Review By Ananda Dasgupta (Journalist)
The sun shines bright in my old Kentucky home,
`Tis summer, the darkies are gay;
The corn top’s ripe and the meadow’s in the bloom,
While the birds make music all the day …..
Stephen Foster’s idyllic depiction of his old Kentucky home suffered, says Paul Kalra in his “From Slave to Separate but Equal,” at least from one major untruth: the “darkies” were oppressed, dehumanized, exploited, brutalized ‑ everything but happy. In his closely‑argued book, the result of two years of dedicated scholarship and rigorous analysis, Kalra sketches a picture of the Old South that shocks as much as it informs. The ten chapters in his work chronicle the rise, nature and development of the unique nature of American slavery, leading to his thesis that the Civil War which finally ended it all was essentially a violent but inevitable manifestation of the deep‑rooted conflicts between the layers that made up the economic system.
Kalra’s thesis is provocative, but the sources he summons to validate his conclusions are impeccable. Perhaps conscious of the lack of traditional credentials (he is an electrical engineer from India who has never taken a course in American History) which would allow him to challenge one of the basic tenets of American history ‑ that the Civil War was fought to free the slaves since slavery was immoral, Kalra’s chapters are replete with quotations from the statements of Lincoln, Jefferson as well as old planters’ letters, journals of the cotton growers, excerpts from speeches made in the Senate and the House of Representatives and what have you.
Kalra’s work is not one, however, which will sell on style. It will sell because he is possibly the first to have taken this sort of hard look at the Civil War and the events which led up to it; and because of his interpretation of “Protestant” – American ‑ type slavery, as opposed to the more benevolent “Catholic” school, initially practiced in Louisiana, which “envisioned freeing slaves in the future, no matter how remote, and recognized every black’s potential to become a Christian with proper education.” Protestant slavery, which was practiced throughout the continent and became the norm even in Louisiana after that state’s induction into the Union, on the contrary, legally denied the Negro’s humanity and relegated him to the level of movable property, thereby permitting no avenues for either his eventual emancipation or his gradual integration into the mainstream.
This strategy was highly convenient in the short term. It allowed slaveholders to split up slave families, deny them literacy or equitable religious instructions, mortgage the men, sell off the children, rape the women ‑ even, horrifyingly, breed slaves for profit. The Southern planters suffered no qualms of conscience in all this ‑ court judgments (like that of South Carolina which held in 1809 that “The young of slaves… stand on the same footing as other animals”), laws and convention validated the convenient belief that the salves were sub‑humans. Kalra piles evidence upon evidence, excerpt upon excerpt and quotation upon quotation to demonstrate the way slaves were perceived and treated by their owners in the South. But his thesis develops a twist in the tale ‑ Protestant slavery, because it denied that slaves were human beings, implicitly enjoined on their owners a lifelong obligation to feed and keep them. This, Kalra says, boomeranged when declining land productivity did not allow the slaves to earn their keep. Southern slaveholders were faced with the prospect of progressively declining dividends from an investment which had collectively cost them $ 2 billion.
There were other complications stemming from the unique nature of American slavery, at least one of them with as much piquant human interest as a popular soap opera. A slaveowner had to deny the humanity of his own mulatto children when they had been born of liaisons with slaves. Kalra recounts how Thomas Jefferson, forced into this corner, tried to persuade the Virginia legislature to dilute the definition of a mulatto from one‑eighth to one‑quarter Negro, a standard by which his mistress’s children could be adjudged white. “… the President of the United States, one of the authors of the Declaration of Independence, could not legally marry the mother of his children or acknowledge his children’s paternity. His own flesh and blood were born into slavery, and when freed were denied United States citizenship.” says Kalra, pointing out the piquant irony of the situation.
There was nothing remotely approaching human interest about the other developments which paralleled Southern slavery. The agricultural South’s dependence on its cash crops of tobacco and cotton and, consequently, on slave labor soon led to one‑third of the entire population of the Southern states consisting of blacks (in fact, blacks actually outnumbered whites in South Carolina and Mississippi while both races were evenly divided in Florida, Georgia, Alabama and Louisiana). This was too many blacks too close by for slaveholders’ comfort. Inconveniently, the North which had freed the slaves decades earlier and was encouraging white immigrants to work in its growing industrial and trading activities not only wanted nothing to do with the South’s depreciated blacks, but were actively marginalizing their own Negroes who were still sticking around. The South, meanwhile, had its own “po(or) white trash” as the Negroes, in complete identification with their masters’ prejudices and perceptions put it -‑ nonslaveholding whites who eked out an existence comparable to, or even worse than, the slaves. These whites, in fact, constituted the vast majority of the white population in the South and were equally exploited by the slaveholders but, Kalra says, were deluded by myths of white superiority and racial solidarity.
The political configuration, artfully designed by the slaveholders and installed in the Constitution itself, had allowed them to hold power for two‑thirds of the time between ratification of the Constitution and the Civil War. This seizure of power was effected mainly through the federal‑ratio clause which by counting the slave as three‑fifth of a white person in the census count, gave disproportionate power to the Southern states in the House of Representatives and the electoral college which elected the president. Says Kalra, “Without (this) clause, the Southern slaveholders would have lost the presidency and thus control over the US Government in 1800, which would have changed the history of the United States”. Not till the Northern population eventually grew, over six decades, to double the size of the Southern population (a large part of the growth was directly attributable to immigration) could political control be wrested back ‑ and Lincoln elected.
Conventionally, historians, while recalling all this as the background against which the bloodiest war in American history was fought, have tried to slot the war, with varying degrees of success, into cause‑and‑effect relationships which were as neat as they were harmless. Kalra’s approach is different: “(The) distribution of income and wealth between slaveholders, nonslaveholders and slaves needs analysis… It is difficult to identify the causes of the Civil War without acknowledging the reality of the economic class system.” And later, “… it was an inter‑class war between whites.”
Kalra’s analysis is acute, his research exhaustive and his conclusions far, far too well-thought-out to be dismissed.