What I have to say about civility (selections from Fanatical Schemes)

[Selections from Fanatical Schemes: Proslavery Rhetoric and the Tragedy of Consensus]

[The argument that the Civil War was caused by the extremism of “both sides”] typifies one conventional way of understanding conflict, exemplified in the saying that “it takes two to make a fight.” According to this view, if there is a violent conflict, it is the result of at least two parties who refuse to compromise, so both parties are to be equally blamed for their intransigence. This sense of a public sphere of compromise and concession is often connected to privileging civility, a powerful, but very vague, concept. “Civility” tends to be defined through negation: it is not emotional or abusive; it does not involve personal attack; it is not offensive. Offending one’s audience, it is argued, alienates them, and persuading them necessitates moving them to one’s side, not pushing them away:

When the ebullitions of passion burst in peevish crimination of the audience themselves, when a speaker sallies forth, armed with insult and outrage for his instruments of persuasion, you may be assured, that this Quixotism of rhetoric must eventually terminate like all other modern knight errantry and that the fury must always be succeeded by the impotence of the passions.  (John Quincy Adams, Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory I: 365.)

The hope is that a rhetor can find a civil way to make any argument–including dissent. Yet, dissent is inherently disruptive, and necessarily upsetting to anyone who identifies with the current system. Hence, as various scholars have noted, privileging discourse that is not upsetting necessarily furthers the disenfranchisement of the already marginalized (see especially Darsey).

This notion of the power of civil discourse is wonderfully optimistic, as it suggests that there might be a discursive solution to every conflict, that violence happens when only rhetors make their arguments badly. In its most extreme form, this theory of rhetoric makes an absolute distinction between the content and form of an argument, so that abolitionists were not wrong to want slavery abolished, but in how they made their case. Had abolitionists tempered their rhetoric, had they not armed themselves with insult and outrage, they might have persuaded slavers to free their slaves; this was the argument that Channing made in Slavery. Condemning abolitionists for their vehemence, Channing promises a different kind of criticism of slavery: “I propose to show that slavery is a great wrong, but I do not intend to pass sentence on the character of the slave-holder” (16). As demonstrated by the reaction to Channing’s book, his readers did not see the distinction; his book was characterized as “pouring oil on a conflagration” (Austin 11), and, despite Channing’s claims to reject violence, “it is insurrection that he preaches” (Austin 14). The 1836 anonymous response insists that, although Channing may not have intended “to excite the blacks to take ‘vengeance,’ and free themselves,” “no work has appeared (so far as I know) so well adapted to produce precisely that attempt” (11). Proslavery readers saw no difference between his rhetoric and the rhetoric of the people he condemned.

As will be discussed in the seventh chapter, the issue of civil language came up continually in regard to the anti-slavery petitions presented to Congress. When a Representative from Massachusetts, George Briggs, pointed out that the language was respectful, James Bouldin (from Virginia) responded that the very nature of the petitions–their criticizing slaveowners–meant that they were inherently disrespectful (40). If “civility” and “respectful” are seen as synonymous, there is no such thing as civil criticism of people higher in any hierarchy. Criticism is only permitted when it is superiors criticizing inferiors, which means, necessarily, the hierarchy itself cannot be criticized; substantive social change is impossible. It is equally impossible if “civility” is defined by the reaction of the audience–that is, if it is assumed that “uncivil” and “upsetting” are synonymous, then civil disagreement on central issues is impossible. Under such limitations, rhetoric cannot solve political conflicts.

I do not mean to suggest that the narrative of proslavery forces provoked by abolitionists is obviously false; it is clear that anti-abolitionism significantly increased in the mid-1830s, and proslavery rhetors certainly blamed abolitionists for their actions. Although I will argue that seeing abolitionist rhetorical stridency as the catalyst for anti-abolitionism is a mistake, it occurs naturally from the sensible project of looking at what participants in a debate say about their motives in getting uglier. In addition, our habit of imagining issues as binaries, coupled with how difficult it is to articulate the relation between rhetoric and reality, means that there is a tendency to assume that discourse either really is or really is not about the purported issue. To suggest that proslavery rhetors were not really provoked by abolitionist rhetoric seems to imply that that rhetoric did not really bother them, and that’s an absurd proposition. People argued about slavery because they genuinely (and vehemently) disagreed about it.

