Why The First Civil War Had to Happen, and Why the Second Looks Likely

A Disease in the Public Mind by Thomas Fleming

Welcome back, and thanks for reading! Paid subscribers: thank you so very much for your patience; I finally have an article for you today, one that I think is quite relevant given the present circumstances. All those who are not yet paid subscribers: while some of this article is free, please subscribe for just a few dollars a month to support this project, get access to audio episodes, and read this article in full. As always, please tap the heart to “like” this article if you get something out of it, as that is how Substack knows to promote it!

Why did the War Between the States, as we in the South call it, or the Civil War, as everyone else calls it, have to happen? Was it because of the economics of slavery, the pressures to extend it to the West, the rising tide of perfidious Whiggery¹ and Liberalism in the lands of the English-speaking peoples, or something else?

Thomas Fleming, in his quite well-written A Disease in the Public Mind, makes a somewhat novel argument, one that is quite relevant today. As he tells it, the War happened not because of fire-breathing Southrons or the Yankee tariff, but because a committed coterie of Puritan-descended abolitionists cheered John Brown as he went on his murderous rampages in the hope of provoking a Haitian-style race war, inflaming Southern fears that such a war would come at Lincoln’s hands. Because of the unique fears and pressure stoked by Brown’s bloody hands and the abolitionists who cheered him and his project, the South decided to fight rather than risk facing the same fate as the French in Haiti, thinking they had no other choice.

As Fleming tells it, that Southern fear of race war that the most committed abolitionist radicals did everything in their power to stoke made war unavoidable. Further, the same is likely true in a somewhat different form today, as shown by the left’s return to 1970s-style terror, along with the twin terror of regime-allowed black on white racial violence, and widespread gloating over that murderous violence. I’ll explain why in this book, and review Fleming’s A Disease in the Public Mind.

Listen to the audio version of this article here:

[AUDIO] Why The First Civil War Had to Happen, and Why the Second Looks Likely

John Brown’s Body

When Union troops marched South in 1861, Fleming notes, it wasn’t some old fife and drum marching music from the Revolutionary War that those long, blue-coated files sang. Instead, they sang “John Brown’s Body,” a folk hymn-type song that celebrates the blood-soaked butcher of Pottawatomie Creek and Harper’s Ferry as “a hero, undaunted, true and brave.”² Why? Why celebrate a reviled murderer who had been hanged for treason just a year and a half earlier? The answer is a long story that Fleming tells in his A Disease in the Public Mind, using it to explain why they were marching at all.

The Disease in the American Mind

The general problem about which Fleming writes is how America became transfixed, as the 19th Century wore on, by the slavery issue. How did the Republic go from grudgingly admitting that slavery had to be tolerated until a proper solution could be found, the opinion of nearly all the Founders and their generation, to accepting over half a million men dead—in large part because of it—as the army invading half the union sang a hymn celebrating the cold-blooded murder of civilians and stole from slave-owning civilians as he claimed they could³?

The answer Fleming gives, in the prologue to the work, is that a “disease of the public mind” overtook the country. Grains of truth were spun into larger and larger horrors in the consciousness of both sides until nothing else could be thought of, and one side had to win. Describing as much, Fleming notes:

Especially fascinating was the statement of the president of the United States in 1859, James Buchanan. Brown's reckless venture was caused, Buchanan said, by "an incurable disease in the public mind." In his final message to Congress in 1860, as Southern states seceded and Civil War loomed, he repeated the assertion.

…

The phrase implies fixed beliefs that are fundamental to the way people participate in the world of their time. A disease in the public mind would seem to be a twisted interpretation of political or economic or spiritual realities that seizes control of thousands and even millions of minds.

Representative of that “disease in the public mind” was John Brown and his attempt to stir up a race war in Harper’s Ferry. Much like the race communists of a century later, he believed the oppressive white southerners should have their property confiscated by vengeful bands of armed blacks,⁴ and was financially supported by a constellation of primarily Massachusetts-based abolitionists in his efforts to bring about the racial Ragnarok that would create the opportunity for such an outcome.

But while Brown’s murderous rampage in Harper’s Ferry crystallized the decision to be made—secession or race war—in the eyes of many Americans, particularly Southerners, the problem originated decades before. As Fleming tells it, it was the murderous Haitian Revolution that spawned the disease in the public mind, which led first to John Brown and then later to the Civil War.

