In an age of “both sides do it” and “teach the debate,” some issues are simply black and white. So it was this week in Alabama, where truth and myth, hate and hagiography collided in two stories of the ongoing legacy of the Civil War and white supremacy. On Monday, the “Heart of Dixie” celebrated “Confederate Memorial Day,” a holiday whose origins unsurprisingly date back to 1866. But while Alabama state offices and courts closed on the 23rd to honor the Confederacy’s fallen soldiers and their “Lost Cause,” just three days later the Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice opened its doors in Montgomery. There, visitors were presented with the stark reality of the South’s decades of racial lynching at a location just a few blocks from the expansive Montgomery slave market those Confederate dead fought to preserve.
While Confederate Memorial Day is part of the sinister, 153-year effort “to rewrite history to hide the truth, which is that the Confederacy was on the wrong side of humanity,” the non-profit Equal Justice Initiative has documented 4,400 of the thousands of lynchings of African Americans across the South which followed its fall. No patriotic American worthy of that name can look away from horrifying truths like these. As the New York Times described just a few:
The magnitude of the killing is harrowing, all the more so when paired with the circumstances of individual lynchings, some described in brief summaries along the walk: Parks Banks, lynched in Mississippi in 1922 for carrying a photograph of a white woman; Caleb Gadly, hanged in Kentucky in 1894 for ‘walking behind the wife of his white employer’; Mary Turner, who after denouncing her husband’s lynching by a rampaging white mob, was hung upside down, burned and then sliced open so that her unborn child fell to the ground.
And what noble cause and lofty principles inspired this bestial, bloodthirsty cruelty? Why were Dangerfield Newby’s ears cut off as trophies after John Brown’s Harpers Ferry raid of 1859, as were the ears, nose, and genitals of Sam Hose during his torture and dismemberment in 1899? Why did Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest butcher hundreds of surrendering black Union troops at Fort Pillow in 1864 and white militiamen slaughter 100 African-Americans in Colfax, Louisiana, who were merely trying to safeguard the results of the local elections there in 1873? As Jane Coaston recently explained (“Confederate Memorial Day: when multiple states celebrate treason in defense of slavery”), Alabama Confederates like Stephen F. Hale made no secret of the obvious in December 1860:
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?
But if the election of the “free soil” Republican Abraham Lincoln the previous month made Hale fear “the downfall of slavery” and the subjection of Southern wives and daughters “to pollution and violation, to gratify the lust of half-civilized Africans,” he was only echoing the leading soldiers and statesmen of the South.
As early as 1837, legendary South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun was defending the “positive good” of slavery:
"If we do not defend ourselves none will defend us; if we yield we will be more and more pressed as we recede; and if we submit we will be trampled under foot. Be assured that emancipation itself would not satisfy these fanatics: -that gained, the next step would be to raise the negroes to a social and political equality with the whites; and that being effected, we would soon find the present condition of the two races reversed."
And to be sure, what Calhoun and his successors sought to defend was slavery and white supremacy. We know this because the leaders of the Confederacy and their founding documents told us so. The Confederate Constitution did not merely proclaim that “No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.” Southerners “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.” Importantly, any new territories brought into the Confederacy would become slave states, too. As Mississippi Sen. Albert Gallatin Brown explained in 1858, he sought to annex Cuba and some of the Mexican states. Why?
“I want them all for the same reason--for the planting and spreading of slavery.”
In the 1840s, the Methodist Episcopal and Baptist churches split north and south over the issue of slavery. While the 1861 Mississippi Declaration of Causes for Secession stated that “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery,” CSA Vice President Alexander Stephens of Georgia declared his breakaway nation was erected on the cornerstone of slavery:
The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution -- African slavery as it exists amongst us -- the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution...
Our new government is founded upon...its foundations are laid, its corner- stone 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 normal condition. [Applause.] This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.
The Confederate media and its military leaders stood firmly atop Stephen’s cornerstone. As Southern Punch put it in 1864:
"'The people of the South,' says a contemporary, 'are not fighting for slavery but for independence.' Let us look into this matter. It is an easy task, we think, to show up this new-fangled heresy -- a heresy calculated to do us no good, for it cannot deceive foreign statesmen nor peoples, nor mislead any one here nor in Yankeeland. . . Our doctrine is this: WE ARE FIGHTING FOR INDEPENDENCE THAT OUR GREAT AND NECESSARY DOMESTIC INSTITUTION OF SLAVERY SHALL BE PRESERVED, and for the preservation of other institutions of which slavery is the groundwork."
Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, after the slaughter of hundreds of surrendering black Union troops at Fort Pillow in Tennessee, April 1864:
"It is hoped that these facts will demonstrate to the Northern people that negro soldiers cannot cope with Southerners."
Chant of Confederate troops at the Battle of the Crater, July 30, 1864:
"'Spare the white man, kill the nigger!"
General John Bell Hood, refusing Union General William Tecumseh Sherman's request for the evacuation of civilians from Atlanta, September 12, 1864:
You came into our country with your army avowedly for the purpose of subjugating free white men, women, and children, and not only intend to rule over them, but you make negroes your allies and desire to place over us an inferior race, which we have raised from barbarism to its present position, which is the highest ever attained by that race in any country in all time. I must, therefore, decline to accept your statements in reference to your kindness toward the people of Atlanta, and your willingness to sacrifice everything for the peace and honor of the South, and refuse to be governed by your decision in regard to matters between myself, my country, and my God. You say, "let us fight it out like men." To this my reply is, for myself, and, I believe, for all the true men, aye, and women and children, in my country, we will fight you to the death. Better die a thousand deaths than submit to live under you or your Government and your negro allies.
Howell Cobb, president of the Confederate Provisional Congress and Major General, on Robert E. Lee's request to arm slaves for the Southern armies:
"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."
Confederate General Robert E. Lee, 1870:
"Everyone should do all in his power to collect and disseminate the truth, in the hope that it may find a place in history and descend to posterity. History is not the relation of campaigns and battles and generals or other individuals, but that which shows the principles for which the South contended and which justified her struggle for those principles."
Confederate Colonel John Mosby, the officer most cited in Lee's dispatches, 1894:
"I've always understood that we went to war on account of the thing we quarreled with the North about. I've never heard of any other cause than slavery."
Former Confederate President Jefferson Davis, 1881:
"Nothing fills me with deeper sadness than to see a Southern man apologizing for the defense we made of our inheritance. Our cause was so just, so sacred, that had I known all that has come to pass, had I known what was to be inflicted upon me, all that my country was to suffer, all that our posterity was to endure, I would do it all over again.''
For his part, President Abraham Lincoln had no doubt about the strength of the conviction shared by Davis and his fellow secessionists. For Lincoln, that only cemented the necessity to fight as ferociously and for however long it took to atone for America’s original sin of slavery. The entire country was complicit in that abomination enshrined in the Constitution. As Lincoln so eloquently put it in his Second Inaugural Address just six weeks before his assassination, slavery was the national tragedy and the Civil War the inevitable and necessary price America had to pay for its extirpation:
One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained…
If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether." [Emphasis mine.]
But in the aftermath of the war, those in the South did not share Lincoln’s “malice toward none” and “charity for all.” They would not “do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves.” And for their part in helping “bind up the nation’s wounds,” the former Confederates would demand the re-entrenchment of white supremacy across the South. It is to our lasting shame that through politics, propaganda, and violence, they succeeded.
In a very real sense, the North won the war, but the South won the peace. The “Southern Redemption” movement swamped national Reconstruction as an ivory curtain of white supremacy, intimidation, and violence soon enveloped the states of the former Confederacy. Northern exhaustion, complicity in the Johnson White House, and the entrenchment of a racist, conservative Supreme Court undermined the clear meaning and intent of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. In less than a generation, the institutionalization of segregation was complete. As W.E.B. Dubois lamented, “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.” It took 100 years after Lee’s surrender to Grant at Appomattox for the civil rights movement to begin the demolition of the edifice of Jim Crow and with it, make possible the liberation of all Americans for all time.
Possible, but still far from complete. Far from engaging in an “enduring confrontation with the past,” the United States for more than 150 years has allowed Confederate sympathizers, southern partisans, and white supremacists to rewrite it. As Coleman Lowndes explained at Vox, “the United Daughters of the Confederacy altered the South’s memory of the Civil War.” Between 1894 and 1918, their campaign to sanctify the “Lost Cause” produced dozens of textbooks, hundreds of memorials and statues, and even the Jefferson Davis Highway to “portray Confederate leaders and soldiers as heroic” and just. (Though their UDC-approved textbooks faded from Southern schools by the 1970s, in 2015 Texas schoolbooks used “workers” or “immigrants” instead of the word “slaves.) And as Eric Foner warned, “the early 20th century works of William A. Dunning and his students at Columbia University … provided an intellectual foundation for the system of segregation and black disenfranchisement that followed Reconstruction.”
