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PORTSIDE CULTURE

HOW GERMAN ATHEISTS MADE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN  
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S. C. Gwynne
March 26, 2024
New York Times
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_ What was the Civil War about? In a word, slavery. The driving force
in American politics in the decades after the American Revolution was
the rise of an arrogant, ruthless, parasitic oligarchy in the South,
built on God-ordained economic inequality. _

In the 1850s, critics of American slavery in the United States were
influenced by German thinkers like Karl Marx and Ludwig Feuerbach.,
(Compilation Credit New York Times: From left: AP; Corbis;
Popperfoto/Popperfoto, via Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis)

 

AN EMANCIPATION OF THE MIND: RADICAL PHILOSOPHY, THE WAR OVER SLAVERY,
AND THE REFOUNDING OF AMERICA, by Matthew Stewart

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE SECOND AMERICAN REPUBLIC: RECONSTRUCTION,
1860-1920, by Manisha Sinha

 

What was the Civil War about? In a word, slavery.

What actually _caused_ the war, however, is a vastly more difficult
idea. Try this explanation on for size: The driving force in American
politics in the decades after the American Revolution was the rise of
an arrogant, ruthless, parasitic oligarchy in the South, built on a
foundation of Christian religion and a vision of permanent,
God-ordained economic inequality.

Though much of the South was poor, this new aristocracy was vastly
rich. Two-thirds of all estates in the United States worth more than
$100,000 were in the hands of Southern white men. Their goal in
seceding was to undo the basic ideals of the American republic and
keep their wealth.

These counterrevolutionaries — for that is what they were —
insisted that men were by divine design _unequal_, both racially and
economically. To fight this notion and crush what amounted to an
existential threat to democracy, the antislavery movement needed ideas
as much as, ultimately, guns.

That’s the narrative that frames Matthew Stewart’s engaging and
often surprising new book, “An Emancipation of the Mind._”_ The
title refers to the rise of new ways of thinking in the antislavery
movement, what Stewart calls “the philosophical origins of
America’s second revolution.”
 

AN EMANCIPATION OF THE MIND: Radical Philosophy, the War Over Slavery,
and the Refounding of America
[[link removed]]
By Matthew Stewart
W. W. Norton & Company; 400 pages
Hardcover:  $32.50
March 26, 2024
ISBN: 978-1-324-00362-5

 
W. W. Norton & Company
The most significant ideas that Stewart traces are religious. From
1770 to 1860, religion in America underwent a massive shift. The
number of churches exploded, North and South. Soon, most of these
churches, using clear and manifold endorsements of slavery from the
Bible (“Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and
with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ”), were
promoting and actively defending the slave republic.

As the antislavery crowd soon learned, it was impossible to spin
“slavery is sin” arguments against biblical literalism. Ending
slavery, Stewart says, “was hardly part of God’s plan.” This
wasn’t just a Southern opinion: Three out of five clerics who
published pro-slavery books and articles were educated at Northern
divinity schools. Two decades before the outbreak of war, abolitionism
was still a skulking pariah, a despised minority in the North as well
as the South.

The abolitionists clearly needed help. Enter the Germans, specifically
the freethinking Germans whose radical republican philosophy
underpinned the failed European revolutions of 1848.
“Freidenkers’’ like the theologian David Friedrich Strauss and
the philosopher and anthropologist Ludwig Feuerbach formulated ideas
of the laws of nature and “nature’s God” that were at odds with
the tenets of Christianity.

A large group of German intellectuals, fresh from the battles of 1848,
arrived on American shores, joined the abolitionist movement and
radicalized it. As he did in his 2014 book “Nature’s God,” which
traced the way that the heretical philosophies of Spinoza and
Lucretius [[link removed]] influenced
American founders like Thomas Jefferson
[[link removed]] and Ben
Franklin, Stewart here argues convincingly that these philosophers
found willing listeners in the persons of Abraham Lincoln, who kept
Strauss and Feuerbach on his shelf; Frederick Douglass, who saw
American Christianity as “the xxxxxx of slavery”; and the
abolitionist firebrand Theodore Parker, whose lectures reached as many
as 100,000 people a year in the 1850s.

Wasn’t much of this simply revolutionary atheism? Yes, it was, and
it’s a bit of a shock to find out how close Lincoln and Douglass
were to these ideas, though they paid lip service to more conventional
Christian beliefs when translating them for the public.

The other big idea here — also with help from the Germans,
especially Karl Marx (a great admirer of Lincoln, who, Stewart argues,
liked him too) — has to do with the _economics_ of slavery. “At
the root of the ills of the slave system,” writes Stewart, “lies
the extreme economic inequality that it inevitably produces — not
just between races but among the white population.”

