Confederate Flag

A CONVERSATION

/ cigarman501 / 1 Comment

The arrest of fifteen Georgia residents who SUPPOSEDLY crashed a black neighborhood birthday party while flying Confederate Battle Flags, brandishing weapons, and shouting racial epitaphs has once again ignited discussion about our Southern heritage and hate.

During a conversation with a really good friend, one whose opinion I respect a great deal, it suddenly became apparent that I had misrepresented myself. Our conversation was about the Confederate Battle Flag that recently was removed from our State House dome. From some of my previous posts, she mistakenly believed that I was of the opinion that the flag was one of the reasons Dylann Roof decided to pull the trigger that took nine lives earlier this summer. I don’t believe that any more than I believe the gun was at fault. What I do believe is that both of these inanimate objects were a part of the same environment that spawned him. Does he suffer from some type of insanity? Probably, and that insanity, cultivated by a fertile environment of racism and cultural division, was pointed at his targets just like his gun.

His environment was one that included a belief in white supremacy and the belief that Blacks, Jews, and Orientals were taking over. It is a variant of the argument that I believe, was used prior to the Civil War to create support from Southern non-slave owners. The belief that if we had not supported slavery we would be living with them, competing for jobs, and marrying off our daughters to them.

My recent rants have not been so much about the flag itself as it was about the attempt to explain the flag in a light of love and heritage, and in doing so marginalizing the effect slavery had on the South and the Civil War. Non-apologist were spouting information that made me wonder if I had read the wrong research as an undergrad history major. It was “Lost Cause” propaganda that the war was only about the state’s rights, independence, and unfair tariffs, not slavery. There is a kernel of truth in that belief but these posters seemed to be forgetting that one of those state’s rights was the right to continue and expand slavery…and the independence to do so.

It is interesting that their defense of the flag rarely speaks to the events that occurred after the Civil War other than to say it was about heritage and not hate. I was born just after the Dixiecrats first hijacked the flag and grew up during the end of Jim Crow, Brown, and the Civil Rights movement. I began my teaching career just two years after the forced desegregation of schools. It wasn’t pretty but I thought we were past most of it. The aftermath of Charleston, Ferguson, North Charleston, the deaths of too many police officers and theatergoers, and a myriad of other places and issues proved to me that we had simply covered it up and ignored it as many posts I have read have proven to me. Black Lives Matter, White Lives Matter, Police Lives Matter, and All Lives Matter seemed to move toward no lives matter unless it is mine. The “us versus them” finger-pointing continues today and has expanded to include gays, Christians, Muslims, police officers, white trash, and any other group or person we disagree with or support. With plenty of fake news sites, anyone’s particular object of hatred could be fed.

I admit to having worked in an insulated environment all my adult life as a teacher. Teaching is not working in the real world, it’s MUCH MORE challenging than that. Ninety percent of my friends of African descent come from that sector as either former students, teachers, or administrators. With few exceptions, they are intelligent, hard-working, and solid citizens in every way. They are also professionals who will tell you that Jim Crow and racism are still alive and well and located in many places other than just the South. The Jim Crow of today has become de facto instead of de jure but it’s there none the less. They will also tell you that, as white Americans, we owe them nothing more than the truth and an honest chance…the same as everyone else.

Even though I have descendants who fought and died under the Battle Flag, I could not support it. I even have some sympathy for the girl who climbed the pole and took it down because fifty-four years is a long time to wait. You might need to know I was in high school during the Civil Rights protests and in college during the height of the Viet Nam protest era. Those protests made a lasting imprint and the right to peaceful protest is ingrained in me no matter how reprehensible it might be. Should she have taken it down? No. Nor should flags be pulled down from private homes or monuments defaced but again I believe that it’s about white supremacy and I would add, the black racism that it has helped to create.

There are fear and lack of trust that both races have for each other in South Carolina and other Southern states that have grown since the Civil War. It is well earned. Throughout the rest of the country our track record with Blacks, Native Americans, Asians and Hispanics has been just as bad and has been widened to include gays and lesbians, Muslims, the Pope and those of us who believe that being unconcerned about political correctness is just an excuse for middle schools like name-calling and bullying. It is time for the name-calling to end but I fear it is just as ingrained as our racism and our cultural and political divide.

SOT IN OUR WAYS

/ cigarman501 / Leave a comment

SOT IN OUR WAYS
“Grace changes us and change is painful.”
-Flannery O’Connor

Grace aside, for Southerners anyway, change is not only painful it is damn near impossible. Most Southerners don’t like being told what to do, how to do it…or being told no you can’t do it. Statements like “I’ve done it this way for (fill in the blank) years” are the norm along with colorful expletives accompanying any attempts at change.

We are known to dig in like mud turtles, even when faced with the fact that what we are being asked to change to is a hundred times better than what we have. Well, “Bless your heart!” With a new washing machine, my grandmother still did part of her washing in a washtub with a scrub board.

Honestly, sometimes I’d like to have a phone with a rotor instead of the one that provides me with a hundred contrasting functions including my wife being able to find me by pushing one button…and don’t get me started on my wife and her Missouri mule-like ideas about change. “And just what was so wrong about Windows98?” Southerners look at change with a jaundiced eye. Lord help us if the “Gubment” tries to get involved!

Saying the South is conservative used to be like saying that the Grand Canyon is a deep hole. Now it is more so. I fear that any slight liberal shift is due to Carpetbaggers transplanting themselves into our homeland and “rooting” out a place for themselves the same way that a wild hog “roots” out an acorn.

These days Southerners tend to vote Republican and support the party of the “status quo.” If you ask someone why they voted Republican you are likely to get an answer like, “Well, my family has voted Republican since 1964.” But why do YOU vote Republican? “You dummy, didn’t you hear me? I told you my family has voted Republican since 1964!” Southerners do hate to repeat the obvious.

This should explain how unusual it was for Strom Thurmond to successfully make the change from Democrat to Republican by way of the Dixiecrats in 1964 due to a protest “that he said” was against “big gubment” and state’s rights. It worked and he was partially responsible for the flip-flop in the political spectrum that we follow today.

I consider myself moderate simply because I will expect some change in my life. You know, change in underwear type things. No, I try not to be held hostage to any party politics, but it is hard. By saying that I am a moderate, places me so far left of some of my acquaintances that many of them think that I might as well be standing next to Karl Marx.

There are Southern liberals. Many are African American or, if white, we tend to hide our liberalness and admit to it privately only to a voting machine. Please be aware that I am speaking of Southerners born and bred, not damn Yankees.

If a Southern liberal’s friends or family were to find out that they voted for a Democrat, this revelation would be accompanied by looks that you would expect from your baptist minister if he caught you coming out of a liquor store or “Hooters.” Never mind asking why he was there because we are also big on “Do as I say do not as I do.”

Before I go on with my tirade, I should point out that our “set in our way-ness,” while a Southern white attribute, is not a trait limited to one race. My friend Butch, who is African American, is as conservative as they come, and it has rubbed off on other members of his family. Of my generation, his loooonnnng pontifications would make a Kentucky colonel or GOP politician proud!

It surprises me how much our world view is comparable despite our differences in race. I attribute this to our rural upbringing that included chopping cotton and corn and working in textiles along with parents and grandparents who would “switch deem legs.” Despite this similar history, I imagine he has voted Democrat since 1964. Why? “You dummy, didn’t you hear me? I told you my family has voted Democrat since 1964!”

I don’t understand why people in other parts of the world consider us to be uneducated and backward just because we are conservative and inflexible to change as a piece of rebar. I just thought that “tongue in cheek.” Despite improvements, our school systems still rank lower while obesity, poverty, and numbers of unwed mothers still rank higher than the rest of the nation.

