News: Confederate History Month, Slavery, Treason and Courage

Confederate History Storm: Slavery, Treason, And True Southern Courage, Allen C. Guelzo, Christian Science Monitor, April 9, 2010.

Governor Bob McDonnell’s controversial proclamation of Confederate History Month should help us remember the South’s rebellion for what it really was.

“I am no minister of hate,” wrote the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass in 1871. But as he watched Northerners in the years after the Civil War turn to teary-eyed embraces of their former Confederate enemies at postwar reunions and veterans’ meetings, he was appalled. “May my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if I forget the difference between ... those who fought to save the Republic and those who fought to destroy it.”

Douglass can be forgiven a certain measure of resentment toward the Confederacy. After all, he was born a slave in Maryland, escaped as a runaway in 1838, turned to a public career as an abolitionist newspaper editor and lecturer, and sent two sons to fight in the Union Army. But he had a point that Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) might have been wise to ponder before Tuesday, when he proclaimed April as Virginia’s “Confederate History Month.” Just what is it, exactly, that Governor McDonnell is proposing to honor?

McDonnell’s proclamation is actually a comparatively bland statement, asking Virginians to acknowledge those “who fought for their homes and communities and Commonwealth in a time very different than ours today.” Absent were any endorsements of states’ rights and the “Lost Cause.” It was simply a declaration that Virginia’s decision to secede from the United States and attach itself to the Confederacy in 1861 “should be studied, understood and remembered by all Virginians.”

The problem lies with something else McDonnell airbrushed out of his initial proclamation: slavery. The proclamation describes the Civil War as “a four year war between the states for independence.” That is true, but it’s like saying that the Titanic sank because it filled up with water.

The proclamation only raises the question of why Virginia and the other confederate states should have yearned for independence in the first place. Twist and turn as we may, the answer to that question always comes back to this: the enslavement of 3.9 million black people. This is not to say that other factors didn’t come into play.

The Southern states had serious grievances with their Northern counterparts over economic policies. Foreign visitors and commentators noted that Southerners had developed a distinctly different regional culture. And there was a long history of disagreements about how much political autonomy individual states possessed within the federal Union created by the Constitution. But if slavery was not the only issue that went into the making of the Confederacy, it was unquestionably the paramount one.

None of the others would ever have brought matters in 1861 to civil war had it not been for the razor-edge given them by slavery. And you do not have to dig very far into the letters, diaries, and speeches of Confederate soldiers and civilians to find out how important the defense of slavery and white racial supremacy was to them.

“Slavery is the only base on which a stable republican government ever was or ever will be built,” announced a Nashville newspaper on the eve of secession. Although only a third of white Southern households owned slaves at the outbreak of the Civil War, as many as 50 percent of Southern households had owned a slave at some time.

Even those who did not own slaves regarded slavery as the bulwark of white supremacy: “The strongest pro-slavery men in this States,” boasted a Louisville newspaper editor, “are those who do not own one dollar of slave property.” And slaveholders and the sons of slaveholding families were generously represented in the Confederate armies. In Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, rates of slaveholding ran as high as 47 percent.

Defending the slave system is scarcely something Virginians can look back on with pride. But even less admirable was the willingness of Virginians to commit treason as part of that defense. Treason is not an easy word to use these days. In modern ears, it has the ring of jingoism and Joe McCarthy, and in our multicultural reverence for diversity, we find it’s become easier to label as “dissenters” people who ask God to damn America or who sell their country’s weapons blueprints to the highest bidder.

But what other word are we to use for American soldiers (like Robert E. Lee) who repudiated the oath he had sworn to defend the Constitution? Or for US senators (like Jefferson Davis) who raised their hand against the flag they were born under and brought on the deaths of 620,000 Americans?

And why is Virginia’s governor celebrating secession, when 31 of Virginia’s westernmost counties in 1861 balked at joining the Confederacy and formed, first, a pro-Union government-in-exile, and then a completely new state of West Virginia in 1863?

