Idealism and materialism in antebellum southern political history : a review essay

Although the mainstream "new political historians" have largely ignored the South, historians of the antebellum South have produced some of the most interesting recent works in political history. These scholars fall into two groups: one finds a white consensus, emphasizes ideology, and concentrates on evidence from "literary" sources; the other discovers evidence of conflict, stresses the material basis of political alignments, and combines quantitative with traditional evidence. In a brief review of books by Channing and Johnson, I point out that by concentrating on the immediate pre-war years, the authors cannot answer even the questions they themselves pose. Cooper's 1978 ideological interpretation finesses the question of the connection between opinions on slavery and Unionism and fails to explain why the southerners' responses to the crises of 1850 and 1860 were so different. The central work of the last two decades, Thornton's, presents the bold and complex thesis that the South was born libertarian and avoids many of the problems of the other works reviewed. His treatment of politics-as largely symbolic-expressive, rather than rational instrumental, and his lack of statistical sophistication, however, invite criticism. The most valuable facet of these works for American political history generally is that they restore politicians, policy, and political thought -- topics often shunted aside by the social history approach of the past generation -- to the study of politics

Do The Facts of Voting Rights Support Chief Justice Roberts’s Opinion in Shelby County?

In June, 2013, a 5-4 majority of the U.S. Supreme Court brought to an abrupt and likely permanent end the most important provision of the most successful civil rights law in U.S. history. Initially passed in 1965, Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act required “covered jurisdictions,” at first in the Deep South and later extended to Texas, Arizona, Alaska, and certain counties and townships in other states, to “pre-clear” any changes in their election laws with the Justice Department or the District Court of the District of Columbia before putting them into effect. Laws that changed the political structure – for instance, redistricting laws, annexations, and shifts from district to “at-large” elections for local governments – were restricted, as well as provisions and practices that directly affected individuals’ rights to vote. While acknowledging the success of the law in greatly increasing the number of African-American and Latino elected officials, Chief Justice John Roberts contended in his majority opinion in Shelby County v. Holder that the problems of 2013 were much less grave than the “pervasive . . . flagrant . . . widespread . . . rampant” voting discrimination of 1965 and that the coverage formula was outmoded because “today’s statistics tell an entirely different story.” Neither the Chief Justice nor any scholars or civil rights proponents or opponents have systematically examined the evidence on the entire pattern of proven voting rights violations over time and space. Was the Chief Justice correct in asserting that such violations no longer tracked the coverage scheme in Section 4 of the Act -- that, as he put it, the relationship of the formula to problems of vote dilution was purely “fortuitous?” Had the number of violations diminished so much in the years leading up to the 2006 renewal of Section 5 that Congress should have ended preclearance altogether because discrimination had basically disappeared? If the number of voting rights lawsuits has diminished, why is that so? Based on the largest database of voting rights “events” – successful lawsuits, Section 5 Justice Department objections and “more information requests,” and consent decrees or settlements out of court that led to pro-minority changes – ever compiled, this paper provides a unique overview of the history of U.S. voting rights from 1957, when the first U.S. civil rights law in 82 years passed, through 2013. It shows that the Chief Justice’s factual assertions were incorrect, that the coverage formula was still congruent with proven violations, and that to the extent that recorded violations had decreased, that was not because problems had ended, but because the Supreme Court had made it more difficult to win lawsuits.En Juin 2013, une majorité de la Cour suprême des États-Unis à 5 contre 4 a mis un terme probablement définitif à la disposition la plus importante d’une des lois les plus efficaces de l’histoire américaine sur la protection des droits civiques. Initialement adopté en 1965, l’article 5 de la loi sur le droit de vote (Voting Rights Act) imposait aux « juridictions couvertes », d’abord dans le Sud et plus tard au Texas, en Arizona, en Alaska, et dans certains comtés dans d’autres États, à valider préalablement auprès du Ministère de la justice ou de la district court du District de Columbia tous les changements introduits dans leurs lois électorales. Les lois changeant la structure politique ont été limitées (par exemple, le passage à des grandes circonscriptions à scrutin de liste, le redécoupage électoral, les annexions) ainsi que les dispositions et les pratiques qui impactaient directement le droit des individus à voter. Tout en reconnaissant le succès de la loi qui augmenta considérablement le nombre des élus afro-américains et latinos, le Président de la Cour suprême John Roberts a soutenu dans son opinion majoritaire dans l’arrêt Comté de Shelby c. Holder que les problèmes de l’année 2013 étaient beaucoup moins graves que la discrimination « omniprésente, ...flagrante ... généralisée » de 1965 et que la formule permettant de calculer quelles juridictions seraient soumises à la tutelle fédérale était dépassée parce que « les statistiques d’aujourd’hui montrent une réalité totalement différente ». Ni le président Roberts, ni aucun universitaire, ni aucun partisan ou opposant aux droits civiques n’ont systématiquement examiné l’ensemble des preuves de violation des droits de vote dans le temps et dans l’espace. Roberts avait-il raison en affirmant que de telles violations ne correspondaient plus au principe de couverture énoncé dans la section 4 de la loi ? D’après lui, la relation entre la formule et les occurrences de dilution du vote était purement « fortuite ». La diminution du nombre d’infractions dans les années qui ont précédé le renouvellement en 2006 de la Section 5 justifiait-elle que le Congrès mette un terme à cette mise sous tutelle fédérale, la discrimination ayant en fait disparu ? Si le nombre de procès a diminué, quelles en furent les raisons ? Cet article fournit un aperçu unique de l’histoire du droit de vote aux États-Unis de 1957 à 2013, en se fondant sur la plus grande base de données jamais compilée concernant le droit de vote (poursuites réussies, objections du ministère de la Justice utilisant la Section 5, « demande d’informations complémentaires », décrets de consentement ou encore règlements à l’amiable qui ont conduit à des changements favorables aux minorités). Il montre que les affirmations factuelles du Président de la Cour suprême étaient incorrectes, que la formule permettant d'imposer la mise sous tutelle était toujours en adéquation avec les violations avérées, et que si les infractions ont diminué, cela n’a pas été parce que les problèmes avaient disparu mais parce que la Cour suprême avait rendu les procès plus difficiles à gagner

