It turns out that lots of folks are willing to help the Republican Confederate Party learn new facts and enrich their celebration of Confederate History Month.
Tonight’s mandatory reading comes from Ta-Nehisi Coates over at The Atlantic. His essay, The Ghost of Bobby Lee is a must read as he dismantles the “Slavery had nothing to do with the Confederacy” myth with a kindness that is firmly rooted in facts and empathy.
TNC moves straight to a take-down of the demi-god of the Confederacy–Robert E Lee–and transforms him from sainted icon to just another deeply flawed member of our species.
It is a major talking point of the Republican Confederate Party that Robert E. Lee hated slavery. This myth is so strong that TNC–like most of us–took it as common wisdom. And then the tubes of the Internets shared its cloud sourcing. Turns out, if you fact check the myth, it is a lie.
In his essay TNC points to a C-span broadcast of Elizabeth Brown Pryor discussing her book, Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee. You can watch that discussion here at C-span’s amazing archives of their recorded programs. One of the great features is the transcript. Here, you can scroll down to the 50:00 mark and click on the transcript excerpt. This will take the video to the start of the Q & A section. Listen for ten minutes or so and you’ll never buy the Robert E. Lee hated slavery myth again. It is a journey into the heart of Republican Confederate darkness and it is worth your time (IMHO).
Exposing the racist lies of the fools worshipping the Confederacy strikes me as a great way to celebrate Confederate History month. Every Republican and every Teabagger should be asked if you can discuss the Confederacy without discussing slavery. Their views on these myths should be on the record.
It matters more than a nit and it is a big diddly of an issue.
Cheers
dengre
BruceFromOhio
Indeed. I’d miss Atlanta. Let’s not do this twice, eh?
David in NY
You know, I’ve long wanted to go to Charleston, SC, which I understand is a picturesque city. But until they take that damn Confederate flag down, I’m not spending one red cent there. I’ve a mind to write that family-values Governor of theirs about it, but he might be off hiking somewhere …
And I may not be going to Virginia or a couple of other places soon, either.
DougJ
Thanks for this post.
Dennis G.
@DougJ:
You’re welcome. Maybe we need a “Celebrating Confederate History Month” category…
Litlebritdifrnt
Completely and utterly OT but I don’t care! I have a huge and complete utter girly crush on Elizabeth Warren, she is da f**king bomb, I mean the woman is so passionate in her beliefs that the little guy deserves a f**king break, she was just about to cry on Rachel Maddow’s show, could some one please put her in charge of something? Oh wait, never mind, isn’t there talk of her on SCOTUS! Do it yesterday! We now return you to your regular blogging.
dmsilev
If Confederate History Month is all about the glories of the sons of Virginia, etc., in the early 1860s, how come we never hear much about people like George Thomas, aka the Rock of Chickamauga?
dms
Mark S.
I remember (albeit kind of vaguely) my high school history textbook made Reconstruction sound awful and denigrated the Republicans (calling them radicals) who passed the 13-15th Amendments. I didn’t grow up in the South and I went to a Catholic school, so there wasn’t any real sympathy for the Confederacy. It’s amazing how these lies can become accepted as fact as long as you are persistent in repeating them.
Steve
What’s a good liberal to do if he attended a college named after Robert E. Lee?
And Another Thing...
Thanks for the link and the instructions. That’s good information to have.
My dad was transferred to Virginia in the 50’s when I was in grade school. All the classes had pictures of Lee, and we got out of school on his birthday. He was revered. I also remember white only signs, etc. My dad used to officiate basketball games at the segregated high schools and on occasion I got to go. Those experiences profoundly affected my attitude about race and the wrongness of racism.
I didn’t really know much about Lincoln until we moved to California and I learned the other side of The War of Northern Aggression.
Slavery really is the Original Sin of America.
freelancer (itouch)
Fuck the south. ‘cept for all our BJ friends, of course.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
I grew up force fed the noble, brave, romantic Rebel Soldier crappola. They fought for and most believed in the cause of owning humans as farm animals. Being poor is no excuse for being stoopid, so the argument that only poor white southerners did the fighting at the behest of their Aristocrat masters is bunk. And I am sure that some of my kinfolk were among them, which doesn’t change anything. The North should have driven a stake through the heart of Old Dixie after the war and not let up till nary a trace of sympathy for the southern lifestyle could be found alive and any attempts to recover it met with a swift demise. As Trent Lott once said, “we could have avoided all these problems we have now”. Of course, he was talking from other end of that street.
gwangung
Confederate History month. To celebrate FOUR years.
Don’t make no sense to me no how.
PeakVT
Maybe we need a “Celebrating Confederate History Month” category.
Not enough snark. Maybe something more along the lines of “Remembering the War of Northern Aggression” would be better.
Litlebritdifrnt
@David in NY:
In defense of Charleston it really is a beautiful city, it is walking friendly (DH and I stayed in the former Citadel school which is now a hotel), of course you can’t get a bloody beer and a slice of pizza anywhere cause every damn restaurant is about 12 stars and serves she crab soup which sucks when your spouse is allergic to sea food. Having said that there are a whole bunch of ladies (one would assume decendents of slaves) who make a VERY good living selling sweet grass baskets to the tourists, I mean I know they take some work but $15.00 for a basket the size of an egg cup? Anything bigger than a sugar bowl will cost you upwards of $50.00. It made me smile that a craft that grew from necessity and using the materials that were available for free now costs the rich white rubes a small fortune to purchase. Perhaps I have a sick sense of humor.
beltane
This whole episode has been highly educational. I’ve learned that historical revisionism is alive and well, and that if not connected to the rest of the country, the South would not be ready to enter the 20th century let alone the 21st.
