Dixie Blues: Making sense of Lott -- and the South.(Trent Lott)

Trent Lott is toast, whether he stays on the plate or not. What does his immolation say about history, and memory?

The Lott episode highlighted two periods in American history -- the civil rights movement and, behind it, the Civil War. (The storm blew up when Lott praised Strom Thurmond, Dixiecrat candidate for president in 1948; one of the killer quotes employed against Lott was a line of praise he had uttered about Jefferson Davis.) Each period raises a question about the Constitution, and about the natural force of change.

The Dixiecrats claimed to be for states' rights within the union, and at least one unbiased observer took them seriously. The 1948 campaign was the last one H. L. Mencken covered. He wished that Thurmond could be on the Maryland ballot so he could vote for him as an advocate of small government. Mencken was a longtime enemy of the revived Klan, and of segregation in his home state, so his praise of Thurmond cannot be attributed to racial animus. With characteristic bile, he added that the South had come late to small government, having swilled at the federal trough throughout the New Deal.

The constitutional claim of the Confederates was more radical -- they asserted a right to secede -- and yet it is less interesting, because it was relatively commonplace. Before 1860, secession was the last resort of whoever felt his ox was being gored. In the 1840s, abolitionists petitioned Congress to break up the union on the grounds that the North was being "drained to sustain" the South; New England Federalists threatened secession at the Hartford Convention as a protest against the War of 1812; at the Constitutional Convention, Gunning Bedford of Delaware said that the little states might well call in foreign allies if the big states pushed them too hard. Since 1865, the argument that states have a right to go their own way has seemed nonsensical, and no doubt it always was: According to our first constitution, the Articles of Confederation, the union was "perpetual." Yet if some secessionists had made good on their threats, the doctrine of extreme states' rights would have acquired thereby the authority of success.

The deeper issue raised by both the Dixiecrats and the Civil War is whether the currents of history need help. Would slavery and segregation have disappeared in the course of things? The Rev. William Sloane Coffin, a classic northeastern lefty clergyman, wondered ruefully in his memoirs whether baseball, football, basketball, and the armed forces had done more to integrate America than all the freedom rides and sit-ins of the Fifties and Sixties (he might have added popular music to his list of practical reformers). Was activism worthwhile? But political institutions can fight long rearguard actions, which can be beaten only by equal and opposing political counter-forces.

In the run-up to the Civil War, the case is clearer. Nostalgic defenders of the Confederacy say that the South would have shed the peculiar institution in its own time, unpressured by meddling Yankees. But American slavery was expanding in the mid 19th century, both morally and geographically. The Founding Fathers thought of slavery as an evil that should wither over time. This was the language of Washington and Jefferson, to say nothing of Franklin, Adams, and Hamilton. Seven of the original thirteen states abolished, or began to abolish, slavery in the founding period; slavery was forbidden in the old Northwest; the slave trade was made eligible for extinction in 1808, and, at President Jefferson's recommendation, was extinguished.

The turning point came in 1820. Missouri was petitioning for admission to the union, the first state carved entirely out of the tabula rasa of the west. The debate over whether it should be a ...