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The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader: The "Great Truth" about the "Lost Cause"

von James W. Loewen (Herausgeber), Edward H. Sebesta (Herausgeber)

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Most Americans hold basic misconceptions about the Confederacy, the Civil War, and the actions of subsequent neo-Confederates. For example, two thirds of Americans--including most history teachers--think the Confederate States seceded for "states' rights." This error persists because most have never read the key documents about the Confederacy. These documents have always been there. When South Carolina seceded, it published "Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union." The document actually opposes states' rights. Its authors argue that Northern states were ignoring the rights of slave owners as identified by Congress and in the Constitution. Similarly, Mississippi's "Declaration of the Immediate Causes ..." says, "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery--the greatest material interest of the world." Later documents in this collection show how neo-Confederates obfuscated this truth, starting around 1890. The evidence also points to the centrality of race in neo-Confederate thought even today and to the continuing importance of neo-Confederate ideas in American political life. The 150th anniversary of secession and civil war provides a moment for all Americans to read these documents, properly set in context by award-winning sociologist and historian James W. Loewen and co-editor, Edward H. Sebesta, to put in perspective the mythology of the Old South.… (mehr)
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Summary
Loewen and Sebesta did a fantastic job of assembling a series of documents over most of the history of America, from 1787 to 2008, to illustrate what the Confederacy was all about, the reason for the Civil War, the truth about the era of Reconstruction, and the ugliness of white supremacy in the country that persists to the present day. The documents are in the form of speeches, official resolutions, and publications, and while at times these can be a little dry and at others absolutely infuriating, they have great power in that they are provided verbatim, with full context, and the authors essentially condemn themselves. It debunks the myths that revisionist, neo-confederate historians have successfully implanted into American consciousness, and for that, excerpts should be required reading in high school history courses.

What is often taught instead reveals a rare case where it was the defeated, not the conquerors, who wrote the history which dominated for over a century later, and this book explains how that played out. To be clear, the South seceded for no other reason than slavery and the fear that it would be abolished, and Lincoln’s response, to go to war, was motivated by keeping the Union together, because he believed the entire American experiment with democracy to be at risk. The book is very successful in supporting this statement, and I provide an excerpt in the lengthy detail section below.

The strongest argument in support of secession is perhaps that the Southern states had the sovereign right to withdraw from the Union, even if neo-Confederates were to admit today that the reason for doing so was slavery. However, the text points out that even this isn’t truly legal per the Constitution, for the clause that allowed it in the earlier Articles of Confederation was removed, as Lincoln put it, because no government provides for its own dissolution. Notably, Southern states agreed that secession was not a right in 1814, when New Englanders talked about doing so because of the War of 1812, and Andrew Jackson opposed South Carolina’s threatened secession in 1832.

After the war, Southern Democrats recognized that the war had resolved the question of slavery, but shifted to actively fighting for the cause of white supremacy – and one could argue that in this regard, the Confederates won the war, at least by 1890, because they were successful until the Civil Rights Movement. African-Americans were denied political or economic power through racist legislation and campaigns of terror. History was revised to obscure the cause for the war and to demonize the era of Reconstruction that followed, and the book is successful in providing examples of all of this.

All of this was also reflected in literature; Loewen points out that “The novel dominating the nineteenth century – Uncle Tom’s Cabin – depicts the pathos of slavery and helped end it, while the twentieth-century blockbuster, a product of the Nadir of race relations, laments slavery’s passing as Gone With the Wind.” He also includes passages from GWTW that not reflect white supremacy and stoke fears of black men raping white women, but also get the truth about the war and Reconstruction dead wrong.

In terms of constructive criticism, I think that the editors probably should have pared down content in some places, such as the complete texts of all of the states resolutions for joining the confederacy, and amped it up in others. It has some content on terrorist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan and the lynchings and massacres they perpetrated, e.g. at Wilmington, North Carolina in November, 1898, but this should have been expanded on. Similarly, voter suppression is broached, but the degree to which it was practiced – and effective – probably should have been discussed further. I also think the national outrage that followed after serviceman Isaac Woodard Jr. was blinded in a racist attack when he returned home after fighting in WWII, something which helped moved Truman to supporting Civil Rights for blacks and led to the Dixiecrats splintering in 1948, should have gotten a few pages. With all that said, I’m glad the book exists! The truth is painful, but incredibly important to acknowledge, particular as the dots connect to the present day.