If treason has become too embarrassing a word, then so has loyalty, and we may as well forget the courage of the west Virginians, as well as those 300,000 other Southerners from Tennessee, Alabama, North Carolina, and (yes!) Virginia who stayed faithful to the Union and fought in its ranks during the Civil War.

We are now within a year of the Sesquicentennial of the Civil War, and unfortunately, McDonnell’s proclamation has been the most prominent reminder of that anniversary. Congress has failed to create a national commission like the one it authorized for the Civil War Centennial, and the states that have formed local Sesquicentennial Commissions have generally stacked them with political hacks and low-visibility museum managers.

The brouhaha over the proclamation forced McDonnell to issue a belated codicil to his proclamation Wednesday, apologizing for the omission of slavery. But this will probably only have the result of forcing celebrations of the Sesquicentennial further into the shadows, as it dawns on the politicos that any public mention of the Civil War is going to alienate some constituency. The only thing worse, as Frederick Douglass might have warned us, than remembering the Civil War wrongly, is not to remember it at all.

Allen C. Guelzo is the Henry R. Luce professor of the Civil War Era at Gettysburg College, and the author of “Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President.”

Text Source: Christian Science Monitor, April 9, 2010

Image Source: Top, Gilbert Gaul; Middle and Bottom, Don Troiani

News----Obama Honors Confederate and Black Soldiers on Memorial Day

Separate but Equal Wreaths are Not a Permanent Solution to the Memorial Day Conundrum, James W. Loewen, History News Networtk, May 29, 2009.
See CWL entry May 20, 2009 for petition to not set a wreath at Arlington's Confederate Memorial. Mr. Loewen, the author of Lies My Teacher Told Me, started a petition asking President Obama not to honor the Arlington Confederate Monument.

Although I had signed petitions to the President going back to the '60s, before Memorial Day 2009 I had never helped to start one. This year, the fact that neo-Confederates misconstrue the Confederate monument in Arlington National Cemetery to misconstrue the Civil War to misconstrue the Confederate cause got to me ... especially since every Memorial Day, the President of the United States lends his prestige to that monument by sending it a wreath.

We (Ed Sebesta and I) wound up with more than 60 co-signers, including major historians of the Civil War period like David Blight, Vernon Burton, and James McPherson; other distinguished historians like John Dittmer, Paul Finkelman, and Kenneth Jackson; and scholars in allied disciplines like Grey Gundaker, Florence Roisman, and Amilcar Shabazz. Leaders or former leaders of important organizations lent their names, including Josh Brown, Lee Formwalt, Susan Glisson, and Roger Kennedy. Professors of education signed, including Sonia Nieto, David Shiman, and Bill Ayers.

Ayers is on my contacts list because, more than a dozen years ago, he participated in inviting me to speak to pre-service teachers at the University of Illinois (Chicago) about ideas in my best-seller, Lies My Teacher Told Me. When sending out emails to people on my list, I considered omitting him, since I knew of his toxic fame. I emailed him anyway, because Sarah Palin had told us all he was a "pal" of President Obama, because it did not feel right to censor my contacts list, and also because I just wanted to see what would happen.

It turned out that the only name the media cared about was Ayers. The Chicago Sun-Times, for instance, headlined its story, "Radical Bill Ayers dogs Obama, even on Memorial Day." Within the story, Ayers's name does not appear until the 14th paragraph, which is appropriate. But no other signer's name appears at all — not mine, not Sebesta's, not even McPherson's, surely America's pre-eminent scholar on the period, whose Battle Cry of Freedom won the Pulitzer Prize. Today, searching for "Ayers Obama "Memorial Day" wreath yields 7,570 hits, while "McPherson Obama "Memorial Day" yields just 2,570.

On Sebesta's list of contacts was art historian Kirk Savage, whose book, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves treats Civil War memorials. Savage penned an op-ed to the Washington Post suggesting that President Obama continue the tradition of the Confederate wreath, but also send one to the new African American Civil War Memorial in DC. (He had proposed this to Sebesta, but for reasons this essay notes, Ed rejected the idea.) The Post never did a story about our petition but did print Savage's op-ed opposing it.