Cumming and Giles, Meet Jenkins and Shaw: Voting Rights and Education in the Two Reconstructions

Historical explanations are inherently comparative. That is, they involve either an explicit or an implicit comparison with a particular or idealized condition or train of events. The phrase “Second Reconstruction” is based, of course, on a recognition of this logic of explanation, and the natural comparison is with the First Reconstruction, that beginning in the 1860s. Perhaps because lately so many historians seem to have lost faith in the possibility of generalization or even explanation, there have been almost no efforts to make rigorous comparisons between the First and Second American Reconstructions by those whose discipline would naturally lend itself to the comparative analysis of change over time. I offer a tentative comparison focusing on two issues: voting rights and racial discrimination in schools

Separate but not Equal: The Supreme Court's First Decision on Racial Discrimination in Schools

In 1899, three years after the “separate but equal” decision of Plessy v. Ferguson, the U. S. Supreme Court for the first time confronted the problem of racial discrimination in education. Writing for a unanimous court, Justice John Marshall Harlan, whose recently refurbished reputation rests chiefly on his liberal opinions in Negro rights cases, decided in effect that the judiciary would do no more to guarantee equality in public services than it had to stop legalized segregation. " ... the education of the people in schools maintained by state taxation is a matter belonging to the respective States," the justice, who was rarely a protector of states' rights, concluded, "and any interference on the part of Federal authority with the management of such schools cannot be justified except in the case of a clear and unmistakable disregard of rights secured by the supreme law of the land. We have here no such case to be determined …. " Attracting even less attention at the time than Plessy did, the case of Joseph W. Cumming, James S. Harper, and John C. Ladeveze v. School Board of Richmond County, Ga. has never received the attention Plessy gained in the wake of the outlawing of segregation in the 1954 Brown decision

An Uncertain Tradition: Constitutionalism and the History of the South [Book Review]

