Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 1: The limits of a "white" memory of American history

One of the neo-Confederate/Lost Cause images that became a bumper-sticker image of support for segregation (that's pronounced "fergit, hail")

Yes, it's that time of year again! The month Lost Cause fans celebrate as "Confederate Heritage Month".

Here at Old Hickory's Weblog, we celebrate the month in the spirit of Old Hickory himself, who crushed the secessionist moves masterminded by John Calhoun in South Carolina during the "Nullification Controversy".

We've been doing this since 2004. The first three years' installment are still to be found at the blog original AOL Journals site, where there are index posts for the 2004, 2005 and 2006 entries. Our tech staff is working on transferring those posts to the Blogger site. But it's proving to be a slower process than hoped.

The 2007 installments are already transferred to Blogger and can be accessed by searching on the blog for Confederate Heritage Month 2007 or by going to the archives, starting a year ago.

Lost Cause or neo-Confederate ideology has several functions: as an ideology for far-right, white supremacist groups; as an ideology for racial prejudice, usually but not always in conservative forms; and, as pseudohistory of the American Civil War. In these posts we've covered some of all of those aspects. And the same will be the case this year. We'll have several posts about the Mexican-American War, which was one of the key events that intensified the political conflicts over slavery in the pre-Civil War (antebellum) era. And we'll be drawing on the wealth of material available from the New York Review of Books archives to discuss various historical issues related to the Civil War.

There are several good reasons to be concerned today about the popularity of pseudohistory in the US. And the Lost Cause version of the Civil War, Reconstruction and segregation is one of the most widespread versions of pseudohistory in the country today.

To start off this year's festivities, I'm looking at an essay by historian Eric Foner, "Ken Burns and the Romance of Reunion", which appeared in Ken Burns' The Civil War: Historians Respond (1996), Robert Brent Toplin, ed., a collection of essays on filmaker Ken Burns' famous documentary on the Civil War.

Foner criticizes the last program Burns' documentary dealing with the aftermath of the war for being "remarkably impoverished" by its focus on the North-South reconciliation of white Americans without conveying a good sense of what that implied for African-Americans and the state of American democracy, especially in the South.

It's not my purpose here to address the validity of his particular complain. But in the course of discussing it, Foner makes some good points about the nature of Lost Cause mythology. "Americans have rarely expressed much interest in the Reconstruction years that followed the Civil War, probably the most controversial and misunderstood era in our nation's past".

A big part of the reason that the Lost Cause nonsense has the unfortunate degree of credibility that it does is exactly that, a lack of understanding of the Reconstruction period and the ideology of the white "Redeemers" who overthrew the post-war democratic governments and replaced them with the corrupt, white supremacist semi-democracies that endured well into the 1960s.

A similar effect also results from the lack of focus on the 10-15 years of conflicts over slavery leading up to the Civil War. The war itself provides a grand narrative of battles with the fate of a nation hanging in the balance and colorful generals dueling on the field of honor, etc. But wars are political events. And you can't understand the politics of a war without understanding something about the political conflicts leading up to it. Accounts of the battles and the strategies of the generals will not give you that information.

Noting that Burns mentions only two African-Americans in his accounts of individuals' postwar careers, abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass and Hiram Revels who became the first black Senator from Mississippi and the first black Senator ever, Foner comments that "Burns introduces Revels simply as an oddity, a foil to underscore the humiliation of Jefferson Davis and the South, since he took the seat once heold by the Confederate President". And he continues:

Revels could have provided an interesting point of entry into the Reconstruction era. For the record, he was one of well over one thousand black men who held public office during the decade known to historians as Radical Reconstruction (1867-77). Their advent symbolized the revolution in American life wrought by Union victory in the Civil War and the destruction of slavery. Reconstruction was a time of intense conflict over the implications of the North's triumph, in which former slaves sought to breathe substantive meaning into the freedom they had so recently acquired. In demanding an end to the myriad injustices of slavery, incorporation as equal citizens into the political order, autonomy in their personal and religious lives, access to education, and land of their own, African Americans helped to establish the agenda of this dramatic period. (my emphasis)

Hiram Revels, the first African-American Senator (R, Ms.)

And, as Foner writes, understanding that period is important to understand much about later conflicts over civil rights. Because:

... in modern debates over the implementation of civil rights laws, the interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment, and the nation's responsibility to ensure equal opportunity for all its citizens, Reconstruction remains a touchstone and, hence, a continuing force in our lives.

And he also makes the important observation:

Ignoring the actual history of postwar America (which necessarily distorts understanding of the war itself) arises inevitably from a vision of the Civil War as a family quarrel among whites, whose fundamental accomplishment was the preservation of the Union and in which the destruction of slavery was a side issue and African Americans little more than a problem confronting white society. (my emphasis)

Unfortunately, this limited and limiting view of the Civil War is very widespread among American whites, even among many who don't subscribe to a full-blown Lost Cause/neo-Confederate interpretation of American history. This is a part of what Edward Sebesta calls "banal white nationalism" among the general public, which is facilitated by the neo-Confederates and by the Lost Cause interpretation of history.

Foner argues that the defeat of Reconstruction and the victory of the Redeemers, which made reunion a reunion of white Americans on a basis of white supremacy, was a critical national event:

A nation is not merely a form of govbernment, a material entity, or a distinct people, but, in Benedict Anderson's celebrated phrase, an "'imagined community." Its boundaries are internal as well as external, intellectual as well as geographic. And the process of "imagining" is itself contentious and ultimately political. Who constructs the community, who has the power to enforce a certain definition of nationality, will determine where the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion lie, who stands within or outside them. If the Civil War created the modern American nation, the specific character that reunion took helped to define what kind of nation America was to be. Reunion represented a substantial retreat from the Reconstruction ideal of a color-blind citizenship. The road to reunion was paved with the broken dreams of black Americans, and the betrayal of those dreams was indispensable to the process of reunion as it actually took place. This was why Frederick Douglass fought in the 1870s and 1880s not only for civil rights, as the final episode mentions, but to remind Americans of the war's causes and meaning. Douglass dreaded the implications of reunion, if it simply amounted to "peace among the whites."

Foner here gives one of the best summaries I've ever seen of the pseudohistorical Lost Cause viewpoint:

For years, historians have been aware that historical memory is unavoidably selective and historical traditions "invented" and manipulated. Forgetting some aspects of the past is as much a part of historical understanding as remembering others. Selective readings of the past, often institutionalized in rituals like veterans' reunions and publically constructed monuments, help give citizens a shared sense of national identity. In the case of the Civil War, reunion was predicated on a particular interpretation of the conflict's causes and legacy. On the road to reunion, the war was "remembered" not as the crisis of a nation divided by antagonistic labor systems and political and social ideologies, but as a tragic conflict within the American family, whose great bloodshed was in many ways meaningless, but which accomplished the essential task of solidifying a united nation. Its purpose, in other words, was preservation, not transformation. Both sides, in this view, were composed of brave men fighting for noble principles (Union in the case of the North, self-determination on the part of the South) - a vision exemplified by the late nineteenth-century cults of Lincoln and Lee, each representing the noblest features of his society and each a figure on whom Americans of all regions could look back with pride. In this story, the war's legacy lay essentially in the soldiers themselves, their valor and ultimate reconciliation, not in any ideological causes or purposes. The struggle against slavery was a minor feature of the war, and the abolition of slavery worthy of note essentially for removing a cause of dissension among white Americans.

Tags: american civil war, confederate heritage month 2008, eric foner, hiram revels, reconstruction, us civil war