Despite the Post's silence, AP and other outlets picked up the story. A minor controversy followed. HNN's posting of our petition drew 90 comments. A blog about the matter at Daily Kos spurred more than 250. Savage's op-ed generated nine pages at WashingtonPost.com. Many were from neo-Confederates attacking any challenge to their beloved Confederate legend. Others, however, came from people respectful of the cause of good race relations while also respectful of the dead.

Americans need to understand that Confederate Memorials come in two kinds. One type remembers and honors the dead. The other glorifies the cause and typically obfuscates what it was (which was slavery). The Arlington monument is of the second type. Donated by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, erected during the Nadir of Race Relations, it does not purport to tell accurate history. It even gets the number of Confederate states wrong, implying that 14 seceded, when only 11 did. Moreover, in recent years neo-Confederates have deliberately misconstrued a black body servant, included in the bas-reliefs, as a Confederate soldier. Then they cite him as "evidence" that thousands of African Americans fought for the Confederacy. As a corollary, this claim continues, the South could not have seceded for slavery.

Why should the President privilege this monument over, say, the Confederate monument in neighboring Alexandria, a pensive statue of the former type? Why, for that matter, should the President privilege this monument over every single monument to United States troops in the Civil War?

It might be said that he no longer does. Unlike his predecessors from Wilson to W, Obama eventually followed Savage's idea and sent two wreaths, one to the Confederate monument, one to the African American monument. Doing so was certainly a significant advance over former practice. However, dual wreaths implicitly equate service for the Union and service against it. They also implicitly equate war fought to maintain and extend slavery with war eventually fought (admittedly, not at first) to end slavery. Surely both sides are not of equal moral value.

This is not the place to make the argument that the South seceded for slavery, not states' rights. Everyone knew this in 1860-61. Today anyone who believes that the Southern states left because they favored states' rights has only to search for and read "Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union." Also useful is my short chapter on Gettysburg in Lies Across America, which tells why and when the states' rights myth began to be told.

To be sure, neither Savage nor the president probably intended to equate North and South. Surely, both Savage and the president meant this "solution" as a way to sidestep all such moral and historical issues and merely honor the dead on both sides. Thus the president assuages two "special interests": neo-Confederates on the one side, and African Americans (and historians) on the other. Left out are United States Civil War veterans as a whole — white and black together.

Hoping to avoid post-petition depression, I humbly suggest that important historical questions remain. Why would presidents of the United States, for almost a hundred years, send wreaths just to the Southern side — the losing side and the wrong side — of our greatest war? Did presidents ever send wreaths to U.S. Civil War monuments — perhaps to the G.A.R. monument in DC — before the Nadir of Race Relations set in? Has even one of the 2,000+ Union monuments ever received a presidential wreath on Memorial Day since the Nadir? What is the connection between race relations of the time and how we remember the past?

Text and Image Source: History News Network

Image Caption: The day after, the President’s wreath lies in a heap to the side of the Confederate monument.

News---Slaveholding Republic History Month Legislation

Confederate Holiday Provokes A War Between The Souths, Dahleen Glanton, Los Angles Times, March 28, 2009.

In a cultural war that has pitted Old South against New, defenders of the Confederate legacy have opened a fresh front in their campaign to polish an image tarnished, they say, by people who do not respect Southern values. With the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War coming up in 2011, efforts are underway in statehouses, small towns and counties across the South to push for proclamations or legislation promoting Confederate history.

Alabama, Virginia, Mississippi, Texas, Louisiana and Florida observe Confederate History Month in April. Georgia has recognized it by proclamation since 1995, and the state Senate recently passed a bill that would make it official -- assuming the measure passes muster in the state House, which could be problematic. Most Southern states recognize Confederate Memorial Day as a legal holiday. Some celebrate it on the June birthday of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, but Texas and Arkansas observe it on Jan. 19, the federal holiday for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

More than a thousand municipalities hold parades and festivals on the holiday, said Charles McMichael, commander in chief of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and efforts are underway to spread it nationwide, state by state. "It has been our experience over the last 30 years or so that when the Confederacy is addressed at all historically, it is done in a way that serves a political agenda. . . . We want the truthful history about all aspects of the Confederacy told," McMichael said. "There are some good things that you can learn, and we think there are more good than bad."

