Debunking Lost Cause and neo-Confederate ideology has remained the general focus of these annual April postings. They have been a combination of discussing relevant issues in the decades leading up to the Civil War, some about the war itself, and analysis of particular pieces of neo-Confederate/Lost Cause advocacy.
Neo-Confederate pseudohistory of the Civil War, slavery, antebellum politics and Reconstruction are important in the field of history itself. For those who care about history, this is a matter for concern in itself.
Jackson Clarion-Ledger cartoonist Marshall Ramsey spoofed Mississippi's latest neo-Confederate controversy - over car tags honoring Confederate war criminal and Ku Klux Klan leader Bedford Forrest
One encouraging development on that front is the starting up of historical retrospectives occasioned by the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, such as the New York Times' Disunion blog, the Washington Post's A House Divided and The Long Recall by The American Interest. These retrospectives focus on the contemporary history of the war as it unfolded, not on retrospective versions of it. This is particularly important in relation to the Lost Cause. Political imperatives among the planters and other prominent leaders in the states of the former Confederacy led them immediately after the Civil War to develop a revisionist history of the war that cast the Confederate cause in a less unpatriotic and destructive image. In particular, the argument that slavery had nothing to do with causing the war and that what was primarily involved was an abstract principle of "states' rights" required major falsifications of prewar history.
One concern I have as such "as it was happening" retrospectives move into the period of the shooting war itself, that political issues relating to Lost Cause pseudohistory may get less emphasis and the drama of battles and military campaigns will crowd them out. In any case, what caused the war, a key element in Lost Cause revisionism and debunking it, requires attention to the events that actually led up to the outbreak of war. It's not that Civil War history as such is irrelevant to such questions, on the contrary. The role of emancipation as a war aim and the alleged participation of slaves as Confederate soldiers - currently a fashionable piece of Lost Cause junk history - are important, as well. But those issues can be obscured in history that overindulges that pathos involves in the innumerable individual triumphs and tragedies that were part of the war itself.
As much as I enjoy studying history, the longer I do it the more skeptical I become about how much current voters and decision-makers actually learn from it. That is a frequently-heard justification for learning history, as in George Santayana's famous statement, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
But those distortions of history were also part of the ideology of segregation and white supremacy that were dominant in the states of the former Confederacy for many years after the overthrown of the democratic Reconstruction state governments circa 1875-77. And they contribute significantly to such ideologies today, from voter suppression by the Republican Party to violent white supremacist militia groups.
Nick Owchar writes about some of the Civil War books that continue to emerge from publishers in Lessons of America's Civil War Los Angeles Times 03/06/2011. He hopefully invokes learning from history:
The lessons of the Civil War, these books suggest, remain relevant.I prefer the quote that is commonly cited to William Faulkner, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."; though more accurately it's what the character Gavin Stevens says in the play Requiem for a Nun Act I, Scene 3. Maybe for 2012 I'll devote most of the Confederate "Heritage" Month posts to Faulkner's stories on the Civil War and closely related subjects.
"The political process was so polarized that democratic compromise was almost impossible. Is our politics less polarizing today? Not really," explains David Goldfield, author of a monumental new appraisal of the war, "America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation" (Bloomsbury Press). "Can we learn from this? I hope so."
A history professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Goldfield said two questions have hovered over his 30-year academic career: Why wasn't there a better way? How did we get to the point of solving disputes only by war? He found his answer and a fresh angle for his book in examining how evangelical Christianity drove a wedge between Southern and Northern interests.
"It intruded into the political process so that there was no middle ground. There was only good and evil," he says. "Self-righteousness doesn't make for good public policy. It poisons the process. That's the theme that frames my book, from the war's start to its aftermath."
There are drawbacks to remembering history. Jeffrey Record has written two memorable books on the problem of American foreign policymakers interpreting current challenges by analogy to past ones: Making War, Thinking History: Munich, Vietnam, and Presidential Uses of Force from Korea to Kosovo (2002) and The Specter of Munich: Reconsidering the Lessons of Appeasing Hitler (2007) . Anti-abortion fanatics like to identify themselves with antebellum abolitionists and 1960s civil rights advocates. They point to the proslavery Dred Scott Supreme Court decision of 1857 to compare it to the Roe v. Wade of 1973 that established a woman's legal right to an abortion. In fact, they do it so often that a Republican politician's mention of Dred Scott will be widely understood among the Republican base as an anti-abortion statement!
It's unlikely in the foreseeable future that we will be able to separate "history" neatly from current political passions or from our desire to identify with historical models and predecessors.
Tags: confederate heritage month 2011, american civil war, lost cause,
neo-confederate, southern agrarians
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