The New York Times did an interview with Curtis Yarvin, a computer engineer who in middle age has become a major player in the reexamination of history by new-right power influencers. He spoke on a number of topics with David Marchese of the Times, including Yarvin’s advocacy of the United States being governed by a monarchy. I was interested in his revisionist history of the Civil War Era and the end of slavery, I have been listening to his words for serval years since his 2017 exchange with Milo Yiannopoulos, but I know that many of my readers may not be familiar with him. Here is how Marchese describes Yarvin’s influence:
But while Yarvin himself may still be obscure, his ideas are not. Vice President-elect JD Vance has alluded to Yarvin’s notions of forcibly ridding American institutions of so-called wokeism. The incoming State Department official Michael Anton has spoken with Yarvin about how an “American Caesar” might be installed into power. And Yarvin also has fans in the powerful, and increasingly political, ranks of Silicon Valley. Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist turned informal adviser to President-elect Donald Trump, has approvingly cited Yarvin’s anti-democratic thinking. And Peter Thiel, a conservative megadonor who invested in a tech start-up of Yarvin’s, has called him a “powerful” historian. Perhaps unsurprising given all this, Yarvin has become a fixture of the right-wing media universe: He has been a guest on the shows of Tucker Carlson and Charlie Kirk, among others.
I will give some extended quotations from the interview so that you can hear it from the horse’s mouth. You can read and listen to the entire interview here. The Times journalist is in bold:
There’s two more [quotes from Yarvin]. “It is very difficult to argue that the Civil War made anyone’s life more pleasant, including that of freed slaves.” Come on. [Yarvin’s actual quote called it “the War of Secession,” not the Civil War.]…
I could say things about either, but let’s move on to one of your other examples. I think the best way to grapple with African Americans in the 1860s — just Google slave narratives. Go and read random slave narratives and get their experience of the time. There was a recent historian who published a thing — and I would dispute this, this number is too high — but his estimate was something like a quarter of all the freedmen basically died between 1865 and 1870.
I can’t speak to the veracity of that. But you’re saying there are historical examples in slave narratives where the freed slaves expressed regret at having been freed. This to me is another prime example of how you selectively read history, because other slave narratives talk about the horrible brutality.
Absolutely.
“Difficult to argue that the Civil War made anyone’s life more pleasant, including freed slaves”?
OK, first of all, when I said “anyone,” I was talking about a population group rather than individuals.
Are you seriously arguing that the era of slavery was somehow better than —
If you look at the living conditions for an African American in the South, they are absolutely at their nadir between 1865 and 1875. They are very bad because basically this economic system has been disrupted.
I can’t believe I’m arguing this.
Brazil abolished slavery in the 1880s without a civil war, so when you look at the cost of the war or the meaning of the war, it visited this huge amount of destruction on all sorts of people, Black and white. All of these evils and all of these goods existed in people at this time, and what I’m fighting against in both of those quotes, also in the way the people respond to [Anders] Breivik [Norwegian terrorist] — basically you’re responding in this cartoonish way. What is the difference between a terrorist and a freedom fighter? That’s a really important question in 20th-century history. To say that I’m going to have a strong opinion about this stuff without having an answer to that question, I think is really difficult and wrong.
I have read a lot of slave narratives, and I can tell you none of those slaves were talking about having a better life under slavery than after they escaped the bonds of slavery. In fact, very few Black people ever offered themselves up to be re-enslaved after their escape. As Union troops spread throughout the South in 1863 to 1865 and proclaimed freedom to those Blacks on plantations, few formerly enslaved people decided to head to areas under Confederate control so that they could continue to be held as slaves. And, as Blacks began voting during Reconstruction, they overwhelmingly voted for the Republican Party which had ended slavery.
Many former slaves experienced disappointment after Emancipation. White-Only legislatures in 1865 and 1866 made up of former Confederates passed the Black Codes in those Confederate states that put in a system of laws that denied rights based on color to African Americans. These included to right travel, vote, serve on juries, and organize their own organizations. Most of these were overturned by the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the 14th Amendment. However, as the Federal government pulled back from enforcing the civil rights granted during Reconstruction, white terror reasserted its sway over the Southland.
Did this mean that lives did not improve for Blacks during the Civil War and its immediate aftermath? Not at all. After the restraints of the authoritarian Black Codes were lifted in 1866, Blacks could travel to be reunited with family members who had been forcibly separated by their white “masters.” Blacks became property owners for the first time in the South. Black institutions created the African American led churches, labor unions, and benevolent societies date back to this period. And, finally, the important gains in civil rights in the 1950s were to enforce the civil rights acts of the 1860s and 1870s.
On thing that caught my attention was this quote by Yarvin:
There was a recent historian who published a thing — and I would dispute this, this number is too high — but his estimate was something like a quarter of all the freedmen basically died between 1865 and 1870.
Never take an “historian’s” word when he says a “recent historian” without naming the person and that he “published a thing” on the topic. Most “historians” would know the name of the person they are relying on to make their claim or at least to know whether the “thing” was a book, a journal article, or a blog post.
I don’t want to make any claims to know exactly what source Yarvin is talking about, although I have my own suspicions. In 2012, Professor Jim Downs published a book Sick From Freedom:
Downs provides plenty of anecdotal evidence of refusal by Union Army commanders to support freed slaves and a complete lack of planning in 1862 to 1864 by the Lincoln Administration to create a refugee relief program for newly liberated people. Downs said that the death toll was high. He did not say that a quarter of Blacks died during this era. What he said was that at least one quarter of the former slaves got sick or died between 1862 and 1870. When he spoke of the deaths he said that they numbered in the hundreds of thousands, not that there were a million deaths which would have been the outcome if a quarter of all of the four million slaves had died.
By the way, the 1860 Black population of the United States was 4.4 million, of whom four million were enslaved. We would have expected that number to drop in the 1870 Census, but instead the Black population rose to 5.4 million. Now of course some Blacks died from the refugee experience during war time, but the population did not see a sudden drop, which would have taken place if there had been a demographic catastrophe. In addition, a fairly large number of people, of all races, die during a any ten year period. I look back and can think of family and friends who I knew ten years ago who are no longer living. They did not die from war or COVID, they died of old age, car crashes, diseases caused by smoking or obesity. If we look back at death during the Emancipation process, a fairly large portion would have died under slavery or freedom, but as the statistics on the population of Blacks in the 1860s show, there was not a marked demographic collapse. In fact, if we look at the number of Blacks in the United States in 1850 there were 3.6 million Black people. This increased by 17% over the next ten years to 4.4 in 1860. In the following ten year between 1860 and 1870, the years of Yarvin’s die-off of Blacks, in fact the Black population went up by 23%.
Note: The photo of Yarvin at the top of this article is from the New York Times.
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