The Civil War is back in the news, and it reminds us of what TrumpMerica’s counter-reformation is all about: Rewriting history.
Yes, I know that’s a loaded phrase, because it’s so often used as an accusation when people try to massage the facts to achieve a favorable outcome for their views. But rewriting history is what historians do constantly, particularly when new information renders the old history inaccurate. That’s what has happened to the story of the Civil War.
As is so often the case, Ta-Nehisi Coates had the best response to Gen. John Kelly’s praise of Robert E. Lee and the Southern cause in the Civil War, unleashing a tweetstorm about the role of compromise in America’s racial history.
(For a fuller desconstruction of the Lee myth, read this corrective piece by the Atlantic’s Adam Serwer from back in June.)
I want to highlight one tweet from that storm:
“[The] notion that we are putting today’s standards on the past is, in itself, racist — [it] implies only white, slave-holding, opinions matter.” Several slave states were majority-black at the time, but those enslaved had no vote and no voice in the debates. Almost all voices contained in the written historical record are white ones.
Recognition of how that inevitably skews our perspective reached professional historians decades ago, but its first widespread appearance in pop culture came with Ken Burns’ inclusion of historian Barbara Fields in his documentary series on the war. Ever since, Southerners who were brought up on the myth of the Lost Cause have watched that myth crumble. Never mind that this myth must die if the country is truly committed to civil rights and equality for all, because for the descendants of Southerners the truth would be too horrible to bear. Nobody wants to be told his ancestors were monsters.
The Lost Cause is, and always was, revisionist history. It was spun to clothe naked greed and lust for power in romantic ideals, to explain away the arrogance of people convinced of their own superiority and the shame of seeing their inferiority exposed. Most of all it was spun to justify the perpetuation of inequality, by law in the South, by custom in the North.
The current rewriting of history makes it both more humane and more accurate. We shouldn’t be surprised that the people so shamefully exposed by the truth behind the myth would react so badly to their perceived loss of honor. Remember, their honor is what they like to pretend the Civil War was all about.