As we seem to be engaged in our own remembrance of the Confederacy here this week, I wanted to add a few thoughts on the difference between the Confederacy as it briefly was (i.e. the Rebellion and War) and the Confederacy as it was presented in later years. And to tell the stories of two men who were unafraid to point out the difference.
First, it has to be admitted that there was no such thing as the Confederate States of America. Despite having a capital, a legislature, executive and judiciary, currency and a constitution, the CSA was a territory in rebellion from the United States for five years.
Strangely, though, the Confederacy did exist, at least in the minds of Southerners and, eventually, everyone for a century after, due to the tireless efforts of revisionist authors, educators, journalists and popular entertainers who, from Appomattox onward, strove to paint a history of an imaginary country and cause centered on the noble defense of liberty and states' rights.
It was a mythos embraced by nearly every (caucasian) citizen of the defeated rebel states. But not all. In fact, two of the rebellion's greatest military heroes knew it was bunk, and publicly said so. And, of course, were vilified by their "country"men.
James Longstreet was perhaps the greatest general in the Confederate army, greater, possibly than his superior, Robert E. Lee, who called him "Old War Horse." His understanding of the futility of the frontal charge in the face of a superior enemy saved Lee's bacon at Second Manassas and, had Lee only listened to Longstreet at Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg, there might actually have been a Confederated States of America.
Yet the revised history tells us that it was Marse Robert's, not Longstreet's, genius for division of forces and flanking maneuvers, that allowed the rebels to hold out so long against such greater forces. Because the revisionists could not bear Longstreet's message to his fellow Southerners after the war: We lost. We don't get to write the history.
Settled in New Orleans after the war, the general was asked to write a piece for the New Orleans Times on the Reconstruction Acts passed by the Congress. Longstreet was bluntly realistic on the rights of victors to dictate terms to the surrendered.
"The surrender of the Confederate armies in 1865 involved 1. The surrender of the claim to the right of secession. 2. The surrender of the former political relations of the negro. 3. The surrender of the Southern Confederacy. These issues expired upon the fields last occupied by the Confederate armies. There they should have been buried. The soldier prefers to have the sod that receives him when he falls cover his remains. The political questions of the war should have been buried upon the fields that marked their end."
source (pdf)
So strongly did Longstreet believe in the rule of law and the bond of a surrendered soldier's word that he commanded U.S. forces against the White League rioters in New Orleans who overthrew the Reconstruction government of the state, a story too long and sad to recount here.
For his bluntness, and his honor, he was demoted, nearly erased from the histories of the revisionists, shunned by organizers of reunions and memorials, such as those promoted by the current governor of Virginia. He fell from the lofty pedestal engraved "beloved and trusted lieutenant of the Divine Lee" to "the scoundrel who lost Gettysburg." The truth, it appears, hurts.
Another brilliant Confederate military man, John Mosby, suffered a similar fate. Nicknamed "The Grey Ghost," Mosby led his Raiders in campaigns of harassment that stymied the Union's efforts to move south through the Shemnandoah Valley of Virginia, even striking behind Union lines and capturing senior officers. Such was his effectiveness that Union General Ulysses S. Grant ordered that any of his men captured be hung without trial.
But, at war's end, Mosby too understood the consequences of defeat and the obligations of the vanquished. He shunned reunions and interviews because he could not stand the revisionists' papering over of the realities of the rebellion.
Even more bluntly than Longstreet, he addressed the issue, saying, "I never apologized for anything I did during or since the war. I committed treason." On the subject of slavery and the attempt to remove it from the reasons for the rebellion, he was unequivocal.
"Why not talk about witchcraft if slavery was not the cause of the war? I always understood that we went to war on account of the thing we quarreled with the North about. I never heard f any other cause of quarrel than slavery."
Mosby supported the presidential campaign of the man who'd ordered him hung, U.S. Grant, and went into service for the new president in the diplomatic corps. He never set foot in Virginia again.
Today's revisionists, who wish, like their predecessors, to paper over the ugly truths of why the South attempted secession, would do well to read and learn from the words of their onetime heroes, men who understood that a soldiers duty requires him to fight as ordered and, should his cause be defeated, to live by the terms of his surrender.
To do otherwise is to dishonor the memories of greater men than they can hope to be, men who fought to the last for the cause they claim to champion, but were defeated, and accepted their defeat with the same honor they brought to the fight.
(Much thanks to Stephen Budiansky, whose book The Bloody Shirt: Terror After Appomattox, has taught me more about Reconstruction and the revisionist South than I enjoy knowing.)
Also, if you didn't read them, do see teacherken's rec-listed diary Appomattox and RoddieH's Southern Intransigence: Inconvenient Truths About The Confederacy.
Thanks for reading, and good night.