The book leaves off in 2010, wondering “if having an African-American in the White House will lead to a new era of race relations that will further marginalize neo-Confederates, or if it will prompt some of the almost 90% of whites in the Deep South who voted against Obama to coalesce, thus breathing new life into the neo-Confederate movement.” Obviously, it was the latter – and it would be nice if Loewen continued to published new, updated editions of this book.

Details
It’s a bit tough to extract and summarize everything this book covers, but a sampler:

John C. Calhoun addresses to the U.S. Senate in 1837 and 1849, stating the inferiority of the black race, and whipping up fears that emancipating blacks would ultimately lead to them ruling over whites. It’s quite similar to the same fears being stoked today, that when whites are in the minority, somehow great chaos and evil will rule over the country.

Alexander Stephens, soon to be Vice President of the Confederacy, addressing the House of Representatives in 1856, stating his views of white supremacy, and finding justification for slavery in the Bible.

The various southern state secession conventions in 1861, which clearly state that preserving slavery was the reason to rebel. Examples: Mississippi’s saying “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery the greatest material interest of the world”, Alabama that “the Black Republican Party” won the recent election, and aimed to “prevent [slavery’s] extension into the common Territories of the United States, and that the power of the Government should be so exercised that slavery in time, should be exterminated”, Texas that “We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment,” that “the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free,” George Williamson, the Louisiana Secession Commissioner, that “Louisiana looks to the formation of a Southern Confederacy to preserve the blessings of African slavery.” There are many others.

The Constitution of the Confederate States of America from 1861, which among other things states that citizens of each State “…shall have the right of transit and sojourn in any State of this Confederacy, with their slaves and other property; and the right of property in said slaves shall not be thereby impaired,” and then later “In all such [new] territory, the institution of negro slavery as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected by Congress.” In other words, it did not allow existing or new potential Confederate states to abolish slavery, which, along with the incredibly strong Federal government that the Confederacy instituted, was completely at odds with the idea of “States’ rights”

Alexander Stephens in his speech, “African Slavery: The Corner-Stone of the Southern Confederacy” in 1861: “Our new government is founded upon…the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery – subordination to the superior race – is his natural and moral condition.”

The three national flags used by the Confederacy over the course of its existence are not actually the one now commonly associated with it; that happened when Strom Thurmond made a point of displaying the battle flag of the Army of North Virginia in 1948, nearly a hundred years after the war. As newspaper editor William T. Thompson put it, the 2nd National Confederate flag was mostly white on purpose, because, as he put it, “As a people, we are fighting to maintain the Heaven-ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race; a white flag would thus be emblematical of our cause.”

In terms of African-Americans fighting in the war, the Confederate Congress passing an act in response to the Emancipation Proclamation that sentenced Union black soldiers and any white officers commanding them to death if they were captured. The cruelty officers like Nathan Bedford Forrest were guilty of would be considered crimes against humanity – and he was lionized with statues over a century later, e.g. near Nashville in 1998 and countless others. Of the Fort Pillow Massacre in 1864, Loewen writes that “Soldiers testified before the resulting congressional inquiry that Confederates buried some wounded soldiers alive and crucified other by nailing them onto tent frames and then setting the tents afire.” One Confederate sergeant wrote this a week afterwards: “The slaughter was awful – words cannot describe the scene. The poor deluded Negroes would run up to our men, fall upon their knees, and with uplifted hands scream for mercy, but they were ordered to their feet and then shot down.”

As for slaves fighting for the South, it was invented as part of the whole “lost cause” mythology. General Patrick Cleburne floated a proposal for this in Jan. 1864, and it was rejected as “revolting,” “incendiary,” and “treasonous.” A year later, Robert E. Lee was desperate, and made a more formal request, which met with similar stiff resistance. Here’s a quote from a Macon Telegraph editorial in reply, which also reinforces the reason for the war: “It would be constantly kept in view, though all the bloody phases and terrible epochs of this relentless war, that slavery was the casus belli – that the principle of State Sovereignty, and its sequence, the right of secession, were important to the South principally, or solely as the armor that encased her particular institution – and that every life that has been lost in this struggle was an offering on the altar of African Slavery. In light of this great and solemn truth, is it not a matter of wonder and astonishment, that Southern men should gravely propose to arm, and as a necessary consequence, emancipate all the able-bodied slaves in the Confederacy … The adoption of this policy would be a foul wrong to our departed heroes who have fallen in its defense.” Howell Cobb and J.H. Stringfellow were similar voices against it, the former writing “You can’t keep white and black troops together, and you can’t trust negroes by themselves.” In March, 1865 an act was passed to use slaves as troops without emancipating them (for that would have been against the CSA Constitution) and two companies were recruited in Richmond, but they never saw action, because the war was over just two months later, in May.

