[
On request, I've here combined my four "Confederate Stuff" pieces, written for Facebook, into a single, more easily sharable post.]
Confederate Stuff
Part 1: Introduction:
Other
than some things I've written in a few Facebook groups, I've tried to
stay away from this whole Confederate flag donnybrook that plays itself
out in my feed every day lately. It's one of those issues that, over the
decades, has proven remarkably impervious to facts or to reason and in
the past, there just hasn't seemed much point in engaging with it.
The
other side of the coin, however, is that the current controversy offers
an opportunity to have a conversation about the subject that, for
decades upon decades, has
badly needed to happen but has never
been allowed to get off the ground. One of the things that comes through
my feed on a regular basis is a endless plethora of memes featuring a
Confederate flag and the words, "If this flag offends you, you need a
history lesson." And, of course, those memes are inevitably circulated
by people who prove worst in need of such a lesson. I have a sweet tooth
for such things. Maybe that much-needed conversation won't happen this
time, but maybe it will.
What has people dissing the
Confederate flag at the moment is Dylann Roof, a right-wing terrorist
who walked into a church in South Carolina and started shooting because
he wanted to kill black people. In pics, Roof is seen waving the
Confederate flag, which seems to have set off a sort of national gag
reflex. We speak of the object as a "Confederate flag" and its roots do
stretch back to the Civil War but that association, which I'll also
cover, is distant in time, the stuff of museums. What is this flag
today? For over 60 years, it's been one of the most prominent emblems of
segregation, racial hatred, white nationalism. It was adopted as the
flag of Strom Thurmond's "Dixiecrats," the then-Southern-based
right-wing of the Democratic party that, in the 1940s, split with the
national party over race and ran a campaign of "Segregation Forever." In
the '50s and '60s, it was thrown up all over the deep South to express
resistance to civil rights. It was and, indeed, still is ubiquitously
flown by the Ku Klux Klan and other like-minded orgs. The amount of
reactionary terrorism carried out by wavers of this flag alone is
staggering. This is the flag's modern context. And like it or not, this
is what it represents today.
I'll confess to being
somewhat puzzled by the anti-flag reaction in the wake of Roof. This
matter has been a festering wound on the soul of the U.S. for all this
time--why start getting outraged now? Something about the Roof killings
seems to have gotten to people in a way the rest hasn't. It may just be a
matter of exposure. Those in the corporate press don't exactly trip
over one another to cover the activities of groups like the KKK these
days. Terrorism by domestic white Christian rightists in the U.S. is
virtually invisible in the national corporate press. It is, in fact, a
far worse problem than terrorism by Muslim rightists but our news
mavens' general rule is that if it doesn't praise Allah, it isn't worth
the time of day. It isn't something people see, and out of sight
probably equals out of mind. For some reason, the Roof story drew
national attention rather than, as is usually the case, being relegated
to the level of a local crime story. When people finally saw it, they
were disgusted by it.
They should be.
But
if all that comes of the current uproar is finally consigning this
hateful rag to a museum, an opportunity to address some much deeper
wounds will have been squandered. Those people who wave this flag while
saying others need a history lesson need to finally get a history lesson
of their own.
--j.
Part 2:
Lately,
memes promoting and defending the Confederate flag flow through my feed
pretty regularly. Most who circulate such material, like most who wave
the Confederate flag itself, are far removed from the crude racists of
the Ku Klux Klan variety. Many of them don't have a racist thought in
mind. Ask them about it and they'll usually tell you the flag is about,
to quote a popular slogan, "heritage, not hate."
But what heritage?
The
irony of those who wave the flag while parroting that other popular
slogan, "if this flag offends you, you need a history lesson," really
is
lost on most of those doing the parroting. For generation upon
generation, their heads have been filled with a ludicrously false
Confederate apologist version of the American Civil War cynically
manufactured after its conclusion by those in the South looking to
expunge the sin of slavery and white supremacy from their cause in much
the same way Holocaust deniers try to expunge genocide from fascism.
The
first African slaves in America were brought to the Jamestown colony in
1619. During the 18th century struggle with England, Thomas Jefferson,
in his original draft of the Declaration of Independence, wanted to lay
blame for slavery at the doorstep of the King and be done with it. The
idea didn't go over very well. At the insistence of the powerful
Southern planter caste, slavery became integrated into the U.S.
