Biweekly Discussion - Slavery & Pseudohistory
Details
This is going to be an online meetup using Zoom. If you've never used Zoom before, don't worry - it's easy to use and free to join.
Here's the link to the event: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87550825276?pwd=UTEvellBWGNHMkRZREw4eVY0Y3B6UT09
Meeting ID: 875 5082 5276
Password: 222437
THE CONUNDRUM OF SLAVERY IN "THE LAND OF THE FREE"
ANALYZING HOW AMERICAN SLAVERY GAVE RISE TO PSEUDO-LAW, PSEUDO-HISTORY, PSEUDO-ECONOMICS & PSEUDO-SEMIOTICS
INTRODUCTION:
America's history of slavery has received several spikes in news coverage over the past few years. Some of this dates back to the 2015 church shooting in Charleston by Dylan Roof, which was partly attributed to Roof's fascination with the Confederacy since his manifesto contained photos of him posing with the Confederate battle flag. This led to calls for Southern states to rid themselves of the public display of this flag, and to remove statues of Confederate generals from public as well. This proved controversial with many white Southerners, who argued these were about "heritage not hate" and that removing them would be "erasing history". This led several far-right groups to plan the "Unite the Right Rally" in August of 2017. It started as a protest of the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee from Lee Park in Charlottesville, NC, and ended in a massive brawl between white supremacists & Antifa activists and the death of Heather Heyer when James Alex Fields Jr. rammed his car into a group of counter-protestors.
As many will remember, Trump commented on the fallout from the Unite the Right Rally shortly thereafter. He argued against efforts to remove the Confederate monuments, saying it would be “changing history” and that if the monuments were removed, figures like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson could be next, due to their ownership of slaves. Trump also created a firestorm of controversy when he said that "you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides" and it wasn't immediately clear whether he meant both sides of the overarching debate about Confederate monuments or both sides of the clash between the white supremacists attending Unite the Right rally and the counter-protestors.
The comments after the Unite the Right Rally weren't the first or last comments from the Trump administration on the subject of slavery and the Civil War in 2017. Earlier in May of 2017, Trump mused in an interview that the Civil War could have been avoided if only Andrew Jackson had been around to stop it. Then in October of 2017, Trump's chief of staff John F. Kelly stirred controversy when he called Robert E. Lee “an honorable man” and said that “the lack of an ability to compromise” led to the avoidable tragedy of the Civil War. Many critics of the Trump administration argued that this sounded almost like the "Lost Cause" apologetics for the Confederacy which had emerged among white Southerners in the late 19th century, where the conflict was reframed as the "War of Northern Aggression".
There's been some provocative arguments about slavery emanating from the political left as well. Just before the 4th of July in 2015, Dylan Matthews stirred up controversy with an article at Vox that argued that the inhabitants of the 13 American colonies would've been better off if we'd either never declared our independence from Britian or lost the war. One of the reasons he gave was that this would've meant that slavery in the American colonies would've been abolished in 1833, three decades earlier and without a bloody & enormously costly Civil War.
More recently, in the summer of 2019, the New York Times ran a series of articles on slavery as part of its "1619 Project" which commemorated the arrival of the first Africans to the mainland of North America, brought by English privateers who seized them from Portuguese slave ship and sold them to the settlers at Jamestown. There's some debate about using 1619 as the date for the beginning of slavery in the future United States since these Africans were treated more like indentured servants, being freed after a prescribed period and given the use of land & supplies by their former masters. But what really sparked debate was an essay by Matthew Desmond that drew upon the work of historians Sven Beckert & Seth Rockman and argued that American capitalism is "uniquely severe and unbridled" and the reason for this can be found in America's history of plantation slavery. Desmond also argued that "the institution of slavery turned a poor, fledgling nation into a financial powerhouse, and the cotton plantation was America’s first big business."
