Metamorphosis

One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin.

-        Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis

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“Nowhere was the American rejection of authority more complete than in the political sphere,” writes historian David Donald.  “The national government, moreover, was not being weakened in order to bolster state governments, for they too were decreasing in power…By the 1850’s the authority of all government in America was at a low point.”

“The war…has tended, more than any other event in the history of the country,” declaimed Republican Governor Richard Yates of Illinois in 1865, “to militate against the Jeffersonian idea, that ‘the best government is that which governs least.’  The war has not only, of necessity, given more power to, but has led to a more intimate prevision of the government over every material interest of society.”

“The civil war of ’61 has made a great gulf between what happened before it in our country and what has happened since, or what is likely to happen hereafter, [George Tucker of Harvard] mused.  “It does not seem to me as if I were living in the country in which I was born, or in which I received whatever I got of political education and principles.”

Insofar as the war was fought to preserve the Union, it was an explicit rejection of the American Revolution.

-        Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men

I have noted before the view by many – most notably (for me) from Jacques Barzun – the suicide of Western Civilization that was the Great War.  There are several events that one might point to for the suicide of the liberal idea in America; in this post I will focus on one of these – the event popularly known as the American Civil War.

Uncivilized War

At a time when warfare between and among Europeans had evolved into what could be described as civilized, the war as prosecuted by the North against the South was much the opposite; General Sherman offers a prime example:

“This was differs from European wars in this particular,” the general pointed out.  “We are not only fighting hostile armies, but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war, as well as their organized armies.”

Sherman was not an aberration:

Grant himself, with President Lincoln’s hearty encouragement, had already discarded any respect for the property of southern civilians when provisioning Union soldiers.

Militarized Nation

At the end of hostilities, the Union was the mightiest military power on the planet.

While the North quickly demobilized, the resultant levels were nowhere near what they were pre-war:

…ongoing military occupation of the South required a post-war standing army that hovered around 60,000 men – four times its immediate pre-war size.

The army became a tool to enforce internal order – to say nothing of the devastation later offered to the Indians.  Restoring order during range wars, stamping out open polygamy in Utah, suppressing anti-Chinese demonstrations; most often, the central government used the army to break strikes.

The total armed forces would never fall below a level half-again higher than the level reached before Fort Sumter.

General Growth of Government

The war had dramatically altered American society and institutions.  The South, of course, would never be the same, but the transformation of the North was also profound and permanent.  The national government that emerged victorious from the conflict dwarfed in power and size the minimal Jacksonian State that had commenced the war.  The number of civilians in federal employ swelled almost fivefold.

A Proper Militia

Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men, Jeffrey Rogers Hummel.

Hummel describes the state of the military at the start of the American Civil War.  It is an enjoyable read for the most part, providing even a few laugh-out-loud moments.

Hummel starts with a bang:

Unlike most European and Latin American governments, the United States did not maintain a peacetime standing army large enough to suppress domestic insurrection.

At the start of the war with Mexico in 1846, the Mexican army was four times larger than that of the US.  At the conclusion of the war, the US reduced its wartime forces by over two-thirds, down to 16,000 regulars.  More than one-third of the regular army’s officers were southerners.  In other words, at the start of the Civil War, both armies – north and south – basically were starting from scratch.

In both cases, the foundation for this unprecedented mobilization was the volunteer militia.

State militias had been the backbone of the military in the US, such as it was.  This system entailed the universal obligation of all males to defend their communities.  After the War of 1812, these state militias came under sustained criticism:

Radical Jacksonians condemned militia fines as falling unfairly upon laborers and the poor, while mandatory training increasingly bore the brunt of an effective campaign of ridicule and civil disobedience.

“Ridicule and civil disobedience”; this is getting good.

Abraham Lincoln, during a speech in 1852 recalled how the required “militia trainings” had been “laughed to death.”

At the head of the local militia parade, “on horse-back, figured our old friend Gordon Abrams, with a pine wood sword, about nine feet long, and a paste board cocked hat, from front to rear about the length of an ox yoke, and very much the shape of one turned bottom upwards; and with spurs having rowels as large as the bottom of a teacup, and shanks a foot and a half long.”

I don’t know the meaning of all of the references, however Mr. Abrams sounds more like a circus clown than a military man.

Even better were the “rules and regulations” that Lincoln’s militia unit adopted:

“…no man is to wear more than five pounds of cod-fish for epaulets, or more than thirty yards of bologna sausages for a sash; and no two men are to dress alike, and if any two should dress alike the one that dresses most alike is to be fined.”

The one that dresses most alike?  I don’t even know how this would work…or look.  Sausages?  Once again, clowns.

The unit even had militia flags, with mottoes such as “We’ll fight till we run, and we’ll run till we die.”

Such ridicule and frivolity served a wonderful purpose: the compulsory features of the common militia had disappeared.

