One of my Facebook friends, a white man from Mississippi, posted a long comment inspired by Jon Meachem's Southern Discomfort op-ed New York Times 04/10/10. He disputed Meachem's contention that Lost Cause/neo-Confederate ideology has historically been identified with white racism. The following is an expanded version of the response I left to his comment.
I don't think very highly of Jon Meachem's work as a pundit. But in that op-ed, he got the basic idea right, that in fact the Lost Cause narrative has been closely associated historically with the disenfranchisement of African-American voters and the Jim Crow/segregation system. This essay, Neo-Confederacy and the New Dixie Manifesto by Euan Hague, Edward Sebesta, and Heidi Beirich, the Introduction to their book Neo-Confederacy: A Critical Introduction (2008), shows how that has played out in recent years.
Anyone who is serious about promoting a Lost Cause version of history and not wanting it to be understood as some form of white-identity politics should be very realistic about how neo-Confederate ideology has actually been used in American politics since the end of the Civil War.
My Facebook friend wrote defensively that it looked to him like "the liberal intelligentsia and avant garde" were trying to "generate an 'intellectual' attack on 'neo-Confederates';" aka 'white, Christian, hood-wearing, cross-burning racists'--by none other than a 'fellow, albeit enlightened Southerner'." I think he got carried away with his quotation marks, because the version of Meachem's article on the Times' Web site as of this writing doesn't contain the phrase "white, Christian, hood-wearing, cross-burning racists."
The notion that slavery had nothing to do with the Civil War became a part of the political position of conservative white Southerners about the time of Lee's surrender at Appomattox. Slavery had been totally discredited by the war, and conservative Southerners who had supported the Confederacy wanted to disenfranchise and otherwise restrict the freedom of freed slaves. The term "Lost Cause" is usually traced to the 1866 book The Lost Cause by Edward Pollard, who made the slavery-had-nothing-to-do-with-it argument. It was pseudohistory then and is now.
Of course, even in Pollard's account, he couldn't hide the fact that every major disagreement leading up to the Civil War had slavery at its core: the Mexican-American War, the Wilmot Proviso, the Compromise of 1850, the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the mini-civil war in Kansas, the Lecompton Constitution, the Dred Scott decision, John Brown's raid at Harper's Ferry, Lincoln's election.
States-rights was an issue in those disputes. The Fugitive Slave Act had the federal government requiring state officials and even private citizens to act as slavecatchers for escaped slaves, with severe penalties for refusing to do so. The Dred Scott decision was a federal decision that directly threatened the ability of free states to legislate against slavery in their own borders. Southern spokesmen demanded that the federal government suppress antislavery advocacy within free states. The slaveowners were always unambiguous in their support for using the federal government to override states rights when it came to defending what Southern orators called "our sacred institution of slavery".
After Lincoln's election, the slaveowners rediscovered the virtue of states rights when it came to preserving slavery, which took precedence with them about any other Constitutional theory and certainly over elementary American patriotism. All the agitation for secession stressed the central role of defending slavery. The most striking thing to me about the amendment Virginia's Gov. Bob McDonnell made to his original proclamation for Confederate History Month 2010 was that it states explicitly, "it is important for all Virginians to understand that the institution of slavery led to this war."
It's true that not all Confederate soldiers were slaveowners. But soldiers on both sides knew very well that slavery was the cause of the war and the reason for the Confederate revolt, whatever their personal opinions may have been on the subject.
It's also not the case that non-slaveowning Southern whites had no direct prewar connection to enforcing slavery. Southern states had required non-slaveowning men to participate regularly in "slave patrols" to look for escaped slaves. They had unchallenged authority to stop and abuse any black person free or slave they saw out in public, whether or not the victim was authorized to be there. And they often did so. It was an effective way to create an emotional bond to the slave system even among nonslaveowners. Betram Wyatt-Brown has a good description of the slave patrols in his Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (1982) They were also a direct precursor to the post-war, Klan-type white terrorist groups who committed so much violence.
I suppose that it will always be difficult to separate history from politics, since a lot of history is, after all, politics of the past. If present-day conservatives want to continue making Lost Cause ideology one of their defining issues, that's really up to them.
Neo-Confederate advocacy groups like the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy were promoting the notion that the Confederacy had nothing to do with slavery, even long before more overt white supremacists types took over the leadership of the SCV around 10 years ago.
I don't know exactly what the current state of that particular internal battle in the SCV is. But they are continuing to promote the same pseudohistory. You can easily see in most of their advocacy material that the idea of the Confederacy having nothing to do with slavery is primarily a way of sneering at black people, such as the latest hobby-horse, the false claim that many slaves fought voluntarily for the Confederacy. In fact, giving slaves guns and military training was the last thing the slaveowners wanted to do.
Tags: confederate heritage month 2010, slavery, us south
No comments:
Post a Comment