Antebellum America is the traditionalist nation image desired by Roy Moore and its associated Trumpery, when PoC stayed in their lane, or else their owners made them stay there.
GOP revisionist history is often sold in their rhetoric as heritage, as though dirt floors could now be a reactionary’s fashion statement. Much like pretending that their diesel trucks “roll coal” onto unsuspecting hybrid vehicles. Carbon footprints are not about jackboots.
21st Century America cannot ever return to that Republican fantasy of conservatism and neoconservatism, whether it’s Trump’s longing for the 1950s of his mom’s meatloaf recipe, or Roy Moore’s desire to bring back the family united under slavery.
The mid-19th Century might have had a low risk of terrorist attack, except for those darned Abolitionists, Fenians, vigilantes… and the violence of slavery itself.
But even claiming the 1850s as a Green Zone of low risk of terrorist attacks is absurd when one considers that terrorism is a political economy common to all cultures.
And because the lack of a peaceful scenario for the end of slavery doesn’t mean one abandons the cause or romanticizes its social relationships and divisions. One moves forward to knowledge, not backward into ignorance.
(Eric) Foner’s first book, Free Soil, Free Labor, and Free Men (1970), which remains the standard work on the rise of the Republican Party, showed how antebellum Republicans were not merely critics of slavery, but exponents of a powerful political-economic ideology of their own.
His most celebrated book, Reconstruction (1988), provided a synthesis that decisively rejected the racist folklore that had informed popular and scholarly treatments of the post–Civil War period for much of the twentieth century.
In these and other works, a central theme in Foner’s scholarship has been the contested terrain of freedom in American history. (This is no less true of his most recent book, Gateway to Freedom, on the antebellum underground railroad.)
The Civil War era, in his view, represented a revolutionary clash of political ideas and forces — a period that unmade and then remade American society. The revolution, of course, remained unfinished — but it was a revolution nonetheless.
You look at our own world, with politics today, it’s easy to say, “Hey, it must have been just a bunch of Northern capitalists trying to control the South,” or “It was just states’ rights.” Whenever I lecture, someone raises the issue of states’ rights, and the thing I like to say is: “Yes, you’re right, the South believed in states’ rights. And the right they were interested in was the right to own slaves.” And that was a right created by state law, so naturally they wanted to protect states’ rights.
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Let’s put it this way: after the Civil War, the free-labor vision becomes the essence of a radical labor critique of the Industrial Revolution.
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