But for many Americans, the Confederacy evokes the atrocities of slavery. The negative image has long angered some white Southerners, particularly those whose ancestors died in the Civil War. In their view, the war is a source of Southern pride. In recent years, they have sought to redefine the Confederacy in multicultural terms, saying that Jews, Latinos and blacks fought for the South. They argue that the war had little if anything to do with slavery. And they've become vocal in opposing white supremacist groups that use the Confederate flag as a symbol of hate.

"Slavery is a part of American history, not just Confederate history," McMichael said. "The Confederacy has gotten a bad rap because we ended up on the losing side and therefore the wrong side of history." But that multicultural interpretation is dubious, one historian said. Commemoration of the Confederacy as a noble cause began shortly after the Civil War ended in 1865, said Jonathan Sarris, associate professor of history at North Carolina Wesleyan College. The multicultural angle is an effort to appear more inclusive, he said, but it ignores the facts.

"To say that it is not racist but about multiculturalism is an attempt to adopt a modern mind-set," Sarris said. "You can call it a victory for the forces of multiculturalism when even the defendants of the Confederacy feel they have to pay some lip service to the idea of tolerance." Georgia state Sen. John Bulloch, a Republican who sponsored the bill recognizing Confederate History Month, said the observance would help tourism, particularly in areas with Civil War battlegrounds. It is no different, he said, from Black History Month.

But Georgia state Rep. Tyrone Brooks, a Democrat and longtime civil rights leader, said the South has lagged behind the nation by trying to hold on to the past. He said the bill will face opposition in Georgia's more diverse House. "These Southern states really still have not come back into the Union," he said. "That is why it's been so difficult over the years to get the states to recognize that flying the Confederate emblem on the flag, holding reenactments and pushing these calendar events as a matter of law is a reflection . . . of their Confederate mentality.

"This is a new day," Brooks said. "The Confederacy lost, and the majority of the American people will not accept these ideas about a renegade group of folks who decided they would overthrow the U.S. government."

Text Source: Los Angeles Times March 28 2009
Image Source: Trucker Plate
Image Source: Rebel Flag Flip Flops

News---SCV's Image Problem and Confederate Battle Flag In Court

West Virginnia Neighborhood Divided Over Confederate Flag, Charleston Gazette, July 8, 2008.

MARTINSBURG -- An Eastern Panhandle neighborhood is divided over whether one homeowner's display of a Confederate flag is a matter of history or something worse. Richard Bushong, a member of a local Sons of Confederate Veterans group, said he had no idea the flag would upset any of his neighbors in the Villages of Washington Trails subdivision. The flag is an early design known as the "stars and bars,'' featuring a circle of seven white stars against a blue background, with two red and one white stripes. It is not the more familiar Confederate battle flag, the display of which has been a flashpoint for controversy around the country.

But neighbor Renee Brunson said the sight of the flag made her think of family ancestors who had been slaves. "I did, I broke down and cried because to me that represents racism and slavery, and we don't need to be reminded of that,'' she said.
Kelly Hester, another neighbor, said the flag doesn't reflect the neighborhood's racial and ethnic diversity. "We really don't want there to be any trouble over this, we just want it taken down because it's not representative of how we feel and live here,'' she said. Bushong said he plans to take the flag down this week, although he said its display has more to do with his interest in history. That interest led him to join the Sons of Confederate Veterans, although he acknowledges the group has an image problem. "The biggest problem we have is distancing ourselves from groups like the Ku Klux Klan,'' he said. "We have absolutely no use for them or any other groups that are based on hate.'' Clagett Management, which oversees the subdivision's homeowners' association, said there is no rule prohibiting the display of flags by homeowners.