The world view is of a fat, tobacco chewing redneck who is a high school dropout sporting “shit-caked” work boots and wearing a “South will rise again!” belt buckle. Usually, this redneck could stand a bit of dental work on his four teeth and is much more concerned about the Second Amendment than any other aspect of “gubment.” His mate is barefooted and wearing a dress she made herself from a feed sack. “Sugah Pie” is pregnant and showing to be quite far along despite having a babe in arms and another, a year older, in a dirty diaper and tugging at the hem of her dress. They will not have to worry about having three in high school at the same time much less college.

In front of their single-wide is a rusting pickup truck on blocks whose engine is leaking vital fluids as it sits on a sagging picnic table next to it. Yes, there is a redbone hound asleep under the truck. Is this an accurate portrayal? Hell no…and, unfortunately, hell yes! The climate is changing but for those of us who are not “sot in our ways,” the change is slow. Oh God, I may be a liberal! Please don’t tell anyone! I will try to do better.

I now live in an area of South Carolina that has become known as the “Dark Corner.” Once I thought it got its name because of our location regarding the mountains to our west that block the sun as it slips beyond the horizon. To “sorta” quote Yogi Berra, it does “get darker here quicker” but that has nothing to do with the name. Oh no.

One local historian suggested that the Dark Corner somehow got its name because Unionist and Confederate deserters invaded the area “hereabouts” to defend themselves against a “gubment” that wanted them to uphold slavery that the deserters had decided was a “rich man’s” war to maintain the “status quo” or in the case of Unionists, a “gubment” that wanted them to rebel against the Union. In and around 1864 they decided to unite and began to fortify the nearby mountains and dare the Confederate Army or local constabulary to show up. By that time, the CSA had its hands full elsewhere and there was no confrontation.

I find it interesting that since the Flag issue in my state landed like a wet cow patty dropped from a B-52, there now seem to be way more Confederate Battle Flags around. I wonder if any of my tradition-laden friends realize the “checkered heritage” of where they live. “Nope, cause hit don’t matter ‘cept that the sumbitch ‘gubment is tryin’ to take my flag!” Damn Right!

The name Dark Corner was first used during the Nullification Crisis and solidified during secession, to quote “They were staunch Unionists during the nullification and secession crises and on the outbreak of civil war were slow to support the Confederacy. ‘Few Dark Corner men. . . have volunteered,’ a Greenvillian wrote in August 1861. ‘It is to be hoped that some light will break upon their darkness.'”

Another example of old traditions dying hard is the production of “tax-free” distilled spirits. Through the depression and into modern times, the Dark Corner was known for its production of moonshine. Not just any moonshine but what has been described as a particularly “fine moonshine.” That is not an oxymoron.

The smoothness supposedly came from the water. In the late Seventies it was also known for producing a particularly high grade of “killer weed” known as “Glassy Mountain Gold.” Weed did not replace moonshining because moonshining was the traditional drug of choice and “the good old boys ain’t about to change.”

During the depression poor families resorted to illegally distilling spirits to pay their taxes and to make a living that the “gubment” was attempting to take away, according to their “way ah thinking.” Well, this is 2022 and it is still being made. One morning in the late 2000s, I stepped out to begin my morning run and was assaulted by the sharp smell of sour mash cookin’. Several years later I found a broken down still on a stream located on my land. They could have, at least, offered me a taste!

I was somewhat shocked to see the face of the father of one of my former players pasted across my TV on the Six O’ Clock News. He was, and is still, a respected “gentleman peach farmer” of high means. His offense? Making “shine.” His defense was that his daddy had made it and his daddy before him and…. He did not need the money to pay his taxes or even take the kids to Disneyworld, nor is he very apologetic. It was a time-honored tradition to make the “family recipe” free of “gubment” taxes and he was “sot in his ways.” My guess is that despite the hefty fine that he paid, he is still “sot in his ways.”

