In the early 1980s I was an Ensign onboard a Navy destroyer. One evening liberty call went down and a young black enlisted man requested permission to go ashore while I was standing watch as the Officer of the Deck. I noticed the young man had a large STARS and BARS patch on the back of his jeans jacket, so I briefly stopped him and asked if he had any idea what that symbol represented. He answered he did not. I permitted him to go ashore with the stipulation that he seek counsel from his Chief, who was also black, upon his return from liberty. That incident lingers in my mind today, especially in light of the Governnor of Virginia's announcement of Confederate History month in the Commonwealth of Virgina.
Two weeks ago I stood at the Highwater Mark of the Confederacy at Gettysburg, looking across the mile and a quarter of open field towards Seminary Ridge, where 13,000 of General Robert E. Lee's finest had gathered on the steamy afternoon of July 3, 1863 in preparation for Picketts Charge. I told the Park Ranger on the scene that family legend has it my father's great-great grandfather, a foot soldier in the 5th North Carolina regiment, was a participant in the doomed attempt to overrun the Army of the Potomac entrenched behind the stone walls on Cemetery Hill and Cemetery Ridge. Terrell H. was one of the lucky ones: he lost an eye but survived a bloody engagement where, over a three day period, 150,000 troops had fought, resulting in 50,000 casulties, in and around a small, otherwise non-descript village in central Pennsylvania.
Over the years I have repeatedly gravitated back to Gettysburg for some reason, trying to grasp the enormity of the carnage of that conflict and that battle in particular. I can never hope to gauge the courage and valor of those who fought on both sides. The suffering on both sides was beyond measure. You cannot but help admire the fortitude of all who were there to serve. But you can question the MOTIVES of those who fought for the South, at least I do.
Think about this. It has been noted that 600,000 lives were lost in the American Civil War. An equal percentage of casualties from today's population in America would be 13.8 million casualties.
The Southern economy was devastated, cities like Atlanta, Richmond, Columbia SC and Vicksburg laid to waste in the process. Plantations, farms, livestock, small homes, small enterprises, all throughout the South lay in ruins. So we celebrate this? In many places in the South the Fourth of July would not be celebrated for the next 80 years. The black population in the South, of course, would bear the brunt of the anger of the whites for decades to come. The legacy of Jim Crow lingers today in some places.
As a Yankee (Rhode Islander) by birth, I have never held any sympathy for anyone formally celebrating the Confederacy's "Southern Heritage," at the expense of this nation's history, or the history of the black people who were so wrongly treated for the first 300 years of American history. To this day I take great umbrage at the sight of any of the Southern state flags that incorporate the Rebel Stars and Bars within their design, and I consider the Sons of Confederacy and any other copy-cat organization traitors to the fundamental ideals of America. They are little different that the Ku Klux Klan, an organization founded by Confederate veterans like terrorist Nathan Bedford Forrest. They proclaim a love of "freedom and liberty," defending a culture and an institution that denied fundamental rghts to millions of blacks. It is outright hypocrisy.
I recently purchased a book THE SOUTH WAS RIGHT to determine if my bais against the long-lost Confederate cause was largely flawed. This book is written by two (admittedly) articulate authors whose premise is hopelessly flawed. Essentially they argue that slavery was an institution throughout the United States in 1860, both north and south. Abraham Lincoln was a tyrant. Blacks in the South embraced their bondage, to the point of willingnly fighting for the South, "only 5-8% of Confederate troops owned slaves," the horrors of the Andersonville prison in Georgia was a myth, the precendent for "the Second Revolutionary War" (i.e. War for Southern Independence) had been set by the first Revoluntionary War, Washingotn and Jefferson both owned slaves and so what's up with that?, that Southerners have unfairly been tarnished with charges of bigotry and suppression of civil rights while northerners have willfully overlooked the race riots of the 1960s, the anti-busing riots in South Boston in the early 1970s, and the fact that the Southern states possessed the "inherent" right to declare their separation from the United States. The tired, old argument that "the war was fought over states rights, not slavery" again and again raises its tired old, ugly head. The reading quickly becomes redundant and shallow, the arguments hopelessly twisted and hypocritical, the logic convoluted, the defense of the Southern cause indefensible.
I paid $1.80 for a used copy of this book and I think I was robbed in the process.
