Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By richards on October 20, 2013

Five years before the beginning of the Civil War, Robert E. Lee future commander of the Confederate States of Americas Army of Northern Virginia wrote a famous letter to Franklin Pierce, the profoundly inept outgoing president. After praising Pierce for his pro-Southern policies, Lee wrote: There are few, I believe, in this enlightened age, who will not acknowledge that slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil. (That phrase was likely meant as a mild rebuke to Pierce, who may not have felt that way.)

This letter has long struck historians as significant because of its apparent paradox: A few years later, Lee would command hundreds of thousands of young men to kill and die for a cause he personally believed was immoral, a cause his great adversary, Ulysses S. Grant, would describe as one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse. Lee was of course not the first white American to be pinioned by this paradox, which was written into our Constitution, with its oblique references to other persons existing in certain states who were to be counted as three-fifths of a human being. Nor was he the last.

How are we to understand the Confederate battle flag waved by a demonstrator from Texas outside the White House last week? Some shutdown supporters, fearing media blowback, tried to suggest it was the work of a liberal agent provocateur, or simply a symbol of rebellious high spirits and Southern heritage. But the meaning of that particular flag, outside the home of our first black president, in the middle of a conflict loaded with not-so-hidden racial messaging, is not difficult to grasp. It strikes me as evidence that the heavy historical weight of slavery, and what Jimmy Carter has called the burden of white supremacy, has not yet been lifted. We ignore it, or agree to overlook it, at our peril.

In that light, I think Steve McQueens riveting film 12 Years a Slave is one of the most important works of mainstream cinema to reach wide release in recent years. Based on the true story of Solomon Northup (played by the Afro-British actor Chiwetel Ejiofor), a free-born African American from upstate New York who was abducted and sold into slavery in 1841, 12 Years a Slave was made by a black director and a black writer (the novelist and screenwriter John Ridley), with a black star. But it also reaches us under the aegis of Hollywoods biggest male star, Brad Pitt (who produced the film and plays a crucial supporting role). Its subject is the complex weave of Americas racial history, which has never been a straightforward or simple dichotomy, and its intended audience is all Americans and indeed the whole world. It is not a movie about white guilt, whatever that would even mean in the 21st century. I not only had slave-owning ancestors, but am descended on my mothers side from a family in the French port city of Nantes who owned slave-trading ships, which might be even worse. I do not remotely feel responsible for their crimes; the only historical obligation those long-ago rich assholes have conferred on me is not to avoid the truth.

Speaking of avoiding the truth, I can see you coming, Confederate apologists. Robert E. Lees letter is sometimes employed as indirect evidence that the Civil War was not really fought over the issue of slavery, but of course it demonstrates no such thing and anyway in 2013 that dog just wont hunt anymore. Despite more than a century of whitewashing and euphemizing about states rights and the Southern way of life, its perfectly clear how white Southerners saw the conflict at the time. And a great many of them did not agree with Lee.

As Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens put it in his Cornerstone Speech of March 21, 1861, the brand new constitution of his brand new breakaway republic has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institutions African slavery as it exists among us the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. The anxiety felt about slavery by Thomas Jefferson and other conscience-stricken slave-owning founders, Stephens went on, had been misguided. Such men had believed that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally and politically Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested on the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition.

Ideology aside, Stephens (who was played by Jackie Earle Haley in Steven Spielbergs Lincoln) had the reputation in rural Georgia of being a benevolent slave master. During his years as a lawyer, he once successfully defended an enslaved woman charged with attempted murder, and after the Civil War ended (and Stephens returned from imprisonment in Boston) many of his emancipated slaves reportedly remained on his plantation as hired hands. Of course we cant now ask any of those people why they stayed. The post-war situation in the South was extremely chaotic, and a job with ones former master was in some cases preferable to no job at all. Its also important to remember that all the historical accounts of that era, including the narratives of former slaves, have been filtered through a white perspective tinged with unconscious or semi-conscious apologetics.

But lets assume, for the purpose of argument, that Stephens was a kind and decent person in his private life, who also became the public spokesman for the virulently racist official ideology of the Confederate States of America and the author of the one text that neo-Confederates would most like to sweep under the historical carpet. If thats the case, he becomes a perfect example of the toxic effects of Americas peculiar institution, exactly the issue explored in 12 Years a Slave. That same poisonous influence drove the anti-slavery Lee to lead the Souths armies into a war that would kill more than a million people (about 3 percent of the U.S. population, or the equivalent of 9 million today).

Its the same poison that we see corrupting both the benevolent and well-intentioned Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch) and the depraved and brutal Epps (Michael Fassbender), the principal slave-owners depicted in McQueens film. They are wealthy men of property and privilege who believe themselves to be free, but with respect to the institution of slavery they are not free to resist it or control it. Indeed, it controls them, as in the scene when Ford tells Solomon that he cannot hear the latters protestations that he is in fact a free man from the North. While the slave-owners do not suffer the physical pain and psychic degradation that the persons who are their human property do, they also are shackled to an evil economic power. Ford is the kind-hearted capitalist, the reformer who seeks to ameliorate and humanize the inherent contradictions of his business. Epps is the capricious tyrant who embraces the sadistic logic of slavery to the fullest, an unforgettable Deep South antihero closely akin to Joseph Conrads Colonel Kurtz.

I want to get back to Robert E. Lee in a moment, because theres a sense in which he saw all this happening. But first we can note that 12 Years a Slave, like Steve McQueens two previous films, is a formally rigorous work that is about more than its apparent narrative or official subject matter. McQueen was a prominent British visual artist before he turned to cinema with the extraordinary Hunger in 2008, in which Fassbender p
layed IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands. Then came Shame, in which Fassbender played a contemporary New Yorker, surrounded by bland and sterile corporate spaces, who is hopelessly addicted to anonymous sex and pornography. Along with displaying Fassbenders much-admired physique, these three movies on apparently unrelated topics all concern the human body as a form of economic and political capital, as the ultimate and universal commodity in Anglo-American commercial society. Slavery is an extreme example, but far from the only one. (I think the anomalous character played by Alfre Woodard, the black wife of a white slave-owner a rare but not unknown phenomenon sends the signal that even in the slave economy power sometimes trumped skin color.)

Continued here:
Slavery, the Rebel flag and the shutdown

Category: Jewish American Heritage Month
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