I came across a nice little essay looking back at the Civil War in the Washington Post. Philip Kennicott concluded his short essay as follows:

It seems there's never been a good time to consider properly what Lincoln really accomplished, which was to lead the country during its primal encounter with modernity. The country is again polarized, and the easy default will be to fall back on the bromides of the war: that it brought suffering to all, that all were complicit in the sin of slavery, that no matter the causes or the ideas behind them, we always have the comforting narratives of bravery and leadership.

If one reads the annals closely, however, it becomes clear that the Civil War legitimized something essential, and dark, that remains with us. Ultimately, the South was fighting for the right to be wrong, for the right to retain (and expand) something ugly and indefensible. It lost the war, and slavery was abolished. But the right to be wrong, the right to resist the progress of freedom, the right to say "no, thank you" to modernity, to leave the fences in disrepair and retreat into a world of private conviction, remains as much a part of the American character as the blood spilled to preserve the Union. Nothing great has been accomplished in America since the Civil War -- not footsteps on the moon, or women's suffrage, or the right (if not the reality) of equal, unsegregated education -- without people also passionately fighting for that dark right, too.

The key concept that grabbed me in all this is the concept of complicity, hence the bold emphasis.

So I began to float back into time once again all because of this damned Kennicott and recent comments by Rush Limbaugh and other members of his Reich.

Alexander de Tocqueville decided to visit this new confederation of states/commonwealths/colonies for a decade and wrote two volumes about his findings. It was not so strange really to have a Frenchman visit America forty years following the French Revolution seeing as thousands from his country ended up residing north of us.

He was quite taken by the vastness of a nation that had recently spanned two oceans in breadth (with some sharing in the NW between US & Canada.) He was in awe of the fact that everywhere he looked, except in the South, everybody was busy doing something all the live long day.

But all of this industry and all of this expansion through the continent by these busy Europeans came at a cost. And Tocqueville described this immense cost as the quandary of the three races.

Among these widely differing families of men, the first that attracts attention, the superior in intelligence, in power, and in enjoyment, is the white, or European, the MAN pre-eminently so called, below him appear the Negro and the Indian. These two unhappy races have nothing in common, neither birth, nor fea- tures, nor language, nor habits. Their only resemblance lies in their misfortunes. Both of them occupy an equally inferior posi- tion in the country they inhabit; both suffer from tyranny; and if their wrongs are not the same, they originate from the same authors.

If we reason from what passes in the world, we should almost say that the European is to the other races of mankind what man himself is to the lower animals: he makes them subservient to his use, and when he cannot subdue he destroys them. Oppression has, at one stroke, deprived the descendants of the Africans of almost all the privileges of humanity. The Negro of the United States has lost even the remembrance of his country; the language which his forefathers spoke is never heard around him; he abjured their religion and forgot their customs when he ceased to belong to Africa, without acquiring any claim to European privileges. But he remains half-way between the two communities, isolated between two races; sold by the one, repulsed by the other; finding not a spot in the universe to call by the name of country, except the faint image of a home which the shelter of his master's roof affords.

The Negro has no family: woman is merely the temporary com- panion of his pleasures, and his children are on an equality with himself from the moment of their birth. Am I to call it a proof of God's mercy, or a visitation of his wrath, that man, in certain states, appears to be insensible to his extreme wretchedness and almost obtains a depraved taste for the cause of his misfortunes? The Negro, plunged in this abyss of evils, scarcely feels his own calamitous situation. Violence made him a slave, and the habit of servitude gives him the thoughts and desires of a slave, he admires his tyrants more than he hates them, and finds his joy and his pride in the servile imitation of those who oppress him. His understanding is degraded to the level of his soul.

The Negro enters upon slavery as soon as he is born, nay, he may have been purchased in the womb, and have begun his slavery before he began his existence. Equally devoid of wants and of enjoyment, and useless to himself, he learns, with his first notions of existence, that he is the property of another, who has an interest in preserving his life, and that the care of it does not devolve upon himself; even the power of thought appears to him a useless gift of Providence, and he quietly enjoys all the privileges of his debasement.