Source: Charleston, West Virginia Gazette

Tennessee Confederate-Flag Controversy Set For August Trial, David L. Hudson Jr. First Amendment Center, July 11, 2008.

A federal district court has refused to grant a preliminary injunction against a flag-display ban in Anderson County, Tenn., public schools in a case involving a former student.One of the most divisive symbols in public life and public schools is the Confederate flag. Its proponents extol it as a symbol of a proud heritage; opponents counter that it represents hate and racial supremacy. Public school officials across the country have found themselves embroiled in legal controversies when they punish students who wear Confederate flag clothing. The Tennessee student, Tom DeFoe, was suspended in 2006 for wearing a Confederate flag T-shirt and belt buckle while attending Anderson County High School and Anderson County Career and Technical Center.

DeFoe sued in federal court, contending that school officials violated his First Amendment rights when they punished him for his expressive clothing. DeFoe argued that his Confederate-flag clothing caused no disruption at school. School officials countered that there had been incidents of racial unrest, violence and disruptions as a result of other displays of the Confederate flag. The injunction was denied July 1. Each side points to the U.S. Supreme Court’s seminal student free-expression case, Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District (1969), in which the Court prohibited the selective targeting of a black peace armband associated with an anti-war viewpoint.

In Tinker, the high court ruled that public school officials could censor student speech if they could show that the expression caused a substantial disruption of school activities or invaded the rights of others. The Court majority reasoned that the Iowa school officials failed to meet this standard with regard to the wearing of the armbands. The opinion also noted that officials allowed students to wear other symbols, such as political campaign buttons and the Iron Cross.

“Clearly, the prohibition of expression of one particular opinion, at least without evidence that it is necessary to avoid material and substantial interference with schoolwork or discipline, is not constitutionally permissible,” wrote Justice Abe Fortas for the Tinker majority. He added that “the record does not demonstrate any facts which might reasonably have led school authorities to forecast substantial disruption of or material interference with school activities, and no disturbances or disorders on the school premises in fact occurred.”

So the question facing the litigants in the Anderson County case is whether the display of the Confederate flag created any substantial disruption or whether school officials could reasonably forecast that such displays would disrupt the school environment. DeFoe’s legal counsel, Knoxville-based attorney Van R. Irion, has filed several motions for a preliminary injunction, asking the court to order the school to stop banning the Confederate flag.

In its July 1 opinion in DeFoe v. Spiva, the federal district court denied DeFoe’s fourth motion for a preliminary injunction. The court rejected the argument that, because the school allowed racially inclusive symbols, the suppression of the Confederate flag constituted viewpoint discrimination. However, the court also ruled that the case could proceed on whether the school engaged in viewpoint discrimination by selectively singling out the Confederate flag while allowing other racially divisive clothing.

“In sum, a school cannot permit discussion of some racially divisive issues and not others, but there is no requirement that a school allow racially divisive speech simply because it allows racially inclusive speech,” Judge Thomas A. Varlan wrote. “Thus, defendants’ allowance of expressions of opinions promoting racial equality, tolerance, diversity and cultural equalities does not mean that they must allow racially divisive expressions.”

Varlan added that “plaintiffs can still be successful in their claim of viewpoint discrimination if they demonstrate that school officials discriminate between different disruptive racially divisive expressions.” The case now proceeds to trial on Aug. 11. “If we don’t win at trial I will absolutely be appealing this case, based upon several other bad rulings,” Irion said. “However, I fully expect to win at trial.” Irion expressed displeasure with the latest denial of preliminary-injunctive relief.

“Categorical bans on content are not allowed when the school already allows other viewpoints to be expressed via the same means,” Irion said. “So, if the school tolerates displays of flags in general, it cannot prohibit the Confederate flag in a categorical manner. It must analyze potentially disruptive flags on a case-by-case basis to determine if a particular display is likely to cause substantial disruption to school operations.”

