Road to Disunion Vol II 1854 to 1861 Secessionist Triumphant By Dr. William W Freehling

     Road to Disunion Vol II 1854 to 1861 Secessionist Triumphant 

By Dr. William W Freehling

    Dr. Freehling was covered in last week's review, so instead of recycling, let’s move forward!  Road to Disunion Vol. II was published in 2007, a full 17 years after the publishing of volume I.  That said, Dr. Freehling had no problem picking right where he left off right, after the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Fugitive Slave Act, and continuing right until the opening exchange at Fort Sumter, which started the Civil War.   

In Volume II, Dr. Freehling continues his core themes. The first, again plainly and openly stated, was that there was no united singular South, but several Souths divided into very different regions with different interests.  Even within those regions, there was division based on social class, location, and life experience, with the biggest distinction he draws being the differences between populations who lived in black belts, regions where there were a high number of slaves, and white belts where the populace was mainly made up of non-slave owning whites.

To illustrate the first theme, Dr. Freehling tackles four failed undertakings that were supported and opposed by various factions in the South: the creation of Kansas as a slave state, the conquest of the Caribbean and Central America to create more slave states, an attempt to reopen the African slave trade in defiance of the American Federal Government, and lastly an attempt to reenslave freed blacks.  Let’s go ahead and take a look at all four, one at a time. 

First was the attempt to ensure that Kansas would be admitted as a slave state, even over the objections of the people who lived there.  In fact, it would be fair to say, especially over the objections of the people who lived there. Over the border in Missouri, where slave owners nervously watched as the number of slaves dwindled and the number of anti-slave white men increased, the idea of being bordered on 3 sides by free states was intolerable.  So they recruited from among the people of Missouri “One Day Kansans” to cross the border and vote in a pro-slave government, as well as sponsored violent armed mobs to terrorize free state settlers and run out anti-slave organizers from the territory at gunpoint.

While this movement enjoyed support in the Southwest and much of the Deep South, the other Border States condemned this behavior, as did the North. So did states like Virginia, as rigging elections was seen as a step too far.  So trying to admit Kansas as a slave state failed to pass in Congress.  Interestingly enough many South Carolina leaders also opposed it because they feared this would lead to people taking slaves out of the economically depressed lands of South Carolina for greener, colder pastures. 

The idea of conquering the nations of South America and trying to seize Cuba and other islands came from New Orleans and was championed by the city’s merchant class.  They were losing business to other ports and thought they needed a set of slave states encircling the Gulf, which would naturally ship their goods to New Orleans. The Federal Government, of course, refused to do this, as most people in the North felt they had plenty of land for settlement to the West already and didn’t like the idea of starting wars with European nations.  Also, there was a great deal of resentment lingering over the Mexican-American War, with some Northerners feeling they had been tricked into an imperialist adventure on behalf of greedy Southern Slavers. 

So their solution was to turn to Filibusters, a name for private armies of mercenaries raised by adventurous wealthy men looking to achieve fame and political power by conquering other states. The United States government did not take this well, often arresting these men for piracy and breaking the Neutrality Laws passed during the Napoleonic Wars.  In one case where a filibustering army led by William Walker invaded the nation of Nicaragua, U.S. Navy Commodore Hiram Paulding counter-invaded and, using his Marines, arrested Walker and his mercenaries and dragged them back to the US for trial.  

Once again the South was divided on this topic. Many Border State slavers feared that adding Caribbean and Latin American slave states would cause the end of slavery in their own states, as men would sell their slaves or simply move further south in pursuit of profit.  So too, did the South Carolina elites,  again fearing the loss of slaves.  Other Southerners in the Middle South opposed it because conquering Native American tribes was one thing, but conquering recognized nation-states was another thing entirely.  

What South Carolina was all in favor of was reopening the African Slave Trade, even if that had to be done illegally. The problem in their view was there weren’t enough slaves to go around, and part of this was driven by the increase in cotton prices in the 1850s, which in turn drove up the price of healthy slaves beyond what many white men could afford. This meant that the wealthiest men in society owned more and more slaves, and fewer and fewer men outside that wealthy elite owned any slaves.  

This received some support in the Deep South, but the Border States and the people of Virginia were simply aghast at the idea. There were two attempts to flout the law, but, interestingly enough, while the captains of the ships were arrested and released by Southern juries refusing to convict them, the firsthand experience of dealing with people freshly kidnapped from their homes was too gut-wrenching for most of the supporters to continue the attempts. So the arch-slavers found themselves too empathic to actually go out and enslave strangers from another continent.  