Constitution. Still, during the radical fervor of the Revolutionary era,
abolitionist sentiment flourished. Between 1777 and 1804, Vermont,
Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island,
Ohio, New York, and New Jersey--most of the U.S. outside the
south--either abolished slavery outright or enacted programs of gradual
abolition. But slavery, particularly in the wake of the cotton gin,
became vital to the agrarian economy of the South, one of the wealthiest
in the world. In what later became the Confederate states, a handful of
rich planters, their fabulous wealth inextricably tied up in the
institution, called the shots.
For over 40 years prior
to the Civil War, slavery had been the top issue in the U.S. As the
nation expanded, there was a constant tension between slave and free
states, leading to a series of efforts to maintain a balance between the
two. The southern planter caste--already granted, by the 3/5 compromise
in the U.S. Constitution, disproportionate representation in the U.S.
government--was particularly sensitive about maintaining this balance so
as not to be outnumbered in the federal government, something the
planters saw as a threat to their survival. Abolitionist sentiment in
the U.S. continued to grow; the Underground Railroad appeared, aiding
slaves in escaping to free territories. Lax enforcement of fugitive
slave laws became a major grievance of the planters. In 1850, South
Carolina threatened to secede from the Union if California was admitted
to it as a free state. The Compromise of 1850 diffused the situation but
it also mercilessly tightened fugitive slave law and beat back an
effort to preclude the spread of slavery. With the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska
Act, congress decided that, instead of seeking any balance, the locals
in a territory could decide if they were to be a free or slave state.
The result was "Bleeding Kansas," a guerilla war between pro- and
anti-slavery forces that went on for a decade. In 1859, the fiery
abolitionist John Brown led his raid at Harpers Ferry. Brown's plan was
to break into the armory and arm slaves to resist their masters. If
failed but the prospect scared the living hell out of the Southern
planters. Abraham Lincoln proved to be the straw that broke the camel's
back. In 1860, he ran for president on a platform of opposing the
expansion of slavery to any further territories. Upon his victory, South
Carolina didn't even wait for his inauguration; in December, the state
seceded.
Confederate apologists will offer all sorts of
alternative explanations for this action. I've always found the most
entertaining to be those who throw around "state's rights" without
mention of what "right" was at issue. There is, fortunately, no
ambiguity on this point; South Carolina issued a "
Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union."
After a long recounting of U.S. history, the document is not only
centrally concerned with slavery, it's solely concerned with it--it
doesn't even pretend as if there's anything else behind the state's
actions.
The other states followed South Carolina's
lead and several of them issued these declarations. And all of them,
without exception, are centrally concerned with slavery.
Mississippi:
"Our
position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery--the
greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product
which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of
commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate
verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none
but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These
products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a
blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the
institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There
was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a
dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work
out our ruin."
Reflecting the white supremacism at the
heart of the Confederate project, the document rails against those who
"advocate negro equality, socially and politically." This was echoed by
Georgia in its own declaration, which rants against those allegedly seeking to bring about "the equality of the black and white races."
Ditto with
Texas:
"We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various
States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by
the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African
race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully
held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that
condition only could their existence in this country be rendered
beneficial or tolerable. That in this free government all white men are
and of right ought to be entitled to equal civil and political rights;
that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is
mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized
and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the
Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations; while the
destruction of the existing relations between the two races, as
advocated by our sectional enemies, would bring inevitable calamities
upon both and desolation upon the fifteen slave-holding states."
And
Florida:
"It is in so many words saying to you we will not burn you at the stake
but we will torture you to death by a slow fire we will not confiscate
your property and consign you to a residence and equality with the
African but that destiny certainly awaits your children."
