History is complicated

This thoughtful young man, Mik Barnes, mulls over the discovery that his ancestors include white men who fought for the Confederate States to preserve Black slavery in the U.S. Civil War. 

The Cado "Parish" he refers to is Louisiana-speak for what most states would call Cado "County."

Video by way of  Civil War Memory.

Does anyone else think that is a Fred Hampton t-shirt that he's wearing?

More attemped murder by the Trump regime

In Minnesota and beyond, the Trump regime is testing whether we'll put up with murdering people who oppose their cruelties.

In Philadelphia, they are testing whether we'll let them kill our knowledge of our past. 

The Trump administration’s claim that it has the power to rewrite American history along its preferred ideological lines was tested in federal court on Friday, as a judge considered whether to order the National Park Service to reinstall displays commemorating nine enslaved African people who worked at George Washington’s home in Philadelphia. (New York Times, gift article)

The original home was demolished in 1832, but the Park Service had preserved the foundation as the site of an exhibit which included the story of our first President's enslaved workers. On January 23, they tore out the display.

A description of the site's historical significance from the National Park Service website:

Examine the paradox between slavery and freedom at this site - once the home of Presidents Washington and Adams and their households -  through the voices of those who lived there, including Washington's enslaved servants. A memorial wall recognizes those who toiled in bondage.

George Washington and John Adams, our nation's first two presidents, took up residence here while Philadelphia was the temporary capital of the U.S. In what Washington called "the best single house in the city..." these two presidents negotiated treaties and presided over divisive cabinet meetings. Washington's large household included family members as well as indentured and enslaved servants. Adams, never a slaveholder, employed a small staff of servants.

I wonder how long that informational text will survive. Actually, I wonder that it is still there when I went looking at the NPS site today (2/1/2026).

The New York Times has more on the Trump regime's plans for the Park Service:

... internal Park Service documents reviewed by The New York Times indicate that more changes to America’s birthplace are in the works. The documents show that the Trump administration has ordered the Park Service to remove or revise other signs about slavery at Independence National Historical Park. 

At the Liberty Bell Center, the administration wants to take down or cover up a sign about “the contradiction between the ideals of the Revolution and the reality of more than four million enslaved people,” as well as a sign that acknowledges the systematic deprivation of civil rights from Black people after the Civil War. 

And at Independence Hall, Trump officials have asked the Park Service to revise text presented on an iPad that highlights the irony of keeping enslaved people in an office directly above the room where the Declaration of Independence was signed. 

... On Friday, Judge [Cynthia] Rufe compared removing the stories of Ms. Judge and Mr. Posey [enslaved individuals] from the site to removing a monument to U.S. soldiers who liberated a Nazi death camp.

“What if they just decided to tear down that monument like it didn’t happen?” she said. “You can’t erase history once you’ve learned it. It doesn’t work that way.” 

Kareem Abdul Jabbar - basketball G.O.A.T. and all around wise American - has thoughts on this brazen historical vandalism:

One thing I always say is this: you can’t fix what you refuse to see. And right now, we’re watching a strategy that’s more than a century old play out again.

The Lost Cause movement rewrote the Civil War into a noble struggle for states’ rights. It worked because people wanted it to work. They wanted a version of history that didn’t force them to confront the brutality of slavery or the racism that survived long after slavery ended. By 1920, that mythology had made its way into textbooks across the country. Enslaved people were suddenly “workers.” Oppression became “tradition.” And we’re still dealing with the fallout today.

The tactics are the same. Label the facts as propaganda. Claim you’re restoring “balance,” as if comforting lies deserve equal weight with documented truth. Erase the evidence before anyone can study it too closely. Same playbook as a hundred years ago, updated for the digital age.

I’m not sure we fully understand what’s lost when we let this happen. When you strip away the uncomfortable parts of history, you don’t make the country stronger: you make it weaker. And without context, it becomes easy to blame the victims. 

He goes on to ponder what we've come to:

... people get exhausted. I know I am. Instead of building something new, you spend all your energy fighting to restore what was already there. That’s not an accident. I think about the kids who will visit Independence Hall after these exhibits are gone. They’ll hear about the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and walk away believing the founding was a pure, noble moment. Nobody will tell them that the same men who wrote “all men are created equal” owned human beings and didn’t see a contradiction. It’s not about “putting down” great men, or even judging them by 2026 standards. It’s about truth.