Here’s what secessionist Edward A. Pollard wrote in his 1868 book about the lost cause: “the true question which the war involved, and which it merely liberated for greater breadth of controversy, was the supremacy of the White race, and along with it the preservation of the political traditions of the country.” The Mississippi Black Codes similarly restricted land ownership, interracial marriage, and allowed whites to use former slave children as indentured servants, the language of which reminded me of similar acts passed in California in this period relative to Native-Americans. Rushmore G. Horton in his oft-quoted 1867 history book made it clear the war was fought because the Republicans would have ended slavery, and that it was vitally important to prevent white blood from being mongrelized through intermarriage, and to prevent black equality at all costs. Really ugly stuff, and yet his book was being republished by the Daughters of the Confederacy in the 1920’s.

Robert E. Lee, in “The White Sulphur Manifesto” in 1868: “It is true that the people of the South, in common with a large majority of the people of the North and West, are, for obvious reasons, inflexibly opposed to any system of laws that would place the political power of the country in the hands of the negro race.”

Many who wrote about the “negro problem,” espousing white supremacy, excusing lynching, and stoking fears of black men – including Stephen D. Lee in 1899, S.A. Cunningham in 1903 and 1907, John Sharp Williams in 1904, and E.H. Hinton in 1907.

John Rankin, who won 16 terms in congress, in 1925, revising the cause for the war but correctly assessing the victory the South had achieved in its aftermath: “We are all glad that human slavery has disappeared; but the dread of the horrible alternative which some of our opponents would have imposed – that of placing the negro upon terms of social and political equality with the white man – aroused the latent indignation of the Anglo-Saxon South…” and later: “A lost cause! You have won the great cause of white supremacy, by which alone our civilization can hope to endure!”

Strom Thurmond’s address to the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1957, in which he blames northern agitation for stirring up African-Americans, similar to the smears used against carpetbaggers during Reconstruction. “We of the South, and we alone, have cared and provided for the Negroes in our midst. The progress which has been made by that race is a tribute to the efforts of Southerners, and of Southerners alone.” Ha!

Sumter Lowry, stoking fears of the mixing of the races that would result from desegregating schools, particularly as it applies to black men and white women, in 1958: “…if you infuse the blood of fourteen million negroes into the bloodstream of the white American, you breed a mongrel race, neither white nor black, and the history of the world shows that wen a nation becomes mongrelized it dies.”

The summary of the Republican party’s “southern strategy” following the Civils Rights Act, courting white supremacists, which reversed the party’s fortunes in the South to the present day. “As Republican strategist Lee Atwater put it, ‘By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’ – that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff.’ It worked. Gradually, the party of Lincoln became the party of Jefferson Davis.” Indeed – and it still is. ( )
1 abstimmen gbill | Nov 18, 2021 |
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AutorennameRolleArt des AutorsWerk?Status
Loewen, James W.HerausgeberHauptautoralle Ausgabenbestätigt
Sebesta, Edward H.HerausgeberHauptautoralle Ausgabenbestätigt
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Most Americans hold basic misconceptions about the Confederacy, the Civil War, and the actions of subsequent neo-Confederates. For example, two thirds of Americans--including most history teachers--think the Confederate States seceded for "states' rights." This error persists because most have never read the key documents about the Confederacy. These documents have always been there. When South Carolina seceded, it published "Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union." The document actually opposes states' rights. Its authors argue that Northern states were ignoring the rights of slave owners as identified by Congress and in the Constitution. Similarly, Mississippi's "Declaration of the Immediate Causes ..." says, "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery--the greatest material interest of the world." Later documents in this collection show how neo-Confederates obfuscated this truth, starting around 1890. The evidence also points to the centrality of race in neo-Confederate thought even today and to the continuing importance of neo-Confederate ideas in American political life. The 150th anniversary of secession and civil war provides a moment for all Americans to read these documents, properly set in context by award-winning sociologist and historian James W. Loewen and co-editor, Edward H. Sebesta, to put in perspective the mythology of the Old South.

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