As for the Confederate statues that continue to desecrate cities and towns across the United States, they weren’t built right after the war to honor or memorialize Lee, Jackson, or “Johnny Reb.” As the building booms of 1890 to 1915 and 1955 to 1970 show (above), they were erected precisely to combat periods of progress in civil rights. After the lash, the white hood, the burning cross, the noose, the poll tax, and the literacy test, the Confederate monument was just the latest weapon of white supremacy.
It was precisely this edifice of Confederate historical revisionism New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu announced his city’s decision last May to remove the Robert E. Lee monument in place since 1884:
The historic record is clear, the Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and P.G.T. Beauregard statues were not erected just to honor these men, but as part of the movement which became known as The Cult of the Lost Cause. This 'cult' had one goal - through monuments and through other means - to rewrite history to hide the truth, which is that the Confederacy was on the wrong side of humanity. First erected over 166 years after the founding of our city and 19 years after the end of the Civil War, the monuments that we took down were meant to rebrand the history of our city and the ideals of a defeated Confederacy. It is self-evident that these men did not fight for the United States of America, They fought against it. They may have been warriors, but in this cause they were not patriots. These statues are not just stone and metal. They are not just innocent remembrances of a benign history. These monuments purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, and the terror that it actually stood for.
But if what Lincoln in March 1865 called “the scourge of war” did pass speedily away from United States of America, the pestilence of racism and white supremacy has not. That sin surely is not the province of the South alone. Oregon, after all, prohibited African Americans from living in, working in or moving to the state until 1916. As the Equal Justice Institute shows, post-war lynchings were not limited by the Mason-Dixon Line. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. saw the reality of Northern residential segregation and racism firsthand in his 1966 visit to Cicero, Illinois. After being struck by a rock, King declared:
“I have never seen, even in Mississippi and Alabama, mobs as hateful as I've seen here in Chicago," King told reporters that day, stripping off his tie and vowing to continue demonstrating. "Yes, it's definitely a closed society. We're going to make it an open society.”
Not if we as Americans continue to allow ourselves to seek comfort in the convenient fiction that the Civil War was somehow just a brotherly “disagreement.” This kind of pernicious political correctness for delicate Neo-Confederate sensibilities is a barrier to—not a balm for—national healing. Confederate soldiers are inseparable from the cause for which they fought. Between 1861 and 1865, the United States experienced a life-or-death struggle between the forces of darkness and those championing the possibility of the emancipation of the human spirit for all Americans for all time. But the tragedy of Reconstruction, segregation, and Jim Crow is that de jure freedom did not bring de facto liberty and equality for all. One hundred fifty five years after George Templeton Strong lamented the hangings of African Americans during the New York draft riots “for no offence but that of Negritude,” the U.S. justice system remains scarred by it still. And we all know it.
Back in Alabama, which along with Mississippi and South Carolina still commemorates some form of Confederate Memorial Day, the historical white-washing continues. As one Sons of Confederate Veterans “Commander” put in Montgomery on that day in 2013:
“It grieves me when I hear one of our people, not being politically correct, try to defend our Confederate heritage and ancestry by saying ‘they fought for what they believed was right.’ They were right. Don’t shame our ancestors by saying that. Learn enough history so you can say they were right. Because fighting for freedom and liberty and independence is right. And our Confederate ancestors were right then, they are right today, and they will be right tomorrow.”
Of course, anyone can appropriate George Wallace’s mantra of “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” I’ll update it now: these Neo-Confederate apologists are wrong now, wrong tomorrow, and wrong forever.
The case is open and shut. Or, to put it another way, black and white. As President Obama eulogized so memorably at Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina, after the racist 2015 shootings in that birthplace of secession:
“For too long, we’ve been blind to be way past injustices continue to shape the present. Perhaps we see that now.”
You can see for yourself. In person or online, go to the Lynching Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice that opened in Montgomery this week. As Bryan Stevenson, the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative explained:
“I’m not interested in talking about America’s history because I want to punish America. I want to liberate America.”
It’s not too late for the truth to set us free.