Crashman
Ta-Nehisi Coates is just a brilliant writer. His recent ruminations on the American history and the Civil War have been, for someone who is interested in and works in a field related to American History, totally fascinating. I’m convinced that some day in the future he is going to write a great, accessible non-fiction book on something related to the Civil War or Reconstruction.
Thanks for spreading the word on this post Dennis.
cmorenc
For those of us old enought to have grown up in the south (small-town eastern North Carolina) during the late days of the Jim Crow era (50s, early 60s), one of the major dissonances along life’s arc is that so many fondly remembered family members and neighbors from that era of our lives, whom we not only remember as good, honorable people, but were bona fide regarded as such within their communities throughout their lifetimes , also were bona fide ardent, deep-seated racists of the sort who would be viewed with deep scorn and dishonor today.
A couple of years ago, I was sorting through some of my late maternal grandmother’s personal effects, which included some letters written circa 1963 discussing the civil rights controversies. It was shocking to read this genteel lady refer with dripping scorn to “uppity nigras” and how “god meant the races to stay separate” and how “communists were stirring up the nigras” and how “nigras had their place, white folks had theirs”. While my maternal grandfather, who had a sterling reputation within his hometown for scrupulously honest business dealings and polite, respectful, friendly treatment of everyone he knew, deacon in the local church etc. left no paper trail, nonetheless I remember enough scattered comments he made when I was about nine or ten to confidently know his attitutudes on race relations were identical (or even stronger) than my grandmother’s. He died suddenly of a stroke back in 1960 at age 70, before anything concretely changed in the Jim Crow racial structure of eastern North Carolina, but my grandmother lived long enough to never quite get over being aghast about the changes in civil rights and the racial arrangements across southern society that occurred before her death in 1984.
What am I to make of these folks who lived in the context of the vastly different prevailing social atmosphere and social consensus across 95% of white society in the south of that era? Do I reject my granparents as being on the whole, honorable and good people, because like fish they grew up under the sea of pervasive racist attitudes which seamlessly existed within the universe they lived in back then?
IMHO the problem with contemporary 2010 “let’s celebrate the Confederacy” southern folks is that unlike Robert E. Lee they DO live in a vastly different society where they should be charged with knowing much better, and that continuing worship of things Confederate is tantamount to fostering the return of racism across society. Lee I think deserves forbearance and forgiveness by the standards of his day, as does slaveowning Thomas Jefferson. Contemporary people who want to worshiply celebrate Lee’s lost southern cause today as “honorable” and something other than it was, to preserve a society economically based on slavery, are not at all honorable. Therein lies a critical difference.
dmsilev
It’s also sort of ironic that they picked April for CHM, as this month can also be described as Confederate Death Throes Month. Thus, we can wish people a Happy Fall of Richmond Day on the 3rd, a Happy Lee Surrenders at Appomattox Day on the 9th, and a Happy Johnston Surrenders What Is Left of the Confederate Army Day on the 26th.
And of course in May, we all celebrate Happy Jefferson Davis Arrested Like a Common Fugitive Day on the 10th. Kids get out of school for that one.
dms
Cerberus
@gwangung:
It’s their attempt to get revenge on “those people” for daring to note how the history books tends to gloss over certain groups. How dare they have an entire month of the year on Black history and now, Obama dares suggest following it up with an entire month on Women in history. Those people should be glad to learn white male history and love it, damnitt.
What, we weren’t supposed to notice the big fat “coincidence” that this just happens to occur in April, two months after black history month, one month after the new “Women in History” month.
This is about aggrieved white male resentment at minority groups getting a tiny sliver of their own and their need to aggressively assert the dominant groups’ dominance.
The fact they can do so on the back of their ongoing revisionist history campaign is just two great (read rancid) flavors coming together.
Crashman
@Litlebritdifrnt: Charleston is a beautiful and interesting city. My fiancee is from Columbia, and on a visit home we went down to check out the city. Took a tour of Fort Sumter, and I was pleasantly amused to hear him tell the group that the Fort was constructed using granite from Maine, so it is, and always had been truly Yankee territory.
New Yorker
Of course the whole “Robert E. Lee hated slavery” myth had to be nonsense, because look at how the lost causers treat the memory of James Longstreet, a man who became a Republican after the war and actually took action on behalf of black equality in the South: he is despised as a traitor despite being arguably the most capable general the South had in that war.
sukabi
I think this article by TNC explains McArdles earlier “thought exercise”….
r€nato
Thanks for the post. I had an American History teacher in high school who tried his damndest to propagandize us from the right. One of his constant hobby horses was that the Civil War was about ‘states’ rights’ not slavery. I was a teen of course and I knew I was being played but I also knew I wasn’t educated enough to know how to call him on it. I’ve remembered that resentment agains Mr. Hatten ever since.