Oppression has been no less fatal to the Indian than to the Negro race, but its effects are different. Before the arrival of white men in the New World, the inhabitants of North America lived quietly in their woods, enduring the vicissitudes and practicing the virtues and vices common to savage nations. The Europeans having dispersed the Indian tribes and driven them into the deserts, condemned them to a wandering life, full of inexpressible sufferings.

Savage nations are only controlled by opinion and custom. When the North American Indians had lost the sentiment of at- tachment to their country; when their families were dispersed, their traditions obscured, and the chain of their recollections broken; when all their habits were changed, and their wants in- creased beyond measure, European tyranny rendered them more disorderly and less civilized than they were before. The moral and physical condition of these tribes continually grew worse, and they became more barbarous as they became more wretched. Nevertheless, the Europeans have not been able to change the character of the Indians; and though they have had power to destroy, they have never been able to subdue and civilize them.

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/1_ch18.htm

Now I realize there are several problems with Tocqueville’s analysis. Most of us realize that there were hundreds of different Native American Nations; languages between these nations varied sometimes as great as the variance between English and Chinese.

Many Native Americans cultivated the soil and produced tools hundreds of years prior to the invasion by Europe.

But putting all this aside, Alexander the Frank was able to pretty much sum up what was occurring in America in the 1830’s.  And he foresees more than just the potentiality of Civil War; he predicts wars between the Negro and the European in the event there is no Civil War. He is not sure that Federalism will succeed and even foresees several different confederations that might be bound together by temporary treaties for the purpose of providing for the common defense of their continent.

I will come back to this in another essay.

What grabbed me about Tocqueville’s perspective on race in America, was that he too underlined the concept of complicity.

The North was hardly free of sin in all of these matters.

He clearly sees the Southern experiment as doomed to failure. The free worker will always out produce the slave. Industry is humming in the north and at a standstill in the South. He is intrigued by the newly invented railroad/locomotive.

(The first trains had been introduced in the NE, specifically in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and New York by the time of deTocqueville’s visit. Gravity Railroads had been around on this continent for over a hundred years; in use for mining; most of this activity taking place in the north.)

He discusses the abolition of slavery in the northern states as contributing to the problems in the South; something that never crossed my mind.

You see, in Maine you might find a Black person for every three hundred Europeans. By the time you reach NY, the ratio might be 100:1.  By the time you get to Alabama, the ratio is more like 40:60.

If a northern state frees all the children of current slaves, the market value of the adult slave diminishes; forcing the northern slave owner to ‘dump’ his product down south. Therefore there was a new migration of the African-American from the north to the south.  All this has little to do with some attack on the northern states under some theory involving morality. After all NY could do nothing about Alabama slavery.

Morality involves another aspect of this discussion.

The emancipated Negroes and those born after the abolition of slavery do not, indeed, migrate from the North to the South; but their situation with regard to the Europeans is not unlike that of the Indians; they remain half civilized and deprived of their rights in the midst of a population that is far superior to them in wealth and knowledge, where they are exposed to the tyranny of the laws 40 and the intolerance of the people. On some accounts they are still more to be pitied than the Indians, since they are haunted by the reminiscence of slavery, and they cannot claim possession of any part of the soil. Many of them perish miserably,41 and the rest congregate in the great towns, where they perform the meanest offices and lead a wretched and precarious  existence.

Tocqueville could have written this in 1935 instead of 1835.

Now there is no intimation that life in the South was any better for the African American:

In the South, where slavery still exists, the Negroes are less carefully kept apart; they sometimes share the labors and the recreations of the whites; the whites consent to intermix with them to a certain extent, and although legislation treats them more harshly, the habits of the people are more tolerant and compassionate. In the South the master is not afraid to raise his slave to his own standing, because he knows that he can in a moment reduce him to the dust at pleasure. In the North the white no longer distinctly perceives the barrier that separates him from the degraded race, and he shuns the Negro with the more pertinacity since he fears lest they should some day be confounded together.