Most of the Southerners I know don’t make shine and have more of their own teeth than I do. A few wave the flag and chew tobacco. Many of us own rusty old pickups. One even has the engine out of his. It’s in his double-bay garage, the one he built to work on his cars that includes a hydraulic lift rack and engine hoist. There is nothing but food on his picnic table and a German Shepard to guard it all. Despite his lack of a college degree, his home, garage, and farm are a lot nicer than mine.

Uneducated? Not where it counts, it would seem, because they don’t award degrees for common sense and work ethic. He doesn’t chew, dip, or drink his spirits out of a Mason jar and is more likely to be in flip-flops than in “shit kickers.” Jimmy Buffett meets Mr. Greenjeans? He also doesn’t wave the Battle Flag, but he is as Southern as the day is long and, I think, more of what the New, New South is about, despite being set in his conservative ways. Yes, he does still vote Republican. “You dummy, didn’t you hear me? I told you my family has voted Republican since 1964!”

“PEPSI COLA”-A LESSON IN PREJUDICE

/ cigarman501 / 1 Comment

In the early 1960’s our Southern heritage was being assaulted with Yankee government mandates to end “separate but equal” in favor of desegregation “with all deliberate speed.” The Deep South was deliberately dragging its feet. Alabama’s flamboyant governor George Wallace probably expressed our segregationist attitudes best when he attempted to stand up to that Yankee government exclaiming, “I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” Our own native son and segregationist Strom Thurmond said, “All the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negro into our homes, into our schools, our churches and our places of recreation and amusement.” Strom would even help lay the foundation for today’s modern GOP when he exchanged his Democratic blue for Republican red because Democratic President Lyndon Johnson stabbed the Solid South in the back by signing into law the Civil Right’s Act of 1964. Thurmond claimed it was in protest of big government and State’s Rights. Sound familiar? Wasn’t Strom a candidate for president on the Dixiecrat ticket? Since Strom’s defection the only Democratic presidential hopeful to take a majority of deep Southern states was Jimmy Carter from Georgia. Considering how well that turned out, I doubt that will happen again. Two years prior to the Civil Right’s Act of 1964, in 1962, the debate over the Confederate flag flying on the Capitol grounds would begin when the Battle Flag of Northern Virginia was raised over the Capitol Dome to commemorate the Civil War centennial…and to “shoot a bird” at the federal government’s attempts to push us toward desegregation.

Despite it being racist times I don’t remember my community being a racist hotbed. It certainly wasn’t a hotbed of racist rhetoric. There were plenty of pro-segregationist meetings in our little part of the world, though. Community meetings with the School Board, superintendent and principal were held in, what I thought back then, was the spacious auditorium of our school. I remember the principal and superintendent, along with the local school board fielding questions from a packed “white” house. One question that was never quite answered was “What are we going to do about those Negro ‘Bucks’ walking the hallways with our daughters?” I realize now how fearful some parents were that their daughters were going to be carried off and raped…or worse, that they might willingly walk off on their own before giving up their most prized gift—gasp!—gladly.

Despite this not being an original thought, I believe that race relations in South Carolina (you may insert racism) is the product of fear that has plagued South Carolina since slavery days when the slave population outnumbered the white population. That fear manifested itself in the “well-founded” terror of a potential slave revolt on one side or the prospect of reprisals caused by revolts on the other. In a few accounts, it would appear that reprisals were carried out because there might have been a brief thought of a revolt. This dread would be continued and intensified after the Civil War. Panic mounted over the contemplation of retaliations by the former slaves and that their “unbridled African passions” would be unleashed on our innocent white female population. (What were the African ladies doing?)