Ignorance has consequences. Without knowledge, it becomes easier to convince the newer generations that racism is just individual prejudice instead of a system built over centuries. It becomes harder for them to recognize injustice because they don’t have the historical tools to identify it.

You can’t challenge the status quo if you don’t know what the status quo was built on.

And that’s corrosive. And that’s the point.

History isn’t supposed to make us comfortable. It’s supposed to make us better. We owe our kids and ourselves the truth, even when it’s hard. Especially when it’s hard.

Exhaustion is real, but accepting lies is not an option. 

We have a long history of struggle over what government is for

It's annoying and dispiriting to watch Republican opposition to President Biden's effort to improve U.S. hard infrastructure. Pretty much everyone agrees roads, bridges, and airports need help, but GOP legislators have received death threats for voting for the Biden plan.

Because the inescapable dividing line in U.S. politics in the mid-19th century was the continued existence and expansion of slavery, it's easy to overlook that support for federally financed "internal improvements" was some of the glue that held together the emerging Republican Party coalition 160 years ago.

The small white master class which ruled states which became the Union-breaking Confederacy wasn't interested in anything that would advance prosperity broadly among small farmers, laborers, and working immigrants. They were doing just fine extracting value from forced slave labor on their plantations. Republicans found a majority constituency by promising to use the federal government to encourage infrastructure building for everyone. There was something from Republicans for the many, even if voters weren't interested in national politics.

The leading planks of the 1860 Republican platform on which Abraham Lincoln ran began by confronting the crisis created by slavery.

That the history of the nation during the last four years, has fully established the propriety and necessity of the organization and perpetuation of the Republican party, and that the causes which called it into existence are permanent in their nature, and now, more than ever before, demand its peaceful and constitutional triumph....

That the maintenance of the principles promulgated in the Declaration of Independence and embodied in the Federal Constitution, “That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” is essential to the preservation of our Republican institutions...

That the new dogma that the Constitution, of its own force, carries slavery into any or all of the territories of the United States, is a dangerous political heresy...

That the normal condition of all the territory of the United States is that of freedom ... 

But that document went on to promise, against the dogmas of the slavocracy, to use government to improve the lives of the people in ways that should seem familiar today:

That appropriations by Congress for river and harbor improvements of a national character, required for the accommodation and security of an existing commerce, are authorized by the Constitution, and justified by the obligation of Government to protect the lives and property of its citizens.

That a railroad to the Pacific Ocean is imperatively demanded by the interests of the whole country; that the federal government ought to render immediate and efficient aid in its construction; and that, as preliminary thereto, a daily overland mail should be promptly established.

And Republican-led Congresses during the bloody Civil War that followed Lincoln's election proceeded to enact a broad wish list of "improvements" that had been blocked by the slave states, including support for railroads, higher education, and owner-occupied small farms. 

How far today's Republican legislators have fallen from this broad vision of national well-being -- in thrall to financiers, corporate bosses, and conman Donald!

Unanticipated consequences

In the wake of this United States' most momentous of our sporadic lurches toward greater justice and truer freedom, radical abolitionist Congresscritters passed the 13th Amendment to the Constitution in 1864 and thereby ended slavery. In so they thought. But the language they chose, inadvertently historian Eric Foner argues, set incarcerated persons up to be re-enslaved. An "Abolition Amendment" has been introduced in Congress this year to finish the job. Foner explains:

The Abolition Amendment would eliminate the Thirteenth Amendment’s “criminal exemption” by adding these words to the Constitution: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude may be imposed as a punishment for a crime.”.

.. When it came time during the Civil War to write an amendment abolishing slavery, Charles Sumner, the abolitionist Senator from Massachusetts, proposed wording based on the 1791 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. His colleague Jacob Howard of Michigan rejected the idea of using a French model. “Good old Anglo-Saxon language” was adequate, he declared, and Congress gravitated to the wording of Jefferson’s ordinance. 