Delaware was the first state to repeal some of its militia fines in 1816.  Massachusetts abolished all compulsory militia service in 1840, followed by six other northern states within the next decade.  In several states the fines were no longer enforced or became nominal.  The mandatory training days dropped in frequency and degenerated into more social than military events.

The South maintained compulsory militia duty on the books; Hummel speculates this was due to the slave patrols.

While the compulsory state militias were in decline, voluntary militias sprung up in replacement; the growth was significant after the War of 1812:

Three hundred [volunteer units] sprang up in California between 1849 and 1856.  In the District of Columbia, one out of every twenty-nine people was a member of one or another volunteer company…Even throughout the South, the volunteer militia almost completely supplanted the common militia.

After the War of 1812 and before the Civil War, the American militia transformed from compulsion to volunteerism.  The Mexican War was fought exclusively with volunteer enlistees, with no recourse to a compulsory draft.

An additional feature:

This volunteer system left responsibility for organizing, recruiting, and often equipping soldiers to state or local governments, or even private citizens. (Emphasis added)

At the start of hostilities between North and South, each side called for hundreds of thousands of volunteers.  These quotas were quickly filled; the South – with one-third the white population compared to the population of the North – filled two-thirds as many volunteers as did the North.  The South even turned away 200,000 volunteers because it could not arm, cloth or feed them.

This voluntary and enthusiastic nature of the combatants did not last long – executions and cruel punishments for desertion took their toll; that the anticipated quick victory (anticipated by volunteers on both sides) did not materialize.  Within one year, both sides suffered from a drying up of volunteers. 

In April 1862, the Rebel legislature authorized a national conscription for the South.  In July of the same year, the North enacted a new national militia law – if quotas were not met by the various state governments, the national government would step in to act.  There was no formal Federal draft in the North until March of 1863.  In both the North and South, conscription provided the minority of the military population.

Summary

The Civil War drastically changed the nature of government in the United States.  One example is provided in this story of the nature of the military: from voluntary state militias to national conscription and Federal armies. 

Perhaps the roots of the current military empire can be found here.

The Slave Power’s Designs for Conquest

The title of this post is taken from a line in Jeffrey Rogers Hummel’s book, Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men.  Cited items are also from this book, except as noted.

Slavery in the North American Colonies

Slavery had not always divided the South from the North.  Prior to the American Revolution, all British colonies in the New World legally sanctioned the practice.

There were black slaves in nearly every colony; 42% of New York City households possessed slaves at the end of the seventeenth century; as late as 1770, nearly twice as many blacks were in bondage in New York as compared to Georgia.

The Revolution brought change, directly and indirectly.  Royal governors of various colonies declared any slave free who would bear arms against the colonists.  At the end of the war, as many as 18,000 freed blacks departed with the British forces.

Slavery During the Continental Congress

The Revolutionary spirit further caused white Americans to challenge the institution. 

Quakers organized the world’s first antislavery society in Philadelphia in 1775, and soon similar organizations dotted the colonies.

Some states offered freedom to blacks who enlisted in the military.  Vermont in its constitution of 1777 became the first to abolish the institution.  The Pennsylvania legislature enacted gradual emancipation in 1780, while the Massachusetts courts pronounced slavery inconsistent with the state’s declaration of rights in 1783.  State after state followed with either outright abolition or gradual emancipation.  The Continental Congress meanwhile passed the Ordinance of 1787, prohibiting slavery in the western territories north of the Ohio river.  New Jersey in 1804 became the last remaining state above the Mason-Dixon line to put chattel slavery on the road to extinction.

Even in the South progress was made:

Many southern states banned the importation of slaves; southern societies encouraging masters to free their human chattel flourished; and several states relaxed legal obstacles to such voluntary manumissions.  These actions spawned the first substantial communities of free blacks, concentrated in the upper South.  Delaware saw the process furthest; three-quarters of the state’s blacks were out of bondage by 1810.

So What Happened?

The Constitution, that’s what:

The first cooling of antislavery fervor became evident in the drafting of the Constitution in 1787.

First, the Constitution allowed for a further 20 years to import slaves, giving time for the states of the lower South to replenish their stocks.  Second, Article IV, Section 2 compelled the return of fugitive slaves even if they escaped to free states – thus requiring the national government to subsidize the enforcement of the slave system.  Finally, three-fifths of the slave population would be counted for representation; these “non-persons” would be contributing to the power of their states in the national Congress, furthering their subjugation.

In 1820 the United States slave population was three times what it had been at the outset of the Revolution.  Thus, while slavery was disappearing throughout the rest of the world, it was expanding in the American South.

According to Rufus King of New York, a veteran of the Constitutional Convention, “The disproportionate power and influence allowed to the slave-holding states was a necessary sacrifice to the establishment of the constitution.”

One is left to wonder: so why do it?  Why establish that particular constitution?  Why not two separate unions in the first place?