Defense of the Confederacy is racism

At least according to this guy.

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Southern Discomfort
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CloseLinkedinDiggFacebookMixxMySpaceYahoo! BuzzPermalink By JON MEACHAM
Published: April 10, 2010
IN 1956, nearly a century after Fort Sumter, Robert Penn Warren went on assignment for Life magazine, traveling throughout the South after the Supreme Court’s school desegregation decisions. Racism was thick, hope thin. Progress, Warren reported, was going to take a while — a long while. “History, like nature, knows no jumps,” he wrote, “except the jump backward, maybe.”

Last week, Virginia’s governor, Robert McDonnell, jumped backward when he issued a proclamation recognizing April as Confederate History Month. In it he celebrated those “who fought for their homes and communities and Commonwealth” and wrote of the importance of understanding “the sacrifices of the Confederate leaders, soldiers and citizens during the period of the Civil War.”

The governor originally chose not to mention slavery in the proclamation, saying he “focused on the ones I thought were most significant for Virginia.” It seems to follow that, at least for Mr. McDonnell, the plight of Virginia’s slaves does not rank among the most significant aspects of the war.

Advertently or not, Mr. McDonnell is working in a long and dispiriting tradition. Efforts to rehabilitate the Southern rebellion frequently come at moments of racial and social stress, and it is revealing that Virginia’s neo-Confederates are refighting the Civil War in 2010. Whitewashing the war is one way for the right — alienated, anxious and angry about the president, health care reform and all manner of threats, mostly imaginary — to express its unease with the Age of Obama, disguising hate as heritage.

If neo-Confederates are interested in history, let’s talk history. Since Lee surrendered at Appomattox, Confederate symbols have tended to be more about white resistance to black advances than about commemoration. In the 1880s and 1890s, after fighting Reconstruction with terrorism and after the Supreme Court struck down the 1875 Civil Rights Act, states began to legalize segregation. For white supremacists, iconography of the “Lost Cause” was central to their fight; Mississippi even grafted the Confederate battle emblem onto its state flag.

But after the Supreme Court allowed segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, Jim Crow was basically secure. There was less need to rally the troops, and Confederate imagery became associated with the most extreme of the extreme: the Ku Klux Klan.

In the aftermath of World War II, however, the rebel flag and other Confederate symbolism resurfaced as the civil rights movement spread. In 1948, supporters of Strom Thurmond’s pro-segregation Dixiecrat ticket waved the battle flag at campaign stops.

Then came the school-integration rulings of the 1950s. Georgia changed its flag to include the battle emblem in 1956, and South Carolina hoisted the colors over its Capitol in 1962 as part of its centennial celebrations of the war.

As the sesquicentennial of Fort Sumter approaches in 2011, the enduring problem for neo-Confederates endures: anyone who seeks an Edenic Southern past in which the war was principally about states’ rights and not slavery is searching in vain, for the Confederacy and slavery are inextricably and forever linked.

That has not, however, stopped Lost Causers who supported Mr. McDonnell’s proclamation from trying to recast the war in more respectable terms. They would like what Lincoln called our “fiery trial” to be seen in a political, not a moral, light. If the slaves are erased from the picture, then what took place between Sumter and Appomattox is not about the fate of human chattel, or a battle between good and evil. It is, instead, more of an ancestral skirmish in the Reagan revolution, a contest between big and small government.

We cannot allow the story of the emancipation of a people and the expiation of America’s original sin to become fodder for conservative politicians playing to their right-wing base. That, to say the very least, is a jump backward we do not need.
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Let's discuss this loopy idea. Let me address his, quite frankly, stupid next-to-last paragraph first. In this paragraph he acts as if the war was originally about the fate of the slaves. It was not, it was not, it was not. My gosh, how historically clueless can this man be? If it was actually about slavery somebody PLEASE explain the bizarre phenomena known as "border States." The most prominent of them is Kentucky, and these had slavery and yet sided with the dang Yankees. Also, how on earth do you explain the generals? Lee and Jackson (CSA) were both anti-slavery. Lee freed all his slaves, and Jackson helped run, illegally, a Sunday school for slaves, in which they taught them how to read. Yet these two sided with the Confederacy. Grant, meanwhile, owned slaves but fought for the freakin' Yanks.

Now let's look at his little talk about Confederate symbols. Let's see... Yes, the KKK does use Confederate imagery. They also use Christian imagery, but are clearly not representative of Christians as a whole. Mississipi putting the CSA flag into its State flag? It's called "defiance," buddy. Ever heard of it? Conquered people tend to not accept the conquerer. Also, he does not demonstrate -at all- that the flag-waving in the 60's had anything to do with racism. It was the War's centennial, for Heaven's sake. This "point" of his needs no further discussion.

Why don't we take a look at the history of Virginia and slavery now? After all, the article was inspired by its governor decreeing Confederate History Month. Let's look at the Old Dominion's past. *Ahem* Before Independence from the British Empire, the State made no less than TWENTY-EIGHT attempts to abolish the slave trade, but all were struck down by the Brits. Afterwards, in the mid-1800's, the Virginia legislature nearly passed a compensated emancipation measure, however Nat Turner's Slave Rebellion pretty much killed that. Earlier that century, Thomas Jefferson, a Virginian and a slave owner, actually created a plan for emancipation that -sadly- never made it to the legislature.

Heck, the Confederacy itself wasn't near as racist/slavery-oriented as this guy makes it out to be. Up to 8% of the Confederate Army at any given time was composed of blacks, including combat troops. I know of several stories about black Confederates, and I'll share one here. During one battle, a shotgun-wielding black Confederate cornered a Yankee cavalryman. The Yank wrote in his diary, "Here I was fighting to free this man [this was after the Emancipation Proclamation] and if I had made one false move on my horse, he would not have hesitated to blow my head off." Doesn't exactly fit the mold, does he? Also, the CS Constitution actually banned the slave trade. Sorta yanks the moral high ground from the North, doesn't it?

This entire post can be summed up in one sentence: This guy doesn't have the vaguest idea what he's talking about.