Quoting Lincoln's statement that he would retain the institution of slavery if he could sustain the union, as a justification for secession, as the book does, is utter nonsense; it does not justify the fundamentally traitorous underlying theme of the book. Lincoln knew the two (preserving the union and preserving slavery) were mutually exclusive possibilities. America could NOT hope to expand (in the western region) without resolving the question of whether those new western states would be slave or free states. Both James Buchanan and Stephen Douglas refused to take the issue head on. It took the vision and courage of Abraham Lincoln to bring the issue to a head, only Lincoln permitted the Confederacy to light the fuse of conflict with the attack of Fort Sumter in April 1861. The North was not the agressor here. It was the fire eaters from South Carolina who pulled the first lanyard. (Historical note: fierce secessionist Edmund Ruffin from Virginia, was in Charleston when General Bureaguard's troops first fired on Sumter. He blew his own brains out within days of Lee's surrender at Appamatox). IDEA: let's celebrate Edmund Ruffin Day, too.
This past week the Governor of Virginia has declared April to be "Confederate History month" in the Commonwealth of Virgina. This was akin to Ronald Reagan's appearance in Philadelphia, MS immediately following the 1980 Republican Convention where he was declared the GOP candidate for President. From this appearance forward, Reagan gained enormous momentum among the former Dixiecrats (former George Wallace supporters) and blue collar Democrats in the South. Reagan's strategy was deliberate: to galvanize the bigots on the far right, and there were many, leading to his election as President in the fall. The Governor's hope is that he too, in his search for the national spotlight, will somehow repeat Reagan's feat from 19098. This will not stand.
Americans have a ceaseless fascination with a conflict that scarred the soul of America, with wounds that have still not healed to this day. We engage in re-enactments, we purchase all sorts of books adn relics (the number of books with Abraham Lincoln as the main subject numbers over 1,500 now), Civil War battlefields are visited by thousands of curious onlookers each year, and we continue to watch and re-watch Ken Burns' saga on the great conflict. We cannot get enough of all things related to the Civil War.
But this abstract reverence for the bloody conflict is not what the Governor is seeking. His goal is NOT enlightenment, it is devisiveness. He has intentionally, the words of Chris Matthews, "ripped the scab" off an old topic, in the process re-energizing thosee who deny the outcome of that conflict. It is deliberate. It is mean-spirited. It is ugly. It is Southern Hesritage revisited.
I tried researching author Thomas Wolfe's reference to the "myth of Southern Heritage" buried somewhere deep in his book YOU CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN. I remember being struck by his observation about 'lies of the noble Southern cavalier' and the rest of the nonsense Southerners tell themselves in their delusional self-justification of a cause dedicated to perpetuating an institutional evil. Wolfe, a native of Asheville, NC, saw the myth of Southern Heritage for the evil it was and is today.
There is no question that racial prejudice abounded in America in the mid-nineteenth century, in both North and South. Lincoln himself was not a saint: he was a product of his times and as such, he had the common biases most people of his time held. His debates with Douglas were carefully crafted so as to not offend slave-proponents in the Southern part of Illinois in the 1850s. He briefly considered sending blacks off-shore to Cuba or Central America; in short he has not the benevolent father of freedom some would have him be. BUT, he was the leader of a new party whose members included a good percentage of abolitionists. He WAS the President of the country at a time when the slave-holding South was vanquished. He was the author of the Emancipation Proclamation, which strangely freed slaves in those territories (regions) not held by the Uion in 1862, but it said nothing about northern states.
A final (what I hope is a related) note before closing: it was the Republican Party who sold out the blacks during Reconstruction, when they agreed to withdraw all northern troops in the South, in exchange for electoral votes for President Rutherford B. Hayes over challenger Tilden in the 1870s. This action led to the brutal Jim Crow years lasting nearly one century.
It has recently been noted that Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address does not solely recognize the valor of northern soldiers who fell at Gettysburg ("these honored dead" includes all who perished), although it is a fact that most Confederate dead were eventually removed from the battlefield in the years following the war, and re-interred in the South. Bravery was in abundance from all sides at Gettysburg.
If the Governor of Virgina wants to celebrate something related to the Civil War, he could begin with celebrtaing Lincoln's speech. See how far that would sit with the Sons of the Confederacy.
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