Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 19: the plague of Lost Cause pseudohistory

Harriet Tubman, conductor on the Underground Railroad

Continuing the discussion of David Brion Davis' article The Terrible Cost of Reconciliation in the New York Review of Books 07/18/02 issue (link behind subscription), reviewing Divided Hearts: Britain and the American Civil War by R.J.M. Blackett and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory by David Blight, he also has some important things to say about the nature of American historical memory about the Civil War.

As Davis writes, "it became accepted wisdom from the 1870s to the 1960s, among American historians as well as white students from grade school through college, that states' rights, not slavery, was the cause of the Civil War". A false historical narrative, the Lost Cause narrative.

He refers to David Blight's book in discussing one of the reasons:

Blight quotes William Dean Howells's famous words that "what the American public always wants is a tragedy with a happy ending." Despite the extraordinarily voluminous literature on the Civil War, few accounts convey the fear, panic, carnage, brutal violence, and suffering that continued to infect the nightmares of veterans,[6] to say nothing of the rubble, ruins, desolate landscape, and crowds of black and white refugees seen throughout the South by 1865. As Blight points out, however, both Northern and Southern whites found it much easier to honor the dead and hold ceremonies amid forests of white gravestones on "Decoration Day," later called Memorial Day, than to confront what Blight terms "the logic of emancipation" and "the stirrings of racial equality." It was easier to commemorate and sometimes sentimentalize the death of 620,000 American soldiers than to remember that the Union victory depended, to a considerable degree, on the enlistment of nearly 200,000 African-Americans, who, like Henry C. Hoyle, could write home about their "struggle for freedom, liberty and equal rights."

In popular memory among whites and to a large extent even in textbooks and in the work of historians, the Civil War came to be seen in terms of its significance as a conflict among white Americans:

Blight's major theme, as he describes the frequent "reunions" of white Union and Confederate veterans, is that the yearning for a "redemptive" sectional reconciliation required a "harmonious forgetfulness" of slavery, emancipation, and even minimal African-American rights. "In this vision of the terms of Blue-Gray reunion," he writes, "slavery was everyone's and no one's responsibility. America's bloody racial history was to be banished from consciousness; the only notions of equality contemplated were soldiers' heroism and the exchange of the business deal."

But it's important to remember that the central role of slavery and emancipation in the Civil War was not forgotten by everyone. It certainly wasn't an invention of "politically correct" recent historians, as the neo-Confederates might like to claim. As Davis explains:

Blight emphasizes the importance of "the emancipationist vision," tracing how it originated with black and white abolitionists and was reflected in Lincoln's revolutionary call for a new birth of freedom. It was a view that was always centered on the "proposition" that all men are created equal. One of the first major events celebrating this tradition occurred when over one hundred black leaders assembled in Louisville, Kentucky, in September 1883. While expressing their gratitude for "the miraculous emancipation" that had brought such seeming promise twenty years earlier, the resolutions of these blacks "threw a bleak picture of African American conditions," in Blight's words, "at the feet of the nation."

In his keynote address at this meeting, Frederick Douglass referred to the "feeling of color madness" and the "atmosphere of color hate" that pervaded "churches, courts, and schools, and worse, the deepest 'sentiment' of ordinary people." "In all relations of life and death," Douglass testified, "we are met by the color line.... It hunts us at midnight, it denies us accommodation...excludes our children from schools...compels us to pursue only such labor as will bring the least reward."

Speaking only days before the Supreme Court struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875, opening the way for later Jim Crow laws throughout the South, Douglass made the telling point that the revolutionary measure of slave emancipation had come "from the hell of war," including "fields of smoke and fire strewn with...bleeding and dying men." It was therefore linked with "deadly hate and a spirit of revenge," which had engendered a Southern determination to reverse the racial revolution by reconstructing the very meaning of the Civil War. (my emphasis)

Davis also deals with another bogus claim of Lost Cause pseudohistory:

It is now clear that American slavery was not doomed to some kind of inevitable economic death ("econocide," to use the term coined by the brilliant historian Seymour Drescher). Nor was the white American public prepared in the mid-1860s for immediate and total slave emancipation. In 1858, in his famous debates with Stephen Douglas, Lincoln predicted, after affirming the total wrongness of slavery, that "I do not suppose that in the most peaceful way ultimate extinction would occur in less than a hundred years at the least." In other words, he was thinking of 1958 at the earliest, but four years later, in 1862, concluded that the South's "rebellion" could not be overcome unless the primary cause of the conflict was eliminated.

Tags: american civil war, confederate heritage month 2008, david brion davis, lost cause, us civil war