The
government of Alabama granted a special commission to Stephen F. Hale
to act as a sort of ambassador to Kentucky, his job being to feel out KY
Gov. Beriah Magoffin's views on the dispute. Hale wrote
a fairly long letter, which still survives, outlining his state's view of the matter:
"If
the policy of the Republicans is carried out, according to the
programme indicated by the leaders of the party, and the South submits,
degradation and ruin must overwhelm alike all classes of citizens in the
Southern States. The slave-holder and non-slave-holder must ultimately
share the same fate--all be degraded to a position of equality with free
negroes, stand side by side with them at the polls, and fraternize in
all the social relations of life; or else there will be an eternal war
of races, desolating the land with blood, and utterly wasting and
destroying all the resources of the country. Who can look upon such a
picture without a shudder? What Southern man, be he slave-holder or
non-slave-holder, can without indignation and horror contemplate the
triumph of negro equality, and see his own sons and daughters, in the
not distant future, associating with free negroes upon terms of
political and social equality, and the white man stripped, by the
Heaven-daring hand of fanaticism of that title to superiority over the
black race which God himself has bestowed?"
In the
service of their own cause, abolitionists frequently referred to
Jefferson's principle, enunciated in the Declaration of Independence,
that "all men are created equal." Jefferson Davis didn't like that sort
of talk. He'd been serving as a senator from Mississippi. In January
1861, when his state seceded, he offered the institution
a farewell address:
"She
[Mississippi] has heard proclaimed the theory that all men are created
free and equal, and this made the basis of an attack upon her social
institutions; and the sacred Declaration of Independence has been
invoked to maintain the position of the equality of the races.... When
our Constitution was formed... we find provision made for that very
class of persons [Negroes] as property; they were not put upon the
footing of equality with white men--not even upon that of paupers and
convicts; but, so far as representation was concerned, were
discriminated against as a lower caste..."
Davis went on to become the president of the Confederate States of America.
And so on.
The
Confederate Constitution
used the U.S. Constitution as its basic model, rendering various
changes here and there. It attempted to end any controversy over
slavery. Article I provided that "No bill of attainder, ex post facto
law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves
shall be passed." Article IV provided that "The citizens of each
State... shall have the right of transit and sojourn in any State of
this Confederacy, with their slaves and other property; and the right of
property in said slaves shall not be thereby impaired." The same
article provided that, in any new territories, "the institution of negro
slavery as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized
and protected by Congress, and by the territorial government: and the
inhabitants of the several Confederate States and Territories, shall
have the right to take to such territory any slaves lawfully held by
them in any of the states or territories of the Confederate states."
This was the cause of the Confederacy; the record is as clear on this as it is exhaustingly extensive.
Only
three years after the war, Alexander Stephens, who had been the Vice
President of the Confederate States, wrote a book, "A Constitutional
View of the Late War Between the States." It was one of the first of
what would become a depressingly dizzying array of revisionist texts
that would appear in the century-and-a-half that has followed. In
Stephens' account, the war was a contest between a tyrannical central
government and those opposed to it, slavery wasn't really a very
important part of the equation at all, and
how dare any writer
claim the Confederates were "pro-slavery"! Stephens can be even more
torturous a read than I; I've taken an except from
his introduction here:
"It
is a postulate, with many writers of this day, that the late War was
the result of two opposing ideas, or principles, upon the subject of
African Slavery. Between these, according to their theory, sprung the
'irrepressible conflict,' in principle, which ended in the terrible
conflict of arms. Those who assume this postulate, and so theorize upon
it, are but superficial observers.
"That the War had
its origin in opposing principles... may be assumed as an unquestionable
fact. But the opposing principles... were of a very different character
from those assumed in the postulate. They lay in the organic Structure
of the Government of the States. The conflict in principle arose from
different and opposing ideas as to the nature of what is known as the
General Government. The contest was between those who held it to be
strictly Federal in its character, and those who maintained that it was
thoroughly National. It was a strife between the principles of
Federation, on the one side, and Centralism, or Consolidation, on the
other.
"Slavery, so called, was but the question on
which these antagonistic principles, which had been in conflict, from
the beginning, on divers other questions, were finally brought into
actual and active collision with each other on the field of battle....
"It
is the fashion of many writers of the day to class all who opposed the
Consolidationists in this, their first step, as well as all who opposed
them in all their subsequent steps, on this question, with what they
style the Pro-Slavery Party. No greater injustice could be done any
public men, and no greater violence be done to the truth of History,
than such a classification. Their opposition to that measure, or kindred
subsequent ones, sprung from no attachment to Slavery; but, as
Jefferson's, Pinkney's and Clay's, from their strong convictions that
the Federal Government had no rightful or Constitutional control or
jurisdiction over such questions; and that no such action, as that
proposed upon them, could be taken by Congress without destroying the
elementary and vital principles upon which the Government was founded.
