"neat, distinct eras instead of long, messy lifetimes"

October 17, 2022 10:27 AM

"It was possible for someone to spend their late teen years attacking slave catchers as part of an abolitionist vigilance committee, hit their 20s ambushing proto-confederates in Kansas alongside revolutionaries who fought on the barricades in 1848, fight in the war itself, battle the klan in guerrilla actions after and still be spry enough to end up in the middle of the 1877 Great Upheaval and the conflicts following that. They would have spent very little — maybe none — of those years in uniform." "Living in the prologue: lessons from America's long civil war" by journalist and anarchist David Forbes (notes on her sources) narrates the life of Abraham Galloway to discuss the US's "long civil war — and the thousand forms of resistance within it".

"A more accurate view is not four years of war, but a whole period of major conflict over the slave power that ramped up in the 1830s, escalated massively in the 1850s and lasted until the 1880s (or even 1898 with the crushing of the Fusionists and the Wilmington massacre/coup). With a giant war in the middle. Some of that war was conventional. A lot of it wasn't."

Disclaimer: I know David Forbes and she is a friend of mine.

posted by brainwane (8 comments total)

Any application to current events vis-a-vis various state stances on birth control, abortion rights, identity issues, et al is an exercise left to the reader?
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 11:11 AM on October 17, 2022 [3 favorites]

(This is a cool essay, but Wilmington, NC was not then and has never been the second largest city in the south after New Orleans)
posted by thivaia at 1:29 PM on October 17, 2022

When did we get federal law with any teeth in it whatsoever prohibiting Americans from sneering "You can't work, sleep, learn, live, marry who you want, eat, sit, enter, or be here because of the color of your skin?"

A century after the Official Civil War ended.

Within the lifetime of many reading this post.

And we can pinpoint similar milestones for various rights of LGBTs, women, non-Christians, and anyone else that our WASP cis het conservative male-driven society decides to Other. SCOTUS decisions within my own lifetime that are now under uncomfortable scrutiny, pushback from conservative legislatures, movements to wipe away gains that people fought, bled and sometimes died for in many cases.

This isn't something that the Founders messed up in draft 1 of the Constitution and fixed as soon as they'd realized that. This is America, then, until recently, and if they get their way, soon again.
posted by delfin at 3:38 PM on October 17, 2022 [11 favorites]

Any application to current events vis-a-vis various state stances

For four minutes of animation, the section of Oversimplified's Civil War explainer covers several ideas of the Abolitionist Period leading up to the Civil War [Link starts at 1:53, stop at 5:53] :
- interpretation questions about vague phrasing in the Constitution
- do-nothing-right-now between sides; because to do otherwise would be to risk the Other Side making the Bad Thing into Constitutional Law the next time they had a majority
- the uneasy balancing act between Red States and Blue States (this time slave vs free, but you see the pattern)
- repeated "There. We've made a compromise deal, and the subject will never come up again." 'Narrator: three years later, it came up again.'
- If you value Democracy so much, why not let the people vote for oppression, huh? Gotcha!

And you'll see recurring patterns.
posted by bartleby at 3:38 PM on October 17, 2022 [4 favorites]

I've always felt like the war was a forgone conclusion since the Nullfication Crisis of '32-33. There were twenty-some years of holding the union together with Band-aids after that.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 3:55 PM on October 17, 2022

Yep, the American Civil War never really ended, and, yes, it began long before 1861; it’s just that it’s the inverse of Clausewitz’s (often misquoted*) saying that war is the continuation of policy by other means. The long Cold Civil War, except that for the most vulnerable Others, it’s frequently been Hot, even as it remained mostly Cold for us white folks. It’s only when it erupts back into Hot status for white folks (e.g., the Jan. 6th storming of the Capitol, the plot to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer) that we are forced to face this fact. (Even fictional incidents like the rednecks blowing away Billy on his Harley at the end of “Easy Rider” can be seen as illustration of how the simmering hostility of the “losing” side can violently shock complacent white folks.)

(*The linked article makes the important point that in Clausewitz’s original German, there’s no “by” but rather “with” (“mit”), so that it’s not that diplomacy and law-making cease as statesmen cross a kind of “event horizon” beyond which only war is used as an instrument of policy, but that war is resorted to in addition to those means.)
posted by Philofacts at 5:55 PM on October 17, 2022 [10 favorites]

This is fascinating history and also pretty straightforward about current conditions. So much history and so much to do. Thanks.
posted by away for regrooving at 1:01 AM on October 18, 2022 [2 favorites]

Yes, pretty straightforward. I joined DF's patreon.
posted by kingless at 12:48 PM on October 19, 2022 [1 favorite]