Repost of part of the Enigmatic Code paper.
I was recently in Atlanta, and had access to a library collection there in which I came across a very useful citation for this paper. So, I am reposting Section 3 with the new quote added, since I think it offers a importantly explicit support for the approach of the paper:
Part 3 of "Enigmatic Code":
The Pressure for Code, The Cultural Amplitude of the South
We have seen that Charleston, as the birthplace of the Scottish Rite’s Mother Council had special characteristics. But it is obvious that these peculiarities only have significance in terms of the cultural amplitude of the South in general during the period. And to understand how the whole notion of a code of rhetoric or, in the Scottish Rite’s case, ritual as well, we must understand the wider sense of things. To do this with justice and fairness in line with the standard of the best scholarship on the South we must, on the one hand, avoid the “the judgmental – even condemnatory – approach in many earlier explorations of southern thought,” which Drew Gilpin Faust identified in his detailed study of historiographical trends of scholarship on the South. Rather we should allow this uninformative tack to be “replaced by an effort to trace the connections between expressed beliefs [in the South] and a region’s way of life.” This can only mean historiographically, as Faust makes clear by citing the trenchant words of Michael O’Brien, that the intellectual life of the South be allowed to “define its own terms.” [Note/ Drew Gilpin Faust. “The Peculiar South Revisited: White Society, Culture, and Politics in the Antebellum Period, 1800-1868,” in Interpreting Southern History: Historiographical Essays in Honor of Sanford Higgenbotham. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987, p. 99. ] But the most recent scholarship on the South of the period also abundantly makes clear that we run into a large problem in trying to gauge this. As a number of scholars has described, but perhaps none better than David Goldfield/31 , the whole sense that one tends to get from the South is covered with a blanket of preconception. These preconceptions would make it practically impossible to properly assess the cultural impetus for people in such a distant period. For following the Civil War:
“The invention of the Old South gave white southerners a tradition, a sense of continuity in a destabilized postwar world…. They needed a sterling vision of the Old South…By creating a history from the story of the Old South…they erected a legend to live by and for. Their history, like all good traditions, scrambled time… white southerners often publicly professed good riddance to slavery in the postwar years, but they protested its shortcomings a bit too much. They cited the institution’s burdens on masters and how it hampered the southern economy and limited opportunities for poorer whites. To hear them, one would think the Emancipation Proclamation liberated southern whites as much as black slaves.”/32
Clearly if we are to accurately gauge a more difficult -to -decipher phenomenon in the Southern past we have to do so without these fanciful preconceptions. Curiously this is important both in the positive and negative directions. As Goldfield makes amply clear, the devotion to these preconceptions blinkers real insight on what the Southern society was really like. Surely we miss the previous intellectual dynamism of some sectors of society in the South if we buy into this odd sense that developed post-Civil War where, “[in] defeat whites recognized the path of their salvation.”/33 In other words, they made a religion, and a worldview out of defeat. This also involved worshipping and orienting themselves primarily to the past, not as a dynamic moment in time, however freighted with contradictions, but as an idealized, frozen moment. The issue is only made more complex by the fact that at certain social levels Southern society, before the ramping- up to the war, was noted for a significant independence of mind. One of course can scarcely appreciate this previously dynamic state if we do not face squarely that in post-Civil War era, “[s]ecular obedience overcame a religious tradition once noted for its individuality.”/34
Further, this secular obedience de-emphasized learning and intellectual development in general because thinking per se was perceived as threatening to the nostalgic system. This happened to such an extent that it had real, tangible results on the educational level in South, even at the highest levels after the Civil War. Again, we miss any chance of accurately coming to terms with the real character of the Southern past if we do recognize that something quite opposite prevailed before, contrary to popular misconception:
“This planter class was an educated elite. In contrast to the South’s general backwardness in public schools, great stress was placed on higher education. ‘If college attendance is any test of an educated people, the South had more educated men and women in proportion to [white] population than the North, or any part of the world. ‘[!]”/35 [emphasis added]
One can only marvel at the last contention. Even if the contention was only close to the truth on a worldwide level –as such things would be very hard to assess surely – it calls for a radically different perception of the position of these Southern intellectuals in world culture. And this is particularly important in assessing the historically and culturally significant fact that as a profound and humane vision of the world’s religions, the Scottish Rite, had the genesis of its Mother Council in an educational environment that was proportionally stronger perhaps than, “any part of the world.”