…I’m pretty sure he was from Virginia.
rootless-e
A handsome mulatto woman, about 18 or 20 years of age, whose independent spirit could not brook the degradation of slavery, was in the habit of running away: for this offence she had been repeatedly sent by her master and mistress to be whipped by the keeper of the Charleston work-house. This had been done with such inhuman severity, as to lacerate her back in a most shocking manner; a finger could not be laid between the cuts. But the love of liberty was too strong to be annihilated by torture; and, as a last resort, she was whipped at several different times, and kept a close prisoner. A heavy iron collar, with three long prongs projecting from it, was placed round her neck, and a strong and sound front tooth was extracted, to serve as a mark to describe her, in case of escape. Her sufferings at this time were agonizing; she could lie in no position but on her back, whieh was sore from scourgings, as I can testify, from personal inspection, and her only place of rest was the floor, on a blanket. These outrages were committed in a family where the mistress daily read the scriptures, and assembled her children for family worship. She was accounted, and was really, so far as alms-giving was concerned, a charitable woman, and tender hearted to the poor; and yet this suffering slave, who was the seamstress of the family, was continually in her presence, sitting in her chamber to sew, or engaged in her other household work, with her lacerated and bleeding back, her mutilated mouth, and heavy iron collar, without, so far as appeared, exciting any feelings of compassion.
———
This whole book is worth reading
http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/weld/weld.html
Crashman
I always keep coming back to the David Blight quote that Ta-Nehisi references in that piece, where he says:
In the face of facts like that, I don’t know how anyone could deny that the war was fought over slavery.
Dennis G.
@PeakVT:
You may be onto something. I think we need a more snark ready name.
Perhaps “Celebrating the War of Northern Aggression” or “Celebrating Governor Diddly’s Nit”.
I am open for suggestions.
Cheers
Ella in NM
@beltane:
I’d agree and add that the entire past two years of history has been highly educational, especially for a person like me who thought we had pretty much a consensus that things like racism were no longer acceptable. Stupid me, eh?
Never before in my 48 years was the platitude about those not learning from the mistakes of history being doomed to repeat them so sadly, agonizingly, salient.
jl
As I said in a previous thread, I am a proud California patriot. Why isn’t California its own country? Then we could print our own money and the budget mess would be history. Easy as pie. My loyalties lie next with some of the Pacific Coast states. Hawaii, Oregon and Washington are semi-civilized areas, and have a culture that I recognize.
There are other parts of the United States, and they are wonderful places, with their quaint ways. They mostly mean well and I try to be open minded and tolerant when I visit.
However, I can celebrate my native CA, where my family has been roaming since it was a state, while recognizing that ‘my’ forbears in CA committed some horrendous crimes against the Native Americans (a genocide that in some parts of the state wasextreme even compared to other parts of the US), Chinese and other Asians. And there was quit a bit of racial prejudice and residential discrimination. I distinctly remember some prejudice against African-Americans surfacing in the older generation in my family during the later part of MJK’s career, though I was very young back then.
I cannot understand this sensitivity and denial about slavery among these Southern heritage patriot types. Unless it is in fact about race.
But then my favorite poem about California is
The miners came in 49
the whores in 51
then they got together
and they made a native son,
so, I have my own perspective on regional pride.
Woodrowfan
sometimes, when I’m feeling ungenerous, I wish Sherman and Grant had been able to access some small nukes…
DougJ
@Steve:
Well, I’m sure you know this already, but Lee was still a hero in some ways. If he’d been a teahadist type, there would have been a guerilla war lasting years.
Cerberus
@Woodrowfan:
You wouldn’t have been the first to fantasize about that.
The Dangerman
Why do I suspect that the same people that celebrate “Confederate History” are the same ones that denigrate the need for a “Black History” month or get pissed off when Latinos fly the Mexican flag during Cinco de Mayo?
toujoursdan
@New Yorker:
Exactly.
Lee wrote:
“In this enlightened age, there are few I believe, but what will acknowledge, that slavery as an institution, is a moral & political evil in any Country. It is useless to expatiate on its disadvantages. I think it however a greater evil to the white man than to the black race, & while my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more strong for the former. The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially & physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race, & I hope will prepare & lead them to better things. How long their subjugation may be necessary is known & ordered by a wise Merciful Providence.”
—Robert E. Lee, letter to his wife on slavery (December 27, 1856)
So slavery was a necessary evil because Black people need “instruction” by whites.
Robert E. Lee HAD several dozen slaves.
beltane
@Woodrowfan: No nukes needed, just an air force.
JD Rhoades
@New Yorker:
I’ve never heard Longstreet described as a “traitor.” I’ve hear his generalship called into question, but most of the people who you’d expect to think of him as a traitor (i,e, dumb people) don’t have any idea who he was.
BTW, it’s definitely worth following the link and reading the whole discussion after TNCs post. Discussions like that are why TNC and Balloon Juice are my two “must read” blogs.
Larkspur
All this reminds me of musician Gillian Welch’s CD called Time (The Revelator), and her song “Ruination Day”. It’s about tomorrow, April 14th. The Titanic hit the iceberg, it was Black Sunday – probably the worst day of the Oklahoma dust storms in 1935, and President Lincoln was shot.
“…Ruination day,
And the sky was red.
I went back to work,
And back to bed.
“And the iceberg broke,
And the Okies fled,
And the Great Emancipator
Took a bullet in the back of the head…”
kommrade reproductive vigor
You know, I can honestly say I never heard this one.
Cerberus
@The Dangerman: Immediately after “Women’s History Month” and two months after “Black History Month”. Yeah, no way that’s a coincidence.
