Beyond the hate
by Tom Sullivan
One story that really struck me in the wake of the Charleston murders and the Confederate flag debate in South Carolina was actually about Kentucky. James W. Loewen, emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Vermont mentioned it on NPR. He explains in his July 1 article for the Washington Post, “Why Do People Believe Myths About The Confederacy? Because Our Textbooks And Monuments Are Wrong.” He writes, “As soon as Confederates laid down their arms, some picked up their pens and began to distort what they had done, and why.” The project to rewrite history began in earnest:
Take Kentucky. Kentucky’s legislature voted not to secede, and early in the war Confederate Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston ventured through the western part of the state and found “no enthusiasm as we imagined and hoped but hostility . . . in Kentucky.” Eventually, 90,000 Kentuckians would fight for the United States, while 35,000 fought for the Confederate States. Nevertheless, according to historian Thomas Clark, the state now has 72 Confederate monuments and only two Union ones.
Neo-Confederates also won western Maryland. In 1913, the United Daughters of the Confederacy put a soldier on a pedestal at the Rockville, Md., courthouse. Montgomery County never seceded, of course. While Maryland did send 24,000 men to the Confederate armed forces, it sent 63,000 to the U.S. Army and Navy. Nevertheless, the Confederate monument tells visitors to take the other side: “To our heroes of Montgomery Co. Maryland / That we through life may not forget to love the Thin Gray Line.”
Pretty stunning stuff. Loewen provides examples of how the “states’ rights” rationalization for secession quickly replaced slavery in Southern memory and in schoolbooks, until people will insist slavery had nothing to do with the “War Between the States” (itself renamed), in spite of plenty of contemporary evidence to the contrary. Then, of course, there is the romance of the “Lost Cause” and the battle flag.
Not to minimize the racist component behind the fetish for the stars and bars, but what gets lost in that simplistic analysis is the psychic impact the Civil War had on Southerners. They were superior by nature and breeding to their northern counterparts:
For most Southern proponents, the argument went something like this. In 1066, William the Conqueror subdued the Saxons — a barbarous, uncivilized race — not only providing England with cultural refinement but also imposing upon the island a class of gentry who were genetically equipped to rule. The enduring features of the subdued Saxon race — which because of medieval sociopolitical reality did not tend to intermarry with their Norman overseers — were a resentment of just authority, a tendency toward fanaticism and a reflexive valorization of liberty for its own sake. The Puritan settlers of Massachusetts were the descendants of those vanquished Saxons, separatist fanatics who burned witches until deciding to dump tea into Boston harbor instead.
[snip]
The colonies of the South, on the other hand (Jamestown, but also later colonies in the Carolinas), were established by members of Elizabeth’s and James’s courts, descendants of the Norman conquerors, the ruling class of England. Though the federal union that followed the Revolution sufficed, for a time, to assuage the centuries-old enmity between representatives of these bloodlines, the writer for that 1863 issue of The Southern Literary Messenger insisted that “none of the circumstances which blended the interests of both people … none of the alliances and intimate associations of Society itself — have availed to obliterate any of the decided marks of this innate, fixed, enduring difference.”
Then Southern gentlemen lost a war on their own soil to common yankee tradesmen and shopkeepers, Saxons, and worse, were forced to accept (though many never did) their former property as co-citizens. That had to be a bitter pill. “Heritage not hate” barely scratches the surface. The Confederate flag represents simmering resentment, a big middle finger to the rest of the country over that loss a century and a half ago.
Someone on a FB thread pointed out that the bulk of Southern troops were dirt poor and hardly aristocrats. True. Neither are the pickup truck drivers flying Confederate flags from the back of pickups down here lately. But they absorbed the mythology nevertheless.
Most likely the dirt poor were not the men of means who erected stone monuments to memorialize the Lost Cause in town squares across the South. Nor the ones who crafted an alternate, more flattering, less treasonous origin story for the war, and promote it still in textbooks.
“Teaching or implying that the Confederate states seceded for states’ rights is not accurate history. It is white, Confederate-apologist history. It bends – even breaks – the facts of what happened,” writes Loewen. And that’s just the way they like it. After a century and a half of determined resistance to history and facts, is it any wonder why conservative politicians, many from the Old South, spout patent nonsense with the same dogged defiance?