Haiti’s Horrors

Before 1804, there were hopes amongst most men of prominence in America that slavery could be gradually extirpated. While the cotton trade looked like a promisingly profitable use of slave labor in the wake of Eli Whitney’s 1794 release of the cotton gin, slavery was still largely something other than a money maker for the republic’s landed men.

Tobacco prices were low, the urge most owners felt to care for their age-worn slaves weighed on estate revenues, the soil was increasingly worn out by the staple slave crops, and the language of liberty that had come with the Revolution made some of the Republic’s greatest men increasingly uncomfortable with their status as slave owners. George Washington, after all, that most patrician of republican men, freed those slaves he could when he died.⁵ He thought it the right thing to do, and in any case, slavery had become more of a millstone than a profit center by 1801.

So, there was a hope amongst many in North and South alike that the system could be gradually done away with and replaced by more traditionally British forms of agriculture involving tenants, leases, and home farms rather than vast latifundia worked by armies of slaves.

The conventional narrative is that the cotton gin changed that. The new lands, new machinery, and new staple crop meant slavery became profitable again, and so it didn’t die out gradually but instead became an immensely profitable form of agriculture to which the South was committed. To some extent, that’s likely true. King Cotton did embolden the South, after all, as it built the fortunes of later leaders like the Wade Hampton family.

But it was far from the biggest issue. In reality, as Fleming convincingly tells it, it was the horror show in Haiti—where the freed blacks led by Jean-Jacques Dessalines murdered every white person on the island while raping as many French women as they could⁶—that convinced the slave owners that the slaves in America could not be freed, as the resultant social situation would, in their eyes, inexorably converge on the horrors in Haiti. As they saw it, the Haitian slave population had not tortured and murdered 5000 or so whites when kept under lock and key, even in the harsh conditions of French slavery, but had only done so after years of freedom, during which period they organized and decided upon vengeance for their former condition.

The fear of every Southerner

Avoiding that meant either something like the utterly impractical Liberia project begun in 1816 by the American Colonization Society,⁷ or continuing to “hold the wolf by the ear”⁸ and maintaining slavery. The fact that vastly more freed blacks chose to emigrate to Haiti than Liberia confirmed slave owning society in its belief that only the latter was in any way a practicable path to continued survival.

That change in attitude occurred in 1804, and gradually hardened over the intervening years as the attitude of Northerners, particularly in New England, became vastly more critical of slavery at the same time as the South became increasingly economically reliant on it. It was nearly three decades later, however, that the hardened public attitude really began snowballing toward civil war.

William Lloyd Garrison and Nat Turner

It was in 1831 that William Lloyd Garrison, a radical abolitionist and New Englander—everything the Southern slave power (and most New Yorkers) despised—returned to his Boston home and began publication of The Liberator, a pro-abolition periodical. It had only a few thousand subscribers, nearly all of whom were in Boston, and preached with radical zeal the extremist message of immediate and total emancipation without compensation, not unlike the present South African demand for expropriation without compensation.

Encouraged by Garrison’s words and his own delusions of receiving messages from God, a slave in Virginia named Nat Turner rose in revolt and murdered a master he admitted to be kind, along with that master’s family. Turner and his fellow rebels then proceeded to rage across Tidewater Virginia in a rampage that left 55 white civilians dead, many of them women and children. Fleming notes:

In late August of 1831, a Virginia slave named Nat Turner gave Garrison's obscure publication an outburst of publicity that he could never have otherwise obtained. Stirred by an eclipse of the sun in February, Turner, a self-appointed black preacher, became convinced God had ordained him to free Virginia's slaves. On the night of August 22, he summoned several followers and approached the house of his owner, Joseph Travis. Later, Turner would admit that Travis was "a kind master." But his kindness did not prevent Turner or one of his followers from burying a hatchet in Travis's skull. Nor did the master's benevolence rescue Mrs. Travis and four other members of his family, including an infant, from a similar fate.

It was as if a chapter out of Santo Domingo's final slaughter under General Dessalines had somehow been reincarnated in Southampton County, a thinly populated rural region not far from Virginia's seacoast. Blacks outnumbered whites by more than a thousand, but most whites owned only two or three slaves and many owned none. Seizing horses from nearby farms, Nat Turner and his swelling band, soon numbering more than fifty men, rode from farmhouse to farmhouse, killing everyone with white skin.