I’d be willing to bet a vital organ that getting back at “them that want their own special months where we have to acknowledge that they existed before last thursday” was reason number one for scheduling this “innocuous history month” when they did.
They’ve woken up to the fact that everyone’s starting to get really tired of aggressively privileged white men running everything and pretending like they’re the be all/end all of America. This is that subset of aggresively privileged douchebags firing off a parting shot trying to assert their “rightful dominion” on all of us “non-normals”.
I’m loving how it’s getting subverted though. I mean, I could count on the “uh, you’re a dumbass” stuff, but the complete dismantling of the decades of lies all over the internet is a joy to behold. It’s like all the lessons that were meant to occur during Black History Month are occurring here because they were too stupid to just ride the status quo.
Delicious.
Niques
@Dennis G.:
Ooh . . . I LIKE “Governor Diddly’s Nit”!
LD50
As for what the CSA was all about, one can also link to the words of the Vice President of the CSA, Alexander Stevens, who, in his famous Cornerstone Speech, said the following in 1861:
But I guess modern wingnuts know MUCH BETTER about what was going on in the CSA government than did members of the actual CSA government.
LD50
@Litlebritdifrnt:
Are you sure they might not be Catawba Indians?
Cerberus
This whole thing reminds me of something else we need to do more of.
Most of these wingnut leaders by virtue of being on the wrong side of history in every conflict, have a trail of tears of statements that are now obscene in the current climate.
Most of the anti-gay forces have histories back opposing the common-sense ERA amendment where they literally advocated women having no other life goal but housewife. And the histories of “beloved” icons reveal all sorts of nasty quotes that are unpalatable by today’s standards.
This is a great and wondrous device we have, not only to reveal the depths of their lies, but to well and truly hang them by their failed fights of yesterday and their recycling of leaders.
Dennis G.
@toujoursdan:
And if you listen to the C-span broadcast described in the post you will find that Lee was a big fan of torturing slaves with the lash, capturing blacks and returning them to slavery and fully embraced a view that whites had a God given right to own and abuse slaves. Lee got mad at his slaves when he felt that they were not giving him enough stolen labor and he was not afraid to whip them to steal more of their sweat and toil.
Lee did write some letters where he was somewhat vague about his view (these fuel the myth), but a closer look at the facts show that he was simply a prick.
SGEW
The Ghost of Bobby Lee piece today prompted me to go back and re-read Ta-Nehisi’s magnificent “Nathan Bedford Forrest Has Beautiful Eyes” post, from a while back. It captures something that I haven’t seen put forward anywhere else:
JD Rhoades
My favorite quote from the discussion at the TNC link:
I wish this didn’t matter, but I suppose it does: I am white; born in Mississippi, 1961; moved away at age 2, but visited there all my life (buried my aunt in Booneville last week) and have never lived outside the south. All this “heritage, not hate” bullshit is shameful. Of course the war was about slavery; of course slavery was evil. The main lesson to be gleaned from studying the Confederacy is a warning: intelligence, education, bravery, industry, and even love and generosity to some will not stop you from being sucked into evil, from participating in it, from relying on it, from making others and even yourself suffer and die to protect it. The lesson of the Confederacy is that we must always be vigilant against our own pride, greed, and fear.
jl
Come to think of it, I do not remember being taught the Lee ‘hated’ slavery. I remember being taught that Lee more like disapproved of slavery and did not think that Southern secession was justified, but decided to fight because of his loyalty and attachment to Virginia.
But then I was raised in ‘liberal’ CA.
I was also taught that Grant was not that concerned about slavery and converted to a strong stance on racial civil rights (by the standards of his day) until late in the war. At the beginning, he thought the war was about preserving the Union, and abolishing slavery was not an issue.
BTW, I was also taught that if it were not for San Francisco, California probably would have joined the South. Most of the state was full of southern sympathizers.
The liberal crimes of San Francisco go way back.
LD50
@jl:
No shit. In his life, the (California) Yahi Indian Ishi had seen most of his relatives massacred by whites:
Apparently when Ishi wandered into that corral in 1911, he was the very last survivor of his family/tribe, and he only ‘came out’ because he was starving. He fully expected to be murdered. He must have been blown away when he got to spend the last 4 years of his life living at a museum in San Francisco.
JGabriel
Dennis, I just want to add my voice to those thanking you for this series on Confederate History. Thoughtful, informative, and I’m learning a lot from them and the included links.
Thanks.
.
Walker
Raised N. Carolinian here. There are many things I am proud of in my heritage. My wife and I even got married at the family’s plantation (which is now a museum). But that is because..
1. The family was Union (so the plantation did not get burnt to the ground).
2. After the war, all of the slaves were given the option to stay as hired employees (all but one stayed).
iriedc
I’ve been learning quite a bit about 1800s Confederate History from TNC.
And now I’m learning a lot about current
ConfederateRepublicanConfederate history from BJ.Thanks to you both!
Litlebritdifrnt
@LD50: pretty sure about that, they are not Indians.
jl
@LD50: It was horrific in most of the California. Some settlers made nice money killing Native American parents and selling the kids into slavery (slavery which was quasi-legal for awhile). I have read anthropologists who say that in some places around where the Yana lived, their bones are still laying out there.
Where I grew up, 100 miles in any direction was supposed to be a big Indian reservation according to some treaty after the Civil War. But my white ancesters shot the people and took the land and no one cared.
