Every year since 2004 I've made daily posts during the month of April as a counter-celebration of what neo-Confederates celebrate as "Confederate Heritage Month". They use it as vehicle to promote the pseudohistorical, Lost Cause version of American history and the reactionary, segregationist political ideology of which it is a part.
For the initial posts in this series for the previous five years, see: 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008.
I was originally blogging at AOL Journals when I started this. AOL has since shut down their blogging service as they try to adjust to the fact that they let their initial spectacular success during the tech bubble running a subscription-based Internet portal service impede them from adjusting their business model to changing online conditions. Fortunately, they set up a way for us to download our posts into Blogger. Unfortunately, I couldn't just load them directly into this blog, so some of the older posts are at a separate location I named "AOL Journals 1st Old Hickory's Weblog".
The invaluable Digby made a post at her Hullabaloo blog called Southern Exposure 12/01/08. Some of the content of this post here is adapted from comments at left at her blog talking about my perspective on the whole neo-Confederate Lost Cause scam.
I grew up (white) in Mississippi. From my own experience, I would say that nobody in the world can whine like conservative Mississippi white folks. I haven't had direct exposure to Serbians and Croats, or to Hutus and Tutsis. But if anyone can whine like Mississippi white people, I hope I never encounter them.
The Lost Cause is one of my bugaboos about American history. David Neiwert has blogged a lot about the neo-Confederate ideology that puts the Lost Cause mythology at its center.
"Southern honor" prior to the Civil War was a social institution based on the central importance of family clans. "Suthun honuh" during the post-World War II segregation days was mainly an excuse for denying black citizens their basic rights as human beings and Americans. While you can trace some historical links, the whole "We will nevuh surrenduh auh sacred honuh!" routine from post-WWII decades bears only the most superficial resemblance to the pre-Civil War version in terms of the social networks in which they were based. Though both of them contained major amounts of racism and fear and paranoia. And, in the post-Civil War times, a segregationist view of religion among most white fundamentalists.
Bob "the Daily Howler" Somerby would say I'm being "elitist". Because he grew up a Yankee and is therefore inclined to be more generous about this segregationist nonsense than I am. And I haven't gathered up the statistics - although I think I may take the time to do it one of these days - but I'm very inclined to agree with the late Steve Gilliard that the group "Christian Right voters" overlaps very heavily with the group "white people who don't like black people very much". (My version, not exact quotes from Steve.)
William Faulkner, who is quoted in Digby's post, obviously studied the actual history of the Civil War very closely. In his stories dealing with that period and Reconstruction, he doesn't present a view at all sympathetic to pseudohistorical Lost Cause jive. In The Unvanquished, he not only slashes and burns the image of the happy slaves who didn't even want to leave their massas' plantations. He also presents a memorable and historically accurate picture (as close as fiction gets) of how the overthrown of Reconstruction in the state was the destruction of democracy by force and violence.
The Lost Cause is a piece of pseudohistory that works well for our postmodern Republicans. Because it validates the idea that you can just make up your own history to fit your ideological requirements of the moment. Create your own reality, as it were.
I don't think this contradicts anything that Ed Kilgore says in the passage Digby quotes from him. But you learn pretty quickly wading through the mud and sludge of Lost Cause ideology that you have to be careful not to lose sight of the fact that slavery caused the Civil War. If you had told anybody North or South in 1861 that slavery "had nothing to do with the war", they would have thought you had dropped in from the Moon. But that's a key claim - apparently the central claim - of Lost Cause pseudohistory.
So, yes, the reckless belligerence that was part of the antebellum system of Southern Honor lead Southern whites to grossly over-react to any real or imagined slight from Northerners - and the slights to which they reacted so strongly in substantive ways were all related to slavery. That perpetual sense of outrage wound up getting seriously in the way of their ability to think through the real consequences of secession which they undertook to defend "our sacred institutions of slavery and white supremacy", as the popular formulation at the time had it.
It's true that the danger of being outvoted in the Senate was a factor in their fears, because if they lost their ability to block anti-slavery measures their Peculiar Institution might be endangered. States rights? Ha! When it came to preserving their sacred institution of slavery, e.g., the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, the slaveowners always, always insisted on the absolute necessity for the national government to override state interference.
Another characteristic of those honorable antebellum Southern white ladies and gentlemen is that they periodically panicked like cattle in a thunderstorm over the possibility of slave revolts. And they pretty much lost their minds after John Brown made his abortive raid at Harper's Ferry in October 1859.
Hey, when you get a Southerner or ex-Southerner started on this topic ...
For regular critical-minded updates on the latest horse-pooh coming from the Lost Cause crowd, I strongly recommend Kevin Levin's Civil War Memory blog. One current fad in Lost Cause propaganda is the story of black Confederates soldiers - of which there were none in the real world). Kevin shoots holes in that one on a fairly regular basis. Kevin's blog is about Civil War history more generally, not solely on the Lost Cause pseudohistory and is well worth periodic visits by anyone interested in current developments in Civil War historiography.
And it wouldn't do to open the 2009 Confederate "Heritage" posts without a reference to Ed Sebesta, whose Web site in 2004 originally gave me the idea of doing this. Ed maintains a blog called Anti-Neo-Confederate where he keeps his readers updated on that most dubious of movements. Ed is one of the editors of the recently-released Neo-Confederacy: A Critical Introduction (2009). The book's Introduction, Neo-Confederacy and the New Dixie Manifesto, is available online (scroll down).
For this year's posts, I'll be commenting on some historical articles and also on some contemporary antebellum material from De Bow's Review, the Southern Agriculturalist and Register of Rural Affairs and the Congressional Globe.
Tags: confederate heritage month 2009, neo-confederate
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