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That many white southerners might actually be kinder than their northern counterparts to people unlike themselves is nothing new, as Wilson shows. "As is well known, or ought to be, the antebellum South was much more ethnically tolerant and open than the North, where the predominant elements can truly be described as bigoted. The South was electing Catholics and Jews to office when Bostonians were burning down convents." In a list of books on immigrants to the South, Wilson includes Robert N. Rosen’s The Jewish Confederates, which shows "how nearly all Jewish Southerners were loyal Confederates who sacrificed and bled as readily as their neighbors and also shows the anti-Semitism rife among abolitionists and Republicans."

Wilson points out that nearly one-fourth of all general officers in the Confederate Army were either from Europe or the North, and that many others had some kind of connection to the North. "In fact," he writes, "almost every Northerner and foreigner who had lived in the South for any period of time was a loyal Confederate." It is also interesting to consider the Southerners who returned to the South from the North and West "in order to share the fate of the Southern people in war. Let me mention just a few: Simon B. Buckner of Kentucky gave up a fortune in Chicago real estate; George W. Rains of North Carolina left a prosperous iron foundry he had established in Newburgh, New York; Alexander C. Jones of Virginia resigned a judgeship in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he had lived twenty years; Joseph L. Brent of Louisiana gave up a lucrative law practice and leadership of the Democratic Party in Los Angeles." We are to believe that these people, and countless others besides, dropped everything and put their prosperous lives on indefinite hold in order to go fight for slavery? Who could be so blinded by prejudice as to persuade himself of such a thing?

Not that this single example in any way does justice to this wide-ranging and absorbing book, but I recommend Wilson’s treatment of Steven Spielberg’s 1997 film Amistad. Amistad was really two movies, says Wilson: "One, about the 19th century slave commerce between West Africa and Latin America, is a powerful piece of film-making. The other, about American politics and law, is completely hokey and misleading."

The Amistad, in case readers do not recall, was a Spanish ship heading from West Africa with a cargo of captured slaves for eventual sale in Cuba. The slaves on board revolted and killed the crew, and the ship, after drifting for quite some time, eventually made it to Connecticut – and thus the Amistad became an American issue only by this accident of navigation.

According to Wilson, the film mentions but does not dwell on the fact that northern judges ruled against freedom for the slaves of the Amistad. In an 8–1 verdict the Supreme Court, with a majority of slaveholding southerners, ruled that these men, having been illegally seized, should be freed.

Spielberg wanted to take this historically minor case that set no precedents and, in Wilson’s words, make it "bear the whole weight of the American slavery that lasted two and a half centuries and the Great Unpleasantness that ended it. Thousands of Amistad study kits have been sent out to schools with this goal. The trouble is, as an account of American history, the thing will not bear the weight. The Amistad had exactly nil influence on (eve of Civil War figures) the nearly four million American slaves (most of whom had been here for some generations); on the 385,000 slaveholding families; on the 488,000 free blacks (most of whom, contrary to usual assumption, were in the South); nor on the issues and events which led to the bloodiest war in American history."

John Quincy Adams is portrayed in the film as a kindly man without guile who possessed a disinterested commitment to the cause of human freedom. As Wilson puts it, in the film it is "all a love of liberty on Adams’s part," though Wilson himself gives good reason to believe that Adams’s motives "had nothing to do with freedom or with the welfare of people of African origin." Adams, moreover, is portrayed as making

a pretty speech about liberty to the Supreme Court. I do not find in research so far evidence that this speech was actually delivered. What appears in the printed court record is legalistic, though it is possible the speech could have been made in unrecorded oral argument. In the film, Cinque, the leader of the Amistad captives, is present in the Supreme Court, which did not happen. And there is a totally fictional character, played by Morgan Freeman, an affluent free black man. Contra the film, no black man, no matter how affluent, would have been permitted to sit in a courtroom or ride in a carriage with white people in the North in 1839. Especially in Connecticut.

That Cinque himself became a slave trader upon his return to Africa, a proposition that Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison states as fact in his Oxford History of the American People, did not of course make it into the film, even though these purely fictional episodes (including a foreboding speech by John C. Calhoun, that never actually occurred, linking the case to the prospect of civil war between North and South) managed to find their way onto the screen. (Wilson gives additional reasons, apart from the mere authority of Morison, for believing Cinque’s subsequent slave-trading career to be more than plausible.)

In such a context it is worth noting the completely forgotten case of the Echo, a ship out of Providence, Rhode Island, that was intercepted in 1858 by the U.S. Navy’s John N. Maffitt (who would go on to command the Confederate raider Florida) and found to have 400 Africans on board, many in quite appalling condition. When Maffitt brought the ship’s captain to Key West for prosecution, the Northern-born judge (and later a Unionist) refused to take the case for alleged lack of jurisdiction – the same claim a New England judge lamely offered when Maffitt had the Echo’s captain sent up there. Meanwhile, the Echo’s captives and crew were taken to Charleston, South Carolina, where their necessities were provided for and where the crew was prosecuted by District Attorney James Conner, who would later lose a leg fighting for the Confederacy.

That, like so many other episodes in American history, doesn’t fit into the cartoon version of our past that the ignoramuses who have appointed themselves our thought police insist we accept if we don’t want to be branded haters and oppressors. So it falls down the memory hole, never to be discussed or heard about again. Clyde Wilson is very good at reaching down into that hole and recovering real American history, and telling the story of our past with all its overlooked nuance, treating its human actors like people rather than categories. Every chapter of this indispensable book corrects propaganda, recovers lost history, or provides a forbidden perspective on American history and culture. Wilson entertains and instructs as he does battle with the anti-Southern smearbund, and I heartily recommend this latest book to all the non-automatons still to be found.

(P.S. Ignore Amazon’s claim that the book will ship in 4–6 weeks. They just received plenty of copies and it will go out to you right away.)

March 10, 2007

Thomas E. Woods, Jr. is senior fellow in American history at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. His books include How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization, The Church and the Market: A Catholic Defense of the Free Economy (first-place winner in the 2006 Templeton Enterprise Awards), and the New York Times bestseller The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History.Link to original review