So, every society, region, culture has a dark episode to their history. Why not face it and recognize it?
I love the South and see plenty that is valuable in the culture, from both sides of the master-slave divide.
And some in my family are immigrants who come from the ‘old country’ (the rest of the US) and some from parts that still use the words ‘War of Southern Independence’. So I have seen the attitude up close during family visits. But I never could understand how they can ignore slavery and racism unless they still have a little problem with race.
Mike in NC
Read a book last year — the name of which I forget — but it was all about popular history and the Civil War. Hollywood has long perpetuated the bullshit of the Lost Cause, from “Birth of a Nation” to “Gone with the Wind” to the present day.
One chapter in the book was about Civil War art. There is a whole cottage industry cranking out paintings of Confederate “heroes” like Lee and Stuart and Jackson, etc. The artists claim they can’t sell enough pictures of Stonewall Jackson in particular, and even more so if it shows him and Lee kneeling in prayer! No doubt Newt Gingrich and Haley Barbour are big customers.
Mnemosyne
@Mark S.:
Me, too, and I grew up in northern Illinois. I’m starting to think that the myths of Reconstruction are far more damaging than the myths of the Confederacy. That’s where the contemptuous term “carpetbagger” comes from — the people who came down from the North to try and help build a civil society.
Kids are still taught in school today that Reconstruction was somehow inherently corrupt and bad and that its almost total failure was a good thing because, um, because shut up, that’s why.
LD50
@jl: For another facet of California’s rather ugly recent past, google “California Proposition 14, 1963”, one of those famous California ballot initiatives, designed to make housing discrimination legal in California. It passed by a big margin. It was struck down by the SCOTUS 3 years later, but only by a 5-4 margin.
Roger Moore
@Dennis G.:
“Confederate Party”. You’re already using it to describe the situation, and it sums it up perfectly.
J. Michael Neal
@dmsilev:
No fucking shit. I’m up for starting a campaign to drum up the funds to commission a life sized statue of Gen. Thomas and have it placed in front of the fucking Mississippi state capitol.
Cerberus
Regarding California and recent ugly history, we should also add that the John Birch Society began here. Also, the Hollywood Blacklisting of “suspected communists” that launched the careers of CA’s own Ronald Reagan and Tricky Dick Nixon.
And as a cherry on the sundae, we also gave the world the Rapture Cult. Tim La Haye, author of Left Behind, the book that propelled the rapture cult into mainstream fundie culture, is from CA.
We all have black marks.
Walker
@Mnemosyne:
For the people I know who cannot get over the war, it is indeed Reconstruction that is the issue. I know many old Southern families who believe that their land was unlawfully seized. In the South, land is eternal. I have people in my family who won’t talk to each other because of land disputes two generations back.
J. Michael Neal
@Dennis G.:
Not so much a tag, but for the revolving blog subtitle: “Kicking Confederate Ass Since 1861.” The proprietor even has the advantage of residing in the state that seceded from the Confederacy.
Actually, that’s an interesting Constitutional question. It seems to me that the Civil War definitively cemented the idea that states cannot secede from the Union, but that parts of states can secede from the whole. It rather puts the kibosh on the idea that sovereignty resides at the state level.
Svensker
@ J. Michael Neal
I think “Kicking Confederate Ass Since 1861” is a splendid idea for just about everything. Slogan-wise, anyway.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
I hope you keep writing on this topic Mr. Dennis G.
J. Michael Neal
@Svensker: I generally think of it as a plan of action rather than a slogan, really.
JGabriel
Just watched the latter half of the linked talk Pryor gave at Arlington, and I was struck with an odd sense of watching the end of an era: Pryor’s presentation was delivered in May, 2007, and it was interesting viewing it from the perspective – unknown to, or at best only vaguely anticipated by, its participants – that the first black president would be elected less than 18 months later.
.
planetjanet
I really want to thank you for bring the Ta-Nehisi Coates article and the underlying lecture to my attention. Mr. Coates impresses me greatly, every time I read his work. The lecture he linked to was quite fascinating. You are right, we do have a lot more to learn about our confederate past.
JGabriel
@PeakVT:
I prefer “Remembering the War Against Southern Insurrectionists and Traitors”.
Perhaps it’s a little too blunt and accurate to be considered snark, but, to my mind, Confederate whitewashing should be met with bluntness and candor.
.
BobS
@J. Michael Neal:
“Not so much a tag, but for the revolving blog subtitle: “Kicking Confederate Ass Since 1861.” The proprietor even has the advantage of residing in the state that seceded from the Confederacy.”
How about “Kicking Confederate Ass Since 2005”, since that was the year of Mr. Cole’s (and not Terry Schiavo’s) Great Awakening.
Stroll through the archives from before then and you can easily imagine him defending the likes of Mr. Barbour and slamming Mr. Coates in a knee-jerk partisan fashion.
Jamie
the best part of confederacy month
http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/appomatx.htm
Cacti
Robert E. Lee was a traitor of the first stripe, and no amount of revisionist whitewash will ever cover that up.
Lee was a West Point graduate and a commissioned officer in the United States Army.
As such, he had taken an oath of loyalty to the Constitution of the United States of America. NOT an oath to defend Virginia. NOT an oath to south. An oath to defend the US of A, against ALL enemies, foreign AND domestic.
Not only did he fail to fulfill his oath, he actively chose to lead those who took up arms against the nation he swore to protect.
