Wednesday, July 8, 2015

Yankee Go Home, or Why Richard Dawkins is Wrong About the Civil War




Anyone who knows me (the overwhelming majority of all none of my readers) has probably heard me say the following:

The two most obnoxious animals in the American ecosystem are the Southern Evangelical and the Yankee Progressive.

Neither will give you a moments peace. Now I know that Richard Dawkins is not himself a citizen of our great republic, but for the purposes of this brief polemic I'm willing to extend him that honor.

To most people the venerable scientist's statement will seem unnecessary to even be said--we all know the stats about the disparity between Northern and Southern states when it comes to income and education levels, and the greater denial of science such as Darwinian evolution and climate change in the former Confederate States. So why are my hackles thus raised, like the proverbial wildcat cornered in the henhouse?

Before I get to that, let me first and foremost tell you what this polemic is not: it is in no way a defense of the Confederate States of America or that horrific institution called slavery that they fought to preserve. Southern slavery, distinguished from other historical forms by it's singularly racial nature, was an abomination that haunts us to this day. And the clumsy attempts of many of my fellow Southerners to whitewash this history and preserve their generals as heroes and gods has done much to prevent our society from healing from these ancient wounds.

But here's the thing that sticks in my craw about the triumphalist yankee's narrative, and that's that it draws a clear line between us and them, as though the south created and maintained it's economy in a vacuum, and all the Northern citizen could do was look on in horror and disgust. This is, of course, absolutely false. In large part, this civilization that the good professors paeans as "The Greatest on Earth" was paid for in the main by cheap southern cotton and tobacco, two plants acquired from the ground almost exclusively by removing the skin and sweat of the African slave. Whatever moral qualms the average citizen of the north, or their political representatives, may have had were more than salved by the immense fortunes built on manufacturing and shipping the finished goods to a world hungry for the produce of the unpaid labor of millions of southern slaves.

The very foundation of our early republic was built almost exclusively upon the back of the negro, in the most literal sense: Washington DC itself was built primarily through slave labor. And the proof of this is so obvious that most history text books in both the North and South present it with no comment--our good President Abraham Lincoln went to great pains to make clear he did not intend to abolish slavery. So while it's true the South started the war in order to preserve slavery beyond the next generation, Lincoln's radical notion was simply that it not spread to the new territories. Territories, it must be stated, where slavery served almost no economic purpose anyways. The North was drunk on the products of the institution that equally disgusted them, and if you can't imagine how both emotions could be held by the same person, you no-doubt-liberal of the modern world, feel in your pocket for your cell phone and tell me how often the misery of it's production bothers you at night. This is the foundation that allowed the North to create what Dawkins calls unabashedly, "the Greatest Civilization on Earth." Without the south there could have been no Great North, and without the rapacity of the North's markets the impetus for the goods of slavery would have been greatly reduced.

The second great mistake Dawkins makes is that in comparing post-war regions, he is ignoring the fact that the North was victorious and essentially untouched by the war, and that the South was defeated and that its heartland was destroyed in the conflict. This was the first step in assuring that the current and near past South would come to be, the second was an act of mercy when the revered President Lincoln saved the sons of Brutus by allowing the white masters to return to their plantations almost wholly unmolested. The desire of the Southern Radicals (mostly Republican, it should be noted) to reshape southern society post-war not withstanding, both Lincoln and his successor, Johnson, ensured that the same political order would continue to dominate in the South after a brief interregnum. By the time Reconstruction was fully under way cheap cotton was again flowing northwards, picked almost entirely by the same people who had done so previously, only now as indentured share croppers. This is the final sin of the national tragedy that was the Civil War, and made Jim Crow and segregation essentially inevitable, and a legacy we are still trapped with today.

So yes, Mr. Dawkins, criticize the failings of the South. Lord knows I do, and not always in a spirit of brotherhood. But nothing about the current situation was inevitable, and most of it was created unintentionally by the well meaning mistake of one of America's greatest heroes. So in light of the temporary citizenship I with the authority of this unread blog have bestowed, I say with deep affection:

Yankee go home.