Of course, the Confederates had complaints about the Yankees other than just slavery. Most Rebs thought poorly of what they called 'wage slavery' (i.e., having a job for which one worked for money). They were more comfortable in a world of position, where land holdings, honor and family connections meant much more than moneygrubbers from the North could comprehend. The South didn't like industrialization, either, or uniformity of opinion imposed through party structures, or other mass institutions on the ascendancy in the North.
Thus, it was ironic then that the South, through rebellion and war, came to suffer both industrialization and uniformity of opinion. During the war, a nation developed in spite of its particularist, states-rights self. After the war, a culture of denial developed in Dixie, where antiquarian fidelity to certain aspects of the past became paramount in the culture's understanding of itself.
I have no trouble with the idea of honoring the past, but it's important to keep one's respects in perspective. That messy, slavery history stuff is important too.
For example, take a look at what we today call the 'Confederate Flag'. The South had many banners, but what they called the 'Battle Flag' (promoted by General Beauregard) achieved its importance only late in the war, and represented the sort of unity that comes only in warfare. No wonder African-Americans dislike its current use in the South! There is nothing - nothing - good in it for them at all!
So, let's honor the antebellum South. In particular, I honor certain antiquarian aspects of "Ol' Times Dere", such as the fact that one of my distant aunts became Jefferson Davis' second wife. I've got blood connections to the Southern elite! Amazing!
But let's honor the North too. I honor, in particular, three fighting brothers from Michigan, my distant uncles. One uncle was grievously wounded at Gettysburg, and although he lived on for another decade, he never really recovered his health.:
Efforts to rehabilitate the Southern rebellion frequently come at moments of racial and social stress, and it is revealing that Virginia’s neo-Confederates are refighting the Civil War in 2010. Whitewashing the war is one way for the right — alienated, anxious and angry about the president, health care reform and all manner of threats, mostly imaginary — to express its unease with the Age of Obama, disguising hate as heritage.
If neo-Confederates are interested in history, let’s talk history. Since Lee surrendered at Appomattox, Confederate symbols have tended to be more about white resistance to black advances than about commemoration. In the 1880s and 1890s, after fighting Reconstruction with terrorism and after the Supreme Court struck down the 1875 Civil Rights Act, states began to legalize segregation. For white supremacists, iconography of the “Lost Cause” was central to their fight; Mississippi even grafted the Confederate battle emblem onto its state flag.
But after the Supreme Court allowed segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, Jim Crow was basically secure. There was less need to rally the troops, and Confederate imagery became associated with the most extreme of the extreme: the Ku Klux Klan.
In the aftermath of World War II, however, the rebel flag and other Confederate symbolism resurfaced as the civil rights movement spread. In 1948, supporters of Strom Thurmond’s pro-segregation Dixiecrat ticket waved the battle flag at campaign stops.
Then came the school-integration rulings of the 1950s. Georgia changed its flag to include the battle emblem in 1956, and South Carolina hoisted the colors over its Capitol in 1962 as part of its centennial celebrations of the war.
As the sesquicentennial of Fort Sumter approaches in 2011, the enduring problem for neo-Confederates endures: anyone who seeks an Edenic Southern past in which the war was principally about states’ rights and not slavery is searching in vain, for the Confederacy and slavery are inextricably and forever linked.
That has not, however, stopped Lost Causers who supported Mr. McDonnell’s proclamation from trying to recast the war in more respectable terms. They would like what Lincoln called our “fiery trial” to be seen in a political, not a moral, light. If the slaves are erased from the picture, then what took place between Sumter and Appomattox is not about the fate of human chattel, or a battle between good and evil. It is, instead, more of an ancestral skirmish in the Reagan revolution, a contest between big and small government.
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