, in Confederacy, in which case rendition would selves by running away? Since no census was most cases, enfranchised until the 14th and have been made part of the peace settlement kept of such fugitives—about the last thing 15th Amendments. (as it had been after the American Revo- a fugitive wants is to be counted—the actual (2) For those slaves who did succeed in escap- lution and after the War of 1812). What numbers are impossible to determine, al- ing slavery, can it really be said that they “eman- standing would “self-emancipation” have in though they certainly do not lean in Berlin’s cipated” themselves? A fugitive from slavery that environment? direction. DeBow’s Review, the South’s prin- was, even if successful, still only a fugitive, (3) Did the slaves really create a fifth column cipal commercial magazine, fixed the aver- and under the terms of the Fugitive Slave of resistance that collapsed the Confederacy age pre-war fugitive population at 1,540 per Law of 1850 could be returned to slavery un- from within? It is hard to see how, consider- annum. (Over a 20-year period, from 1840 der procedures which make the words “due ing that the Confederacy held out for four to 1860, that would amount to no more than process” fail on the lips. What was required years under the pounding of Northern mili- 30,800 fugitives.) Even at the height of the for emancipation, and not just escape, was tary might without any significant internal Civil War, when the conditions for fugitives a change in the slave’s legal status, and that challenge, black or white. Herbert Aptheker were at their most opportune, the best esti- could come in only two ways: manumission struggled to uncover evidence of slave revolts mate anyone offered was Secretary of State by an owner, or a mass federal emancipation in American Negro Slave Revolts (1939), and William Henry Seward’s off-hand suggestion in time of war, as a military necessity. The lat- most recently, in “Rose’s War and the Gen- in 1865 of 200,000, and Berlin’s own Freed- ter, of course, was the path dered Politics of a Slave Insurgency in the men and Southern Society Project concedes took in the Emancipation Proclamation; and Civil War” (Journal of the Civil War Era, De- that “the number of black people” who fled even then, he was unsure enough about the cember 2013), Thavolia Glymph has offered slavery for Federal authority “can be estimat- standing of presidential “war powers” that he an account of a slave uprising in Pineville, ed only roughly.” In a slave population of over sought a “king’s cure for the evil” in the form South Carolina, that was both racial and 3.9 million in 1860, these numbers are vanish- of the 13th Amendment. Absent the Eman- gendered—but which only took place in the ingly small. In that circumstance, can we re- cipation Proclamation, then, every fugitive, last week of March 1865. If anything, Ohio alistically talk about a “general strike” by the every “contraband” sheltered by the Union congressman William Holman was annoyed slaves, a “guerrilla war” against slavery, much Army, would have been legally liable to ren- that “three and a half or four millions of Af- less suggest that they possessed the critical dition at the close of the war. And had the ricans remain right in the very hotbed of this political mass that “drove the issue of eman- war ended with the election of George Mc- rebellion”; yet, “they have remained perfectly cipation to the top of the wartime agenda”? Clellan in 1864 rather than the re-election of indifferent and passive until your Army has And in what way were they expected to do Lincoln, then the likeliest result would have reached them, idle spectators of the war.” this driving? Certainly not through the vote, been a negotiated peace with an independent Bear in mind, though, that the failure of the

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emancipated slaves to stage such a revolt was States, they fashioned an argument for their But notice the order: the Proclamation first, actually offered as an argument infavor of permanent freedom that few among even the the flight from slavery following. emancipation, since it proved the restraint most recalcitrant white politicians would have and self-control the slaves possessed, even found easy to deny. But in a much larger sense, atrick rael’s eighty-eight years— in the face of easy and bloody opportunity. the slaves did not need to resort to flight to de- with 329 densely packed pages of “Nine-tenths of the able-bodied Southern stabilize the Confederacy. They destabilized Ptext—constitutes a much longer road population have been in arms for more than it just by remaining where they were, and let- to emancipation than Berlin’s, and one which two years” and “the President’s Emancipa- ting white slaveowner fantasies about slave is substantially more attentive to the details. tion Proclamation was made public nearly insurrections keep critical numbers of white Rael organizes his account of the long-term a year ago,” concluded Francis Wayland, Jr., males out of the Confederate armies and in demise of slavery around sociologist Im- in the Atlantic Monthly, and yet none of “the local slave patrols and militias. manuel Wallerstein’s “world-systems” analy- old men, women, and children remaining at If the slaves in any way moved Northerners sis, which casts the workings of a society in home” had been slaughtered, massacred, or closer to supporting emancipation, it was not terms of its geography—the metropole, the brutalized. This was not because the slaves by flight, but by being drafted for menial duty semi-periphery, and the periphery. Almost all loved the ol’ massa or found slavery the easy by the Confederate armies. Northern whites of the great slave emancipations of the 19th yoke Southern apologists tried to make it did not relish the prospect of their sons dig- century occurred as they did because slavery seem, but because the risks of revolt were ging and toiling in trenches under a Southern was a feature of a regime’s periphery; emanci- so high and the federal armies sufficiently sun, while white rebels used black slaves to do pation could take place without excessive con- near. “When the negroes can gain nothing the same thing, and then used the entrench- flict because slaveholding was located far from by rising against their masters,” Joel Prentiss ments to shoot Northern soldier-boys. In his the metropole, where the decisions about slav- Bishop remarked, “but everything by keep- splendid study of The Peninsula Campaign and ery were really made. Think of West Indian ing quiet, they will not rise.” the Necessity of Emancipation (2012), Glenn emancipation. The abolition, first of the slave David Brasher makes the telling point that trade, then of slavery itself, was a decision nd yet, there is no quick jump “if the North did not emancipate the slaves, made in Westminster about a labor institu- from this point to the smarmy as- the Confederacy would use them on a larger tion on the British empire’s periphery; the re- Asumption that the slaves were simply scale.” Hence, an Emancipation Proclamation sistance of the West Indian planters in Parlia- inert all during the war. Over 179,000 blacks, was just the thing to entice the slaves to desert ment grew increasingly feeble, and finally had mostly from the Confederacy, fought in Union the labors imposed on them by their Confed- to yield. In the United States, however, slavery blue; another 18,000 served in the U.S. Navy. erate military masters. This is as much an ex- and slaveowning politics sat in the very seats Just by donning the uniform of the United ample of “black agency” as self-emancipation. of the metropole in Washington, thus making