"By
their acts, they did not identify themselves with the Pro-Slavery Party
(for, in truth, no such Party had, at that time, or at any time in the
History of the Country, any organized existence). They only identified
themselves, or took position, with those who maintained the Federative
character of the General Government."
Whew! Did you get
all that? Back in 1861--7 years earlier and only a few days before the
Confederacy would start the Civil War--Stephens had
a very different--and much clearer--view of these matters:
"The
new Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions
relating to our peculiar institutions--African slavery as it exists
among us--the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization.
This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution.
Jefferson, in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the 'rock upon
which the old Union would split.' He was right. What was conjecture with
him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the
great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The
prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at
the time of the formation of the old Constitution were, that the
enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that
it was wrong in principle, socially, morally and politically. It was an
evil they knew not well how to deal with; but the general opinion of the
men of that day was, that, somehow or other, in the order of
Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This
idea, though not incorporated in the constitution, was the prevailing
idea at that time. The constitution, it is true, secured every essential
guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no
argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus
secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas,
however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of
the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and
the idea of a Government built upon it--when the 'storm came and the
wind blew, it fell.' Our new Government is founded upon exactly the
opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon
the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that
slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral
condition."
When people who wave the Confederate flag
use the slogan "Heritage, Not Hate," this is the "heritage" in question,
whether they realize it or not.
But is that all there is? No. I'll get to
that in the next round.
--j.
Part 3:
I've covered the ugly, racist "heritage"
represented by the Confederate flag. That's what's being celebrated by
those who revere it, whether they recognize it or not. But that "whether
they recognize it or not" part is a rather complicated matter, one not
typically treated with much sensitivity by internet flame-wars.
The
Confederate states had launched what became the most murderous war in
U.S. history and nearly destroyed themselves. Defeat was a bitter pill
that had to be swallowed but the fact that all of it had been done in
the name of such an utterly disreputable cause was, for far too many,
simply more than they were willing to acknowledge. In the years after
the war, various writers in the South began to craft a self-serving
mythology that has been dubbed the "Lost Cause." It portrayed the
antebellum South as a sort of beautiful paradise of chivalrous Christian
gentlemen and genteel Southern belles sipping mint juleps on the porch
while smiling, contented darkies worked the land. Slavery was a benign
institution--loyal simpletons, living out their God-given station in
life while overseen by benevolent masters. Far from being fought for its
preservation, the war was a noble effort at self-defense by saintly
warriors out to defend freedom and resist tyrannical government
encroachment. The mythologists ubiquitously described the Confederates
as the true heirs of the American revolutionaries.
This
mythology began to develop almost immediately after the war's end and,
in fact, drew from even older pre-war Southern cultural
self-mythologizing (to an extent that, in my view, is underappreciated
but that's a different topic). As it evolved, it encompassed the
Reconstruction era; the popular image of rapacious Yankee carpetbaggers
descending on the prostrate South while radicals, aided by scoundrelous
scallawags, empowered corrupt, iniquitous governments across the former
Confederacy in order to extend their own power and profit is a product
of it. The post-war Ku Klux Klan--in reality, perhaps the most violent
terrorist movement that has ever operated on U.S. soil and the first
that could accurately (if anachronistically) be dubbed fascist--was a
noble enterprise to defend the Southern way of life from these
interlopers who sought to destroy it.