So a group of South Carolinians decided maybe the easier thing to do would be to re-enslave freed blacks. Allow me to delve into what I will generously call the logic of this idea, which was rooted in plain and simple racism. The argument was that Free Blacks would be worse off than slaves because they were not capable of handling themselves in modern society without a gracious owner to protect and direct them. This fell apart because there were plenty of successful Free Black Men and Women, some of whom even owned slaves of their own. Also, in many other Southern states, this raised cries of protests of subverting the will of the slavers who freed their slaves.  Plus, in many areas freed blacks functioned as a needed artisan and skilled labor class that was simply too valuable to risk. So the idea fell apart pretty quickly. 

So what did unite the South, you might be asking?  After all, they pulled together enough to start the Civil War.  There were two things, really: first was the institution of slavery, and the hatred that outside criticism stirred.  The men of the South loathed being told that owning slaves made them immoral and less ethical than Yankees, who they looked down upon as Capitalist cannibals. In the name of these two things, they were willing to go to any lengths to protect the institution of slavery and silence any criticism, including shattering the nation itself and creating their own where dissent would be utterly forbidden. 

We see this when they are willing to trample the rights of the people who actually live in Kansas, bringing not just voter fraud but also violence and political repression in the name of spreading slavery.  We see this when Northerners or even native Southerners voice criticism or act in ways that could be considered subverting or resisting the social order of slavery, and the reaction to form an angry mob, commit assault and battery, and force the offender out of their lands at gunpoint. We also see this when the non-slave owner inhabitants declare they wish no part of a Southern Confederacy, areas like eastern Tennessee, North Virginia, and North Alabama; the response isn’t respect for their rights to choose their government, but violent repression and bitter denunciation.  Ironic given that they demanded every right to leave their government, but refused to grant that right to others. 

The second driving theme that is unavoidable when reading the text is that the elite class of South Carolina was the wellspring from which the idea of Secession flowed.  That poisoned water would slowly but surely soak into the soil of the South, until it nurtured a Southern-wide crop of young men who believed that the only thing to do was to tear the nation apart, no matter the cost. The effort took decades and constant work to spread the ideals that at first only the elites of South Carolina held dear, that slavery was good and should last forever, and the only way to do that was to split from the Northern Free states.  This would turn out to be one of two things uniting the different Souths into a single South. 

The other thing that unified them was fear of their slaves and the thought that discussion of freedom would cause them to rise up.  The raid on Harper's Ferry by John Brown is discussed at length in the book, and the South was not only terrified of the idea but convinced that the North would continue to send men south to encourage the slaves to rise up and murder them in their beds.  In their minds, the abolitionists would not rest until they had caused a mass race war in the South and destroyed everything they built. This fed the hatred and resentment of the North in the South and led to demands for national censorship and trampling of Northern State rights in the pursuit of protecting slavery.  This in turn feed Northern resentment and hate of high-handed Southern tyrants who would enslave white Northerners just to protect their delicate feelings. 

When South Carolina and the lower Southern states succeeded, many states in the middle and upper South balked.  They hoped that if they could delay long enough, they could hammer out a compromise and reform the Union without violence.  They could serve as middlemen between the Lincoln administration and the rebels and create a lasting peace.  However, when South Carolina’s cannons forced the issue and Lincoln called for volunteers to defend the Union,  many of the men of those states found they would rather kill Yankees than Southerners. Their dislike of having their flaws and faults publicly pointed out, and the decades-long resentment of those critics, outweighed any qualms they had about breaking the country.  After all, at least those Southerners were fellow slave owners

Companion video is found here: https://youtu.be/WF5lA4pIn3g?si=K1NeUS6J7aR5Dct1

Road to Disunion Vol I: Secessionist at Bay 1776 to 1854 By Dr. William W Freehling and companion video

 Road to Disunion Vol I: Secessionist at Bay 1776 to 1854

By Dr. William W Freehling

Dr. William W Freehling was born in Chicago, Illinois on December 26. 1935.  He grew up in Chicago and headed to Harvard for his undergraduate work.  He graduated from Harvard in 1958 with honors, including Magna Cum Laude, and Phi Beta Kappa.  He then headed to the University of California, Berkeley, where he received his MA in 1959 and his PhD in 1964.  He would then go on to teach at Berkeley, the University of Michigan, John Hopkins University, and Harvard, and endowed chairs at The State University of New York, Buffalo, and Kentucky. After a long and respected career, he retired and turned his hand to writing history. 