Because of its very familiarity, the text of the Thirteenth Amendment did not undergo necessary scrutiny. The criminal exemption was almost never mentioned in congressional debates, contemporary newspapers or at antislavery conventions that endorsed the proposed amendment. 

... But with the overthrow of Reconstruction and the imposition of the comprehensive system of white supremacy known as Jim Crow, the prison population expanded rapidly. 

Southern states filled their jails with African-Americans, often former slaves convicted of minor crimes. They then rented them out as labor for the owners of railroads, plantations and factories, or required them to work on chain gangs building roads and other public projects, or inside prison walls for private businesses. 

The labor of prisoners became a significant source of revenue for Southern states. The system also took hold, but in a much smaller way, in the North. ... Conditions were barbarous and the supply of convicts seemingly endless. “One dies, get another,” became a popular refrain among those who profited from the labor of prisoners. ... With the expansion of private prisons, more and more inmates work for private contractors, sometimes in factory settings within prison walls. In recent years, many companies have used or benefited from the labor of prisoners. 

... the 13th Amendment shows that unanticipated consequences can be as significant as intended ones. The amendment, which destroyed the largest slave system the modern world has known, was deservedly an occasion for celebration. Especially given our heightened awareness of the inequities of our criminal justice system, it is high time the criminal exemption was eliminated, as the abolition amendment proposes.

This Abolition Amendment isn't going to become law anytime soon, but it's important that we understand that we need it.

•••

Another example of less-than-entirely expected consequences: the smart, annoying, contrarian pundit Matthew Yglesias has turned himself into a subscription Substack he names "Slow Boring." He's prolific and I find I learn from him.

But this email/blogging medium also provides space for self-indulgence. And this week he has been whining about social media backlash for promoting his current book on Joe Rogan's podcast. Rogan is apparently a wildly popular misogynist bro-talker who, like many of his breed, has an ant in his pants about gender bending and takes it out on transfolk.

Yglesias complains he's being subjected to "cancel culture" for going on Rogan's show. But also, his response is to lay out where he stands on trans rights as follows:

I support trans rights:
I am glad that transgender people won Civil Rights Act protections from the Supreme Court.
I’m glad Biden has committed to reversing Trump’s executive orders on trans health care.
I’m for open access to restrooms and frankly for the abolition of gender-segregating of bathrooms in general.
I’m looking forward to a new and more enlightened era on military service.

This isn't all warm and fuzzy -- it's not going mollify people who suffer directly from society's rejection of their non-standard gender identity and presentation. But getting a majority of us to this level of understanding of what right behavior looks like would create the context for a better life for millions of people. Maybe we can get to where a young friend doesn't find the job he had been promised had somehow disappeared when his prospective employer realized he'd transitioned. 

Formal tolerance and recognition is what comes first; only when we get this far can we live into deeper acceptance of the unfamiliar. 

Yglesias didn't like being called out -- but it got him on record. That's a good consequence. 

Photo from a contemporary video about Louisiana' Angola Prison.

Movement history that can inspire today

Since I dinged one academic yesterday for what I considered weak historical analogies that shed little light on his subject, now I want to raise up an article by an historian that I think uncovers powerful resonances between contemporary events and US history.

Manisha Sinha is the author of the monumental study The Slave's Cause: a History of Abolition. In The New Fugitive Slave Laws in the New York Review of Books, she discusses several recent criminal cases brought against humanitarians which call to mind 19th century struggles to end slavery in the United States.

Scott Warren, a volunteer for the group No More Deaths, has been charged for illegally providing food and water to migrants in the Arizona desert. His travails remind her of the Ohio farmer John Van Zandt whose long legal battle in the 1840s against indictment for assisting nine fugitive slaves to hide successfully left him penniless and broken. Warren's recent trial led to a hung jury; the government wants to try him again.

The German ship captain Carola Rackete rescued 41 African migrants from the Mediterranean Sea; the right-wing populist government of Italy seized her ship, though individual criminal charges laid against here were dismissed by an Italian judge. The organization that sponsored her voyage, Sea-Watch International, charges Italy with "kidnapping." Sinha points out that

Abolitionists, too, often called those who captured free blacks and assisted in fugitive slave renditions “kidnappers,” ...

