ANTEBELLUM: FROM THE LATIN: ANTE = BEFORE; BELLUM = WAR: BEFORE THE WAR: IN AMERICA, BEFORE THE CIVIL WAR

In the 1850s moderates pursued the politics of avoidance. They feared that the sectional disputes between the slaveholding South and the non-slaveholding North would tear the country apart. In other words, confronting the issue of slavery would lead to disunion. The people who insisted on agitation, to confront the issue and force the nation to change, were the abolitionists (both black and white). The abolitionists were regarded by most white Americans as radicals and fanatics whose agitation was dangerous because it would split the country apart.

But William Lloyd Garrison, the most famous white abolitionist, declared "No Union with slaveholders." He regarded slavery as a terrible sin that would bring the wrath of God down on the head of all of America collectively. Slavery, in his eyes, was a curse: not only upon the slaveholders but also upon all the people who were guilty of the sins of complicity and indifference because they allowed the evil to continue. They tolerated evil in their midst. Garrison "the fanatic" believed it would be better for America to be split apart in disunion than for the North and South to remain united as one country, but with the North tolerating slavery in the South as the price of union. This union, to him, rested on a corrupt and immoral and accursed bargain.

Most white Americans, other than the abolitionists, considered the continuation of the Union the most important issue. However for Garrison and some black abolitionists, an America that tolerated the evil of slavery did not DESERVE to exist or to continue. In other words, if America could not be right and just then let it go under...

The huge irony of history is that in 1860-61 the Southern states took the fatal leap toward disunion. Secession IS disunion. The step to disunion did not come from the North, swayed by abolitionism, but from the South, swayed by panic and hysteria and insecurity over the future. The Southern secessionists claimed that Lincoln INTENDED, eventually, one way or another, to destroy slavery. They didn't know how he would do it. But they suspected his INTENTIONS.

The North, however, would not allow the South to secede. Lincoln asked for 70,000 troops to restore "proper government" in the South and crush the rebellion.

The war to stop secession (disunion) that began in 1861 turned, in September 1862, into the war to end slavery. In 1865 Congress passed, and the states ratified, the 13^th Amendment. In effect, it said that slavery shall not exist anywhere in the United States. In the end, slavery, a system of terrorism and violence, was ended through violence (war). The problem that the country had sought to avoid since 1787 came back to haunt the nation with a terrible vengeance in 1861 (psychologists would recognize this principle as the "return of the repressed").

So much of "history" that is taught in K-12 and elsewhere is propaganda, patriotic propaganda that is designed to make us proud of America; and make us feel good about America. But this feel-good propaganda is a fabric of tissue-paper. It is a diet of sugar water and cotton candy. It sugar coats, and hides, and suppresses the truth. It gives us an incomplete and distorted picture full of holes and omissions.

Apologists of the "patriotism school," who want to sweep away the warts and rough edges, like to pretend that the Constitution was a perfect document. They exalt it as the "blue print of freedom." They claim that it gave us democracy. But here a lie is perpetrated as a fraud, and the fraud tries to pass itself off as "the truth." The early republic did not allow the enslaved Africans to vote; most states did not even allow free Afro-Americans to vote; and women did not receive the vote until 1920. What kind of a democracy disenfranchises its racial minorities and the half of the population that is female? And such "freedom and liberty and justice" as there was, was not for all. It was "for whites only." To call this society a "democracy" is a mockery. It is a sham and a charade.

The Constitution created a racialized republic; a stratified, hierarchical society that, most of the time, excluded anyone who was not white and male. In retrospect we can see that the Constitution was a rather flawed, limited, imperfect document that allowed slavery to continue. Worse, the mechanisms for the resolution of conflict failed. The conflict between North and South, free and slave, was not resolved except by bloodshed and violence and war. The War of Southern Independence, with 600,000 dead and wounded, is the measure of the extent to which the Constitution was flawed and FAILED. The antebellum American system was one that stood by impotent and powerless while 4 million human beings were subjected to the terrorism of slavery.

HARD QUESTIONS

If we hold antebellum America up to a mirror, then we might be inspired to ask some hard questions. What is wrong with a country that can practice such inhumanity as chattel slavery, or tolerate it in others? What was wrong with a people or a generation who could practice such inhumanity, or tolerate it in others? Who was the REAL savage, the real barbarian, the real "animal,": the slave or the slavemaster?

Today, as we look back, sometimes we wonder how some of our ancestors could have been so cruel and so lacking in human feeling. Power corrupts. And power that enriches leads to greed. We can regret the tragedy of the past. But we should not try to EXCUSE it away or explain it away by saying that, somehow, such barbarism is just "normal" of human societies. Chattel Slavery was a reflection of a sick and diseased society. It was primitive and retarded. It was excessive and pathological. The institution of slavery warped and distorted the personality of the slaveholders, and made them depraved. More than that, although it was profitable, it was a species of insanity (madness) and mental illness. The greatest problem with sick, pathological, mentally ill people is that they come to regard their sickness and pathology as "normal." People who grow up in abusive situations may even come to regard abuse as a "normal" way to treat other people. What does it say about a society that it comes to regard insanity as normal, and tries to excuse it away, and justify it, and rationalize it? Indeed, if that which is insane becomes "normal," that which is normal (like fighting to defend one's humanity or family) becomes "criminal" and "insane" and "abnormal." In other words, it was not Nat Turner and John Brown who were insane. It was their society that was sick and insane and deviant and abnormal. But in antebellum America sickness had become "normal." In this sick society the lie that America was free and the slaves are animals became the (phony) "truth."

The harshest judgment that we could render would be to say that antebellum America was a sick, diseased society; that slavery was a monstrous and insane institution; and that the people who arranged that system, and accepted it, and tolerated it, and tried to justify it, were insane. The poor slaves were abused within the confines of an insane system, and it drove some of them insane. This is the cruel, brutal truth that stares back at us if we hold antebellum America up to a mirror. Until we can accept THIS hard truth, we are continuing, and collaborating in, and perpetuating, the sickness and insanity. The first step toward dealing with any sickness or addiction is to admit it. But denial is so much easier. The addict cannot confront addiction until he (she) stops denying it. The sick person cannot begin to get well until he acknowledges that something is or was wrong. We cannot exorcise the demons of the past if we pretend that they are not there. The legacy of slavery cannot really be laid to rest, and our country cannot heal the unhealed wound, if we refuse to acknowledge that a wound is still there. A contemporary society that pretends that wounded people have no wounds is STILL insane, and STILL sick, and STILL living in denial.