Were it not for the magnanimity of Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses Grant, Lee would have hanged for treason at the end of the Civil War.
New Yorker
@JGabriel:
If that’s the way you feel (I do too), you’ll love Christopher Hitchens’ comments from this old column that came out shortly after Trent Lott’s comments about Strom Thurmond and “all those problems”.
http://www.slate.com/id/2075467/
Actually, now that I think about it, nothing much has changed concerning Kissinger, Law, or the whole celebration of the Confederacy to make this column any less relevant today.
PeakVT
@J. Michael Neal: The Constitution says something along the lines of: no new states within the borders of existing states unless the other states agree. What happened is that after Virginia seceded the people of what is now WV formed a new government, which the federal government recognized as the government of Virginia. Then the new VA government along with the Union States agreed to split the old state of VA. So, no precedent was set that parts of a state could unilaterally secede into a new state.
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
@Dennis G.:
How about: Diddling a Nit
Great writeup makes for an excellent read Dennis. I am enjoying your take on the events and the comments are icing on the cake. Slavery is what it was all about and attempts to revise history should be shot down at every chance. Revising history is a dangerous thing that should be confronted. Those who do not learn from history…
What is good about this is that rather than the ‘north’ bringing this issue up, the responsibility for the revival of discussion about events relating to the Civil War lies solely on the shoulders of the ‘south’. With these traitorous weasels whining about “states rights”, starting a militia to fight the federal government and declaring celebrations of the ‘good ol’ days’ of Dixie, they are giving us the perfect opportunity to scorn, deride, and dismiss their blatant attempts to rewrite history.
Now is the time to stomp a mudhole in the ass of this traitorous bullshit about secession and romanticizing about more genteel times that have never really existed anywhere except in their fevered dreams.
Good work Dennis, kudos.
TenguPhule
So May will be known as “Honoring Union Heroes month” now? This Memorial Day could be so awesome.
Phoebe
@JD Rhoades: Thanks. That was great. That lesson is completely lost on tons of people, of course. Someone else said we can’t fault Lee for being a product of his time and place, and I had a friend from Texas who said she was prejudiced “because that’s how I was raised.” [it was prejudiced instead of racist in 1978]. Nothing would EVER change if people didn’t question how they were raised.
Even in Lee’s time and place, there were people who questioned how they were raised. Because of them, it is a different time now, and people aren’t raised the way they used to be, for the most part. What is it with the bitter clinging? Sore loserdom?
J. Michael Neal
@BobS: I was reading back in those days, and I never got the sense that Mr. Cole had the slightest truck with neo-Confederates. He could be exasperatingly, mind-bogglingly wrong, but not in that direction. If he had been, I doubt I’d have stuck around to watch the chrysalis open.
patroclus
Wow – thanks for the link to that video with Elizabeth Brown Pryor; I hadn’t realized and had certainly never been taught that Robert E. Lee was such a shit. An ill-tempered white supremacist slaveholder, who was notorious for ill treatment; combined with out-and-out traitor-like conduct at the very moment he could potentially have saved the situation all wrapped up with all the murderous war stuff. Ugh! And this is the guy Virginia and much of the country reveres?? I think the actual historicity should be more widely known; especially with respect to the recently-revealed personal letters of Lee.
At the very least, people should actually listen to the words of the Band’s The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.
Triassic Sands
@Cerberus:
If by “here” you mean California, I don’t think so.
The John Birch Society was founded by Robert Welch in Indianapolis, Indiana in 1958. Today, its headquarters are in Appleton, WI.
Orange County has long had a reputation for being a hotbed of Bircher activity. Perhaps that’s where you got the idea that the JBS started in California.
ChrisB
@patroclus: Yes, that’s a great lecture by Elizabeth Brown Pryor. Makes me want to read her book.
The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge
@patroclus:
Actually, they shouldn’t—it’s quite inaccurate. Robert E. Lee never led an army in Tennessee. I guess that “Virgil, quick come see—there goes Braxton Bragg!” wouldn’t have rhymed.
I know I’m late to the party, but we mustn’t give these traitors the benefit of the doubt that they only went to war to preserve slavery where it already existed. The first 13th Amendment—which passed both Houses of Congress and would certainly have been ratified—handed them that on a silver platter.
They went to war because there was resistance in the North to the extension of slavery into the territories, prospectively creating new slave states. The Southerners were reluctantly willing to honor the Missouri Compromise line, but assumed that any new states south of it would automatically be slave states. When the Kansas-Nebraska Act carved two new states out of the Nebraska territory and allowed the inhabitants of each new state to—horror of horrors—vote on whether to enter the Union as a slave or free state, they tried to overwhelm Kansas with southern settlers, resulting in a brutal 10-year civil war that led up to the main event.
Everybody knows that, and that Dred Scott’s owner brought him north of the Missouri Compromise line, resulting in his suing for his freedom. Everybody is suitably outraged that the Taney court ruled that he wasn’t a citizen, and thus had no standing to petition a Federal court. Most people ignore the little aside at the end of the decision: “And oh yeah—the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional to begin with.”
If any one man started the Civil War, it was Chief Justice Taney, because this allowed the slaveowners to dream of a whole raft of new slave states, to overwhelm the free states in the Senate. (And we’ve recently been reminded how Senators representing maybe 10% of the population can bitch up the whole detail.)