Between 1852 and 1862, Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote 487 articles
for The New York Daily Tribune; Lincoln likely read them
[[link removed]].
They explained the war as “nothing but a struggle between two social
systems, the system of slavery and the system of free labor.”

After the war came Reconstruction. How do you deconstruct
Reconstruction? Very, very carefully. It’s one of the toughest, most
maddeningly complicated tasks in the writing of American history.
That’s because Reconstruction — the word we use to denote the
failed post-Civil War attempt to build a more inclusive country —
unfolded in different ways in different states, on different
timetables and with a wildly proliferating cast of players.

In her new book, “The Rise and Fall of the Second American
Republic,” the historian Manisha Sinha not only has taken on this
vast subject, but has greatly expanded its definition, both temporally
and spatially. Her Reconstruction embraces the Progressive Era,
women’s suffrage, the final wars against Native Americans,
immigration and even U.S. imperialism in the latter 19th and early
20th centuries. She covers these difficult issues with remarkable
skill and clarity.

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE SECOND AMERICAN REPUBLIC: Reconstruction,
1860-1920 [[link removed]]
By Manisha Sinha
Liveright / W. W. Norton; 562 pages
Hardcover:  $39.99
March 26, 2024
ISBN:  978-1-63149-844-2

 
Liveright
In Sinha’s telling, the achievements of Reconstruction — we are in
the latter 1860s and early 1870s here — are truly amazing. The
federal decision to use the Army against recalcitrant ex-Confederates
to secure rights for Black people resulted, she writes, in “a brief,
shining historical moment when abolition democracy triumphed in much
of the South and across the rest of the nation,” which “meant the
inauguration of a progressive, interracial democracy.”

These years saw the passage of constitutional amendments that
guaranteed citizenship, equal protection under the law and the vote
for Black men. They also saw the rise of a powerful Freedmen’s
Bureau, Black voting on a massive scale and the election of thousands
of Black representatives to national, state and local office. More
than 600 Black politicians were elected in the South to state
legislatures alone.

Black Americans and freedpeople, Sinha reminds us, were themselves
behind much of this change, a process she calls “grass-roots
reconstruction.” As she laid out in her 2016 book “The Slave’s
Cause
[[link removed]],”
and shows more briefly here, they documented atrocities and pushed to
have them exposed, filed petitions, swore out affidavits at the risk
of their lives and formed political organizations and lobbies.

But the Second American Republic would soon come crashing down, the
victim of another violent counterrevolution whose principal weapons
were racial terror and political assassination. In its place rose a
New South, where class distinctions were shored up, where the
government was by and for white men and where the belief that Black
people were inferior to white people was firmly in place. Instead of
economic freedom, Americans got debt peonage, stolen wages,
criminalized self-employment and a convict leasing system. The great
flowering of education during Reconstruction was trampled too as
terrorists burned down more than 600 Black schools.

Sinha tells these stories well. She also pushes out beyond the
conventionally defined subjects of Reconstruction. In her account, the
ascendancy of Jim Crow and the conquest of the West, among other forms
of repression, are profoundly connected, and not only because the
government failed to protect Black liberty as well as Indigenous land
rights and sovereignty. The Army that was raised to fight Southern
counterrevolutionaries was redeployed in the West to subjugate
Indians. The literacy requirements used to disenfranchise Black
Americans in the South also proved effective in targeting immigrants
and working-class people in the North.

Still, the ideals of the Second Republic did not completely wither on
the vine. Sinha convincingly advances her vision of Reconstruction all
the way forward to 1920, when the 19th Amendment granted women’s
suffrage. That landmark event was inspired by the marquee equal rights
amendments of the Reconstruction era, which, Sinha writes,
“bequeathed a legacy of political activism and progressive
constitutionalism” on the movement, a breath of air that gave
America new life.

_[S.C. GWYNNE is the author of “Hymns of the Republic: The Story of
the Final Year of the American Civil War
[[link removed]].”]_

* slavery
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* anti-slavery
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* Civil War
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* US Civil War
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* American Revolution
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* U.S. history
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* South
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* Abraham Lincoln
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* Frederick Douglass
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* Confederacy
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* Reconstruction
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* Progressive Era
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* Women's Suffrage
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* Native Americans
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* Indigenous peoples
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* Genocide
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* Immigration
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* Karl Marx
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* Frederick Engels
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* Ludwig Feuerbach
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* German immigrants
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