Thus, as we have noticed there are some positive effects from disabusing ourselves from the preconceptions that Goldfield has outlined. On the other had, doing so also pulls the rug out from under the misconception that somehow Southern society was humanely groaning its way out of its terrible “peculiar institution”. The reasonableness of Goldfield’s contentions are only confirmed by the fact that we can read its insights as confirmed by an important older source on the period, which makes a crucial and analogous point:
“Socially as well as economically the plantation played an enormously important role in Southern life; for the entire region the plantation gentry became ‘the model for social aspiration.’ For the urban and professional classes the plantation seemed the one sure road to social reputability, and there was ‘a decided tendency for lawyer, doctor, carpenter, merchant, and tailor to move into agriculture, as fast as the accumulation of capital would permit’ Despite the ’concentration of wealth, slaves, and power in the hands of the few,’ Roger W. Shugg has found, ‘little resentment was expressed by the less fortunate minority.’ …[They] saw the neighboring planters as somewhat more successful but by no means superior beings, to whom they were often related by blood or marriage. As Cash astutely remarks, ‘If the plantation had introduced distinctions of rank and wealth among men of the old backcountry, and, in doing so, had perhaps offended against the ego of the common white, it had also…introduced that other vastly ego-warming and ego-expanding distinction between the white man and the black.’”/36
I believe it is significant that this summary from Randall’s famous standard reference book on the Civil War, which was brought up to date by Donald’s revision, in fact confirms the views of Goldfield. We can easily understand by this summary the great sense of complacency that under-girded the continuation of the slavery system. Thus, as we have said, disabusing ourselves of the notion of the Old South becomes clearer as having an intrinsically dual purpose both in positive and negative references. This is particularly crucial for the ability to understand the appearance of the Scottish Rite. For the question becomes, where did the sense of independence of mind come from that characterizes the Rituals of the Scottish Rite in an environment, which was increasingly hostile to freedom of thought? This questioned is only sharpened by the knowledge we have gained about the current of independence of thought and mind encouraged by high levels of education in the South at this period.
Another way to understand this independence of mind is by addressing a much under-appreciated fact of the development of the Southern ethos that relates to its colonial past. Specifically, as evidence of this phenomenon we can look to the literary phenomenon of “promotional pamphlets” from the colonial period, which sought to convince and attract prospective white citizens from the Old World . Unlike the rigid class hierarchy of Britain, these promotional pamphlets spoke of a different type of world:
“Though few were aware of it, what promoters depicted was a world in fundamental conflict with paternalistic values . They advertised a fluid social order while tradition glorified social stasis. They spoke of equality of opportunity where paternalists assumed inequality and stratification. The pamphlets they distributed among anxious Europeans stressed the importance of individualism and hard work with the promise of material reward, but paternalistic ideology stressed the mutual obligations of all members within a community. In short, the ideals implicit in the promotional literature were far different from those assumed by the slaveholding “gentlemen” who had fitted bondage so neatly into their conceptual order.”/37
This literature had a profound effect on the type of person that came to the South from the Old World. It drew people given to that sense of individualism. The picture then is created of a Southern ethos that is profoundly in conflict with itself from very early in its existence, because some of the earliest influences were from the English aristocratic tradition as reflected in some of the richest in the South. Whereas other influences came from more skeptical, individually minded folks drawn by the pamphlets’ vision of a place where you could make good. As James Oakes makes tremendously clear in his admirable summary, what drew people particularly to the South was the ability to have independent means of making a go of it in life. In addition, there were particularities in this such as the “Scotch-Irish [who] brought to the new World an almost religious devotion to the principles of free enterprise. Add to this their deep antipathy toward all things English and aristocratic…their sheer numbers helped change the character of the typical master from the haughty English gentlemen of the seventeenth century to the democratic entrepreneur of the nineteenth.”/38
This cultural set-up makes it easy, I contend, to explain the co-existence of a sort of static religiosity, which supported the social order, including slavery, and an opposing tendency toward religious questioning based on an independent, entrepreneurial spirit. It is beyond the scope of this argument to delimit, as Oakes expertly does, the many variables of personal questioning of the slavery-system, based on diaries and letters, and the need to support their – to them – very real capital investment. But it is crucial to see this as a dynamic environment, all the same, with many conflicting interests, and not the staid set-up of the “Old South” so well critiqued by Goldfield. This sense is only bolstered by summary notions like the following:
“Thus, the evidence is conflicting. Antebellum slaveholders counted in their ranks a disproportionate share of the nation’s wealthiest citizens, yet this very concentration of wealth set the planter aristocracy apart from most slaveholders. The economic structure of the slaveholding class changed little in the decades before the Civil War, indicating social stability. Yet there was a dramatic increase in the number of slaveholders, significant upward mobility, and pervasive demographic restlessness among slaveholders as well. Concentration and diffusion, stagnation and fluidity were all characteristics of the slaveholding class. What is missing from such dichotomies is the vast array of individual variations that, by their complexity, force re-examination of the nature of slaveholding in America. With the economic paradoxes of the antebellum South, we have only begun to sense the diversity of American slaveholders.”/39