Therefore, simply guaranteeing the institution of slavery where it already existed wasn’t nearly good enough for them, even when it was offered. If they had simply gone to war to protect the institution in their own states, that would have been reprehensible enough, but somewhat understandable considering it was the basis of their economic system. But no, they went to war as part of a conspiracy to limit the free states to the Northeast and the Upper Midwest and stake out the rest of the continent for themselves. That’s much worse, in my opinion, and they should be called on it at every opportunity.
Wile E. Quixote
Dennis, you just don’t get it. You see, the Civil War was about slavery, but it was the South that went to war to free the slaves. Don’t believe me. Well in 1861, at his first inaugural, Lincoln repeated the following point which he had made in several other speeches.
See, the Southerners knew that Lincoln wasn’t going to do anything about slavery, and noble, freedom loving Southerners like Robert E. Lee hated it and wanted it abolished. So they ran a Serbian Jew Double Bluff on Lincoln by seceding from the Union. But it wasn’t enough, even as late as 1862 Lincoln wrote:
For noble, freedom loving, colorblind Southerners like Robert E. Lee and Nathan Bedford Forrest this wasn’t enough, and they vowed to keep going with the Serbian Jew Double Bluff and continued to bitterly fight the Civil War until 1865 when Lincoln wrote, in his second inaugural.
As soon as Lincoln made this speech the noble, freedom loving Southerners knew that the four year long Serbian Jew Double Bluff that began at Fort Sumter in 1861 had succeeded, and the noble, freedom loving, slavery hating Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia a month later on the 9th of April, 1865.
patroclus
Actually, I think the song is not only accurate but particularly applicable to the issues concerning Lee historical revisionism. Lee certainly never commanded an Army in Tennessee, but the song lyrics refer to a time after the War after Virgil has returned to Tennessee and is with his wife. The raid referred to in the song is by Major General Stoneman’s cavalry at a time in which the Confederate soldiers were “hungry and barely alive.” (Interestingly, Stoneman had been captured a year earlier in Georgia and was the highest ranking Union officer ever a POW; he was traded back to the Union at Sherman’s personal request and then went back to raid the Dalton-Richmond line; he later became a Democratic Governor of California).
His wife doesn’t refer to “Robert E. Lee” (or certainly the despised Bragg); she refers to “the Robert E. Lee.” That is, in my view, something like a train or a steamboat. And then, he laments that they’ve taken “our very best.” Which is later revealed to be Virgil’s brother (now “above him” as in heaven). At least in my view, Virgil blames the War for the loss of his brother.
Robbie Robertson supposedly researched the history before writing the lyrics and it was certainly regarded as an anti-war song by Joan Baez and others.
Dennis G.
@DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal):
That would work. Diddling a Nit is short and to the point and gives the fat bastard of Mississippi his proper due.
Cheers
ItAintEazy
I think the best evidence against the “Civil War was not fought over slavery” bullshit is to recite the very Confederate Constitution itself. The issues of “states rights” is negated by Article 4, Sec. 3, Subsec. 3 and I quote:
That’s right, if you become a state in the Confederacy, you don’t have much “states’ rights” when it comes to slavery.
Other than that, the Confederate constitution is basically the same as the U.S. constitution (barring 6-year presidential terms, line-item veto, etc) except for a certain phrase that’s scattered throughout the document making clear WHAT’S being preserved and WHO’S being enslaved.
The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge
@patroclus:
I’ll take your word for it. I always heard that verse as implying that his wife had been raped and/or murdered by a passing army under the command of Robert E. Lee—that she was “the very best” they took from him.
I think one of the most disgusting things about the whole Confederate apologia is their whining about all the “atrocities” committed against them, by the much-maligned Uncle Billy Sherman, for example. If you examine them, it’s always the Union Army’s failure to “respect private property” that they complain about. A Federal Army is just supposed to march by and watch them growing crops and manufacturing weapons for the Rebel Army and do nothing about it, because it was all private property!
To people jaded by living through the 20th century, none of these “atrocities” seem particularly atrocious. The only ones that would qualify were committed by the Confederates—massacres of surrendering black soldiers, for example, or Andersonville.
That’s why my interpretation of that lyric struck me as wrong—Virgil’s wife would never have been the victim of such a crime…assuming she was white, of course.
Xenos
@cmorenc:
I had a similar dilemma with a beloved grandfather, and while he held a white supremacist world view his psyche was really dominated by religious bigotry. His parents were radical Protestants from Ulster, and raised him in turn of the century Brooklyn to be at war with every Catholic, Jew, and Methodist he met. It was a form of child abuse, and he never got over it, even though as far as we knew he was a kind, affectionate and generous man. Throughout most of his life that sort of bigotry was pretty normal. By the 70s he did not recognize his country any more, and was pretty bitter about that.
Now he is long gone, and all but one of his many grandchildren are married to Italians, Poles, Irish, Jews, and Greeks.
Napoleon
Of course it was always all about slavery. In the late 90s my now ex, her son and I went to Gettysburg the weekend before the 4th of July weekend, so in other words just a few days before the anniversary of the battle. There was a statute covered on the field that was going to be unveiled and dedicated on the anniversary that was of one of the most important Confederate generals during the war, James Longstreet. I was told that even though there were hundreds of statutes erected to Lee, Stonewall Jackson, etc all across the south that this statute was the first of Longstreet, even though he had been so important. Why? Because after they lost he thought the now freed blacks should be given the vote.
