Confederate "Heritage" Month 2010, April 23: Christopher Centner on neo-Confederacy

I wish the article by Christopher Centner, "Neo-Confederates At the Gate: The Rehabilitation of the Confederate Cause and the Distortion of History" Skeptic 9:3 (2002) were freely available online. It gives a solid overview of the Lost Cause/neo-Confederate pseudohistory scam. A portion of it is available here.

Centner writes (perhaps a touch overdramatically):

The Neo-Confederates' power is in their conviction and their dedication to ancestral, religious and ethnic pride. History is a full-contact sport and the Neo-Confederates take their evangelism seriously. Neo-Confederates are well organized, educated, and have a vision. They have heard the call to battle, and wage it relentlessly with revisionist zeal. Those more loyal to historical accuracy need to defend historical truth or lose the future to an ugly past.

Centner discusses several strands of neo-Confederate propaganda: "heritage defenders" like the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) and the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC); "Agrarian Romantics" inspired by the essays in I'll Take My Stand (1930) which romanticized the Old South and segregation - he writes that Southern Partisan magazine "takes much of its inspiration" from that book: libertarians, in particular the LewRockwell.com website; "Christian Soldiers" who bring a fundamentalist religious emphasis to idolizing the Confederate - he cites Jim Langcuster and Charles Jennings as examples of this tendency; and, overt racists, among whom he includes Michael Andrew Grissom and far-right groups who emphasize their supposed Celtic heritage.

Although he doesn't group them all under those classifications, he also mentions several organizations and individuals then prominent among the neo-Confederate set: the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC; the successor organization to the White Citizens Council); the Heritage Preservation Association (which may be defunct now); the League of the South (which is pretty much a white supremacist group); the Southern Party (which if this Wikipedia entry is correct was a front group for the League of the South and was disbanded in 2003); the Lawful Government of the South Fellowship (also apparently defunct); Mad Annie Coulter; columnist Charley Reese; and, The Washington Times. It's not unusual for fringe groups to come and go. They merge and change their names, dissolve in faction fights, lose all their members, whatever. But, as Republican Governors Bob McDonnell of Virginia and Haley Barbour of Mississippi have reminded us this month, neo-Confederacy is alive and well, including among senior figures in the Republican Party.

Centner makes a couple of good points about typical styles of neo-Confederate/Lost Cause arguments. One is technically known as, making stuff up (I've inserted an extra paragraph break):

Inaccurate or made-up quotes are favorite Neo-Confederate tools. Fraudulent quotations are nearly impossible to falsify, since they have no antecedent. Thus, Neo-Confederates have Grant keeping slaves until the Thirteenth Amendment passed, justifying his actions by saying, "Good help is so hard to come by these days."

"As for the alleged quotation from Grant, I have never seen it before and cannot believe it for a single moment," commented the Ulysses S. Grant Association's John Y. Simon. "[H]e freed the only slave he ever owned in 1857. The slaves to whom the writer referred were owned by his wife, which was a different matter. These slaves, incidentally, would have been freed by Missouri law in early 1865, rather than awaiting the ratification of the 13th Amendment. Old Confederates used to crow that Grant owned slaves when he accepted the surrender at Appomattox, Lee did not. This is wrong."

He also does a take-down of the "Black Confederates" claim that African-Americans served in the Confederate army. As he points out, most of these claims are "based upon second-hand reports, obviously false reports, and folklore." The claim of Black Confederates has been a favorite hobby-horse of the Lost Cause crowd for years now. It's used to reinforce their key pseudohistorical claim, that slavery was not the cause of the Civil War.

For a more recent takedown of one current favorite piece of SCV propaganda on this topic, see Kevin Levin's Looking For Silas Chandler Civil War Memory 03/28/10.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2010, neo-confederate, slavery, us south