Abortion in the Civil War

Abortion, rather than contraception, was the primary form of birth control during the antebellum and Civil War era. In the Civil War era it is estimated that there was one abortion for every five live births. William Buchan's Domestic Medicine contained prescriptions for bringing on delayed menstrual periods, which would also produce an abortion if the woman happened to be pregnant. The book prescribed heavy doses of purgatives that created violent cramps, powerful douches, violent exercise, raising great weights and falling down.

By the early 1860's most states had laws restricting abortion, but these laws were directed at unqualified abortionists and were intended to protect women. Procuring an abortion was not a crime in South Carolina and was illegal in Massachusetts only after the fetus had "stirred". Most Americans of this period did not regard abortion as a crime until the fetus had "quickened" (begun to move perceptibly in the womb). According to the prevailing view of the time, the fetus had no soul before quickening and had not demonstrated its independent existence through movement. Until quickening, the fetus was regarded as an extraneous part of the pregnant woman that could be removed without ethical constraint.

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Runaway Slaves and Drapetomania

Estimating the total number of runaways is difficult. Some consider the claim of a southern judge in 1855 that the South had lost “upwards of sixty thousand slaves” to the North to be a credible estimate. Frederick Olmsted discovered as he toured the South during the 1850s that on virtually every large or medium sized plantation he visited masters complained about runaways. It was a rare planter among those who owned twenty or more slaves who could boast that none of his slaves had ever run off.

Masters were forced to explain why contented and well cared for servants abandoned them so frequently and in such large numbers. Among other disciplines, masters looked to science (i.e. pseudo science) for answers. Dr Samuel Cartwright of New Orleans offered a medical explanation. In an article published in DeBows’Review in September 1851, Cartwright explained that many slaves suffered from “Drapetomania, Or the Disease Causing Negroes to Run Away.” Dr. Cartwright hypothesized, “The cause, in most cases, that induces the negro to runaway from service, is as much a disease of the mind as any other species of mental alienation.” The doctor went on to assure his readers that the Creator’s will in regard to the negro is that he shall be a “submissive knee bender,” noting a particular anatomical conformation of the knee supposedly peculiar to the race. If the white man abuses the negro or tries to put him on an equal footing, Doctor Cartwright said, it causes a mental imbalance which required, “…whipping it out of them out of it, as a preventative measure against absconding, or other bad conduct.”

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The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882

The Chinese immigration “problem” began in California. California, which became a state in 1850, far from major population centers, was confronted with a chronic shortage of workers needed to meet expanding demands for labor. The available white labor supply in California was too costly. Unhappy workers could always take up independent grub stake mining. Profitable individual mining continued late into the nineteenth century in the rich streams of California.

American small producers and workers saw Asian immigrants as a coerced labor force, not unlike slaves, and, as such, a tool that big corporations could use to their detriment. For example, the San Jose branch of the Workingmen's party saw its goal as persevering “in this struggle and agitation until we have eliminated from our midst the Asiatic serfs transported to these shores…at the behest and in the interests of soulless monopolies, by which free labor is being enslaved.” To the small producers, the availability of Asian labor to corporations spelled the end of their independence. They would be forced out of business or farming. Working men, saw Asian labor threatening their jobs, standard of living, and perhaps most important, their unions, which fought to sustain and increase both of these. The anti-Asian movement was less a movement against Asian workers themselves as it was against big corporations.

American workers made a distinction between voluntary and induced immigration. Voluntary immigrants chose to come to America because they valued liberty, equality and the American way of life. Induced immigrants came on the terms of big corporations. The induced immigrants were regarded as tools of big corporations and despoilers of the American way of life.

Chinese immigration did have a negative economic impact on American workers. By 1870, the Chinese were a highly visible segment of the San Francisco labor force (13.2 percent). The immediate consequence of this labor influx was a reduction of wages and the extension of the working day. Of all trades in San Francisco, cigar manufacturing was the most affected by Chinese labor. Ninety one percent of all cigar makers in San Francisco were Chinese. Cigar makers in California, because of cheap Chinese labor, averaged wages ten per cent lower than in twenty other states. Wages for Chinese workers averaged half those of white workers in the shoe and clothing industries. White workers blamed the Chinese for falling wages.

Immigration seemed responsible for the new vulnerability of workers because it expanded the labor pool and created a reservoir of potential strikebreakers. Raised initially because of the Chinese, but later generalized to include southern, central, and eastern European immigrants, the economic threat posed by immigration politicized workers as trade unionists.

Chinese immigration became a national issue culminating in the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 which forbade any additional Chinese immigrants for ten years. The law was regularly extended each decade until it was repealed in 1943 when China was given a small annual quota of 105 immigrants which continued in effect until 1965.



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The Birth of Racism in America

In the late summer of 1619 a storm beaten Dutch ship (possibly a pirate ship) appeared in the harbor at Jamestown. The ship had nothing to trade except twenty Africans recently taken from a Spanish vessel. An exchange for food was made and the Dutch ship sailed away. It is not clear if the Africans were considered slaves or indentured servants by the English settlers. There was no precedence in England for enslaving a class of people for life and making that status inevitable. It is clear, however, that by 1640, at least one African had been declared a slave. This African was ordered by the court "to serve his said master or his assigns for the time of his natural life here or elsewhere."

The development of slavery in Virginia set the pattern for the development of slavery throughout the South and laid the foundations for the development of race relations in America.

