BUSH AND THE CONFEDERACY
by Ted Vincent of Berkeley fsln@aol.com

"Is there a president anywhere in the history of America as bad as George W. Bush? I believe there is. It is Jefferson Davis. He came from privilege. He wasn’t elected. And he marched thousands of young men to their death in a long war for immoral ends," declared Chris Chandler of the Chandler and Roe political/music duo at their January 28th performance at Berkeley's La Pena night club. In the audience, frantically trying to scribble the comment accurately, was this writer, who , in serendipity, had come to the club for a break from composing this article.

Perhaps the most menacing similarity between Bush and the president of the Confederacy is their ability to act against the will of the majority of the people. We see in the November 2006 vote, in the polls and in the marches of hundreds of thousands that Bush lacks a majority. In the South of 1860, a bit over a third of the population had no vote and was not polled. African Americans nonetheless testified their support for Lincoln and the Union by marching off the slave plantations in treks often far longer than those of the anti-Bush marchers today. Once on the Northern side, a quarter million blacks served in the Union army, and many thousands more were aides-de-camp, including black women, (women of either race were denied expression via votes and polls).

Just under two thirds of Southerners in 1860 were of basic European roots. They have been stereotyped as either plantation owners, or poor whites with too little civilization to withstand appeals to join in protecting "the southern way of life," "the rights of the white man," and fending off Northern acts of "subjugation, confiscation, and emancipation," as one newspaper put it.

But the Southern voters showed in November 1860, and in referendums and legislatures in the months after Lincoln’s victory, that a majority of whites were not enamored of the secession adventure pushed by Jefferson Davis. Regrettable, the evidence is often overshadowed by the ultimate success of Davis in his Bush-like politics of paranoia and patriotism to wage war for "immoral ends."

Southern white sentiment in the 1860 era is evidenced in geographic political alignments, in the manner that today certain regions are more or less anti-Bush. .For instance, in Virginia’s 1861 referendum on secession, the western counties of small farmer "hillbillies" voted 89% pro-Union. After the vote, West Virginia seceded from Virginia and was admitted to the Union as a "free state" in 1863. In East Virginia there remained enough anti-secession whites for that region to have a rump pro-Union government in opposition to the Confederate one in Richmond.

Hill country whites in East Tennessee refused to join the Confederacy, and Tennessee Senator Andrew Johnson, who was from their region, stood by the Union and northerners made him Lincoln’s running mate in the 1864 election.

The Confederates claimed that Kentucky and Missouri were two of their states. But most all of their territory was run by rival pro-Union legislatures from the start to the end of the war. Arkansas had two rival governments. Georgia joined the Confederacy after a popular referendum that allegedly gave a 56% majority for secession. But a recount conducted in 1972 found the non-secession vote in Georgia had had a slim majority, one that might have been a larger except that data from some counties had been lost over the years..

Bush has step by step taken the nation into more dangerous territory, with a possible war against Iran looming. Southern secessionists stepped boldly to create enough fear over the Republican Party nomination of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 to keep Lincoln off the presidential ballot in ten states. And note, Abe was not an anti-slavery firebrand; he merely didn’t like the institution. Featured in the November election in the ten states was Stephen A. Douglas of the old Democratic Party, John Breckenridge of the new Southern Democratic Party (heralded by secessionists), and John Bell of the Constitutional Union party (the old Whig party that tried to be both pro-South and pro-Union). Breckinridge and Bell debated often and said little about the Republicans. One historian writes, "Neither of the two threatened secession, although they often challenged each other ... as to who was the more loyal to southern rights and interests," - shades of the Iraq debate today wherein no party seems willing to mention negotiation with the "insurgents."

In November 1860 the Breckenridge party that fronted for separation took only 44 1/2 percent of the total popular vote in the future Confederate states, and this with Lincoln off most ballots and blacks excluded. Undaunted, as Bush is undaunted by this past November, the secessionists pressed for state conventions to vote secession up-or-down. In Texas, the aged Sam Houston was governor and he vetoed the call for a convention; it was held anyway. In Georgia the Whig leader Alexander Stephens managed to delay a secession convention, but he changed his mind on the issue when Jeff Davis offered him the Vice Presidency in the Confederacy. Explaining his change of heart, Stephens declared that the "cornerstone" of the new government rested "upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery —subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth." By early February the Confederacy had seven states.

Zealous advocates of the racial cause included General P. G. T. Beauregard, who proudly fired the first cannon shot at Ft. Sumpter in Charleston harbor, thus starting the civil war. Beauregard is said to have also fired the war’s last shot when he put a bullet in his brain shortly after learning of General Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. The Union commander at Ft. Sumpter had agreed he would abandon the fort on April 15th, and thus the Beauregard’s cannon fire on the 12th seemed unnecessary. However, Davis knew he needed an "incident," and thus ordered the military action. The justification was that Lincoln had sent supply ships toward Sumpter, which Davis said was an act of war against a "soverign state." Hysterical secessionist propaganda about "Northern aggression" at Sumpter led four fence-sitting Southern states to join the Confederacy. It is probably a forlorn hope that Bush will not create a new Ft. Sumpter.

Working against today’s majority for peace is a culture of greed not unlike that which helped Davis swing the South. Many a wavering Southern white in 1861 might have remained a Unionist had not the main gauge of life’s success in the region shifted from Thomas Jefferson’s ideal of the independent farmer to slave plantation ownership.. Davis asked Southern whites to stay in the economic crap shoot that was the chance to become one of the 1 in 660 Southern white families that owned a plantation or the equivalent in wealth. And today, we see a shift from the "New Deal" infused post-World War II bonanza of cheap tract homes for the rising working class, to construction of enormous mansions that might as well have white columns in front and a rocking chair for sitting with a mint julep.

Davis and company stoked fear of an influx of Northern life-style, described as immoral city life of corruption and slovenly immigrants, some of them Godless Catholics and Jews. Had 1860 immigrants worn turbans Davis’ propaganda probably would have won him the war. Behind the complaints was envy.

During the 1850s, the South fell year by year farther behind the North in industry, infrastructure, education, health care and other aspects of modernization. In education, one of the first acts of West Virginia upon its entry into the Union was the vote of its legislature to fund a public school network - a mainstay in the North. The Jeff Davis led secession was, in part, a flag waving distraction from issues of public needs, much as Bush’s "war on terror" distracts from issues of education and medical care. Regarding the latter: it was common in the Davis’ era for wealthy Southerners to go North for operations - what we call today "medical tourism." From Georgia to the North came William and Ellen Craft, most of the distance by stage coach, in the absence of the train service then common in the North. Ellen grimaced at each bump of the coach, although the bandages covering her jaw were really not for an impacted tooth, but a disguise. She and William were slaves who escaped with the ruse that light hued untalkative Ellen was a male and the master of William, the servant who could decipher her nods. Fear of slaves being "up to something" led the masters to sleep with colt revolves under their pillows, notes Michael Moore. That Southerners were better shots than Northerners helped lengthen the Civil War.

While Davis didn’t "win," he fractured the Union and created a government so autocratic that at one point Georgia threatened to secede back into the Union because of his heavy-handed tactics.. Bush appears to be trying his best to fracture and replace our democracy. What’s to stop him? It took Abraham Lincoln’s armies to defeat Davis.

[Credit for historical research and perspective in this article is due UC Professor Emeritus Kenneth M. Stampp.]
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