The centerpiece of our hate was the resentment by white supremacists, a majority of the white population throughout the South specifically and the US in general, that we were going to be groveling at the feet of black lawmakers. The old “loss of status bug-a-boo” was primary on the minds of old white “planter class” who had had the power and wanted it back. While some blacks were elected, all of that would change with the end of Reconstruction and the antebellum status quo would return and be maintained with De Jure legislation that became known as Jim Crow laws. Later this would be upheld with the Supreme Court railroad case Plessy v Ferguson which made “separate but equal” the law of the land and which intensified the trepidation and hate on both sides of our heritage.

Separate but equal did not seem to be a problem in Indian Land. It did not seem Brown’s “with all deliberate speed” could be an issue at this time but, for reasons that eluded my six-year-old mind, people were worried. We did not have a huge population of African-Americans and none of them were carrying spears or wearing leopard skins like in the Tarzan movies. They tended to live around Van Wyck, the brick making capitol of the state, or out past Uncle James’s farm which might as well have been in…deepest Africa. Maggie Cureton’s family lived way, way, way across the road and by the 1960’s they were long gone.

While I had seen African-American males I would not meet my first African- American adult male until the very late fifties when we remodeled our house. A black brick mason with the interesting name of “Pepsi Cola” Mobley was hired to add the brick veneer to our original home along with the two new rooms added onto each end.
“Pepsi Cola” was a stud, as were his two sons who served as helpers and apprentice brick layers. It was their responsibility to carry the bricks and “mud” to their father as he did the placing of the brick runs. I found the whole endeavor to be interesting but not nearly as interesting as the “colored” folk who were carrying out the tasks. The acorns did not fall far from the tree! Close-cropped “steel wool” hair over clear ebony skin; they possessed the whitest of stereotypical teeth below broad flat noses and wide cheekbones. All three were powerfully built with muscles bulging and glistening with sweat from handling and placing the bricks. “Pepsi Cola’s” decades of brick work had given him shoulders so wide I doubted his ability to walk through a door without turning sideways along with hands that were beaten, scarred and as rough as the slabs on the side of my grandparent’s barn. All three started the day in tattered yet clean tees and denim pants that had patches patched over patches. As the heat of the day intensified, shirts would be discarded exposing broad, powerful chests that were covered in tight black curly hair. Curiously, whenever my grandmother or mother stepped outside, there was a bit of a scramble to put their shirts back on. “Pepsi” was gregarious, singing Negro hymns and laughing his way through the day or “holding court” for anyone near by, which was usually the eight or nine-year old “little man” that was me. I found him to have the most interesting accent to go along with a lot of words that began with “dees” ended in “esses.” His sons were the exact opposite – quiet and, I would say, somewhat sullen. In hindsight, my guess is that there was little way to wedge a word in edgewise with “Pepsi Cola” around.

I learned a lesson of the times during the course of the remodeling. Sent to carry a jug of water out to the workers, I asked Mr. Mobley, “Mr. Mobley, would you like some water?” “Eyes do, Eyes do, indeeds, Little Man,” he answered with his best grin. In turn, I gave the sons water and returned to my grandmother who informed me of my grievous faux pas, “You don’t refer to ‘coloreds’ by mister unless you use their first name.” Okay, “Mister Pepsi Cola!”

For me and the rest of South Carolina, Separate but Equal would hold on tenaciously until my senior year when “token integration” was introduced. Over the next few years, mainly 1969 and 1970, full integration and busing would rule the day when made possible by the threat of losing federal funds instead of earlier threats of federal troops which could not help but bring back references to Reconstruction. Scenes of angry whites meeting buses carrying black children had been broadcast nationwide on our little black and white television since 1957 in Arkansas. Luckily these scenes were not played out in our little corner of the world; however, throughout the state white families fled their public schools, preferring instead to turn down federal subsidies and send their children to private schools bearing names of Confederate generals and politicians. Forty-five years later many of those “academies” still exist, especially in areas that can be described as socially and economically lacking and whose public schools are still predominantly black.

