Confederate "Heritage" Month 2010, April 15:

Georgia Congressman Preston Brooks displays his version of Southern honor by sneaking up to antislavery Massachusetts Sen. Charles Sumner sitting at his Senate desk and clubbing him senseless

Every year when I do these April posts on neo-Confederacy and related issues, I worry that I won't be able to find material for it. And every year I wind up not getting to things that I had planned to cover.

Finding things to use is even less of a problem this year, thanks to Gov. Bob McDonnell of Virginia casting new attention on "Confederate heritage" and how problematic is is. This is one of many articles assessing the current issues: Carl M. Cannon Why Liberals Are Right to Refuse to Honor the Confederacy Politics Daily 04/12/10. Cannon's assesses the outcome of MCDonnell's Confederate flap well:

McDonnell's six-paragraph proclamation declared April to be "Confederate History Month." The governor appears to have seen the offending document as innocuous, and much of it was, but it was underpinned by a sentiment that does not reflect a universal view among Virginians; namely, that it is important to pay homage to "the sacrifices of the Confederate leaders, soldiers and citizens during the period of the Civil War." The proclamation also had had an important omission, these critics asserted, namely any reference to slavery.

In the outcry that followed, including personal protests from some high-profile African American Democrats from Virginia who had bolstered McDonnell's 2009 Republican candidacy, McDonnell quickly made amends. A new paragraph was inserted into the document:

WHEREAS, it is important for all Virginians to understand that the institution of slavery led to this war and was an evil and inhumane practice that deprived people of their God-given inalienable rights and all Virginians are thankful for its permanent eradication from our borders, and the study of this time period should reflect upon and learn from this painful part of our history ...

This is a pretty thorough mea culpa, and as direct a refutation of Southern revisionism as anyone could ask for, so continued criticism of McDonnell from liberal Democrats can understandably be viewed as partisan posturing. But political jockeying notwithstanding, liberals are indeed right to confront this issue forcefully, whenever it arises. [my emphasis in bold]

I wouldn't say that Democrats shouldn't criticize McDonnell's decision to proclaim Confederate History Month in the first place. But given his initial blunder, I've had the same praise for his amendment to his proclamation. It does directly refuse the historical lie that is at the core of neo-Confederate "Southern revisionism".

I don't assume in non-blog publications that the authors are responsible for the titles put on their articles. But it shouldn't be only liberals who are right to criticize McDonnell's proclamation of a Confederate History Month. But given the extent to which today's Republican Party has embraced neo-Confederate ideology, the headline is understandable. Why would anyone assume today's conservatives in America would criticize a glorification of the Confederacy?

Cannon goes on to give a useful discussion of the historical issue of slavery bringing on the Civil War:

Jefferson Davis, in a speech to the Confederate Congress in April 1861, extolled slavery as a benevolent invention that allowed a "superior race" to transform "brutal savages into docile, intelligent, and civilized agricultural laborers." Alexander H. Stephens, Jefferson Davis' vice president, proclaimed that Jefferson and the Founders' high-minded declarations of universal liberty were "in violation of the laws of nature." This was profoundly wrong, Stephens said.

"Our new government is founded on exactly the opposite idea," thundered the vice president of the Confederacy. "Its foundations are laid, its cornerstone 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 moral condition."

This was the kind of thing said by a group of now-forgotten men called "secession commissioners." They were dispatched in 1860 from South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi and Alabama to other state capitals in the South urging state legislatures to prepare for secession. These men outlined a bloody apocalyptic scenario of black rebellion and the attendant slaughter of whites – with frequent allusions to mass rape and throat-slitting. They invariably mentioned Haiti as the relevant example, and stated flatly that this is what Lincoln wished on the South.

"The [Haitian] Negro ... arose with all the fury of the beast, and scenes were then enacted over a comparatively few planters, that the white fiends [of the North] would delight to see re-enacted now with us," Andrew Pickens Calhoun – son of John C. Calhoun – said in Columbia, S.C. ...

"Our fathers made this a government for the white man, rejecting the Negro as an ignorant, inferior barbarian race incapable of self-government, and not therefore, entitled to be associated with the white man upon terms of civil, political or social equality," Mississippi secession commissioner William L. Harris told Georgia's Legislature. Lincoln, he said, was committed on a course "to overturn and strike down this great feature of our Union."

That is why the Confederacy existed, to preserve slavery and the white supremacist and racist doctrines used to justify and defend it. It was anything but an honorable cause.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2010, slavery, us south