24 June 2015

Lies, damned lies, and Southern lies about the Civil War

Tony Horowitz, author of Blue Latitudes and Confederates in the Attic, has a sobering essay, How The South Lost The War But Won The Narrative, at Talking Points Memo. He urges paying careful attention as the fate of the Confederate battle flag is debated:

But listen carefully in coming days as legislators and others debate the flag’s fate. You’ll hear over and over again that the flag represents “heritage, not hate,” and that if the banner must now be furled, it’s because Roof, the Klan, and other extremists have hijacked and tarnished its meaning. What you’re unlikely to hear, at least from whites, is an honest and historically accurate reappraisal of the Cause for which Southerners fought.

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…a deeper problem remains, and not just among those who cherish the Confederacy. Nationwide, Americans still cling to a deeply sanitized and Southern-fried understanding of the Civil War. More often than not, when I talk to people about the conflict, I hear that it was about abstract principles like “state sovereignty” and “the Southern way of life.” Surveys confirm this. In 2011, at the start of the war’s sesquicentennial, the Pew Research Center asked more than 1500 Americans their view as to “the main cause of the Civil War.” Only 38 percent said the main cause was slavery, compared to 48 percent who answered states’ rights.

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I’m not very optimistic that the debate over South Carolina’s flag will bring a deeper reckoning. Furling the statehouse flag may bring temporary relief to South Carolinians, but what we truly need to bury is the gauzy fiction that the antebellum South was in any way benign, or that slavery and white supremacy weren’t the cornerstone of the Confederacy. Only then, perhaps, will we be able to say that the murdered in Charleston didn’t die in vain, and that the Lost Cause, at last, is well and truly lost.

The Lost Cause, arguments that the Civil war was about “Northern aggression,” and asseverations that the leaders of the Confederacy were not racists, are powerful myths that extend far beyond the South. In the recent past, two politically active residents of the Flathead, former State Representative Derek Skees (R-Whitefish), and Pastor Chuck Baldwin, the Constitution Party’s Presidential candidate in 2008, expressed views on the Civil War that were at variance with history:

To my knowledge, neither man has recanted nor repented those views.

Fortunately, the truth about the Civil War is being taught in some colleges in the South. Here’s a lecture from Houston, Texas: