MDDM slavery WAS Re: Re[2]: Jefferson's Pillow

[Doug Millison]

fq:
>The prime motive was money.
>  Racism therefore justified both the slave trade and the owning of slaves
> as a means to acheive that money.


http://www.bbk.ac.uk/eh/eng/pynchon/madsen.htm
Thomas Pynchon's Post-Colonial Critique in Mason & Dixon
Deborah L. Madsen
Professor of English, South Bank University, London
ABSTRACT
[...]  First, I
set out some of the ways in which issues crystallising around colonialism
have characterised all of Thomas Pynchon's work. Then I go on to discuss
how, in Mason & Dixon, as elsewhere in his fiction, Pynchon explores
colonialism as a culture, a psychosis, and an epistemology. Colonialism is
represented as a will to control, to dominate and to possess. It is this
psychology of power that underpins colonialism. I look at his 1966 essay,
'Journey Into the Mind of Watts', to see how the colonial psychology still
informs race relations in post-colonial America and then go on to discuss
the representation of enslavement in Mason & Dixon. [...]


"[...]   More convincingly than any other historian I know of,
Blight explains one of the most troubling questions for the understanding
of American history: why it became accepted wisdom from the 1870s to the
1960s, among American historians as well as white students from grade
school through college, that states' rights, not slavery, was the cause of
the Civil War or, as many Southerners have long insisted on our calling it,
"the War Between the States." As late as 1947, as I can clearly remember
when I was a GI Bill veteran in an Ivy League college, an aging professor
of history could teach us that slavery in the American South was a benign
and civilizing institution, but uneconomical and thus of minor importance
in American history; that the Civil War was a preventable but heroic
tragedy, fomented by a few extremists in both North and South; that the war
led to the "emancipation" of a people wholly unprepared for such sudden
freedom and thus easily manipulated and corrupted by opportunistic
"carpetbaggers" and "scalawags"; and that only such groups as the Ku Klux
Klan, who played upon the superstitious fears of the "half-savage,
half-childish Darkies," could begin to restore order.

In Race and Reunion Blight explains in imaginative detail how such views
became entrenched. He examines the different ways Americans remembered,
interpreted, and honored their most divisive and traumatic experience from
the turning point of the Civil War, in 1863, to the culmination of the
semicentennial of the war's end in 1915. Because race was so deeply
involved in the causes, significance, and outcome of the conflict, Blight
skillfully keeps "the problem of race" in view in every chapter, especially
as denial of the war's impact on race became the formula for sectional
reconciliation and acceptance of white supremacy. [...]

Blight's major theme, as he describes the frequent "reunions" of white
Union and Confederate veterans, is that the yearning for a "redemptive"
sectional reconciliation required a "harmonious forgetfulness" of slavery,
emancipation, and even minimal African-American rights. "In this vision of
the terms of Blue-Gray reunion," he writes, "slavery was everyone's and no
one's responsibility. America's bloody racial history was to be banished
from consciousness; the only notions of equality contemplated were
soldiers' heroism and the exchange of the business deal."

The quest for sectional harmony drew enormous cultural and psychological
support from the novels and eventually the films (such as Gone with the
Wind) depicting "the plantation legend," with its sentimental imagery of
faithful and comic slaves. The Virginian Thomas Nelson Page and his
numerous popular imitators established the model for the postwar
generation. Thus as "Sam," one of Page's typical darkies, recalls the
blissful times "befo' de war," he muses:

Dem wuz good ole times, marster -de bes' Sam ever see!... Niggers didn' hed
nothin' 't all to do-jes' hed to ten' to de feedin' an' cleanin' de hosses,
an' doin' what de marster tell 'em to do; an' when dey wuz sick...de same
doctor come to see 'em whar ten' to de white folks.... Dyar warn' no
trouble nor nothin'.

In a story by Joel Chandler Harris, written in 1877, the entertaining old
black man Uncle Remus saves a Confederate family and even shoots a Yankee
who is about to kill his master. Blight points out, however, that in the
much more widely read 1880 version, Remus

saves the Union soldier whom he has wounded as a loyal rebel, and then
gives himself and his labor to all in happy reunion. Uncle Remus,
therefore, was the ultimate Civil War veteran-he fought on both sides, he
saved the Union, and as the old representative of his race, he demanded
nothing in return.

For Blight one of the few admirable writers of the period was the novelist
Albion Tourgée, the author of the Reconstruction novel A Fool's Errand, who
challenged the plantation literature filled with "happy darkies,
steadfastly loyal uncles and aunties." Tourgée perceived that "to the
American Negro the past is only darkness replete with unimaginable
horrors," and that "the farther he gets away from slavery, the more bitter
and terrible will be his memory of it."


from:
The New York Review of Books
July 18, 2002

The Terrible Cost of Reconciliation
By David Brion Davis

Review of

Divided Hearts: Britain and the American Civil War
by R.J.M. Blackett
Louisiana State University Press

Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory
by David W. Blight
Belknap Press/Harvard University Press