She goes on to draw out the similarities between our recoil from images of the drowned Salvadoran father, Óscar Ramírez, and his young daughter, Valeria with the immense impact of the scene of the slave Eliza and her infant escaping across the Ohio River in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852).

She concludes:

Today, in criminalizing the provision of humanitarian assistance to migrants we have resurrected the fugitive slave laws of antebellum America. Just as abolitionist activists were once targeted, human rights activists have found themselves in the sights of the Trump administration for surveillance and prosecution, according to a recent Amnesty International report. ...

Some historical analogies can mislead, granted, but we should be mindful of the lessons from history that can shine light on our current humanitarian crisis. The first is that evils we had thought long banished from civilized societies can reappear, and with alarming speed. ... The second lesson from history is how quickly such measures can be accepted as necessary, even “natural.” That ordinary people of any ethnicity or nationality can partake in and support evil actions at any time is not news to historians.

... the interracial nineteenth-century abolition movement can provide valuable inspiration to those involved in today’s efforts to provide humanitarian aid to migrants and refugees and to resist the threatened descent into authoritarianism, mass atrocity, and inhumanity. ... The plight of today’s “Dreamers” and citizens and legal immigrants married to undocumented immigrants is comparable to the status of runaway slaves who married free blacks and raised children in free states. ... We might well paraphrase Frederick Douglass’s great speech, “What to the interned migrant is the Fourth of July?”

The [1850] Fugitive Slave Law sparked outrage in the North, especially in areas where the abolition movement was strong. Hundreds of cases brought to court under the law by slave-catchers and slave owners in the 1850s led to abolitionist protests and scuffles with federal marshals.

Manisha Sinha's history of abolitionism is less a retelling of what happened in the course of this country's tormented trajectory toward ending slavery and more an exploration and evaluation of abolitionism as a prolonged social movement. Because that's how she's chosen to look at the past, it is not surprising that she excels at picturing the present within a social movement vision. Read it all here.

Enslavers built this country with the whip

If you care about how white supremacy came to be the unhealed wound in this country's body and soul, I suggest two history books that provide a grounding through which to interpret that evil's current manifestations. The first was published four decades ago, Edmund Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom. (The link is to my short discussion of it.) Morgan describes how adopting slavery made possible early colonial Virginia's tobacco economy and how maintaining slavery by violence warped the intellectual world of the U.S. founding generation. Last year, Cornell historian Edward E. Baptist's The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism extends analysis of slavery to the frontier states where cotton became king and U.S. capitalism accumulated its foundational wealth.

What Baptist has done is simple, if laborious and painful: he has studied many, many slave narratives and post-slavery interviews with the institution's survivors and discerned patterns of horror which render a story quite different from what we may have learned in school. Then he has woven this material into a powerful narrative of the pre-Civil War United States.

His central assertion, which I would say is unlikely to be refuted, is that southern planters in the then-southwest (Alabama, Mississippi, Texas and so on) invented a new system for exploiting bound human labor that yielded previously unimagined productivity. Enslaved African Americans literally created the wealth of the emerging United States, under the lash. Here's a longish, but I hope understandable, set of quotations that summarize Baptist's case:

The kind of slavery that [the slave Charles] Ball was encountering and that was emerging on the frontiers of the early nineteenth-century South was inherently new. For centuries, slavery in the New World had expanded by a process of extension: adding new slaves, clearing new fields ... By 1820, whites had already transported more than 200,000 enslaved people to the South's new [southern and western] frontiers in the years since 1790. ...

What made this forced migration truly different was that it led to continuous increases in productivity per person -- what economists call "efficiency." ... The first slavery [in Virginia and on the east coast] had not yielded continuous improvements in labor productivity. On the nineteenth-century cotton frontier, however, enslavers extracted more production from each enslaved person every year.

The source of this ever-rising productivity wasn't a machine like the ones that were crucial to the textile mills. In fact, you could say that the business end of the new cotton technology was a whip. ...