Most of our fears have not been realized. Our most prized possessions it would seem, our women, were not carried off and gang-raped by angry blacks. I guess some white supremacist would say that things are worse because there are A LOT of BIRACIAL folks walking the streets and country roads of the South today. I wonder by what means they got here? Oddly enough, there is even one in the White House! Could it be that most of us are finally overcoming our fears?

I wrote this in the language of the times and it was not meant to offend anyone…except racist and white supremacist. I hope I was successful.

A Quest

/ cigarman501 / 1 Comment

One Southerner’s search for the truth about his Southern Heritage and Hate

The aftermath of the Charleston Massacre has caused me to examine one of the very cornerstones of my life – my Southern heritage as it relates to “War of the Rebellion.”  Recent calls to remove monuments and rename buildings has renewed this examination.

Born on an Easter Sunday (April 9, 1950) a mere eighty-five years to the day the most revered man in the South, General Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox Court House, I grew up re-fighting “The War of Northern Aggression.”

As a child I really did not understand any of the dynamics of our Civil War and, at one time, could not understand “why” North Carolina had invaded South Carolina and “why” much of the fighting had taken place in far away from Virginia or “out west.”  In my defense, I was very young and uneducated.

I thought that it might have been something like the Gillette “Fight of the Week” and held in a neutral ring. This was in 1957 and I know it was this year because of my favorite TV series – the one year wonder “The Gray Ghost” – aired only in 1957. This program is what caused the “why” questions to first be asked as it chronicled the exploits of Confederate cavalry commander John Singleton Mosby and his men who rode rings around the foolish “Damn Yankees” located in distant Virginia.

A year or so later, after the worst decision since James Buchanan sent the “Star of the West” to provision Fort Sumter, “The Gray Ghost” was canceled. By this time I had had a geography lesson or five and my program of choice became “The Rebel” starring Nick Adams as a former Confederate soldier and aspiring journalist named Johnny Yuma.

Complete with Rebel kepi, Colt revolver, and a sawed-off shotgun, Yuma traveled the Texas countryside righting wrongs and defending the weak while making amends and trying to come to grips with what he had experienced during the “War of the Rebellion.” He would then write about his travels and adventures in a journal that had been given to him by a friend. I too wore my kepi and packed my cap pistols proudly as I defended the chickens and hogs around my grandparent’s old barn.

Both Mosby and Yuma were heroic figures, Mosby in real life, although maligned like James Longstreet for choosing to serve in Grant’s “Yankee government” after the war, and Yuma as a knightly character in black and white television. They were portrayed as chivalrous characters like all of the men who wore gray or butternut and who fought to preserve the Southern way of life against the invading blue-clad Yankee hordes. They were as knightly as the character Ivanhoe in Walter Scott’s book by the same title.

For some reason, “Ivanhoe seemed to be required reading in order to become a true Southern gentleman. I am unsure if I am a gentleman but I have read the book and saw the Robert Taylor version of the movie repeatedly. I confess that I still watch it to lust after a young Elizabeth Taylor whose character Rebecca is the Jewish object of Norman Knight Brian De Bois-Guilbert’s desire as played by a way-too-old George Sanders.

I was too enamored by Elizabeth Taylor’s green eyes to recognize the parallels between the Civil War and the movie at the time but realize now that there were many. The story and movie are about Ivanhoe’s quest to ransom King Richard’s return to the English throne. He led an outmanned and ill-equipped army that featured Robin of Loxley and his “merry men.”

The movie emphasized the cultural strife between the Normans and the Saxons and their class inequalities and also displayed the racism and anti-Semitism shown to Rebecca and her father Isaac. All could be metaphors for the United States during the period leading up to and including the war.

During the climactic “wager of battle,” Rebecca sits stoically awaiting her fate as Sir Brian De Bois-Guibert, who is willing to destroy what he loves rather than allow her to love another, seems to have the upper hand until Ivanhoe prevails and mortally wounds the Yankee at the end. Did I say Yankee? I really meant the Norman knight.