Comparisons across time or space are merely incomplete casual explanations, small descriptive steps on the path to analysis, historians’ conventional rhetorical substitutes for more comprehensive empirical generalizations. If the South has had a legal "legacy of ambivalence,” if its "spokesmen frequently sought to be in the federal order without being of it" (p. 6), as Kermit Hall and James Ely assert in their introduction to this collection of essays from a 1987 symposium, just what produced that ambivalence, assuming, as the editors do implicitly, that the South was more mentally divided than the North was? If courts in colonial Virginia were clerk-dominated, locally-oriented, and concerned overwhelmingly with procedures, not substance, as David Konig contends in the chronologically earliest essay in this volume, how, precisely, does that colony's experience compare to that of others, or of Virginia later, and what factors explain the variations? If eleven of the fifteen states that failed to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment were southern, as Mary Bonsteel Tachau points out in a stimulating, if necessarily skeletal essay on the largely unexplored topic of southern women's legal history, what accounts for the greater degree of opposition to women's rights in the South? How, if at all, do the causes of these contrasts relate to slavery, segregation, fundamentalist Protestantism, climate, modes of production, "culture," or whatever

Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy [Book Review]

When I worked in my first criminal disfranchisement case in 1979, I thought it was a mere tidying up operation, an effort to overturn the last vestiges of the openly racist 1901 “disfranchisement convention” in darkest Alabama. I never imagined that the issue would become much more critical in the ensuing decades and that in 2006, I would be employed as an expert witness against felon disfranchisement in what claims to be the enlightened state of Washington. In many respects, the world has not moved forward

Shaw vs. Reno and the World of Redistricting and Representation

Justice O ' Connor's majority opinion in the 1993U.S. Supreme Court case of Shaw v. Reno has widely been seen as withdrawing judicial protection of minority voting rights -- a welcome development to those who believe as a matter of faith that discriminatory electoral rules, racist appeals in elections, and racially polarized voting are things of the distant past, but less hopeful to close students of redistricting and election campaigns of the last two decades. Deeply ambiguous, the opinion has spawned a wide range of interpretations, from assertions that it bans redistricters from taking the race of voters into account at all, even when they place them in majority-white districts, to contentions that it merely asks for further information about the basis for establishing certain "ugly" districts that have majorities of African Americans or Latinos. In this paper, which is based on research that I carried out for Shaw v. Hunt, the remand version of Shaw v. Reno, and Vera v. Richards, its Texas counterpart, I try to restore a sense of reality to the often factually incorrect assertions or implications of Justice O'Connor's opinion, not only by a close textual reading of the briefs and opinions in the Supreme Court case, but also by looking in considerable detail at the actual redistricting processes in North Carolina and Texas during the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. Were race, partisanship, and individual politicians' interests taken into account in redrawing districts before 1991, or were all previous reapportionments pristine exercises in civic virtue? Might the states in the 1990s have had compelling interests in redressing past racially discriminatory practices? Were the motives of the 1991-92redistrictings so uncomplicated that they can be easily and unambiguously determined by a quick glance at a map? For North Carolina, I also examine whether white and black public opinion and the voting records of white and black members of Congress differ systematically from each other. Do black voters need black faces to represent them? Shaw's vagueness affords the Supreme Court the possibility of gracefully backing away from its separate but unequal standards, standards that allow whites standing to sue without having to prove that the electoral rules at issue have a racially discriminatory effect and without having to show in detail that they were adopted with a racially discriminatory intent. In the final section, I outline five escape routes from Shaw, all of which are based on its factual inadequacies

Twice the Work of Free Labor: The Political Economy of Convict Labor in the New South [Book Review]

Applying to the postbellum South the Marxist penological assumption that legal punishment is "distinct from, and relatively unconnected with, crime," Lichtenstein's deeply researched, well-written book contends that convict leasing and the chain gang "played a central role" in the development of the southern economy and the region's race relations (253, xviii). Although relying heavily on slavery's whips and chains, both of these attempts to economize on prison costs were fostered, according to Lichtenstein, not by benighted southern reactionaries but by "progressives," often from outside the region and often connected with the national government. African-American prisoners kept the coal, brick, and turpentine industries in Georgia (the focus of the study) profitable before 1908, when the abolition of leasing convicts to private companies became a major "progressive reform." Thereafter, the chain gang-over-whelmingly black but with an increasing percentage of whites in the 1920s-was essential in the expanding and paving of rural roads that were necessary for the commercial, industrial, and agricultural development of the state