The Perception of the “Morally Superior Yankee"

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The concept of moral, intellectual, and ethnic superiority was deeply ingrained in New England puritan culture and is easily traced politically and through literature. The following citations from “The Deification of Me Lincoln” by a New England academic and author of several books, Ira D. Cardiff, who lived through this period shows how casually that was assumed and entered into forming explanations of all forms of historical events.

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“Lincoln receives credit for the successful prosecution of a great war, for the preservation of the union, for the abolition of human slavery and for telling a good story.  To the latter he is entitled to the credit accorded.  To the three former – well, let us see.  Did the South ever have a chance of winning the war? Never! Pitted against it was a North of immense material resources and wealth, a much greater population than the South, a population more energetic, more resourceful and better educated, thus a larger and better equipped army, officered by several quite superior generals; therefore the ultimate outcome was inevitable.” (1 p. 17)

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Specifically addressing slavery and the demographics of slavery he goes on to say:

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“As to the abolition of human slavery; within the century previous, human enlightenment had developed to a point in Europe and America that such a gross violation of man’s natural rights as human slavery had become repugnant to the mass of mankind.  At the time, the intense struggles of the American and French Revolutions were fresh in the minds of the people and the thought of a human being treated as a piece of property to be trafficked as a mule or a hog was offensive to all sense of decency – even to most southerners.  In fact, the slave owners of the South were relatively few in number, though powerfully politically on account of their wealth and social prestige.  The passing, sooner or later, of the atrocious institution of slavery was, therefore, also inevitable.” (1 pp. 17-18)

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Then with regard to the populations themselves he says:

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“These Southern ruling aristocrats were, many of them, descendants of the Cavaliers who settled Virginia. They were Royalists by nature and had little patience with the frugal and industrious Puritans and Roundheads of New England or the hard working German and Irish immigrants of the North.  They were for the most part wonderfully fine people, but with a viewpoint and a background so totally different from that of the Northerner that a reconciliation of the two was virtually impossible.” (1 p. 22)

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This book was written in the early 1900’s and he was right on a few points but objectively wrong on several others. Because of the time that had passed, it’s safe to assume the perceptions had survived the test of time to that point. Note his high praise of the immigrants but within a decade from the time he wrote these words, any good will between those of Puritan descent and the Irish Catholic and German populations would be a thing of the past as they would be on opposite sides during the run up to WWI. The fact that these groups were largely Catholic/Liturgical did not bother him as he was an atheist but was always of great concern to progressive evangelicals which this book was actually targeted at.

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As slavery became uneconomical due to increase in populations, unsuitability of the land for large farming on the scale it was done in the South, and the rise in manufacturing, it gradually died but still there were slaves in New York until 1850 and in New Jersey until the war. After emancipation laws were passed in New England, other laws were put in place to ensure that the small Black population there would never have anything approaching equal standing. Free Blacks were denied title to property, subject to a wide variety of punishments based on crimes that were unique to their race, subjected to deportation for such offenses as vagrancy and or disturbing the peace. Moving west following the migration pattern of people from New England and New York, these sorts of laws generally became worse.  All northern states had some form of “Black Code” with the Illinois Black code being the most well-known and notorious. The Illinois Black Code (Black Exclusion Law) was written by John A Logan who became a Union General by presidential appointment. Lincoln’s lifelong friend Ward Lamon said of the code. “(It) “was of the most preposterous and cruel severity, a code that would have been a disgrace to a slave state and was simply an infamy in a free one. It borrowed the provisions of the most revolting laws known among men, for exiling, selling, beating, bedeviling and torturing Negroes, whether bond or free” (2).  Blacks had no legal rights a white man was bound to respect and it was a crime for them to settle in Illinois unless they could prove their freedom and post a $1000 bond. Any black man found without a certificate of freedom was considered a runaway and could be apprehended and auctioned off by the sheriff to pay the cost of his confinement (2).  The New Orleans Bee referred to the statue as “an act of special and savage ruthlessness” and it remained in place until after the war.

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In New England entire Black communities were assaulted and burned to the ground with app. one hundred violent incidents being recorded between 1820 and 1840 in what could be summarized as a strategy for the physical removal of Blacks from communities (3 pp. 41-42).  All of this had the effect of depopulating the northern states of African-Americans. At the time of the war the Black population in the north was 1% despite appearing to offer freedom to escaped slaves. For this reason, the Underground Railway ended in Canada. In Democracy in America, Tocqueville noted that the “problem of race” was worse in non-slave holding states than in slave owning states and that blacks were seen as aliens to be removed from their society (3 p. 40).  With few exceptions, the Yankee wasn’t so much in favor of any sort of equality and was most interested in maintaining racial separation. This sort of thinking really extended to other groups as well and wasn’t by any means limited to Blacks.

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Yankees, of course, had a greater scourge in their midst at that time which were the Catholics and, demographically this concern, as noted earlier, wasn’t unfounded.  Lyman, Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s father, was a renowned anti-Catholic crusader whose sermon in 1834 directly incited the Ursuline Covenant riots in Boston is a standard bearer for this sort of thinking but it was also deeply engrained culturally. Catholics were a permanent underclass. The Indian wars and removal were also starting around this time in the Midwest with the Lakota Sioux. They remained a ruling class distinct from other elements of the population.

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Bibliography

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1. Cardiff, Ira D. The Deification of Lincoln. s.l. : Christopher Publishing House, 1943.

2. Bennett, Lerone. Forced Into Glory. s.l. : Johnson Publishing, 1999.

3. DiLorenzo, Thomas J. Lincoln Unmasked. New York, New York : Three Rivers Press, 2006.