Have plowed through about 1000 pages of civil war history and plan to get through another 1000 before posting a reply to Charlie Post's article that I have been commenting on here occasionally.
I have come to one conclusion already that I doubt any additional reading will budge me from. And that is the dubious character of the "second American revolution", at least from the standpoint of the Northern ruling class being the agency of such an event.
I am taking a close look at the close class affinities between the Northern bourgeoisie and its purported deadly enemy, the plantocracy, that is revealed in a number of places. At its best, the Northern elite had *no interest* in creating a class of yeoman farmers in the south from the emancipated African population. While swearing allegiance to free labor, free soil was another matter altogether.
One of the most revealing aspects of this was the editorial footprints of the Nation Magazine, founded in 1865 by abolitionist E. L. Godkin. As I pointed out in an article I posted a while back on the Nation Magazine, Godkin was a *liberal* in the late 19th century sense. He was for free trade, competition and all the sorts of economic measures associated with people like Alan Greenspan today. He opposed slavery because it was inimical to his own economic philosophy.
That being said, Godkin and his associates were not at all predisposed to an all-out assault on the plantation system, as long as it was based on *free labor*. In 1867, President Johnson had run into a conflict with the Radical Republicans in the Congress, who passed legislation to break the back of Southern reaction. When Johnson kept cutting deals to maintain white power in the South, he was impeached. In an December 5th 1867 editorial on the impeachment, the Nation spelled out its opposition to the impeachment:
"It must now be confessed those who were of this way of thinking [namely that the Radical Republicans were going too far], and they were many, have proved to be not very far wrong. It is not yet too late for the majority in Congress to retrace its steps and turn to serious things. The work before it is to bring the South back to the Union on the basis-of equal rights, and not to punish the President or provide farms for negroes or remodel the American Government."
If the abolitionist Nation Magazine was opposed to providing farms for negroes [sic] and remodeling the US government, then which class was it speaking for? And what was its political and economic agenda? More to come...
Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org