DBrown
@jl: The problem with the south is it is still in the mindset of victim and denial. Fact – lee was a traitor and monster as well as a slave owner who abused his slaves. Fact, the civil war was all about slavery (by the south, it is far more true that the North was not fighting to win the freedom of slaves until late in the war.) Relative to Native Americans, I don’t see people today acting proud about the killings of Native Americans back then. Rather, I see more truth about what we did to them, not less. The south still tries to make hero’s out of swine like lee.
Napoleon
@DougJ:
I don’t know if I would be willing to grant him that. There is a reason that the South ran a set piece type of traditional war instead of a more guerilla type of war you would expect these days from an insurgency. People who run guerilla wars do so when the population they are in and among either support them or are at least not hostile to them, or else it becomes impossible to run the guerilla war. That was never an option for the South because a huge chunk of the South’s population was directly opposed to the system that prevailed in the South. So the power structure in the South really had to operate like a regular country with a regular army and a government that could not fade into the woodwork at night because it had to be in place so as to keep the slaves in place.
rootless-e
@Napoleon: Yep. In fact, they had to divert troops to put down slave rebellions during the war.
flukebucket
Definitely.
After all, Confederate History Month is a big fuckin’ diddly.
celticdragonchick
@Phoebe:
people do honestly tend to reflect the attitudes and mores of their times, and it is a fools errand to suppose that everybody should just be able to buck the system and become enlightened 21st Century ideals while living in a 19th Century world.
The past is like a different country. They do things differently there. (not my line, but I like it)
Ta Nehisi make much the same point at the end of his essay when he claims ownership of both the good and the bad of our past. You don’t have to excuse what they did, but it is useful to at least understand the dynamics in play at that time and apply what was felt to be outrageous and what was acceptable in open society.
celticdragonchick
@Napoleon:
An awful big chunk of poor whites in Appalachia were not too impressed with the Confederacy either. The biggest joke is seeing how the descendants of those same whites are now the most likely to fly the stars and bars that there great great grandpappy would have spat upon.
RoonieRoo
I’ve been struggling with this latest line of posts on Balloon Juice as a loyal BJer who normally enjoys the commentary. It’s been a struggle for me as a native Texan who is very proud of my state and a person that was raised by a man that is so liberal lefty that he makes Jessie Jackson look like a tea party nutjob.
I am a Lee. My grandmother was the last to carry Lee as her last name and we now carry Lee down as a middle name. “Lighthorse Harry” Lee would be my great x 4 ( I think it is 4) grandfather. My branch is from one of his other children.
I’m apparently a racist who believes in slavery by the very virtue of my geography and heritage according the y’all. My home should be burned or nuked or my state should be kicked out of the union purely on your judgement of my entire state/family based on some nutjobs in the news.
It’s getting old trying to read and appreciate a conversation that should be had about the nutjob politicians when every thread becomes a series of attacks on southerners as a whole and the ways that we should be punished for just being born here.
I love how everyone here KNOWS that every southerner and every person of descent agrees and worships Lee and the rest of the Confederacy. Frankly, y’all know shit and you are no different than the Rethugs who seem to believe that we all support their idiocy.
So, do me a favor, and see if it is possible for you to have a conversation about this Confederacy nonsense in an adult way. You might find that the South agrees with you more than you want. Well that assumes that you want to know that since if we do agree with you, it is harder to judge and get your rocks off calling for a return of Sherman.
flukebucket
RoonieRoo I feel your pain.
I am a southern hippie. I come to Balloon-Juice often just so I can leave here punch drunk.
Let ’em have their fun man. It ain’t no thang.
Larkspur
This is unfair and you know it. Personally, I think a remembrance of the Civil War would include a lot of solemn recognition that so many, many people died, on our soil, less than 200 years ago.
Not that I don’t sympathize. Blanche McCrary Boyd, a writer from South Carolina, author of, among other books, a collection of essays entitled The Redneck Way of Knowledge, once observed that being from the South is kind of like being Goebbels’ daughter: no one blames you exactly, but they all want to how it’s affected you.
So I do get a sense of your feeling of alienation. But I don’t want to alienate you. War’s over.
PS: Boyd may have said “Himmler’s daughter”. But you get the drift.
BobS
@J. Michael Neal: I agree that there was nothing Mr.Cole wrote that would indicate any racist sentiments of his own. But he was on the same side as the neo-Confederates on some pretty important issues, for instance the war in Iraq and a running defense of the Bush administration. It’s not for nothing the graphic at the top of the page has the Confederate flag decorating the GOP elephant.
A look through the archives can find him regularly tipping his hat to disgusting creatures like the execrable Ann Coulter and similarly blasting bloggers and public figures who were right on the war like Juan Cole and the economy like Paul Krugman.
In that respect, it’s disingenuous to suggest this blog has been fighting the good fight since 1861.
Will
RoonieRoo,
I am a Southerner – Southeastern North Carolina variety – and my advice to you is to suck it up. I’ve grown very tired of liberal Southerners whining about how aggrieved they feel that people look down on the South.
If it bothers you that much, move. If not, deal with the fact that your beloved homeland fought for slaves, still retards the rest of the country and, consequently, gets a bad reputation.
Original Lee
@The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge: Have an internet. Unfortunately, too few of us get this kind of history in high school. Thanks!