Although blacks were held in hereditary servitude long before Virginia laws specifically recognized slavery, a large number of Virginia’s blacks worked as servants for a limited term or otherwise earned their freedom just like whites. White and black servants worked together in the fields, shared the same punishments, the same food, and the same living quarters. The most remarkable evidence of a racially open society comes from the records of Northampton County. These records indicate that some twenty nine per cent of the county’s blacks were free and that a least two of these, Francis Payne and Anthony Johnson were planters (Johnson even becoming a slave owner himself).

During the second half of the 17th century, the British economy improved and the supply of British indentured servants declined as poor Britons had better economic opportunities at home. To lure cheap labor to America, terms of indentures became fixed and shorter. By the 1670s Virginia had a large number of restless and relatively poor white men (most of them former indentured servants) threatening the established order of the wealthy and propertied. A popular revolt in 1676, the so called Bacon’s Rebellion, led Virginia planters to begin importing black slaves in large numbers in preference to the more expensive and politically restive white indentured servants.

The increasingly high price of free labor was incompatible with the profitable running of plantations. The landowners turned to slave labor, encouraging the first massive introduction of slaves from Africa in 1698. The new labor force was more controllable because blacks, as a group, were not normally thought to be naturally guaranteed the “rights of Englishmen” accorded to white freemen. In short, the system was to be based purely on force, and Virginia’s laws soon reflected this.



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U.S. attacks Mexico (1914)

The opening of vast new oil reserves in Mexico, coupled with the conviction that the existing Mexican government under Victoriano Huerta was friendly to British oil interests, spurred the United States to a policy of armed intervention in an attempt to topple the Huerta government. In addition to the economic motivations for U.S. policy in Mexico, Woodrow Wilson, believing in the universal efficacy of the democratic process, was particularly hostile to Huerta who had attained the presidency through violence. With regard to his policy toward the Huerta regime, Wilson stated that he intended “…to teach the Latin American republics to elect good men.”

In its drive to topple Huerta, the Wilson Administration enforced an arms embargo on Mexico. This policy was abandoned when the pro-U.S. Constitutionalists began winning and required additional arms to topple Huerta. The final U.S. intervention against Huerta, the seizure of Vera Cruz, ostensibly to obtain satisfaction for an affront to the American flag, served the more important purpose of cutting Huerta off from vital military supplies and customs revenues coming from Vera Cruz. The occupation of Vera Cruz ultimately led to the ousting of the Huerta government and the installation of the pro-American Constitutionalists. With the triumph of the Constitutionalists, American oil companies were to gain pre-eminence in the Mexican oil fields.

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Teddy Roosevelt and "Protective Interventionism"

In 1904 when Theodore Roosevelt announced the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, declaring in a message to Congress that:

“If a nation shows that it knows how to act with reasonable efficiency and decency in social and political matters; if it keeps order and pays its obligations, it need fear no interference from the United States. Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America as elsewhere ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, exercise an international police power.”

Ostensibly invoked to forestall European interventions for debt collections in the Hemisphere, Roosevelt’s “protective interventionism”, in fact, laid the basis for frequent U.S. military intervention in the Caribbean, and the final incorporation of the area into the U.S. sphere of influence. With the advent of the Roosevelt Corollary it was no longer necessary for a European or Latin American government to do any thing concrete to trigger a U.S. intervention. All that was required was the unilateral decision of the United States that intervention was appropriate. With the construction of key naval installations and the adoption of Theodore Roosevelt’s ideology of the “Big Stick”, the United States established a strategic hegemony in the Caribbean and nominated itself to the position of international police power for the area.

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Whiteness of a Different Color by Matthew Frye Jacobson (Book Review)

Jacobson contends that the concept of race is a product of politics and culture and is in fact “a modem superstition”.

The perception of race is a matter of power relationships. The Irish were considered part of a Celtic “race”, inferior to Anglo in the nineteenth century largely because they were outsiders. What made them outsiders? Certainly the long history of English occupation and Irish subjugation was a starting point, but the sticking point was probably religion. As late as 1960, with the election of John F. Kennedy, Catholics (and the ethnic groups that made up their congregations) were not considered quite American. Catholics were considered “ethnic”. In Jacobson’s terms, “not quite white”. Kennedy was attacked for being susceptible to taking orders from the Pope contrary to the good of the American people. Kennedy’s election marked the final passage of Catholics into the main stream of American life.

There appears to be a tremendous need within human society for people to “belong” to some identifiable group. Outsiders are almost by definition inferior to one’s own group in some way. Perhaps this is a reflection of identity formation. Once identified as part of what Benedict Anderson would call “an imagined community” (gang, nation, race), the cohesion of the group becomes of paramount importance to the individual. Group identity becomes the discursive boundary (“ I am an American therefore....”, “I am a Muslim therefore....”). Groups can become more inclusive if the cohesion of the group is maintained. Fear and conflict appear to be catalysts for making groups more inclusive while maintaining cohesion. Thus the Nazi threat of the 1 940s made America more tolerant of ethnic and cultural differences (“expanding the borders of whiteness”). Similarly the rise of a more militant black consciousness succeeded in papering over earlier white ethnic European differences in the face of a common “enemy”.

Inclusion in the dominant group is about assimilation and cohesion. Assimilation is the badge of acceptability. In the early days of the Saudi Naval Expansion Program (SNEP), for example, Saudis were not accustomed to dealing with professional women in the workplace. Business required women to travel to Saudi Arabia, which was unacceptable to the Saudis. Not sending them was unacceptable to the Americans. Ultimately, the Saudis declared the women, “honorary men” so that they could travel and work in the Kingdom. Because of their work status, American women had been assimilated into the Saudi world view as “men”. Jacobson correctly indicates that a similar process breaks down the barriers between different ethnic and racial groups.

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