The Contrarian : North-South Divide

The American Civil War was not a simple struggle between slaveholders and abolitionists, argues Tim Stanley.

Worldhistoryblogspot.blogspot.comThis year marks the 150th anniversary of the outbreak of the American Civil War. Karl Marx defined it as a struggle between two historical epochs – the feudal and the capitalist. The victory of the latter made possible the eventual recognition of the human dignity and the civil rights of African-Americans.

Yet throughout the war British public sentiment favoured the slave-holding South. In October 1861 Marx, who was living in Primrose Hill, summed up the view of the British press: ‘The war between the North and South is a tariff war. The war is, further, not for any principle, does not touch the question of slavery and in fact turns on Northern lust for sovereignty.’ That view was shared by Charles Dickens, who wrote: ‘The Northern onslaught upon slavery is no more than a piece of specious humbug disguised to conceal its desire for economic control of the United States.’

What Marx and the modern reader understands to be a moral question – the question of whether or not one man could own another – many contemporaries understood in terms of economics and law.

Prior to fighting, relations between the North and South had been poisoned by disputes over taxes. The North financed its industrial development through crippling taxes imposed by Congress on imported goods. The South, which had an agricultural economy and had to buy machinery from abroad, ended up footing the bill. When recession hit in the 1850s Congress hiked the import tax from 15 to 37 per cent. The South threatened secession and the North was outraged. An editorial in the Chicago Daily Times warned that if the South left the Union ‘in one single blow, our foreign commerce must be reduced to less than one half of what it is now. Our coastwise trade would pass into other hands. One half of our shipping would lie idle at our wharves. We should lose our trade with the South, with all of its immense profits’. War was the only alternative to financial ruin.

The North was broadly opposed to slavery and this cultural difference shaped the rhetoric of war. Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party was a free labour movement – rabidly so. Northern popular culture depicted Southerners as decadent, un-Christian sponges. Lincoln’s election in 1860 put government in the hands of the man most identified with anti-Dixie prejudice. Inevitably Southerners interpreted it as a Northern coup d’état.

Economic and cultural fear propelled the country into war. But slavery was rarely the issue at hand. While the Republican Party was anti-slavery, it was not abolitionist. In his 1861 inaugural address Lincoln stated: ‘I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so … If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it.’ High-minded though its rhetoric was, the Emancipation Proclamation of 1862 only freed slaves in areas occupied by Union forces. Slave-holding states fighting for the Union were exempted. Secretary of State William H. Steward commented: ‘We show our sympathy with slavery by emancipating slaves where we cannot reach them and holding them in bondage where we can set them free.’

The roots of economic difference between North and South lay in their labour systems. As Marx observed: ‘The whole movement was and is based, as one sees, on the slave question. Not in the sense of whether the slaves within the existing slave states should be emancipated outright or not, but whether the 20 million free men of the North should submit any longer to an oligarchy of three hundred thousand slaveholders.’ But the record shows that Northern greed and anti-Southern prejudice played a big role in the Civil War too.

The Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial

Historytoday.com - This Sunday, August 28th, the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial will be inaugurated in Washington DC on the 48th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, when King delivered his historic ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. The effort to build the memorial took over 25 years. The story of its creation is complex and marred with controversy.

The Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial is situated on the National Mall in Washington DC on the northwest corner of the Tidal Basin. Its address is 1964 Independence Avenue in reference to the 1964 Voting Rights Act, which King played a key role in achieving. It is surrounded by 182 cherry blossom trees which will blossom every April on the anniversary of King’s death.

The design of the monument is inspired by a quote from King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech: ‘out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope’. It consists of a granite boulder, which is split into two stones inscribed with 14 quotes from King’s most famous speeches and sermons. A sculpture of King emerges from the missing piece of the boulder, which is pushed forward and symbolises the ‘stone of hope’.

The idea to build a memorial was first suggested in 1984 by Alpha Phi Alpha, the African-American fraternity of which King was a member. Congress authorised the memorial in 1996, and two years later, a foundation was set up to raise the $120 million (approximately £73 million) necessary for its construction. An international design competition was launched in 1999, which yielded over 900 entries from 52 countries. Submissions were judged by a panel of 11 architecture and fine arts professionals from China, France, Mexico, India and the United States.

The design submitted by ROMA Design Group, an architecture firm based in San Francisco, was eventually selected and the Chinese artist Lei Yixin was chosen to carve the image of Martin Luther King in the ‘stone of hope’. However, the decision caused significant controversy: some argued that a black American artist should have been chosen and Lei Yixin was criticised because his public works include more than a dozen icons of Mao Zedong. In 2008, the US Commission of Fine Arts argued that the style of the colossal statue was too stern and confrontational, and the announcement that the memorial would be carved in Chinese granite rather than American stone met further criticism.

The memorial will be nevertheless be inaugurated this weekend. It is the first on the National Mall to honour a man of peace and a man of colour.

Further information about the memorial is available on the Martin Luther King National Memorial website, including photos of the memorial at various stages during its construction, a virtual tour and information on its design, construction and the events organised to mark the inauguration.

How accurately, however, does the memorial represent the achievements of Martin Luther King? In Martin Luther King’s Half-Forgotten Dream Peter Ling argues that by adulating King for his work in the Civil Rights campaigns we have misrepresented the complexity of those struggles and ignored some of the equally challenging campaigns of his last years.

In Recording the Dream Brian Ward reveals some of King's little-known experiences as a recording artist.