February 20, 2007
A Modest Proposal II Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 03:30 PM EST John Steele Gordon writes that the Confederate flag (as opposed to the Confederate battle flag) is “an honorable emblem of their ancestors’ ‘blood-bought immortality.’” While I certainly intend no disrespect to Mr. Gordon, who is hardly responsible for what his great-great-grandfather did in 1861, I couldn’t disagree more. It is, for one, the flag of treason, which is precisely what its followers committed when they raised arms against the United States. As a general rule, nations do not honor treason with public commemorations or iconography. That few people recognize the flag does not rob it of its meaning. It is also the flag of chattel slavery. To understand the meaning behind the emblem, one need only read the words of Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the Confederate States of America, who famously said that the “corner-stone” of the new nation “rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.” Several years ago I contributed articles to the Washington Post and Dissen on the issue of the Confederate battle flag. If readers will indulge a little recycling on my part, the following is an edited excerpt from my Washington Post piece and makes the counterargument to Mr. Gordon’s modest proposal: In the debate over the presence of the Southern Cross on various state flags, many impartial observers continue to repeat the worn platitude that the flag is an emotional issue for white and black Southerners alike. As Boston Herald columnist Don Feder argued, “Southerners have every right to be proud of their heritage. . . . If Lincoln were alive today, he would say let the South honor its heroes. Race relations aren’t advanced by denigrating a symbol good Americans died for. . . .” Surprisingly, such statements aren’t new. This value-neutral interpretation of the Civil War emerged within a few decades of the war’s conclusion. As the nineteenth century neared its end, the ex-slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass denounced the collective amnesia that he thought had taken hold of the nation. “What was bad before the war, and during the war, has not been made good since the war,” he admonished a crowd assembled in 1894 at Mt. Hope Cemetery in Rochester, New York. “Whatever else I may forget, I shall never forget the difference between those who fought for liberty and those who fought for slavery . . . there was a right side and a wrong side in the late war which no sentiment ought to cause us to forget.” Douglass was outraged by the willingness of the victorious to forgive and forget the trespasses of the vanquished. In the years following Reconstruction, Northerners seemed oddly complicit in a vigorous cultural assault against common-sense memory. They joined Southerners in refashioning the war as an epic family feud in which Johnny Reb and Billy Yank each fought courageously and honorably, then buried the hatchet and became brothers again. A powerful combination—the passage of time, the disillusioning experience of Reconstruction, and hardening racial sensibilities in both regions—led many Northerners and Southerners to revel in shared military glory without dwelling too much on the causes of the conflict. This spirit of reconciliation, and its emphasis on combat over ideology, found its most popular expression in a vogue that swept America in the 1880s and 1890s: blue and gray reunions. Veterans and their families attended hundreds of these gatherings. Reflecting and nourishing the nation’s fascination with all things military, The Century—a popular, widely circulated magazine—ran an acclaimed series of articles between 1884 and 1887 on “Battles and Leaders of the Civil War.” The editors explained that “no time could be fitter for a publication of this kind than the present, when the passions and prejudices of the Civil War have nearly faded out of politics, and its heroic events are passing into our common history where motives will be weighed without malice, and valor praised without distinction of uniform.” Until recently, historical consensus held that soldiers in the 1860s were driven by a variety of impulses, most of them vague: courage, honor, local ties, manly valor. Conspicuously missing from that list were theoretical commitments to the preservation or abolition of slavery. Writing in this vein nearly 50 years ago, Bell Irvin Wiley, who at the time was considered the leading authority on Civil War military culture, claimed that “American soldiers of the 1860s appear to have been . . . little concerned with ideological issues.” But more recent scholarship suggests that many Confederate soldiers knew well the ends for which they fought. The historian James M. McPherson, of Princeton University, has argued that “ideological motifs almost leap from” the written record bequeathed by Civil War soldiers. After reading more than 25,000 personal letters and 249 journals penned by Union and Confederate troops, McPherson concluded that a “large number of those men in blue and gray were intensely aware of the issues at stake and passionately concerned about them.” McPherson found that Confederate soldiers often made explicit mention of the need to preserve slavery. Sometimes they couched their purpose in the South’s regional idiom—for instance, the need to protect Southern “liberties” and “institutions.” But even a casual student of American history understands what such expressions implied. As Abraham Lincoln famously complained in 1854, the “perfect liberty they sigh for is the liberty of making slaves of other people.” One especially popular Civil War myth, often used to guard ordinary Confederates against the judgment of history, is that the struggle was a “rich man’s war, poor man’s fight.” It's true that only one third of Confederate soldiers were slaveholders or members of slaveholding families. But as McPherson reminds us, non-slaveholders also had a commanding property interest in the institution. “That property was their white skins,” he explained, “which put them on a plane of civil equality with slaveholders and far above those who did not possess that property.” Indeed, McPherson’s research painstakingly chronicles the racial obsessions of everyday soldiers who did not own slaves but who feared the social consequences of emancipation. “I never want to see the day when a negro is put on an equality with a white person,” wrote one such artilleryman in 1862. “There is too many free niggers . . . now to suit me, let alone having four millions.” Seventy-five years after the Civil War, the novelist William Faulkner captured revisionism’s powerful grip on the Southern mind. Colonel Sartoris, a character in several Faulkner novels and short stories, is asked in one of them why he fought for the Confederacy. Sartoris replies simply: “Damned if I ever did know.” In Mr. Gordon’s proposal, the ghost of Colonel Sartoris lives on.
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