Today we’re looking at his first published book, Road to Disunion Vol I. published in 1991.  The book sets out to provide a political and social history of the South, from the nation's early days after the Revolutionary War to 1854, just after the passing of the Fugitive Slave Act.  This period includes the Missouri Compromise, a compromise passed in hopes of quieting the feud between the North and the South but only ended up inflaming it. In doing so, the compromise became one of the prime sparks that led to the explosion we call the Civil War.  

The book sets out with two primary arguments, the first bluntly and forthrightly stated, and the second is never outright stated, but you’re led to it, as any other conclusion is blocked off.  The first is the argument that there was not A South, but the region we would call the South was several different regions bound together by the overriding tie of being slave states.  The second was that secessionism was something created, nurtured, and, after decades of failure, finally exported to the rest of the slave states from the malaria-choked, miserable swamps of South Carolina.  Let me explore these arguments here. 

First Dr. Freehling carefully splits the region we tend to think of as The South into three separate regions.  First, we have the Deep South, of which South Carolina occupies pride of place in this book, but states like Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi are also part of this region.  Then we have the Upper or Middle South, with Virginia usually being the prime example, but also including North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas. Lastly is the Border South made up of states that border the Free States of the Union: Maryland and Delaware being the main two, but Missouri and Kentucky would also be part of this region. 

That said, the book also leads me to a fourth region that emerges from the text, the southwestern frontier states like Arkansas, Tennessee, and Missouri. These states were often in conflict with the older states along the Gulf of Mexico or Atlantic Coast, and often acted against those states to secure their own interests. This is illustrated in the book by the extensive coverage of the conflicts between Andrew Jackson and Senator John C Calhoun, men who worked together but whose conflicting interests led to them spending just as long bitterly fighting each other. Given how much time and space Dr. Frehling devoted to those intra-South battles, I feel we should count those states as a separate region. 

The second argument that Dr. Freehling lays out is how South Carolina was different from other Southern states.  Most of the original states were settled by colonists out of England, but South Carolina was settled by colonists from the sugar island of Barbados, who brought their slaves with them.  So unlike, for example, Virginia, where the laws allowing slavery weren’t passed until 50 years after the colony’s founding, South Carolina had slavery as part of its economy, its social structure, and very identity from day one. This would have a profound effect on how South Carolina viewed slavery, a view that would do incredible damage to South Carolina, the South, and the United States as a whole. 

Dr. Freehling leads us through the many crises that pitted the interests of slavers against those of freemen, for example, the banning of slave importation in 1807, along with early attempts to close off new territories to slavery.  If this had succeeded it would have meant that Alabama, and Mississippi for example would have been free states. This was incredibly close, and only failed by one vote because a New Jersey representative was home sick with a fever. We also see the early battles in the Northwest Territories where Illinois and Indiana were almost made slave states; this was prevented by the heroic action of Edward Coles the governor of Illinois at the time, who honestly seems to be a forgotten American hero here.  

We proceed from there to nullification, where South Carolina tried to act alone declaring their right to nullify and ignore federal laws and almost got the entire state’s teeth kicked in by an enraged President Jackson. He parked the US Navy outside of South Carolina’s ports to collect the “nullified” tariffs and threatened to march in with an army, while the rest of the South sat on its hands and watched.  Meanwhile, attempts to block slavery from expanding in Missouri and Arkansas failed. The battle lines were being drawn, though; it was clear that an increasing number of Americans in the North and the Border South believed slavery should not be allowed to spread.  This was something that the aristocrats of South Carolina found utterly enraging, and leading them to formulate the idea of leaving the Union and forming a Southern nation. However, a pan-southern identity didn’t exist yet, and most Southerners considered the aristocrats of South Carolina lunatics. 

We also learn that early generations of slave owners often professed hopes that one-day slavery would disappear from the South naturally, that economic conditions would change, leading to slaves being sold away and, at some tipping point, their distant descendants would pass laws banning slavery (Not that they ever took action to make that happen.).  South Carolinians, however, argued from the earliest days of the Republic that slavery should be eternal, and it was good in and of itself. In fact, members of the South Carolina elite class declared that slavery was not just good but the best organizing principle for society. 

As the nation expanded, the confrontations between those who wanted the evil of slavery contained and those who supported its spread became more protracted and more bitter.  At first slave owners in Virginia would plead for more slave states because that would let them “diffuse” their slaves away from the Border States and Middle South, but as the decades wore on this argument increasingly fell to the wayside. South Carolinian thinkers reached out to the rest of the South in a never-ending attempt to forge a united region under a single political banner, with slave-owning being the common bond across regional and state lines. 