To the point, Ivanhoe was just like our chivalrous young men who rallied to the flag to defend their states. It was always assumed that they would find a way to prevail at the end against the more numerous and better equipped Yankee invaders. Instead, the best the South had to offer spilled their blood and the blood of their enemy. The South was destroyed in the attempt…well…maybe reborn.

A great yarn.  It became much more than a story for those chivalrous young men who rallied to the flag. Two of those young men were John R. and Marion DeKalb Rogers, my great, great, great and great, great grandfathers. Both enlisted in what would be Company H, Twelfth Regiment of the South Carolina Volunteer Infantry in August of 1861.

John, according to family tradition, died of typhoid fever less than six months into his service but died under the flag NONE-THE-LESS. Marion would go on to fight in twenty-eight battles including Gettysburg. Most of these battles were fought under the standard that we know as the Battle Flag of the Army of Northern Virginia and were led by the famed Confederate commander General Robert E. Lee. Unfortunately for the South, it would be the Yankee flag and Sherman’s “bummers” who would have the last say in South Carolina and Grant’s Army of the Potomac in Virginia.

According to my great, great grandfather’s military records, despite fighting gallantly in a rearguard action to allow Lee’s Army to escape Petersburg, he and a thousand other Confederate soldiers would be overwhelmed and captured at a Virginia village named Sutherland (Southerland?) Station on April 3. (According to actual historical records the battle took place on the 2nd.) He was lucky as over five hundred were killed in action. This was less than a week before Lee would surrender but not have to hand over his sword to Grant at the McLean House at Appomattox.

After my grandfather’s capture, he would be held at Hart’s Island in New York until his release in July. Of the original one hundred and thirty-seven recruits in Company H, only seventeen made it home alive. M. D. Rogers was one of those lucky seventeen, which for my particular lineage was fortuitous.

After the massacre in Charleston, there was a decision to remove from the South Carolina Capitol Grounds the Battle Flag – the same flag that my granddads times two and three fought under and the same one that many Southerners are now trying to keep flying. Their point has been that the South was not defending its peculiar institution of slavery as one of the reasons to go to war. According to many supporters, slavery was just a “side issue.”

My great grandfathers were part of the eighty to ninety percent who shouldered arms but were not slaveholders. So…they could not have fought to uphold slavery, could they? The war was about regional rivalries. It was about how the Northern economic interests desired to control the South, a “red-haired” stepchild, with illegal tariffs so as to ensure that Southern cotton was cheap when it was acquired by the Northern factories. They wanted to steal Southern chattel and not honor laws that would return Southern property to us. It was an argument over State’s Rights and sovereignty.

When we had had enough and seceded from the Union, the Federals broke a promise and took over an uncompleted fort in Charleston Harbor. Later, when an attempt was made to re-provision this fort, our gallant military opened fire to drive the ship away. Eventually, we opened fire on Fort Sumter itself in order to force the Federal garrison to abandon our newly acquired property and the rest is history…or is it?

A teaching friend of mine and a true Son of the South often makes the argument that Civil War history has been victimized by “revisionists” who have attempted to defame the South with inaccurate and adjusted claims. Until a while ago, a dozen or so years before Charleston, I would have agreed with him. Unfortunately, I believe now that we both have been victimized by what became known as “The Lost Cause.”

I also acknowledge that I will never be able to convince him or other diehard “Sons of the Confederacy” of that victimization. The phrase Lost Cause was coined by Virginia writer Edward Pollard who wrote the book The Lost Cause in 1866. (1)

In an essay about Pollard’s book, Origins of the Lost Cause, Michael Speiser of the University of Virginia states, and I quote because he says it better than I ever could, “In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, a number of white southern writers and political leaders worked to construct a favorable history of the old South and the Confederacy.

