Jefferson Davis

I recently spent a week touring the Deep South.  Rather, I had work there, and as usual planned some sight seeing.

I visited Jefferson Davis’s final home, Beauvoir, in or right next to Biloxi, Mississippi. It is quite literally as far south as it can be, sitting right on the beach, or as close as prudent in an area prone to hurricanes; and of course in the State in my mind at least most associated with the Antebellum South.

Two things caught my attention.  One, he was married to Zachary Taylor’s daughter, who died three months after they were married, leaving a seemingly permanent hole in his psyche.

Second, and much, much more importantly, he was arrested after the Civil War, and placed in prison for two years without charge.  The obvious charge would have been treason, but he was never tried.  Why?

BECAUSE THE COURTS MIGHT HAVE VINDICATED SECESSION.  The right to secede has never been argued before the Supreme Court, in my understanding.  Lincoln simply DECLARED it illegal, and with a solidly Republican Congress behind him (all the Democrats, by and large, left with the South), was able to get war declared and waged.

Legally, though, the case has never been put before a high court, or so I believe.

It is of course impossible to defend slavery.  It is quite possible to put it in context by noting that it was then and remains common in the Islamic world, and that slavery has been a feature of life for all of human history.  What we know of the Roman Republic comes from a Greek slave, Polybius.  The Spartans depended on slaves for their ability to train warfare full time.  Most of the major cities in Ireland were established by Viking slavers, who bought the slaves created when one Irish clan or tribe defeated another.  The word slave comes from Slav, since so many Slavs were enslaved particularly for the Ottomans.  Etc.  The world over you find this.

At the same time, I believe NSA spying on every American was made possible by Appamattox.  Our Founding Fathers read history, and they understood that power tends to concentrate, and having concentrated, it tends to increase, in a manner quite similar to Newton’s Laws of Motion.

Who could have imagined 100 years ago that literally every public communication in the country might be subject to the scrutiny of a Secret Police?  Our cell phones are tracking devices, which can be used as microphones for eavesdropping.  Every telephone call can be monitored.  Every email, every fax.  Some people even have wired in Kinect’s or Wii’s, that transmit EVERYTHING going on in your living room, in an EXACT replication of Orwell’s Big Brother.

Historically, it is clear that the Supreme Court has been the most proximate agent of tyranny.  Even now, it has not rendered an opinion on NSA spying, which if it is not violating the 4th Amendment, we may as well throw that Amendment out.

But all of the massive vitiations of Constitution were enabled by the after-math of the Civil War, specifically the Amendments passed by Congress after the Civil War granting the Federal government rights it had not previously possessed.  Were the goals admirable?  Of course.  But they were also long lasting, and have worked today for the concentration of an increasingly abusive and unaccountable Federal government.

Without the Civil War and its after-math you could not have a Roe v. Wade (not everyone realizes that this ruling was derived entirely from the Bill of Rights and one prior case ruling designed specifically to engineer this bench legislation) or Obamacare. One can certainly argue the merits of both, but my view was and continues to be that the only possible resolution of complex moral problems is through distributed solutions.  Let Texas be Texas and Oregon Oregon.  Anyone who dislikes their climate sufficiently can move to more congenial places.

But slavery.  Here is my take: did slavery end with the Union victory?  Did blacks benefit in immediate and measurable ways?  Did they?  Do you know?  What happened to them after the war?

The South was wrecked, culturally, economically, politically.  Everyone became more poor. And who was most poor to begin with?  Blacks.  What did most former slaves do to earn a living?  Share-crop.  Was this better?  Hard to say, but it was certainly not a large improvement.

Fast forward to Brown versus the Board of Education.  The Supreme Court mandates integration, despite the fact that this policy likely would not have made it through Congress or southern legislatures.  The problem is so huge, they effectively said, that SOMETHING must be done.  Something must be done.

And they did something.

And Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, ending legal segregation and discrimination.

And Affirmative Action policies came into being, policies which actively and openly discriminated against whites (and eventually Asians).  Progress, right?

Where, now, today, do most blacks live?  What is their average socio-economic status relative to the rest of the country?  What is their average income?  What does their typical home look like?  What is their average level of education?  At what rate do they get Ph.D’s?  As a group, what are their cultural ideals?  Who are their heroes?

Frederick Douglas had balls and vision.  Martin Luther King, Jr. had balls and vision.  Is Black America where they would have wanted them to be?  What do you think?

Here is my contention: complex social systems can only evolve in helpful, hopeful, useful ways when they evolve gradually.  If you pull out a hammer and follow the Fabian vision of change (I had actually not until this moment realized that both hammer and sickle are also weapons), it doesn’t take.  It is like a hollandaise sauce that clumps up (I have lots of experience with this).  It’s not only not optimal, it can even be retrogressive.

No one can call the Civil Rights movement a success who looks at the plight of blacks today, and in my view no one can blame anything but the destructive ideas of restitution and self pity which leftists implanted for use in their own political games.

Finally, one last reflection. The Antebellum South was in some respects a caste system.  You had the rich plantation owners. the soldiers, the businessmen, the poor farmers, and the slaves.  It was not unlike India, with its Untouchables.

I bring this up because I recently read about India’s on-going violence against so-called Untouchables.  It is horrific, and as bad or worse than anything done to blacks in the South.  Here is one article: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/06/0602_030602_untouchables.html

People watch Selma and they cry, and they cry as if America is the only nation in the history of the world to commit crimes.  No: we are the MOST MORAL, because we have deeply moral impulses en masse, and because our crimes are admitted publicly, and atoned for.  There is a monument to the Selma march in Montgomery.  There are Civil Rights monuments throughout Mississippi and Alabama.  I saw many of them.

Who is speaking, today, about the 160 million Indians living virtually without rights?

The hypocrisy of the Left is nauseating.  I’ll leave it there.