Friday, February 27, Gerald Early (English) discusses Iver Bernstein's (History) paper, "Revitalizing America: Maroon Politics and the Origins of the Civil War." Comment on this announcement to continue the discussion.
I found this to be a fascinating paper, and Professor Early's comments were just as stimulating. I'd like to suggest that there's one thing that remains a bit unclear in the paper that has little to do with the direction the conversation took yesterday, about the nature of 'maroon politics,' and might be closer to Andrew's question about causes. In terms of the move to Civil War, I'm not entirely clear whether American political culture after, say, 1850 should be seen as being completely divided over conceptions of the good, or over conceptions of how the political sphere broadly defined should operate--that is, is this a debate over how democracy should work, procedurally, or what values should give shape to that democracy? In so many ways, the revitalization of America being described here seems to be about creating a "more satisfying culture" (Wallace's phrase) in terms of shared values. And clearly this impulse can be seen driving some of the key actors in the paper (Gerrit Smith, for instance).
But in terms of the causal factors leading the nation to war, it appears that Professor Bernstein gives pride of place to disagreements about how American politics (again, broadly defined, to include free discussion; responsive deliberative institutions; and consistent, constitutional rule of law) should *work* that drove the nation to war. I'm thinking of the three paragraphs following footnote 63, where "the anti-maroon campaigns"--violent, legislative, judicial, all of them--appear to have led many to believe that their political system was being taken away from them. And, in the end, that seems to be the causal force at work here. Lincoln's famous image in the House Divided speech (1858) of going to sleep one night thinking Missouri might become free only to awake to find Illinois a slave state makes the point pretty well. He was anxious that he was witnessing the death of a functioning democracy. Perhaps the paper does best in describing the crises and political anxieties that got Americans in 1858 to that point, to the point of believing that their political system no longer worked. But, ultimately, perhaps we could say that the disagreements over what that "more satisfying culture" ought to look like led to a Civil War only when it appeared that the political system, as a system, no longer worked?
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I found this to be a fascinating paper, and Professor Early's comments were just as stimulating. I'd like to suggest that there's one thing that remains a bit unclear in the paper that has little to do with the direction the conversation took yesterday, about the nature of 'maroon politics,' and might be closer to Andrew's question about causes. In terms of the move to Civil War, I'm not entirely clear whether American political culture after, say, 1850 should be seen as being completely divided over conceptions of the good, or over conceptions of how the political sphere broadly defined should operate--that is, is this a debate over how democracy should work, procedurally, or what values should give shape to that democracy? In so many ways, the revitalization of America being described here seems to be about creating a "more satisfying culture" (Wallace's phrase) in terms of shared values. And clearly this impulse can be seen driving some of the key actors in the paper (Gerrit Smith, for instance).
ReplyDeleteBut in terms of the causal factors leading the nation to war, it appears that Professor Bernstein gives pride of place to disagreements about how American politics (again, broadly defined, to include free discussion; responsive deliberative institutions; and consistent, constitutional rule of law) should *work* that drove the nation to war. I'm thinking of the three paragraphs following footnote 63, where "the anti-maroon campaigns"--violent, legislative, judicial, all of them--appear to have led many to believe that their political system was being taken away from them. And, in the end, that seems to be the causal force at work here. Lincoln's famous image in the House Divided speech (1858) of going to sleep one night thinking Missouri might become free only to awake to find Illinois a slave state makes the point pretty well. He was anxious that he was witnessing the death of a functioning democracy. Perhaps the paper does best in describing the crises and political anxieties that got Americans in 1858 to that point, to the point of believing that their political system no longer worked. But, ultimately, perhaps we could say that the disagreements over what that "more satisfying culture" ought to look like led to a Civil War only when it appeared that the political system, as a system, no longer worked?
Kevin Butterfield