Rebel Redemption Redux
By Joshua Michael Zeitz
In the winter of his life, the ex-slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass took up arms in fierce rhetorical battle for the collective memory of the Civil War. "Death has no power to change moral qualities," he admonished a crowd assembled in 1894 at Rochester's Mt. Hope Cemetery, where, nine months later, he would himself be laid to rest. "What was bad before the war, and during the war, has not been made good since the war. . . . Whatever else I may forget, I shall never forget the difference between those who fought for liberty and those who fought for slavery." It was a theme he had been sounding for almost thirty years -- that national amnesia must not obscure the crimes of the Confederacy, that the spirit of inter-sectional reunion must not blot out the moral dimension of the Civil War, that "there was a right side and a wrong side in the late war which no sentiment ought to cause us to forget."
Douglass was outraged by the willingness of the victorious to forgive and forget the trespasses of the vanquished. In the years following the Civil War, Northerners seemed completely acquiescent in the face of a vigorous cultural and historical assault against common-sense memory. They permitted Southerners to divest the bloody conflict of its ideological and moral components and to refashion the war as an epic family feud in which Johnny Reb and Billy Yank each fought courageously and honorably, buried the hatchet, and became brothers again. While Douglass vigorously rejected "that school of thinkers which teaches us to let bygones be bygones," by the late nineteenth century, more Americans chose to treat the 1860s with wistful but selective retrospection. At battlefield reunions, in popular fiction, inscribed on war memorials, a single theme reverberated clearly: the war was over, its cause was moot, and all should be honored.
No wonder that some seventy-five years after the war, William Faulkner's Colonel Sartoris could honestly respond to the question of why he fought for the Confederacy with "Damned if I ever did know."
Frederick Douglass's lament remains apt 135 years after the close of the Civil War. Responses to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's (NAACP) controversial economic boycott of South Carolina -- a sanction that remains in effect, pending the removal of the Confederate flag from state capitol grounds in Columbia -- demonstrate the lasting influence of a value-neutral interpretation of the conflict that once pervaded both Civil War-era historiography and virtually every medium of popular culture and art. Although few credible sources convey any sympathy in discussing Confederate flag proponents, most objective news sources assail the emblem for its Jim Crow-era connotations, rather than for its original, equally pernicious meaning. Many papers have contented themselves with repeating the worn platitude that the flag is an emotional issue for many white and black southerners alike. As the Atlanta Constitution-Journal editorialized early this year, "people of good will obviously want to find a way out of the impasse -- a way that removes the insult felt by African Americans, who see the flag as an emblem of slavery, without denying or insulting the heritage of those white Americans for whom it recalls the honorable aspects of the South's past."
Statements like this are as common as they are wrong. They suggest moral equivalency where none exists. More disturbing still, they emanate from apostles of moderation who should know better. ...
Further aiding the process of historical revisionism was a highly successful Southern literary assault on public memory.
Beginning in the 1880s, a host of Southern writers -- most notably Joel Chandler Harris, John Easton Cooke, Thomas Nelson Page, and Sara Pryor -- flooded the nation's mass-circulation fiction market with local-color stories depicting the antebellum South's refinement and civilization. To court Northern readers (something they did exceedingly well), these writers scrupulously avoided topics that might rekindle old political flames and instead wove tales replete with beautiful plantation belles, dashing cavaliers, and dull-witted but cheerful black slaves. One study finds that between 1875 and 1900, Northern magazine fiction most commonly described black freedmen as "simple," "fervent," or "good-humored," qualities that harmonized with Page's stock story line: out-of-town traveler (often from the North) meets "old retainer" (a former slave remaining in his master's service) who, after a great deal of prodding, reminisces wistfully of a bygone age when "nuttin warn too good for the n-words."
Above all, these writers celebrated the Southern heritage without dwelling on the nagging questions of slavery and treason. "[F]or those who knew the old Country as it was then," reads one of Page's novels, "and can contrast it with what it has become since, no wonder it seems that even the moonlight was richer and mellower 'before the war' than it is now." Such sentimentality and romance played well with Northern audiences, whose memory of slavery and capacity for race liberalism had evaporated considerably since Reconstruction. Over were the days when Uncle Tom's Cabin could enrage a nation of readers with its depiction of slavery's violent assault on the cherished institutions of family and Christianity.
Among the most successful and enduring artistic apologies for antebellum Southern culture were Thomas Dixon's trilogy (The Leopard's Spots, 1902; The Clansman, 1905; The Traitor, 1907) -- adapted by director D. W. Griffith into the popular film Birth of a Nation -- and Margaret Mitchell's classic, Gone With the Wind, 1936, which sold a remarkable 3.5 million copies in less than a decade and was made into an enormously popular movie. Dixon didn't stop at glorifying the antebellum South. His explicitly avowed purpose in writing The Clansman was to recount "the bold attempt of Thaddeus Stevens [a radical Republican congressman] to Africanize the ten great states of the American Union." Mitchell's work, though more subtle and certainly less ferocious, nevertheless whitewashes the antebellum South and conveniently ignores the misery and indignity suffered by four million enslaved people on the eve of the war.
The lasting acclaim each author enjoyed, and the conspicuous absence of a literary counter-assault, underscores the extent to which trends like Social Darwinism and mass immigration had, by the early twentieth century, eroded what little Northern commitment to race liberalism survived Reconstruction.
"I'd be with my people, right or wrong," Shelby Foote proclaims. "If I was against slavery, I'd still be with the South. I'm a man, my society needs me, here I am." Foote is living proof that many Americans -- especially those who are most interested in the Civil War -- remain under the spell of a century-old tendency to mystify the Confederacy's martial glory at the expense of recalling the intense ideological purpose associated with its cause.
Of all people, Foote should know better. He is not merely the author of three especially popular volumes about the war. He is also the descendent, on his mother's side, of East European Jews. If parallels between slavery and shoah have ever occurred to him, he gives little indication of it. The Confederate flag, he explains, "stood for law, honor, love of country." It was only later that "the good ol' boys in the pickup trucks" misappropriated the banner and altered its meaning. One suspects that Foote would not agree that the swastika was once a perfectly respectable symbol of law, honor, and national pride, before it was lamentably hijacked by skinheads in the 1960s and 1970s.
Shelby Foote is living testimony to the failure of many Civil War enthusiasts and public figures to disavow the American army that fought under the rebel banner. As a nation, we remain very much under the spell of Robert E. Lee, even as we decry slavery and its legacy.
When state and municipal governments accord the rebel flag honor or recognition, they sanction all that the flag stood for: treason, slavery, and a race state. When the rest of us soft-pedal that official endorsement, when we hem and haw in deference to the memory of the ordinary Confederate soldier, we demonstrate a blissful ignorance of history.
The clamor over the Confederate flag is sure to continue. The NAACP has pledged to press forward with its boycott until the banner is removed from South Carolina's statehouse grounds, and other states, like Mississippi, can expect a protracted battle to remove the emblem from their state flags. We have a unique opportunity to reconsider our national love affair with the Lost Cause and examine in a more thoughtful way the ideological dimensions of the Civil War.
[Joshua Michael Zeitz is a doctoral candidate in American history at Brown University.]
Carl
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