Garrison, despite insisting his message was a non-violent one, didn’t respond to the murderous rebellion his writings helped spark by toning things down and emphasizing the non-violence of his message. Instead, he gloated over the deaths of the whites and called for the public’s sympathy for the South’s slaves, including the murderous ones caught up in the rebellion:

Did Garrison express even a hint of sympathy or pity for these stunned, grieving families and their terrified neighbors? Did he confess that his immediate emancipation slogan was wrong, or at least in need of amendment? The only emotion Garrison permitted himself was thinly disguised gloating—and a call for sympathy for the slaves.

Garrison and a growing array of copycats and allies then continued bombarding the South with anti-slavery propaganda of the sort that many thought stirred up Turner’s rebellion. Meanwhile, though many normal people, even in Boston, found Garrison distasteful, much of the region’s high society was increasingly aligned behind his virulent attack on the South, concluding that slaves should be told to "at least try to cut your master's throat."⁹

That behavior was critically important, as it meant that even those in the Southern states who wanted to compromise could not. They came away from the experience of trying to find a moral and acceptable compromise that extirpated the admitted evil without creating a murderous race war with the feeling that the Garrison-style abolitionists didn’t want abolition, but instead such a race war. As Fleming notes:

Thomas Jefferson Randolph went back to Albemarle County, determined to continue his fight for gradual abolition in his grandfather's name. He stood for the legislature again and defeated a former U.S. congressman who ran against him on a proslavery platform. But Randolph soon grew discouraged and abandoned his campaign. Forty-two years later, in a bitter letter written after the Civil War had reduced him and his family to poverty, Randolph told how Virginia had been inundated with an avalanche of abolitionist propaganda that revealed a "morbid hatred of the southern white man" and blackened his character "with obscene malignity." Before long, enraged Virginians would not tolerate a discussion of how to eliminate slavery because abolitionism had become synonymous with hatred and contempt for their way of life, as well as a word that stirred their deepest fear—a race war.

Slander and Smears

Once hardened in their opinion that slavery not only had to go immediately, with no compensation offered, but that the South was evil for refusing such a plan, the abolitionists then started smearing the South. The goal of the smear campaign was to convince Northern moderates (of which there were still many) that the whole Slave Power was a dark, dismal, and backwards place. In fact, they even pushed the analogy that the South was ruled by Satan, as shown by its leading men living and operating as Washington had.¹⁰

Such is not a path to compromise, though it gave the abolitionists a smug sense of superiority and a belief in the moral rectitude of their intransigence in demanding that the South disband its economic engines to slake the conscience of New England radicals. It didn’t help that most of those abolitionist radicals, both in Britain and America, were profiting from the worse-than-slavery conditions of textile mills and early industrial enterprises.¹¹

And it was a major economic engine, one that was wealthier and more dynamic than even that of the industrial North, that the abolitionists were demanding the South give up. As Fleming notes:

Perhaps the most startling fact these statistic-minded scholars have uncovered is the South's breathtaking wealth. In the 1850s, the fifteen slave states were by far the most prosperous section of the nation. Southern farms, many of them slave-managed, were between 35 and 50 percent more profitable than comparable farms in the free North and Midwest. In 1860, the South, if considered as a separate country, would have ranked as the fourth-richest nation in the world. Southern whites had a higher per capita income than citizens of France, Germany, or Denmark.

…

Perhaps most remarkable is how much the South's four million slaves were worth as property: $3 billion. That sum exceeded the North's investment in railroads and factories. This figure does not include the value of the land that the South's farmers owned, worth at least another $3 billion.

..

On a per capita basis, the four wealthiest states in the Union were South Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Georgia, In the top twelve were only two northern states, Connecticut and Rhode Island. These newly discovered facts demolish the standard abolitionist assumption that the North was the dynamic section of the country and the slave-encumbered South was mired in backwardness and poverty.

Further, though parts of the South, such as Virginia, had struggled to replace early cash crops like tobacco with something that could be grown profitably with slave labor, that was largely a non-issue by the 1850s; in fact, there were even planters who succeeded in growing grain on an industrial scale using mechanized machinery and slave labor.¹² Paired with the tendency of the more successful plantations to use profit-sharing agreements and the like to get good labor out of their slaves, it is evident that the abolitionist-spread lies of Southern economic backwardness were largely made up. Perhaps they had been true of Virginia in the 1840s,¹³ but otherwise, it was largely untrue.