More recently, in the weeks following the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police on May 25th, 2020, protestors around the United States have not only torn down or defaced a large number of Confederate monuments, but they've also vandalized monuments to abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass (Rochester), John Greenleaf Whittier (LA), Matthias Baldwin (Philadelphia) & Hans Christian Heg (Madison), the black Union soldiers of the 54th Regiment (Boston), and even black lynching victims (Duluth), suggesting the historical knowledge of some anti-racist protestors is sorely lacking — or that activism has given way to petty vandalism. Statues of George Washington & Thomas Jefferson (Portland) and Ulysses S. Grant (San Francisco) have been toppled as well. This has spurred public debate about whether Founders and Union generals should still be publicly honored if they owned slaves or had views we'd now regard as racist. There have also been demands to take down several statues primarily due to their condescending composition — notably the Emancipation Memorial (DC & Boston) which features Abraham Lincoln standing over a kneeling slave, and the Equestrian Statue in front of the Museum of Natural History (NYC) which features a Native American chief and a black African walking beside a mounted Teddy Roosevelt. Trump's argument in 2017 that pulling down Confederate statues may lead to a "slippery slope" in which monuments to the Founding Fathers will be torn down as well now seems almost prophetic — a word most skeptics would never expect to use to describe our 45th president.
On June 30th, due to public pressure, state officials in Mississippi announced they would redesign the state flag to eliminate the "stars & bars" which was the last remnant of the Confederate battle flag on official state flags. Activists have also pressured corporations to do away with various corporate symbols or icons that hark back to slavery or Jim Crow, such as Aunt Jemima syrup & Uncle Ben rice. Certain old movies that lend nostalgia to these periods like "Gone With The Wind" and "Song of the South" have been taken out of circulation by streaming services as well. Activists have claimed that these visible reminders of the "Lost Cause" mythology & white supremacist ideology continue to affect race relations in America, while critics have argued this amounts to "erasing history".
AS SKEPTICS, HOW SHOULD WE EVALUATE THE ABOVE ARGUMENTS?
The skeptic movement typically deals with pseudoscience and conspiracy theories, but occasionally skeptics also evaluate historical arguments. Often, skeptics focus their debunking efforts on the most preposterous historical claims — like the oft-heard speculations on the History channel that "ancient aliens" had a role in the construction of the Egyptian pyramids and the Nazca lines. Skeptics have also gone after Holocaust denialism, where certain people (typically although not always anti-Semites) claim that Nazi "death camps" didn't exist and that the numbers of Jews killed by the Nazis in WWII are vastly overstated due to a conspiracy between historians, Jewish activists & the Israeli government.
More recently there's been some skeptic focus on debunking the pro-Confederate historiography that portrays Southerners as kindly slavemasters and gallant soldiers who fought for a "Lost Cause" that was ultimately defeated by "Northern aggression". This is a bit different than debunking Holocaust deniers however, since the Lost Cause historians don't claim that slavery didn't exist or the Civil War never happened. Instead, they argue that slaves weren't generally treated any worse than Northern laborers in coal mines & factories, and that the Civil War was an unjust act of "Northern aggression" rather than a righteous fight to end slavery. While some of the arguments of Lost Cause historians are focused on historical facts, much of their debate with mainstream American historians revolves around the moral significance of various events. This means that as we discuss this issue, we're not merely arguing about how historians should source their facts and draw inferences about past events, but we're also almost inevitably arguing about ethical questions. And to the extent that we're addressing claims about the importance of slavery for the antebellum economy of the US or the significance of Confederate monuments today, we're also going outside the domain of history and into the realm of economics and semiotics.
In the first section of this discussion, we'll look at the Founding Father's views on slavery and how it figured into the writing of the Constitution. We have a lot of historical writings on slavery from the Framers in the issue of slavery, both from slavery opponents like John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and Governeur Morris to somewhat reluctant slaveowners like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Jay, and James Madison. We'll consider whether or not the Constitution presents a clear legal justification for or against slavery or if it's ambivalent. We'll also discuss whether certain interpretations of the Constitution's position on slavery — like the idea that the Three-Fifths Compromise meant the Founders considered blacks only partly human — might constitute an untenable form of "pseudo-law" (similar to the fringe claims that the federal income tax is unconstitutional we discussed in a past meetup). Since this portion of our discussion mostly focuses on events in America's Founding Era, we'll also consider the hypothetical scenario where the US lost the Revolutionary War and consider whether that would've led to a quicker & more peaceful end to slavery in Britain's North America colonies, since England abolished slavery in 1833.
In the second section, we'll dive into the Neoconfederate "Lost Cause" apologetics for Southern slavery & secession. We'll consider the extent to which this narrative amounts to "pseudohistory" and "historical negationism" by distorting or denying well-sourced historical facts, such as the fact that the desire to preserve slavery was the major reason cited by the Southern states in their declarations of secession from the Union. We'll also consider whether slavery would've eventually been abolished if the Southern states had been allowed to peacefully secede or whether the Civil War could've been averted if the federal government offered to purchase slaves' freedom from the slaveowners as was done in the Northern states in the early 19th century, England's colonies in 1833, and France's colonies in 1848.
