The Philosophy of Coercion
The legality of secession, and the legality of the coercion of the seceding states back into the Union, has been discussed at length on various threads. And it will doubtless continue to be discussed long into the future.
But here we are trying something different. Here we shall be examining the philosophical and moral aspects of coercion or, if you like, of the War For The Union. Please observe the spirit of this thread by the avoidance of legal argument.
This is too big a subject even to summarise in one post. What follows are simply a few thoughts.
There are various definitions of “democracy”. But, in the modern sense of the word, I would argue that it is generally accepted that a democratic society is based on freedom. The notion that anyone can be forced to be a citizen of a democracy, through the application of violence, is repellent. Such a use of violence appears to be self-evidently wrong in the same way that, say, burglary or child-molesting are wrong. Further explanation seems redundant.
But there is a regional variation. In the northern part of the United States, even in the year 2005, many people subscribe to the notion that one community does indeed have the right to force another to bend to its will.
In “The Mind Of The South”, W.J. Cash wrote that “The Civil War and Reconstruction represent in their primary aspect an attempt on the part of the Yankee to achieve by force what he had failed to achieve by political means…fundamentally, the satisfaction of the instinctive urge of men in the mass to put down whatever differs from themselves – the will to make over the South in the prevailing American image and to sweep it into the main current of the nation.”
[Cash, The Mind Of The South, p.125.]
Avery Craven drily noted that “Removing motes from a brother’s eye is an ancient practice.”
[Craven, The Coming Of The Civil War, p.117.]
And James Russell Lowell characterised New England in the early-mid 19th century as a region where “Everybody had a mission (with a capital M) to attend to everybody else’s business.”
[Ibid., p.128.]
It is this fundamental nosiness and assumption of moral superiority which intrigues me. How did it arise? Let’s consider the Puritan heritage of many Americans, and of New Englanders in particular. Puritanism and pluralism are fundamentally incompatible. The Puritan believes that both his faith and his chosen form of society are the only paths to salvation and that everything that is different from his experience and preference is fundamentally wrong. It needs rebuilding from the bottom upwards, and whoever is responsible for this deviation from the norm deserves punishment.
When this inherently intolerant mindset is confronted with material hardship, as was frequently the case in the northern states during the period of expansion westwards towards the Great Lakes, a scapegoat is required. Some straightforward class hatred seems to have been the result: “A thoughtful observer in a neighborng state sensed a feeling of ‘envy and even hatred…in persons [aganst merchants] as strong as those of serfs in Europe against the privileged classes.’ ”
[Ibid, p.131.]
Avery Craven has some really interesting observations about Northern society during this period: “Western men, especially, believed in the efficacy of governmental action for the achievement of social and moral ends. Both Church and State ought to serve democracy. Democracy was one with the will of God and the natural law. It guaranteed a moral order and when men or the misinterpretation of constitutions violated that order appeal to the higher law might be made. Reform movements in such an atmosphere became crusades. Even material problems had their moral aspects…
…The underlying idea, common to all moves and found in all places, was that something hoped for in American life was not being realized; that democracy – meaning everything from the Holy Commonwealth and men free from all kinds of unpleasant restraints to a high degree of material prosperity for all Americans – was being threatened by the rise of new and harsher restraints. The Industrial Revolution was creating a new rich group and reducing labor to a new degree of dependence. The spread of cotton was bringing into existence a new and overshadowing power in a rival section. The urban center, differing from the farm in material standards and moral codes, lured the rural youth and exercised an increasing influence in legislative halls. The Southern plantation seemed even more extravagant and foreign. The acquisitive drive was growing stronger, and the world and the flesh more enticing. Inequality was becoming everywhere more apparent. The purposes of God and of the Founding Fathers were in grave danger..
…As has been said, the aristocracy which was threatening American freedom and equality had been produced largely by the economic shifts in the North-east itself. The cotton planter was much more a symbol than a reality to most of them”
[Ibid., pp.130-131.]
But a powerful symbol, and one which still resonates in the present day. Notice how often participants on these boards refer to slave-holding “aristocrats”? A European looking at the pre-war South would have seen no aristocrats. An unkind European would have declared that he saw only hicks; prosperous hicks in some cases, but hicks nonetheless. But labelling them “aristocrats” automatically removed them from the ranks of American republicans; it condemned them as un-American; it branded their society as one which was ready for a Puritan Makeover.
Our working premise so far is that
- A community steeped in religious Puritanism is inherently hostile to any deviation or non-conformity
- In America this Puritanism was combined with the self-satisfied belief that God was an integral, and interested, partner in the great American Experiment
- Anything which might endanger the great Experiment was therefore deserving of destruction as both treasonous and blasphemous
- Economic hardship in the North led to popular resentment of capitalism and of the new “aristocrats” who had grown wealthy through it
- Although the “aristocrats” of the plantations bore no responsibility for this hardship, they were a particularly potent symbol of un-American indolence, exploitation and decadence