What should be clear from Oakes’ description is the quite dynamic sense of the culture. Yet these “dichotomies” existed in a social framework, and the glue was the sense of aspiration amongst the less rich to one day be amongst the wealthier, which inexorably meant participation in the slavery system. But for our purposes we can also see that these “dichotomies” directly have an effect on religious intuitions as well. “The only philosophical justification of slavery that ever gained any real popularity among slaveholders was the religious one….”/40 But if we connect this fact with the evidence of great education amongst many, which surely included philosophy, we are left ineluctably with a vast area of unspoken and unarticulated philosophical questioning and speculation. I believe it is precisely in this realm that the Southern need for a Code emerged. In addition, the potentially philosophical, or perhaps suppressedly philosophical nature of that realm would explain the need for an enigmatic rhetoric or expression. There is sufficient evidence to say that the Southern ethos contained a real insight into human freedom, but it was of course embedded in a tragically conflicting background. James Oakes has recently even made this more clear in a notably public forum, and spoken with a simplicity unlike his usually complex scholarly arguments: “… slavery is freedom turned upside down… in a peculiar way…the study of slavery [is] helpful in understanding what freedom is…”/41 It is surely reasonable that this unspoken sense could have found some sort of attempt at articulation in the tendency to express a deep sense of freedom. In other words, if it was not socially acceptable to express it in direct philosophical exposition, it had to be hidden in symbolism. And the circumstances might have made it hard to even face these realities in one’s own self. This sense opens the possibility that people yearned to express a freedom, which they even hid from themselves.
As we begin to narrow this notion down on the Scottish Rite’s Mother Council in this odd environment, let us do so respectfully both of the tragic circumstances which cannot be avoided in an analysis, and on the evidence of real people trying to make something philosophically interesting and partially valid of their lives. We can see it as an attempt for some congruence in a very incongruent culture. The field open before us then, I suggest is one in which profound religious intuition and symbolic insight could exist in a very tangible and monumental way. But this needs to be balanced with the sense that what was clearly not present was any great moral heroism or prescience. In this sense the “happy amalgam of Protestants, Jews and Catholics of diverse occupations,”/42 that make up the “Eleven Gentlemen” who were the founders of the Scottish Rite may not be particularly noteworthy or above- the- average for moral foresight or prowess. But by their very accepting diversity, in thought and religious inclination, they can be said to be quite profound in their religious-philosophical vision and fore-vision. That this paradox could have realistically existed, is much more consistent with the cultural facts and tendencies I have delimited, and much more descriptive and realistic even to tragic realities, than the simple charge of hypocrisy ever could be.
This sense is only sharpened if we go from the general cultural sense of the South, to the particularities of Charleston. which ultimately must always be our focus for the genesis of the Scottish Rite. Charleston had a marked tendency towards a more paternalistic ethos even in the broader economic environment, based precisely on an economic factor:
“The slave holders in this perimeter were set of from the majority of masters not simply by their extraordinary wealth but by the physical and social stability that wealth produced. To a large extent this was because they grew crops that were consistently profitable and could not be grown elsewhere: rice in the South Carolina lowlands….”/43
So by dint of the very stable wealth of many of its citizens, Charleston represented a rather unique combination of influences. And this reflected in the day-to-day peculiarities of the place. As we have seen, firstly, the phenomenon of close proximity of the bondsmen day-to-day in the city with white persons. But also a distinctly paternalistic culture that contrasted sharply with other parts of the South, which tended toward more materialistic and entrepreneurial, which often meant more harsh. Indeed, a large part of the paternalistic ethos involved the rejection of materialism, and emphasis on spiritual values by contrast. As well as the emphasis on transcendent notions of family and community, which even included the bondsmen./44 These paternalists were much more likely to think of the bondsmen as “members of the family,” than more materialistic types.
Paternalists were also much less likely to ever engage in secessionist talk, and added complex opprobrium to any political arguments for the dissolution of the Union. Thus their standpoint might have appeared in some way as oddly liberal compared to others in the South on many matters, compared to more entrepreneurial types who had a more starkly conservative bottom-line thinking. This may go a long way in explaining the unique character of Charleston in terms of the treatment of the bondsmen. This involves a sense that is extremely difficult to appreciate now. Because they held anti-secessionists, pro-Union views, in common with many in the North (who were “liberal” in perhaps a different sense than they were), their feelings about their personal locus in their “Capital,” Charleston, would had to have been quite curious indeed from our historical vantage point. Based on all the evidence of how these people in fact thought about themselves, I believe we labor under a false presumption about what Charleston would have been psychologically for them. For us today it appears as an exquisite locus of tradition of a very conservative upper- crust sort./45 A place where everyone seems to be well-born, as an analyst quite close to our own day noted: “Claims to high birth are so usual in South Carolina that to admit to belonging to the middle class is to admit that you don’t belong.”/46 Unlike our current conception, paternalists of that period did not comprise the total population, though their world-view certainly ruled. This ambiguity between having the guiding or reigning world-view in a place, and being the most significant citizens, and yet not comprising the population thoroughly was a recipe for underlying anxiety. Thus, the sense we later associate with Charleston of staid tradition must be replaced with a sense that conveys the foment inherent to the contradictions of the place. Thus significantly, while prizing stability, paternalist patricians necessarily and habitually would have included a deeply dynamic view of this stability. In their world-view, since everything and everyone had their proper place, there could be considerable, easy-going liberality within that stratified system.