... The best known innovation in the history of cotton production, as every high-school history student knows, is the cotton gin. It allowed enslavers to clean as much cotton for market as they could grow and harvest. As far as most historians are concerned, the gin is where the study of innovation in the production of cotton ends ... But here is the question historians should have asked: Once enslavers had the cotton gin, how then did enslavers produce (or have produced, by other hands) as much as the gin could clean? ... [E]nslaver-generals took land from Indians [think Andrew Jackson and Sam Houston], enslaver politicians convinced Congress to let slavery expand [most prominently South Carolina's John C. Calhoun and such Presidents as Polk, Pierce and Buchanan], and enslaver-entrepreneurs created new ways to finance and transport and commodify "hands." And, given the finite number of captives in their control, entrepreneurs created a complex of labor control practices that enslaved people called "the pushing system."... Innovation in violence, in fact, was the foundation of the widely shared pushing system.

... "Their plan of getting quantities of cotton," recalled Henry Bibb of the people who drove him to labor on the Red River, "is to extort it by the lash." In the context of the pushing system, the whip was as important to making cotton grow as sunshine and rain. ...

[And the whip, squeezing productive creativity from the enslaved pickers, worked.] From 1805 ... to 1860 in Mississippi, the amount of cotton the typical "hand" harvested during a typical day increased three, four, six, or even more times over. In 1801, 28 pounds per day was the average from several South Carolina labor camps. ... by the 1840s, on a Mississippi labor camp, the hands averaged 341 pounds each on a good day ... To alienate one's hands and rewire them for someone else was torment. Enslaved people, however, discovered how to do it.

Southern planters could sell any amount of cotton to English mills; their riches rapidly increased. Northern financiers and budding industrialists got in on the bounty by buying up securitized shares of slave "hands" who worked on the plantations, financing yet further geographical spread of the system. This financial tie-in, in turn, meant that in the Panic of 1837, Northern bankers ended up owning the debt of some of the the biggest planters. Now it was their system.

From the perspective of the Southern planter class, the means by which their slave-enabled boom could be revived and made to last forever was through expansion to new lands. They sought (and obtained) Texas and yearned to seize the entire U.S. Southwest, Mexico, Cuba, and Central America for the slave production system.

African Americans had been saying for years that slavery's power built on the acquisition of new territory. On the frontier, enslavers could destroy the old standards of production, disrupt families, securitize the individuals extracted from them as commodities, sell the financial instruments thus created on financial markets around the world, and ride the resulting boom of excitement.

So why did resistance emerge in the North to extension of slavery? Baptist makes a solid case for the North's complicity in the profits of slave production, but is less clear on how countervailing forces emerged. Certainly most Northerners were not abolitionists until perhaps the middle of the Civil War and even then their abolitionism did not extend to sympathy with enslaved African Americans.

My understanding is that a critical fraction of Northerners came to resent being impeded by the "Slave Power" from developing the country in a different direction. The South's insistence on its "institution" stood in the way of "free labor," of "internal improvements" like railroads aided by the federal government, of a Homestead Act offering public land to settlers, and of the launching of land grant colleges. This vision had significant popular force behind it; Congress enacted much of it within a year of Confederate secession. Meanwhile, the South saw Lincoln's election by northerners with these ideas as a sign that they and their system had lost. Hence the wild throw of the dice that was the Confederacy and the Great Rebellion.

Baptist insists that we misunderstand how defining slavery was to the mid-nineteenth century United States.

It has been said that the Civil War was "unnecessary" because slavery was already destined to end, probably within a few decades after the 1860 election. Yet this is mere dogma. The evidence points in the opposite direction. Slavery yielded ever more efficient production, in contrast to the free labor that tried (and failed) to compete with it, and the free labor that succeeded it ... Forced labor that is slavery in everything but name remained tremendously important to the world economy will into the twenty-first century. [See this for example.] And the lessons the enslavers learned about ... forcing ordinary people to reveal their secrets so those secrets could be commodified, played out in unsteady echoes that we have called by many names (scientific management, the stretch-out, management studies) ...

I think Baptist would question, as we all must, whether the rebels of 1860 have even yet definitively lost their war to retain driven, powerless labor. This is what Harold Meyerson questions this month in How the American South Drives the Low-Wage Economy. The country is still fighting it out; at least some of the time, the contemporary "we" is a broader, more inclusive one than in 1860.