We see how this effort to forge a united front was pushed further by the Gag Rules, where the first abolitionist societies believed that all they needed to do to end slavery was reason directly with the slave owners. To this end, they sent individual slave owners letters outlining why slavery was not just bad for slaves, but also for the owners. The South reacted as if they had found out that abolitionists were sending letter bombs, and demanded that mail be censored and never delivered. Bonfires were created from the letters, and any Southerner who was caught reading these letters risked being thrown on those fires. 

Abolitionists caught by surprise by this decided that, if they couldn’t speak to slaveowners, they would speak to Congress.  They sent petitions to Congress asking for a national ban on slavery, gradual emancipation of slaves, or other plans.  Southern Congressmembers demanded that such petitions to Congress be thrown out unread; this deeply rankled the Northerners, even those unsympathetic to abolitionists. Most Northern Congressmembers had no intentions of granting those petitions, but refusing even to read them was a bridge too far. Eventually the gag was rescinded, but the fact that the South felt it had the right to censor Northern speech deeply offended Northern Americans.  Meanwhile, Southerners resented being told their way of life was evil and not fitted to democracy, even when all they were being told was the truth. 

The next great battle was over the annexation of Texas, which would later be tied into the battle over spreading slavery to the Mexican Cessation, the lands seized from Mexico after the Mexican-American War.  Slave owners wanted Southern California as a slave state, but the North, already irked at having fought a war for slavers and panicking at the idea that Texas would become an English protectorate and a haven for escaped slaves, flat-out refused.  A compromise was found, but it only left behind more anger, frustration, and determination to make the next confrontation the last one. So by 1854, when the book ended, South Carolina’s pan-Southern ideas of secession and a common Southern identity were no longer dismissed.

Each conflict led to a hardening of attitudes in both the North and the South.  In the North, the abolitionists went from a despised fringe group to a mainstream position.  In the South, the idea of getting rid of slavery someday was abandoned as a surrender to outside Northern pressure. As the stances hardened, the battle lines became more set and more dug in, and violence was increasingly likely. The differences between states within the regions of the North and the South increasingly became less important as the major difference of Free vs Slave drowned out everything else. 

This is a very well-detailed book that covers a lot of history and provides an incredible depth of information, especially of parts of our history that are all but forgotten or glossed over by popular histories and schools today. That said, I don’t entirely buy blaming South Carolina for secession.  Yes, they were calling for it as early as the 1820s, but I don’t think a group of people who successfully fought a revolution to split from the world’s most powerful empire would have failed to come up with the idea on their own. That said, I’m still giving Road to Disunion Vol I: Secessionist at Bay 1776 to 1854 by Dr. William W Freehling an A. If you want to dig deeper into the causes and tensions leading to the Civil War, this book is for you.  Just beware it’s a dense and detailed read, so you may have to read it more than once or take a lot of notes to retain information. 

Watch the companion video here: https://youtu.be/cvfKnXwO9nI?si=StGr5WwnF4zThtKr

Disney's The Little Mermaid 2023: Live Action Quest for More Money

 https://youtu.be/BTDrx5zwBOM?si=5aPGxhvU8kQ3aG7y

We end our dive into the lore and legends of merfolk with the latest adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen's work The Little Mermaid. The live-action adaptation of the 1989 animated classic

The Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Andersen

 https://youtu.be/KxzRAGGZXCc?si=kI2TQs91lBKNfG0B

We at last look at the story that dominates modern conceptions of mermaids, if you listen carefully you can see the elements that slipped into every movie we've covered so far.

The Fisherman and His Soul by Oscar Wilde or The Opposite of Little Mermaid

 https://youtu.be/6P6NTBup5cA?si=vuAdLE2baebjnnx-

What if instead of the Mermaid seeking to gain a human soul, the human man decided to get rid of his? We discuss Oscar Wilde's fairy tale of a man who falls in love with a mermaid and decides to abandon his soul to be with her, as well as the consequences of that.

Ponyo (2008): A Mermaid Fairy Tale

https://youtu.be/EoRqn63YYVE?si=3HjLUYWsSUxOE0_v

We look at the animated film Ponyo and how it fits into mermaid mythology and have a brief talk about fairy tales.

The Mermaid (2016): To Love or to Murder?

 

https://youtu.be/oHFYRoLSk-o?si=_TNYhY-M5JVMF1dM

We look at the Chinese-made Romantic Comedy The Mermaid and discuss the movie and how it fits into mermaid myth and legend.