This entirely
self-serving blend of half-truths, misrepresentations and fanciful
fabrications proved incredibly popular in the South. Organizations like
the Southern Historical Society, the Sons of Confederate Veterans and
the United Daughters of the Confederacy (the latter of which became
particularly powerful) sprang to life, the promotion of the myth being
among their central goals. They wrote, lectured, created monuments,
museums, successfully lobbied for laws requiring that history textbooks
reflect the mythology and created blacklists of books that failed to do
so. Mildred Lewis Rutherford of the UDC--a teacher from Georgia who
became one of the best-known "historians" of her age--spent much of her
life as an apostle of the myth, which had become a full-blown ideology
(a series of them, really) that broke the bounds of the South. In 1915,
D.W. Griffith directed THE BIRTH OF A NATION, a film based on the
revisionist novel "The Clansman" by Thomas Dixon Jr. With its images of
mounted Klansman heroically riding to the rescue against villainous
Reconstruction reformers, it became a smash hit, the first American film
ever screened in the White House (for then-president Woodrow Wilson)
and a major factor in the 20th century rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan,
which used it as a recruiting tool for years. In 1936, Margaret Mitchell
published "Gone With The Wind," which became a massive bestseller,
netted for her the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and became one of the most
popular representations of this mythology ever created. Until, that is,
the movie version was released in 1939. The film took Best Picture at
the Academy Awards and became the biggest box-office success in cinema
history, a title it still holds 76 years later.
Pro-Confederate
ideology has continued to mutate and evolve. As Americans began to come
to terms with the unvarnished horrors of slavery, one doesn't hear as
much from Confederate apologists about those "contented darkies"
(although they're still around in some quarters). As a counter, a
significant apologist literature has developed around the longstanding
myth of black Confederate soldiers who willingly took up arms in defense
of the Confederacy, sometimes said to number in the tens of thousands.
The actual number: zero (I'll be dealing with this matter later). Other
apologists have tried to get around slavery by focusing on Confederate
legalistic arguments, taking the position that the Confederate states
had a "right" to secede and, in rather Orwellian fashion, casting those
states as defenders of free association standing against tyranny.
In the century-and-a-half since the war, elements of this long-nurtured Lost Cause mythology have taken
very
deep root in the U.S., particularly in the South. The perceptions of
many--probably most--who revere the Confederate flag have been shaped by
generation after generation of this propaganda; they don't even realize
their view of the matter is a product of carefully cultivated fictions.
Others fancy the romanticism of the mythology, which can seem
particularly appealing in the increasingly oppressive present. A growing
contingent of rightists simply see history as a weapon to be used in
contemporary political disputes and don't really care about the truth.
There are lots of reasons why people cling to the flag besides simply
looking to glorify a white supremacist cause (though those looking to do
that are yet another faction who cling to it). If any reasoned
discussion is going to proceed, recognizing this is essential. There's
no doubt the arrogance bred with ignorance one so often receives from
those who brandish the flag brings down a lot of scorn and contempt by
those more familiar (or more concerned) with the history in this matter
but the other side of that coin is that not every fellow--and not, in
fact, most fellows--waving the flag is some dim-witted racist.
--j.
Part 4:
My
plea for greater understanding shouldn't be misunderstood; those who
wave the Confederate flag are, whether or not they know it and whether
or not they acknowledge it--and whether or not they like it--venerating
something that is utterly abhorrent. Let there be no mistake about this:
the Confederate cause was mass murder in the service of human bondage
and racial superiority and there's nothing honorable, benign or remotely
worthy of reverence in that. As a counter to this, it's sometimes
objected that most of the individual soldiers who fought for the
Confederacy didn't own slaves and many had motives other than upholding
slavery but even if those premises were sound--and as I'm about to
demonstrate, they aren't--this line of reasoning is still terminally
fallacious. Some buck private from Alabama doesn't set the policy and no
more dictates the cause in which he's serving than do servicemen today.
And the flag represents the cause.
In the case of the
Civil War, the likelihood is that theoretical buck private was inducted
into the army against his will, which, alone, renders rather dubious any
appeal to whatever he thought he was there to do. The Confederacy had
to resort to forced conscription almost immediately. In April 1862, just
over a year to the day after launching the war, the first Confederate
draft was enacted. The Southern planter caste, which had been entirely
responsible for bringing about the conflict, exempted itself from the
draft, so there weren't a lot of rich plantation owners in foxholes to
offer up their reasoning for the war they'd brought about.[1] It is,
however, a mistake to assume few in the South owned slaves.[2]
Altogether, about 1/3 of families in the Confederate states were
slaveowners. In Arkansas, it was 20%, the lowest percentage in the
Confederacy. In Mississippi and South Carolina (the birthplace of
secession), it was nearly half. Most slaveowners didn't own big
plantations but the Confederate states' entire economy was built on
slave labor.