Arthur F. Knight III, attorney for the schools, said that “the Confederate flag is a racially divisive symbol” in public schools. He noted that two days after two African-American students who had moved from an area hit by Hurricane Katrina enrolled in an Anderson County school, other students raised a Confederate flag in the gym. “Go to www.kkk.com and see how that group uses the Confederate flag,” Knight said.

Source: First Amendent Center

Illustration: Rebel Flag Belt Buckle

News----Wisconsin Badger Reacts to Rebel Heritage Days

South Trying To Rewrite History, Andrew Wagner, Badger Herald, University of Wisconsin, April 4, 2008.

Should anyone cherish a society in which 40 percent of the population was once enslaved? A society in which the proportion of slaves to freedmen was one to 25? That, after all, was the reality of life in the Confederate States of America. Of course, the answer to this question is a personal one. However, when governments start getting involved in answering this question, the situation rapidly gets out of hand.

It has become customary for some states, counties and municipalities in the South to declare April “Confederate History Month” or “Confederate Heritage Month.” Last year I discovered some of the perverse content of many of the declarations signed by the governors of these states. Let me emphasize something very important before looking closer at this issue: I do not take issue with solemnly remembering or commemorating the deaths of the hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians who died in the conflict. Their deaths were a loss to this nation. What I take issue with is the distortion of the portrayal of the Civil War that continues to go on from year to year.

So far this year two states, Mississippi and Georgia, have signed and sealed proclamations declaring April to be a month for Confederate remembrance. Mississippi’s proclamation approaches the issue in a relatively neutral manner. Their document proclaims a Confederate Memorial Day when “we recognize all those who served in the Confederacy” that gives Americans the opportunity “to reflect upon our nation’s past” and “gain insight from our mistakes and successes”.

All in all, the document isn’t very controversial. While my personal insight from looking at the history of the Confederacy is that it should be cursed rather than remembered, everyone’s entitled to a different personal opinion. Whereas Mississippi takes an appropriately subdued approach to the topic, Georgia’s proclamation makes a mockery of history and the reality of life in the Confederacy. Georgia’s Confederate History Month proclamation asserts “Georgia has long cherished her Confederate history.” This alone isn’t too alarming, although I question why anyone would want to publicly announce how much they cherish a slave society.

But the most disturbing part comes immediately thereafter. Here, the proclamation claims to recognize the “many African Americans both free and slave who saw action in the Confederate Armed Forces” as well as those who “participated in the manufacture of products for the war effort.” The net effect of this language immensely confuses the issues surrounding the Confederacy. Why, in this rendition of history, it almost sounds as if blacks and whites all banded together to fight for states’ rights and liberty! Considering that only 1.5 percent of the Confederacy’s population was free blacks, I somehow doubt this was the case.

I bet the slaves who were forced to work in the war industries had a much different perspective on what was going on there. Furthermore, I suspect the many slaves who worked in the cotton plantations that helped fund the Southern war effort didn’t have a particularly positive view of their situation either. In fact, I suspect they were much more likely to curse what they were doing than to cherish it.

The idea that white and black southerners willingly joined together to fight northerners simply isn’t supported by the available evidence. What little joint fighting and effort that occurred is insignificant, especially given that the South did not create a program to offer slaves freedom in return for fighting until the last few months of the war. It’s clear to me that on this subject the state of Georgia is fundamentally wrong. Under the guise of remembering the tragedy of the Civil War, Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue has affixed his signature to a document that obscures and molds history into a parody of itself.

The fact that something like this could officially happen in the United States government in the 21st century is mind-boggling. Given that the month of April is just starting, I have no doubt that other states will likely issue these sorts of proclamations as well. Hopefully none of them will be as ludicrous as Georgia’s.

If Americans truly want to “gain insight from our successes and failures,” as Mississippi’s proclamation has stated, then a good first step would be to condemn Georgia’s blatant obfuscation of history as the apologistic drivel that it truly is.

Andrew Wagner (awagner@badgerherald.com) is a junior majoring in computer science and political science.

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