However, such is the perception that remains the prevalent one to the present day, thanks in large part to the abolitionist propaganda, much of which came from their attempt to create the perception that the South was ruled by backwards and demonic overlords. Meanwhile, the abolitionists insisted that the South had to disband its main economic engine, the collected capital of which was worth more than the famed Northern railroads and industrial concerns.

Then, out of those hard feelings, came Bleeding Kansas and John Brown.

John Brown’s Murder Spree

If Nat Turner had been the spark that exploded the hardened feelings that came out of the Haitian Revolution into a monumental tide of growing passions and calls for reprisals, it was the 1854 to 1859 fight over the Kansas Border Territory, a fight now known as “Bleeding Kansas,” that turned those hardened feelings and bad blood into a tumultuous procession toward war.

In the Bleeding Kansas struggle, gangs of armed men who were either southerners who wanted Kansas to become a slave state or Yankees who wanted to see it be a free state fought, sometimes to the death, over what it would become. Unlike the Civil War that soon followed, this was a war of ambushes, raids, and murder, not Napoleonic combat between delineated formations of uniform-wearing gentlemen. Further, the fact that each new state controlled two Senate seats made the fight a near-existential one for each side, as two additions to the slave side or free side could spell disaster for the loser as the Missouri Compromise broke down.

But while the political aspect of the fight was important, really it was the fact that the fight happened at all that shifted the course of American history. Particularly, the fight was important in that it created John Brown, the butcher of Pottawatomie Creek and terrorist of Harper’s Ferry. Fleming, noting the importance of the struggle to Brown and his myth, along with how pro-slavery and free stater violence turned him into a notorious butcher, provides:

Anger mounted on both sides. The proslavery men struck first, alter a proslavery sheriff was shot while sitting in his tent. About 750 Missourians, Alabamians, and South Carolinians stormed into Lawrence, Kansas's largest antislavery town, and wrecked the place. They burned and looted houses of the antislavery leaders, blew up the Free State Hotel, and smashed up two antislavery newspaper offices. They did not kill anyone, largely because the most outspoken antislavery men had fled in advance of their arrival.

The Browns lived twenty-five miles from Lawrence. By the time they arrived with their thirty-four-man rifle company, the attackers had departed. John Brown was infuriated by the sight of the ruined hotel and other houses. "Something is going to be done now," he declared.

The following night, Brown, his four sons, and two other followers dragged five unarmed men out of their cabins along Pottawatomie Creek, known to be a proslavery stronghold. Brown ordered his sons to execute them before the horrified eyes of their wives and children, using two-edged cavalry swords that all but amputated arms and legs and heads. Perhaps most appalling were the murders of James P. Doyle and his two oldest sons, while Doyle's wife, Mahala, pleaded frantically for their lives and four other bewildered Doyle children watched the butchery. The Doyles were immigrants [who had nothing to do with slavery].

A radical abolitionist and lifelong loser whose adult life reeked of failure after failure and hints of criminality,¹⁴ John Brown was not an admirable man even before he butchered random families in the dead of night. He was still less so after he did so.

But the abolitionists loved him. He was fêted by Boston’s brahmins, cheered by New England radicals, and left untouched by a wary federal government even when it captured him as the years-long Bleeding Kansas struggle raged.

Eventually, however, the conflict he had used to clamber to prominence atop a pile of bodies ended. Much in contrast to what the hysteric-sounding abolitionists claimed, a Southerner put in charge of the territory did a reasonable job tamping down on violence and encouraging fair elections even when they returned outcomes contrary to his regional preference (this was much in contrast to how Lincoln’s men acted during the Civil War)¹⁵.

Another Southern-born territorial governor, appointed by President Buchanan, was continuing the evenhanded policies of his predecessor. Fighting between proslavery and antislavery settlers had dwindled to the vanishing point. Elections to a territorial legislature were held, and free-state voters won overwhelmingly. Peace of sorts seemed to dawn on the military front, though Kansas would soon provide more political shocks.

John Brown had lost interest in this minor war. As his depression caused by the failure of his fundraising campaign lessened, his manic faith in his destiny resumed its grip on his unstable mind. Over the next year and a half, Brown would reveal to Stearns, Sanborn, and four other Boston backers a far more ambitious plan. With their help he would assault The Slave Power in the proud state where it had been spawned—Virginia.

