The Lost Cause Is a Lost Cause
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.
Nicely done.
To give one example of how our minds are captured by the shame narrative foisted on the country by the traitors who lost the war try this… close you eyes and picture a Southern Plantation.
Do you picture a stately mansion with a broad veranda where elegant people drink mint juleps? Or do you picture a forced work camp where rows of squalid shacks house half starved slaves?
The term “Southern Plantation” is itself a disgusting relic and should be left in the dustbin of history in favor of the more accurate – Slave Labor Camp.
Your mind is captured by a false narrative “foisted” upon it by a set of nonexistent traitors? That’s the kind of defense Richmond erected in 1865: meager.
The Slave Labor Camps? Loaded, as in the Soviet Gulag. From 1710 onward, the birth rate in the black population of the US was positive, and closely tracked in its growth and decline that of the population of whites. The slave population experienced a natural increase right through the duration of the war, the blacks up to the beginning of the 20th century. In spite of the fact that the slave trade was killed in 1804(?).
The amount dietary protein in the slave diet was within a few percentage points of that enjoyed by whites, and of the half-million or so free people of color in the US, more than half lived in the South.
See NPR resources and “Without Consent or Contract.”
Responding with these data is not to seek to regale the institution of slavery, but to disabuse holders of the view that it was a holy hell. It was not. If one had to be black and a slave, the best place to be one was on a Southern plantation, or in one of the Southern cities.
Where slavery was as you depict it was in Trinidad and Jamaica. Those populations declined, exhibiting negative rates of “increase” through the first quarter of the 19th century.
President Lincoln’s biggest mistakes were reconstruction and amnesty. We are still living with the consequences of those mistakes. He should have had malice towards all the southern traitors and slave holders and charity toward none of them.
But Lincoln was a racist, too.
TAQ; I’ll just say that it saddens me that people actually think this way and can’t see the numerous logical flaws in their thought process.
I actually hesitated to use “starved” as shorthand for the horror of slavery. The systematic destruction of families, the demolition of humanity that was integral to the Forced Labor Camps is hard to sum up in a sentence or two
Disappointed wrote:
President Lincoln was assassinated just six days after the Confederate surrender at Appomattox; it’s kind of difficult to blame Reconstruction on him. President Andrew Johnson tried to mitigate the harsher aspects of Reconstruction, but was completely bullied by a “radical republican” Congress determined to make Reconstruction as harsh as possible.
A slave is still a slave. Even the “good” slave owners owned people. This BS rationalization of slavery is one of the reasons I hate Gone with the Wind.
TAQ: so you are going to tell us that because of the birth rate and the protein intake of the prisoners, they are somehow better off?
You are aware, I assume, that protein intake and “breeding” were investments in the forced labor camps, right? Especially after the slave trade ended, it was the only way to ensure that your kids would be able to make a living.
“Responding with these data is not to seek to regale the institution of slavery, but to disabuse holders of the view that it was a holy hell. It was not.” TAQ, my head is spinning with how casually you can discuss the enslavement of a race of people, for the enrichment of a class of oligarchs who demonstrated absolute savagery relative to the enforcement of their privileged status. it took a new idea of warfare, practiced by William Tecumsah Sherman against the southern civilian population, as in Atlanta, to finally deprive these oligarchs the means to carry on their “cause”, and thus end the war. The South was in it to win it, and it was a cause supported by both military and civilian populations. Dedication to a cause does not, however, confer moral greatness upon it. SMH.
TAQ is correct that conditions for slaves were much worse in the sugar islands, where the life expectancy for an imported African was about 4 years.
Meanwhile, it is also true that being beaten on the soles of your feet, which breaks bones but leaves no bruises, is not as bad as having electrodes attached to your scrotum.
Your mileage may vary.
Torture, bondage, plunder, murder and terror was not a “holy hell” because the human chattel ate almost as well as “whites” and reproduced at regular rates. On the reproduction issue, how many were the result of rape, do you think?
Fucking disgusting comment from TAQ. I wish you would have posted it under your own name, but alas…
Headquarters Military Division of the Mississippi,
In the Field, Kingston, Georgia, November 9, 1864
I. For the purpose of military operations, this army is divided into two wings viz.: Thy right wing, Major-General O. O. Howard commanding, composed of the Fifteenth and Seventeenth Corps; the left wing, Major-General H. W. Slocum commanding, composed of the Fourteenth and Twentieth Corps.
II. The habitual order of march will be, wherever practicable, by four roads, as nearly parallel as possible, and converging at points hereafter to be indicated in orders. The cavalry, Brigadier – General Kilpatrick commanding, will receive special orders from the commander-in-chief.
III. There will be no general train of supplies, but each corps will have its ammunition-train and provision-train, distributed habitually as follows: Behind each regiment should follow one wagon and one ambulance; behind each brigade should follow a due proportion of ammunition – wagons, provision-wagons, and ambulances. In case of danger, each corps commander should change this order of march, by having his advance and rear brigades unencumbered by wheels. The separate columns will start habitually at 7 a.m., and make about fifteen miles per day, unless otherwise fixed in orders.
IV. The army will forage liberally on the country during the march. To this end, each brigade commander will organize a good and sufficient foraging party, under the command of one or more discreet officers, who will gather, near the route traveled, corn or forage of any kind, meat of any kind, vegetables, corn-meal, or whatever is needed by the command, aiming at all times to keep in the wagons at least ten day’s provisions for the command and three days’ forage. Soldiers must not enter the dwellings of the inhabitants, or commit any trespass, but during a halt or a camp they may be permitted to gather turnips, potatoes, and other vegetables, and to drive in stock of their camp. To regular foraging parties must be instructed the gathering of provisions and forage at any distance from the road traveled.
V. To army corps commanders alone is in-trusted the power to destroy mills, houses, cotton-gins, &c., and for them this general principle is laid down: In districts and neighborhoods where the army is unmolested no destruction of such property should be permitted; but should guerrillas or bushwhackers molest our march, or should the inhabitants burn bridges, obstruct roads, or otherwise manifest local hostility, then army commanders should order and enforce a devastation more or less relentless according to the measure of such hostility.
VI. As for horses, mules, wagons, &c., belonging to the inhabitants, the cavalry and artillery may appropriate freely and without limit, discriminating, however, between the rich, who are usually hostile, and the poor or industrious, usually neutral or friendly. Foraging parties may also take mules or horses to replace the jaded animals of their trains, or to serve as pack-mules for the regiments or bridges. In all foraging, of whatever kind, the parties engaged will refrain from abusive or threatening language, and may, where the officer in command thinks proper, give written certificates of the facts, but no receipts, and they will endeavor to leave with each family a reasonable portion for their maintenance.
VII. Negroes who are able-bodied and can be of service to the several columns may be taken along, but each army commander will bear in mind that the question of supplies is a very important one and that his first duty is to see to them who bear arms.
— William T. Sherman, Military Division of the Mississippi Special Field Order 120, November 9, 1864
@REV: On the reproduction issue, here’s what South Carolinian and diarist Mary Chestnut had to say about her peers, couched in a passage about “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”:
“But what do you say to this — to a magnate who runs a hideous black harem with its consequences, under the same roof with his lovely white wife and his beautiful and accomplished daughters? He holds his head high and poses as the model of all human virtues to these poor women whom God and the laws have given him. You see, Mrs. Stowe did not hit the sorest spot. She makes Legree a bachelor.”