[….]

If “civility” and “respectful” are seen as synonymous, there is no such thing as civil criticism of people higher in any hierarchy. Criticism is only permitted when it is superiors criticizing inferiors, which means, necessarily, the hierarchy itself cannot be criticized; substantive social change is impossible. It is equally impossible if “civility” is defined by the reaction of the audience–that is, if it is assumed that “uncivil” and “upsetting” are synonymous, then civil disagreement on central issues is impossible. Under such limitations, rhetoric cannot solve political conflicts.

[….]

Abolitionist rhetors were no more emotional than proslavery ones, and they were far more rational. Emotionalism and rationality are not at opposite ends of a spectrum; they are only tangentially related (unless one has the circular, and useless, definition of each as the absence of the other). William Lloyd Garrison, whose writing style I personally find irritating, engaged in rational argumentation insofar as he accurately represented his oppositions’ arguments and engaged them. He strove for internal consistency, his paper presented multiple sides of various arguments, he published arguments with which he disagreed. Harriet Beecher Stowe, another author often condemned for polemicism, demonstrates deep knowledge of proslavery rhetoric in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Passionate, sentimental, committed, and assertive, these authors still managed to represent proslavery arguments clearly and accurately. Abolitionists were not more histrionic than proslavery rhetors, but they did have more uteruses among them, and I would suggest that the extremely sexist tendency to perceive women as more emotional, coupled with a desire to shift the stasis away from slavery, facilitated the creation of a political, and then scholarly, consensus about the fanaticism of abolitionists. Women were excluded from public discourse because they would be emotional and irrational; they would, in other words, behave the same way proslavery rhetors already did. Whether we are to understand histrionic outbursts as a point of white male privilege, or to see proslavery rhetors’ condemning abolitionists for doing what they themselves do as yet another instance of cunning projection, is unclear to me. But it is clear they did it.

A famous exponent of an extreme version of this tendency is Frank Owsley, who blamed “egocentric sectionalism” for the war, a flaw practiced more by the North than the South: “The people in one section failed in their language and conduct to respect the dignity and self-respect of the people in the other section” (Stampp, Causes, 56). It is striking the extent to which this echoes proslavery rhetoric. By “the people” of the south Owsley means slavers–if anything, abolitionists had far more respect for the dignity and self-respect of slaves and African Americans than did slavers–and the war was caused by not respecting their feelings. Owsley does not condemn the south for failing to respect the feelings of the north; this is not, despite his concluding sentence (that unity is in danger when “one section fails to respect the self-respect of the people of another section” 58), an image of mutual respect.[i] Less extreme versions of this explanation arise in Tise and Faust, both of whom still accept that there was something provoking in abolitionists’ rhetoric. What one wonders is just what Owsley, Tise, and Faust think abolitionists should have done instead–there was, as made clear in the gag rule, no way to criticize slavery that was not provocative; slavers took any criticism as a personal attack.

To blame abolitionists for incivility is to preclude abolition. My grievance is not with the notion that public discourse ought to have certain standards, and that billingsgate should be avoided–I hope it’s been clear that I consider proslavery rhetors’ reliance on smear tactics was juvenile, hypocritical, and destructive. The problem is that conventional notions of civility, which tend to emphasize whether the audience is offended, inevitably put an impossible burden on dissenters. That latter point cannot be emphasized enough. While calls for social change might themselves call for more or less violence, they always necessarily involve criticism, and no one likes to be criticized. To prohibit anything other than “civil” political discourse, as long as “civil” is defined as discourse that does not upset anyone, is to prohibit social change.

[i] It is also interesting that Owsley asserts that “The language of insult which the so-called fire-eaters employed, however, was not usually coarse of obscene in comparison with the abolitionists; it was urbane and restrained in a degree–but insulting” (58). This is simply not the case.