Thus, a collection of Boston-based oligarchs and abolitionists put together the fund Brown used to collect thousands of pikes, hundreds of firearms, and the small band with which he marched to Harper’s Ferry in an attempt to instigate a Haiti-style slave revolt and white genocide. Once there, they murdered a few civilians, ineptly hid out in the armory they had set out to capture, and were killed or captured thanks to the local militia and a contingent of Marines led by Robert E Lee and JEB Stuart.

The Aftermath of Harper’s Ferry

But though Brown was finally apprehended and soon hanged, the aftermath of Harper’s Ferry was substantial, perhaps to the point of being more so than the slave revolt he hoped to spawn would have been.

For one, the South had finally had enough. Infuriated by the Bostonian funding for Brown’s terror campaign and abolitionists responding to his murderous escapades with much the same sort of glee with which Garrison had responded to Nat Turner’s,¹⁶ Southerners took the opportunity to remind the timid and conciliatory members of their world that Brown had wanted slaves murdering their women and children with pikes:

While Brown was on trial, wealthy Virginia slave owner Edmund Ruffin was hard at work on a very different task. He had rushed to Harpers Ferry and joined his friend, Governor Henry Wise, in interviewing Brown on the day he was captured. Ruffin had persuaded Wise to give him a sizable number of Brown's pikes. He saw these weapons as convincing proof that Virginia should secede as soon as possible. With a fanatic's energy, Ruffin distributed the pikes to key people throughout the South.

Every state governor received one. With each pike was a letter from Ruffin asking if the recipient appreciated what Brown's wealthy abolitionist backers had given him to arm the slaves. Could the South stay in the same country with people who could complacently look forward to seeing these weapons thrust into the bodies of helpless women and children?

Further, the attack itself and the South’s exasperated reaction to it, along with all the other infuriating incidents and petty indignities inflicted on both sides, changed America. In those last years before the War, justice wasn’t done, with the treasonous funders of Brown being allowed to escape justice in the name of unity (which further infuriated aggrieved Southerners), as even members of Congress carried concealed weapons.¹⁷ While carrying concealed firearms is sometimes necessary and indubitably our right as Americans, it is a sad and uncivilized state of affairs—a dire reflection of the times—when normal people and legislators must do so for fear of crime or political violence.

But, most importantly, the Harper’s Ferry slave revolt that wasn’t crystallized the fear in the minds of nearly every Southerner that what the abolitionists really wanted was a race war similar to that of Haiti, a murderous campaign of racial grievance that led to the destruction of prosperity and the murder of countless women and children. So, when Lincoln was elected and the abolitionist contingent won, the South reacted violently, seeing the federal government as now controlled by the same sorts of men who had cheered on John Brown:

In Port Gibson, Mississippi, two days after Lincoln's election, an orator declared that a "black Republican" president meant that the South was on its way to "the bloody scenes on St. Domingo, the destruction of the white race, and the relapsing into barbarism of the black race." He was joined by a chorus of speakers and writers in other states. In New Orleans, the pastor of the First Presbyterian Church predicted a repetition of the horrors that "converted St. Domingo into a howling waste." The sermon was published and sold 100,000 copies. An editorial in the Montgomery, Alabama, Advertiser declared that government by abolitionists could have only one horrific outcome: "Look at St. Domingo."

Critically, this was even the case in Virginia. Steeped in the glory of the American Revolution and Founding, ruled by men much more stable and traditionalist than the fire-breathers, and the seat of the federal government, Virginia could and should have been the Southern state that put the brakes on secession and helped calm tempers while finding a compromise.

In fact, it almost did, with the legislature remaining opposed to secession until the very end, when it became apparent that Unionist armies would be marching South, whatever Virginia did. Such was a situation the Virginians could not allow, for they remembered that most of those men who would soon be marching South while singing “John Brown’s Body” were the sort of men who had supported his murderous rampages. They had laughed with glee and celebrated as he planned to murder men, women, and children, and tried to kill thousands more. They had encouraged Nat Turner’s rebellion, tried to stir up others like it, and done their damndest to destroy the South’s engine of vast economic prosperity while comparing its Christian gentlemen to Satan himself.

Reconciliation with those types could not happen, and allowing them to march South and inflict a race war upon Dixie was unconscionable. No, Virginia and her leading men wanted desperately to remain in the Union. But, because of John Brown, they could not.¹⁸ The rest of the South evidently agreed, as Southerners poor and rich alike flocked to the banners to fight not for slavery, but against an abolitionist-inflicted race war.¹⁹

Why A Second Civil War Is On the Way