But the paternalist- tending types, that made up still a substantial portion of the white population of Charleston, also thought of themselves as the epitome of “good sense,” again in the manner of an unaffected liberality. They would have made the assumption, which seems strange from our historical vantage point, that like all dwellers in national capitals they were in a cutting -edge milieu where matters of import were decided and advanced ideas debated. This helps explain the widely noticed phenomenon of their condescension to those actually involved in the ultimate locus of politics in the country. They would have seen the real Capital of the country, Washington D.C. as having become, as one unique analyst has so revealingly put it, as an “experiment station” for the rights of blacks locally even under pre-emancipation laws/47 . We can deduce that the paternalists of Charleston thought of themselves as having just the right attitude towards the bondsmen, which in fact would have appeared strikingly liberal compared to many outside a paternalist center like Charleston. In other words, for them those in the “South’s Capital” had done the “experiment” just right, unlike the social laboratory created in the “Nation’s Capital.” (Recall the curious phenomenon of how liberally the bondsmen had access to independent mode of employment in Charleston.) They would have felt that they had struck the right balance, to avoid having Charleston become a mere ”experiment station” like Washington D.C.
This explains how they thought of themselves as rather cutting-edge in the religious training and education of the bondsmen./48 “Charlestonians really believed…that ‘they had the perfect society…Charleston thus became the center of an idea, a southern way of life. And from this center these ideas began to penetrate throughout….’”/49 In this sense, we can surmise that they would have seen Charleston as the real intellectual Capital of the country as they experienced it. That is, though they were ardent supporters of the Union’50 , the actual Capital had been co-opted into mere local matters of the place as an ”experiment station.” Thus even though, anti-secessionist and pro-Union, they would have thought of Charleston as the default or de facto Capital./51 Of course all of their views of their situation appear very perplexing to us indeed, and in reality likely to have provoked underlying anxiety in them, even if they thought in terms of great stability.
From a potential philosophical perspective, however, this unique environment, and their even more curious and perhaps grandiose self-perception of it, set the essential instability of the situation in sharper relief. It only heightens the potential contradiction and the need for a philosophical pressure- reliever of sorts. As Larry Tise, author of the most comprehensive study of proslavery ideology, especially as it involved those in the religious- clerical state, has perceptively noted:
“Instead of keeping to the defense of slavery as a perpetual institution of southern society, Charleston’s proslavery writers of 1822 and 1823 attempted to defend an escape from an intense emotional crisis.”/52 [italics added]
Further, we can read Tise’s observation in comparison to his reflections about other locales in the South to mean that this sense of “emotional crisis” was particularly sharp for those in Charleston. Because of this sense, I believe we are justified in seeing Frederick Dalcho and the others as symbolic of people immersed in these conflicting tendencies based on their local culture. With all the foregoing, it is not unreasonable therefore to read some words from his sermons as indicative of some sort of underlying sense that there was a greater sense than the prevailing order allowed:
“[Freemasonry] sees in every man a Brother, and where misfortune and want too often disperse and estrange both relations and acquaintances, there are ]Freemasonry’s] principles called into most active exertion.”/53
It seems perspicacious to understand men like Dalcho as seeing in Freemasonry a way of expressing their own incongruities. As we said previously, how else can one read the profound de-centralization of orthodox Christian faith that Freemasonry represents generally, and the Scottish Rite in particular, in such a cultural environment? If, by contrast, every scholarly source makes clear in clarion tones that orthodox religiosity was the most constant source of justification for bolstering the rigid system of slavery, there seems little doubt that the de-centralized vision Freemasonry must have represented something else for these men. The facts are that even with this being so, it did not represent something that could push them into a more morally heroic inclination. That is unfortunate. But if they were like most average people of their time in this respect, that does not mean that they were not different in the intuitive and symbolic talent and needed to express their own nettlesome incongruities which can be read between the lines. The beauty of the rituals is a potent and ultimately unavoidable evidence of this. And I will suggest as we conclude this paper that this deeper sense can be read into the Rituals and ethos of the Scottish Rite, as the intriguing Code of the South to which it gave expression.
Mar 15, 2011 11:10:02 AM
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