In the third section, we'll look at some recent argument about whether slave-based cash-crop agriculture was such a major part of the antebellum South that it can fairly be said that the US economy would've never grown so rapidly without it, or whether slavery was inefficient and actually slowed the rate of innovation & economic growth — particularly in the South. Historians & economists have argued back & forth about whether considering slavery a necessary (if not sufficient) cause of America becoming one of the wealthiest nations in the world is an empirically supported argument or a muddled form of "pseudo-economics".
In the final section, we'll try to take a skeptical & science-based approach to some issues involving "semiotics" — the study of signs & symbols, and we'll consider whether or not there can be false interpretations of public memorials, flags, corporate icons, movies & books that we might call "pseudo-semiotics". We'll look at how the public debates over public memorials to Confederate generals & soldiers and the Dixie flag, as well as to slave-owing Founders like Washington & Jefferson, constitute a sort of "racial Rorschach test" that forces us to consider the meaning of public monuments & symbols. We'll see how this ties in with the recent pressure put on corporations to do away with corporate icons like Aunt Jemima & Uncle Ben, as well as the removal of old movies like "Gone With The Wind" from streaming services and books like "Huckleberry Finn" from school libraries. We'll try to determine if there's a somewhat objective way to determine whether or not these visible aspects of our culture signify an endorsement of slavery & white supremacy or merely function as public reminders of our nation's morally tarnished history.
NOTE: We covered this topic in October of 2019, and the discussion outline is mostly the same except we looked at the debate over whether or not the Bible endorses slavery, and if so was it more akin to "indentured servitude" rather than the racialized chattel slavery practice in colonial era & the ante-bellum South. Our discussion today instead has a section on the debate over Confederates monuments, the Confederate battle flag, and other cultural icons that hark back to slavery. To review the old discussion outline, use the following link:
https://www.meetup.com/Philly-Skeptics/events/rgrhxqyznbbc/
A BRIEF WORD ABOUT HISTORICAL ARGUMENTS:
It's worth pointing out that all 4 of the issues we'll discuss are controversial because they tie into many people's sense of political & national identity, and the arguments in these debates are often formulated with sweeping generalizations & false dichotomies, for example:
- The US Constitution is fundamentally pro-slavery (or fundamentally pro-freedom).
- The Civil War had nothing to do with slavery (or was only about slavery).
- The Transatlantic slave trade & Southern slave plantations had nothing (or everything) to do with why America became a wealthy nation.
- The Confederate flag, Confederate statues & movies like "Gone With The Wind" are tributes to white supremacy (or Southern heritage).
In order to make our debates more logically sound, it may be worth reviewing why Sweeping Generalizations & False Dichotomies are fallacious:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faulty_generalization
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma
It might also be good to understand several other logical fallacies that often crop up in debates over history, although we should note that not all historians agree they're always fallacious:
- Is-Ought Fallacy (a.k.a. Naturalistic Fallacy, Fact-Value Distinction): a failure to distinguish how the world is versus how the world ought to be; in historical debates, this can involve arguments about the "right side of history" that confuse empirical questions about how things did happen with ethical questions about how things should have happened.
- Genetic Fallacy: a fallacy of irrelevance that is based solely on someone's or something's history, origin, or source rather than its current meaning or context.
- Intentional Fallacy: the fallacy of basing an assessment of a work (or symbol) on the creator's intention rather than on one's response to the actual work. (This principle is related to the "death of the author" in literary studies, i.e. the decline in interpretations based on what the author "really meant", but it can also apply to historical interpretation.)
- Reification Fallacy: a fallacy of ambiguity, when an abstraction (abstract belief or hypothetical construct) is treated as if it were a concrete real event or physical entity. A common case of reification is the confusion of a model or symbol with reality: "the map is not the territory".
- Historian's Fallacy (a.k.a. Hindsight Bias): an informal fallacy that occurs when one assumes that decision makers of the past viewed events from the same perspective and have the same information as those subsequently analyzing the decision. It's similar to but distinct from "presentism", a mode of historical analysis in which present-day ideas (such as moral standards) are projected into the past.