(Photo: Mathew Brady [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons)
This essay originally appeared in The Washington Post.
One hundred and fifty years ago Thursday, after Union infantry effectively encircled the Army of Northern Virginia, Robert E. Lee sent a note to Ulysses S. Grant proposing a meeting to discuss terms of surrender. With that, the Civil War began to end.
And at some point in the future, it may yet.
The emancipation of the slaves that accompanied the North's victory ushered in, as Abraham Lincoln had hoped, a new birth of freedom, but the old order also managed to adapt itself to the new circumstances. The subjugation of and violence against African Americans continued apace, particularly after U.S. Army troops withdrew from the South at the end of Reconstruction. Black voting was suppressed. The Southern labor system retained, in altered form, its most distinctive characteristic: unfree labor. As Douglas A. Blackmon has demonstrated in his Pulitzer Prize-winning study Slavery by Another Name, numerous corporations-many of them headquartered in the North-relied heavily on the labor of thousands of black prisoners, many serving long sentences for minor crimes or no crimes at all.
Indeed, one reason the race-based subjugation of labor was so resilient was that it was a linchpin not just of the Southern economy, but also of the entire U.S. economy. For much of the 20th century, the prevailing view of the North-South conflict was that it had pitted the increasingly advanced capitalist economy of the North against the pre-modern, quasi-feudal economy of the South. In recent years, however, a spate of new histories has placed the antebellum cotton economy of the South at the very center of 19th-century capitalism. Works such as Empire of Cotton, by Harvard historian Sven Beckert, and The Half Has Never Been Told, by Cornell University historian Edward E. Baptist, have documented how slave-produced cotton was the largest and most lucrative industry in America's antebellum economy, the source of the fortunes of New York-based traders and investors and of British manufacturers. The rise in profitability, Baptist shows, resulted in large part from the increased brutalization of the slave work force.
Lincoln understood this-how could he not?
The traders and investors in New York rendered that city a center of pro-Southern sentiment
, so much so that its mayor, Fernando Wood, actually suggested that the city secede from the Union to preserve its ties to the Southern slaveholders. British commercial interests pressured their government to extend diplomatic recognition to the Confederacy. In his second inaugural address, Lincoln termed slavery not a Southern sin but an American one, for which both North and South were condemned to a form of blood-soaked, divine retribution. "If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come," Lincoln said, "but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him?"
Even today, one of America's most fundamental problems is that the alliance between the current form of Southern labor and the current form of New York finance is with us still. The five states that have no minimum wage laws of their own are in the South: Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee. Southern-based corporations such as Walmart are among the leading opponents of workers' right to organize, and as Walmart has expanded into the North and West, so have the "right-to-work" statutes of Southern states been enacted by Republican governments in the Midwest.
The Southernization of the Republican Party and the increasing domination of Wall Street's brand of shareholder capitalism over the nation's economic life have combined to erode both the income and the power of U.S. workers. Unions are anathema to Wall Street and the GOP. Federal regulations empowering consumers and employees are opposed by both.
Fueled by the mega-donations of the mega-rich, today's Republican Party is not just far from being the party of Lincoln: It's really the party of Jefferson Davis. It suppresses black voting; it opposes federal efforts to mitigate poverty; it objects to federal investment in infrastructure and education just as the antebellum South opposed internal improvements and rejected public education; it scorns compromise. It is nearly all white. It is the lineal descendant of Lee's army, and the descendants of Grant's have yet to subdue it.