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Claremont Review of Books w Spring 2016 Page 49 mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm the task of ripping slavery up by the roots in- Stowe gets only five sentences inEighty-Eight if slavery shall be planted within them. finitely more difficult, and, ultimately, impos- Years.) The ultimate symbol of the willingness Slave States are places for poor white sible short of civil war. Rael is shy of speaking of free blacks and Northern whites to take people to remove from; not to remove to. of this as an example of American exception- action was John Brown. The raid on Harpers alism, but he does admit that, in this case, ab- Ferry in 1859 was a sign of a new conjoining adly, peasantry is in fact what olition “took a unique form in America.” of slave resistance and metropolitan sympathy, triumphed—not in the territories, Rael’s book is a comprehensive history and a cause of white Southern horror that Sbut in the South. The slaveholding of slavery’s end, well-informed, subdued in led directly to secession. The ensuing Civil states had been drifting away from the En- tone, and in most cases forgiving. He does War brings emancipation, but Rael is care- lightenment origins of the American polity not believe (as David Waldstreicher, Paul ful to remind us that “African Americans in for 40 years before the Civil War, egged on Finkelman, and George van Cleve do) that the South…were not property, lacking agency by Romantic enthusiasts for hierarchy and the founders were unqualified hypocrites and will.” vassalage like James Henry Hammond and who cunningly crafted a pro-slavery Consti- There are moments when I wish Rael was George Fitzhugh. Stymied by the Civil War tution, and he is more willing than most to right, and that emancipation represented from building hierarchy on slavery, they did acknowledge that it was the rise of bourgeois a “rainbow” moment of racial oneness and the next best thing, which was to build it on notions of property rights which made prop- united racial heroism. The problem is that tenancy. Protected in their landownership erty in human beings seem repulsive in an most white Northerners (including more by the folly of President Andrew Johnson’s age which had abandoned hierarchy as the than a few abolitionists) were more inter- amnesties, the defeated planter class, as Rael governing principle of social life. The Consti- ested in attacking slavery as a medieval and says, set about regulating the lives of the tutional Convention, Rael says, made three— aristocratic labor system, to be replaced by freedmen, economically and socially, around but only three—bargains with slaveholding free markets and free labor, than they were vagrancy laws “[r]esurrected from medieval (the three-fifths clause, the rendition of fu- origins.” gitives, and delaying the criminalization of Which, in turn, raises the question of the foreign slave trade until 1808), and even “black agency” from a different perspective: then only because the members of the Con- The study of history is if free blacks and fugitive slaves were as ef- vention were confident that the institution of not about the search for fective in undermining slavery as Aptheker, slavery was on its way out anyway. That was Du Bois, Hahn, and Berlin want them to be, before, of course, the unlooked-for explosion what feels good. what accounts for the ease with which the of a single commodity—cotton—as the most old plantation elite, its war-damaged con- valuable raw material of the new industrial dition, imposed its new serfdom on them age. In pursuit of cotton profits, Southern- in liberating black people from bondage. The in Reconstruction? Many Marxist histori- ers forgot all about their embarrassment United States of the 1860s was not yet the ans of Reconstruction, from Eric Foner to over slavery and promoted whatever policies industrial giant it would become before the Robin Blackburn, construe Reconstruction would help slavery thrive: Indian removal, century’s end, and the most important issue as a missed moment for uniting the labor nullification, opposition to internal improve- for Northern whites was whether the west- energies of black agricultural workers and ments, the gag rule, censorship of the mail, ern territories could be set aside for free la- Northern factory workers in a single revolu- Texas annexation, and finally, the Mexican bor and family farms, rather than swallowed tionary phalanx. I suspect, however, that the War. up by slavery and plantations. Slave labor real story of Reconstruction is not about how was synonymous in their minds with tenancy free labor managed to subvert this budding ut not even rael can resist the for whites (and no wonder, since Southern- proletarian alliance, but about how serfdom obligatory bow to self-emancipation. ers owning more than 50 slaves owned 42.7% and vassalage, in their new Romantic forms, BAs Southerners made more and more of the South’s cultivated land). Rather than defeated free labor and free markets in the outrageous demands for special treatment, acquiesce in the prospect of being reduced South. In the hierarchical world created by their Northern neighbors began lending a to a peasantry, Northern whites fought black codes, sharecropping, and Jim Crow, sympathetic ear to the complaint of free blacks back against Southern aggrandizement, and any appeal to self-help had little opportunity and escaped slaves. These black activists, in- hence the Civil War. As Lincoln explained in of being heard. sists Rael, created strategies of direct action, the Peoria speech of 1854, while the fugitives presented insoluble moral Allen C. Guelzo is the Henry R. Luce Professor and political problems. (No one illustrated We want them [the territories] for the of the Civil War Era at Gettysburg College, and those problems more dramatically than Har- homes of free white people. This they the author, most recently, of Gettysburg: The riet Beecher Stowe in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but cannot be, to any considerable extent, Last Invasion (Alfred A. Knopf).

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