I know well how the South Carolina State House, and more recently its grounds, look with the Confederate battle flag flying over it. I grew up in the path of Sherman’s March through South Carolina in what is now part of Rev. Clementa Pinckney’s senate district. During Jimmy Carter’s presidency and the prime time era of the “Dukes of Hazzard” I learned the basic tenets of the Lost Cause. The Confederacy had been a noble failure, it held, one that demonstrated the martial virtues of southern soldiers and their officers; but the Cause came up short due to the industrial and man-power advantages held by the Union.
Funny that
slavery wasn’t mentioned. It would be inaccurate to say that I learned that slavery
had no role in the causes for the war, because slavery only came up as a result
of the war.
While boys
outside the South debated the merits of Ken Stabler versus Terry Bradshaw I
remember sitting in a lean-to fort in the woods behind a friend’s house arguing
over how Robert E. Lee could have won at Gettysburg. Being raised in that
distinctively native southern white mindset leaves a mark, and it is difficulty
to unlearn faith in the myth of the Lost Cause. That unlearning is what many
white southerners must do.
Studying
history helped me unlearn the Lost Cause, but I also unlearned it by watching
others perform the rituals of it. In college I saw how members of one southern
fraternity held annual balls where all the members dressed as dandified Confederate
officers. Almost none of them would have had ancestors who rose above enlisted
rank, I realized, and what they were doing was using memory of the war to
define themselves as special, important, and leaders in the present. By
implication they mattered more than other southerners who were black or poor.
The image of
the Confederate ancestor in the southern mind is central to the Lost Cause problem.
Those who know (or at least assume) they had ancestors who fought imagine them
as a younger version of Robert E. Lee or Stonewall Jackson: lean, handsome,
serious-minded and brave men with a fervent belief in Confederate nationalism,
States’ Rights, and protecting their homes.
No doubt
that image fits some soldiers, but relatively few. By 1862 the first
conscription act for the Confederacy in April of 1862 established the draft
and, it extended all one-year volunteer commitments to three years. The
government had already begun to run out of volunteers who would sign-up for
their cause and man its armies and it had to put in a stop-loss to insure the
original volunteers didn’t leave. Moreover, the draft had to be violently
upheld with Home Guard units — a potent reminder that the entire economic and
social structure of the South rested on violence. Make no mistakes, the
Confederacy not only supported violence to preserve slavery; it also used it
violence to force non-slave owners to fight.
Do those
holding fast to the myth consider that at least one in ten of their Confederate
veteran ancestors deserted?
I knew from
childhood that I had ancestors who served. At least one was drafted and another
ancestor died of wounds defending Charleston. More recently I have learned of
others, though, who were Unionists. Official affidavits say other relatives hid
from the draft by living on little islands in the swamps. I can’t see how
flying the Battle Flag honors them.
The Lost
Cause myth whitewashes all of those parts of southern heritage just as it
conveniently forgot the thousands of African American Marylanders taken into
slavery by Lee’s invading army in 1862.
Alabama took down the Battle flag with no
fanfare. Wal-Mart, eBay and other outlets for commerce gave it up with
corporate memos. South Carolina has done it through the legislative process.The 150th anniversary of the end of that cruel war, and now the removal of the battle flag from South Carolina’s state house grounds in reaction to yet more terrorism against African Americans is the right time to bury our Lost Cause fantasies too.