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/1_ch18.htm

We all know about how Black women would actually raise white children. We all know about the House Slave. We all know something about Blacks and Whites living in proximity together in the South.

There is a different chemistry between the races in the South. But for the North to get all too moral about all this; for the North to scream too loudly about the rightness of the Civil War and for the North to castigate the South too righteously is ridiculous to the extreme.

Tocqueville then reviews theoretical remedies to the problem of the three races.

First, you cannot send back all of the slaves to Africa. Liberia is an interesting country to Tocqueville, but it is hardly a panacea. He notes that public records of the day demonstrated that for every slave sent to Africa, two or three new slaves would be born anew. This theory of exile had been proffered by Jefferson, Monroe and Lincoln.

Second, he really believed that if the slaves were freed all at once in the South, the sheer number of freed Negroes without property or education would lead to racial wars.

So Tocqueville spends a great deal of time defending himself from accusations of being a lover of slavery and an enemy of freedom. But he does apologize for the Southerner’s predicament.

They were born into a terrible pickle. Many if not most of the Southerners actually despised the institution or the reality of slavery.

But what is a mother to do?

Now there was a reaction to all of this. Men like Calhoun arose to make great speeches about how slave owners were doing a service for all humanity. You really should read some of his Romanesque oratory in this respect. He was truly a pig.

So what prompts this 12^th grade essay of sorts?

At a signing ceremony at the White House the president declared that approval of the long-delayed legislation “isn’t simply a matter of making amends, it’s about reaffirming our values on which this nation was founded: the principles of fairness and equality and opportunity.”

Obama promised during his campaign to work toward resolving disputes over the government’s past discrimination against minorities. The measure he signed settles a pair of long-standing class-action lawsuits. The measure also settles four long-standing disputes over Native American water rights in Arizona, New Mexico and Montana.

Elouise Cobell, a member of the Blackfeet Tribe from Browning, Mont., and the lead plaintiff in the Indian case, called the signing ceremony “breathtaking,” adding that she did not expect it to happen in her lifetime. Cobell filed the suit 14 years ago and led efforts to reach the $3.4 billion settlement a year ago and then push it through the House and Senate.

http://biggovernment.com/publius/2010/12/08/the-pigford-president-obama-signs-black-farmers-settlement/

This all started in litigation. The plaintiffs were attempting to seek redress for discrimination in the handing out of farm subsidies for decades and decades. The statistics are clear on this point.

Well, our friend Representative Steve King screams reparations and talks about young black farmers running to the cities in order to sell and use drugs. Nonsensical, racist, unhistorical, demeaning,…I dunno, go ahead and pick your adjective or attack me for being too far left and radical. But King’s conduct is indefensible. How am I supposed to open up a conversation with this racist fascist prick? He never read the Pigford file. He has no idea what issues were involved in this 14 year long litigation.

He just flatly says that if we did not have a Black President, this settlement would never have been a settlement.

And this gets into the claims made on all of the right wing blogs and publications that all Barack Obama wanted to do as President was to make reparations to members of his race. I guess the part of the package going to Native Americans was collateral damage?

Then I come across this:

http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/201012080026

Just plug them into that Pigford Lawsuit and give them reparations.

Rush not only pisses on the plaintiffs in the Pigford Lawsuit. Rush not only disses the POTUS once again calling him a racist. Rush not only plugs into the most racist blogs on the internet with his conspiracy theories.

Rush makes the incredibly dumb claim that all people seeking unemployment benefits are minorities. There is certainly a disparity between the unemployment rates among minorities than whites, but MORE WHITES RECEIVE UNEMPLOYMENT BENEFITS THAN minorities.

I will make this claim.

Everybody who listens to Rush Limbaugh is complicit in all of this.

Everybody who voted for Steve King is complicit in all of this.

It is this type of complicity that keeps racism and discrimination alive in this nation.

Just as Alexander de Tocqueville proved almost two hundred years ago.