Propaganda is to a democracy what violence is to a dictatorship.
— William Blum
The Trumpian twaddle that pollutes my social-media streams is deadening.
The obvious question I always return to is: How can so many Americans believe this crap?
Are they all stupid?
Or are some stupid and others venal?
Or are they neither, but brainwashed instead?
Flash back 160 years for the answer.
The Civil War, the greatest trauma to wrack our democracy, was waged because wealthy cotton planters—20% of the South's population—needed cheap labor.
Those 20% convinced the 80%—one million Southern men altogether—to fight to the death to defend slavery.
How in the hell did they do that?
Through three cadres of influencers, says Civil War historian Gordon Rhea.
In "Why Non-Slaveholding Southerners Fought," Rhea asks you to "travel back with me to the South of 1860." If you do so, you learn:
- Southerners had no problem enslaving four million Blacks. They weren't real Americans, after all, but "immigrants," as Ben Carson says.
- Southerners were terrified Blacks would rebel. They'd not just "destroy the suburbs," as it were, but organize and form their own states. John Brown's 1859 Harper's Ferry Raid looked to them a lot like the BLM disturbances this summer.
- Southerners felt beleaguered by Abolitionists, the critical, cranky "Libtards" of their day.
- Clergymen. Before there was Fox News, clergymen were the South's broadcasters. Insisting the Bible was infallible, week after week they told churchgoers that slavery had the "sanction of Jehovah" and that Abolitionists were infidels who insulted God's word. One clergyman labeled the Abolitionists "atheists, socialists, communists, red republicans, and Jacobins." (AOC, are you wincing?)
- Politicos. In late 1860, five states—Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and Louisiana—sent traveling envoys throughout the South to speak in public, hand out brochures, and place op-eds in local newspapers. Their message was one-track: Lincoln craved not merely emancipation, but equality for Blacks, which meant "the marriage of your daughters to black husbands.” Like today's Critical Race Theorists, Lincoln wanted to destroy the "American way of life."
- Local leaders. Local Southern leaders—who tended to be planters—told their communities that Abolitionists were "haters" and the enemies of "law and order." Abolition meant releasing "more than four million of a very poor and ignorant population to ramble in idleness over the country until their wants should drive most of them, first to petty thefts, and afterwards to the bolder crimes of robbery and murder.” Defeating Lincoln, they claimed, was the only way to ensure the "heaven-ordained superiority of the White over the Black."
Don't miss Episode II.