Those deluded souls who brandish the
Confederate flag under the popular slogan "Heritage, Not Hate" haven't
just had their perceptions of the Confederacy shaped by false
propaganda. They're also being, intentionally or otherwise, quite
selective in what Southern "heritage" they're celebrating. To an extent,
this could be forgiven--the other side of the story has, until fairly
recently, been largely ignored by historians (in my view, a spectacular
failure of the craft). Popular histories tend to leave the impression of
a Southern population unified behind the Confederacy but nothing could
be further from the truth. It's estimated that about half the white
population of the South opposed the Confederacy. In addition, a large
portion of the Confederate population were slaves, who, for obvious
reasons, certainly had no loyalty to the Confederate cause.[3] Slaves
made up nearly half the population of Alabama, Florida, Georgia and
Louisiana and were a numerical majority in both Mississippi and South
Carolina, the birthplace of secession. Most of the South was opposed to the Confederacy. A lot of the South
actively fought against it. The Civil War wasn't just a conflict between
North and South, it was also a civil war within the South.
Sam Houston, the hero of the Mexican
war and the governor of Texas during the onset of the crisis, was
dramatically removed from office when he defiantly refused to support
the Confederacy but in most accounts of the war, most Southern
opposition tends to fall through the cracks. The anti-Confederate and
pro-Union factions within the South, which overlapped but weren't always
entirely the same, didn't publish much. Many of them lived in places
where it wasn't physically safe to hold such views. Some waged guerilla
war against the Confederate army. Their stories are collected in, among
other places, the records of the Southern Claims Commission, which was
established by the U.S. government in the 1870s to reimburse those who
had, during the war, remained loyal to the Union and had furnished
property to (or had property officially confiscated by) the U.S. Army. A
fairly limited scope but it eventually produced a large and much
wider-ranging record, a record of which historians have made far too
little use.
The historical record has been further
distorted by the ceaseless activities of Confederate apologists, as I
covered in the last sheaf of these notes. In "Lies Across America: What
Our Historic Sites Get Wrong," historian James Loewen documents how
Confederate apologists, pimping their mythologized version of the war in
the decades following its end, managed, as part of their propaganda
efforts, to erect monuments to the Confederate dead that seemed intended
to erase from memory the existence of Southerners who opposed the
Confederacy. The United Daughters of the Confederacy erected one of
their monuments in Jones County, Mississippi, a county that remained
loyal to the Union and that, at one point, launched an armed revolt that
the Confederate military had to put down. Loewen:
"In
the border states, the UDC and SCV (Sons of Confederate Veterans)
erected pro-Confederate monuments and markers that make Maryland, West
Virginia, Kentucky and Missouri--states that were predominately
Unionist--look predominately Confederate. Kentucky's legislature voted
not to secede... Eventually, 90,000 Kentuckians would fight for the
United States as against 35,000 for the Confederate States.
Nevertheless, according to historian Thomas Clark, the state now has 72
Confederate monuments and only two Union ones! West Virginia seceded
from Virginia to stay with the Union, yet in 1910 the UDC erected a
statue of Confederate Gen. 'Stonewall' Jackson on the State Capitol
lawn. The Daughters are still at it: the only memory of Civil War
soldiers at the Charles Town, West Virginia courthouse is a
pro-Confederate plaque the UDC affixed in 1986."[4]
In one of the most visible manifestations of opposition to the Confederacy, a
massive number of southerners joined the Union army. The war is always
said to have pitted "brother against brother," but the extent of this is
little understood. For every two Southerners who served in the
Confederate army, one served in the Union army. The South, in fact,
provided more men to the Union army during the war than were killed by
the Confederate army.