Seeking vindication of the white South in the wake of seemingly crushing defeat, they resurrected pro-white southern imagery and ideology of earlier years. In doing so, these advocates for the white South constructed a “Lost Cause” mythology and memory of the Civil War and white Southern history and culture. Specifically, they celebrated the South’s natural beauty and idyllic plantations, supported a white supremacist racial hierarchy in southern society, claimed liberty as a southern principle and the American Revolution as southern heritage, wrapped their sectionalism in a constitutional theory of state sovereignty, and nostalgically glorified the southern past.” (2)

One might want to think of Gone with the Wind or the original Birth of a Nation at this time.The Lost Cause was what I was taught and in turn, I repeated this same history when I taught it, at least at the beginning of my career. My indoctrination was so complete that I would not dig more deeply into my heritage until many years later. My teaching wasn’t about slavery but about Southern rights with “Tara’s Theme” playing in the background.

Most slaveholders held one or two slaves, not hundreds, and only ten or twenty percent owned slaves at all. Most slave owners weren’t abusive. Why would you beat something as valuable as a slave? Would you beat a horse or is that a bad analogy?  Those were the “facts” I was taught.

Scenes of happy slaves singing while toiling in the fields flitted through my mind again accompanied by more strains from “Tara’s Theme.” The North was attempting to commandeer Southern cotton and the profits made on the backs of these happy slaves for the sake of the Northern industry. Dah, Dah, Daaaah, Da, Da, Daah …wait… that was the theme to the “High and the Mighty” not “Tara’s Theme.”

The Lost Cause IS a part of our true heritage, but not our true history. So is the heritage of hate that racism, slavery, the Civil War and its aftermath have left to us…even today. So is the fear that it all fostered…for both races. It is the heritage of both SOUTHERN BLACKS AND WHITES and doesn’t even begin to cover the heritage of Jim Crow, forced prison labor, red lined districts, etc.

Our Southern heritage is not just a white heritage; it is also a black heritage like two sides of the same coin. We all have to recognize this fact and accept it. I believe that we can keep our heritage, both black and white, despite or, maybe, in spite of the hate and fear.

Much like an abuser in a twelve-step program, we must be truthful and that starts with being truthful to ourselves. One place to start might be to recognize that our racism is as much an American phenomenon as it is a Southern one. Northerners, Westerners, African-Americans, Hispanics, and Asians also display prejudice. After all, I have had it pointed out to me repeatedly that the North is just as racist as the South, if not more so. Okay… that makes me feel better.

Despite my heritage, I realize that the removal of the Battle Flag was right and a long time coming. I believe that much of what has been discussed about removing other parts of our Confederate history is not only hurting White Southerners but Black Southerners as well. Instead of tearing down monuments or removing the bones of our sometimes conflicted and dark history, whether black or white, why don’t we add to those monuments?  Why don’t we admit to our hate and our heritage.

In South Carolina, for every “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman or Strom Thurmond, there is a Charles Townsend, a Harold Boulware, a Matilda Evans, a Pat Conroy or a former student like Phillip Boykin. Let us remember those folks who have worked hard to unite our South and to move our “multi-racial” society forward. We might also want to remember that like Strom Thurmond or Ben Tillman many of us have some secrets that we would like to hide and forget.

The history that was—WAS… and can NOT be changed…although I have never taught history using a flag or a statue. We must accept and recognize our history, both good and bad. Despite their racism, both Tillman and Thurmond accomplished much good for our state. That statement is not an excuse for their travesties.

We should admit that the flag and our monuments represents two sides of heritage and unfortunately, one of those sides is hate. To say that slavery was a side issue, despite all of the evidence otherwise, simply marginalizes a large percentage of our population. To me, our heritage of racism and white supremacy is not worth doing that.
(1) Edward Albert Pollard, The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates (New York: E. B. Treat & Co., Publishers, 1866).
(2)  http://www.essaysinhistory.com/articles/2011/6