For those with longstanding roots
in the South, this is their heritage as much as or, arguably, even more
than than the Confederacy. Those who fly the Confederate flag while
crowing about their "heritage" are choosing a very specific part of
their ancestry to celebrate--the white supremacist part devoted to
maintaining slavery. And, as noted, this is the case whether or not they
know it and whether or not they acknowledge it. The Confederacy
shouldn't be an ongoing concern; it belongs in a museum, not
ubiquitously hanging from flagpoles and defiantly pushed in people's
faces in a hurtful and divisive way. Southerners are notoriously
hardheaded. I know; I'm one of them. I don't, for a moment, believe them
impervious to reason on a matter such as this. Far too many of them
don't understand it though, and become very upset and even offended when
people cast a critical eye toward their reverence for their symbol of
the Confederacy. Some of them have no interest in wanting to
understanding it--they're deeply emotionally invested in it for various
reasons and there probably isn't any helping them. For most, though,
that's not the case. That's part of why I've spent the last few days up
to my eyeballs in these notes, writing more about the subject than I
ever wanted. If it contributes some little bit to a greater
understanding, both from my fellow Southerners and from those
outside-looking-in, I'll have accomplished my goal.
But most likely, no one will ever read any of it, so what can you do?
--j.
---
[1]
The wealthy did the same in the North when, later, the U.S. established
one. The cry of "rich man's war, poor man's fight" went up on both
sides of the Mason-Dixon.
[2] Confederate apologists
have often misrepresented census figures by placing the raw number of
free people against the number of slaves, which makes it appear as if
there were far fewer slave owners than there were. The relevant data
concerns the number of families who owned slaves, numbers which are
available in
the same census data.
[3]
In the last few decades, Confederate apologists, in an effort to
counter greater public awareness of the horrors of slavery, have
transformed their longstanding mythology about loyal slaves who accepted
their lot and crafted a significant body of propaganda advancing the
notion that there were black Confederate soldiers who took up arms in
defense of the Confederacy. These soldiers are said to number in the
tens of thousands and sometimes even hundreds of thousands.
The
actual number is closer to zero. Slaves were hauled along with the
Confederate army; their job was to act as bearers, servants, laborers.
Race-based gun bans had existed in the South for many years before the
war. Every Confederate state, in their respective legal codes, made it a
criminal act, typically punishable by death, for anyone to arm or train
in the use of arms slaves. Most of them extended this prohibition to
free blacks as well.
By December 1864, the position of
the Confederate army had become desperate. Robert E. Lee petitioned to
be allowed to induct black soldiers. In reaction to this, Howell Cobb of
Georgia, reflecting the general consensus that this violated the basic
premise of the Confederacy, called the request "the most pernicious
idea that has been suggested since the war began." He wrote, "You cannot
make soldiers of slaves, or slaves of soldiers. The day you make a
soldier of them is the beginning of the end of the Revolution. And if
slaves seem good soldiers, then our whole theory of slavery is wrong."
Even with its military decimated and on the verge of total collapse, the
Confederate congress only acquiesced to allowing the draft of blacks by
a single vote and only out of utter desperation. The authorization was
passed on March 23, 1865; the war ended a few days later, on April 9,
1865. The first group of black soldiers were put in training; they never
saw any real action.
For years, G.K. Edgerton became a
sort of mascot of the neo-Confederates, pimping the black Confederate
soldiers myth and other elements of apologist ideology. He was embraced
particularly warmly by those looking to separate the Confederacy from
slavery because he, himself, is black. Here he is doing
his clownish routine
in my hometown. Edgerton was, at one point in life, the head of the
Asheville, North Carolina chapter of the NAACP, which threw him out
nearly 20 years ago (for unrelated activities). Skip Alsop, the
executive director of the NC state branch, said of him, "His elevator
doesn't doesn't go all the way to the top. It doesn't even reach the
second floor." An utter crackpot, Edgerton spent years crisscrossing the
country dressed in Confederate grey and spreading Confederate apologist
lies. Slavery had nothing to do with the Civil War, slavery was "a
great institution of learning" for blacks, there were black Confederate
soldiers, etc.. He has a history of associating with white supremacists,
including Kirk Lyons, an open neo-Nazi with whom he worked for years.
[4]
Loewen covers how Confederate apologists, as part of their propaganda
work, spread pro-Confederate monuments far and wide. One stands in
Cleveland, Mississippi, a town that wasn't even founded until two
decades after the war--at the time of the war, it was empty wilderness.
Apologists managed to erect monuments to the Confederate dead in places
as far-flung as Montana, which neither had any "Confederate dead" nor
even existed at the time of the war.
