On the erasure of history
On the erasure of history
Perverting or erasing a people’s history is, in my opinion,
a crime against humanity, and perhaps one of the most common such crimes, often
committed unwittingly by well-meaning individuals who simply repeat what they
were taught. History ought never to be
suppressed, twisted, or erased, but this has been done in some form by nearly
every government that has ever existed. The job of an honest historian is to
use any and all sources available (such as the citations which follow this
essay) from which to distill the most faithful explanation of a time, event, or
figure. The written word is the most common resource, but artifacts are also
useful. From the dawn of civilization, monuments were commissioned to glorify
what a people or its leaders valued, typically rulers, religious figures, and
heroes, and to symbolize the power of the state, edifying its supporters, intimidating
its opponents.
There is presently, and has been for some time, an effort in
the United States to twist or erase a portion of its history for the
edification of some within our population who find it uncomfortable. One means by which they seek to enforce the
lie is with monuments to heroes of the Confederacy, placed not in cemeteries or
battlefields, but courthouses and main streets, placed there for two reasons,
to edify supporters of a myth, and intimidate those who dare challenge it,
placed there in large part by organizations which strove quite successfully to
twist and erase history.
In a large percentage of American schools, students are misled
about one of the most tumultuous and consequential aspects of our nation’s
history, slavery, secession, and the Civil War. The harsh realities of slavery
are downplayed, and its utter entanglement with secession ignored. Many
American students are taught that only a small percentage of Southerners owned
slaves, that secession resulted from disagreements over economic policy and opposition
to an overreach of a federal government dominated by northerners. This
perspective is subjectively understandable. It isn’t comfortable to think that
one’s ancestors fought for slavery, much more attractive to view them as
patriots. But this is a lie. 25% to 49% of the white population in Confederate
states lived in slave-owning households (1), sons from slave-holding families
were over-represented among volunteers for the Confederate army (2), and
leading Confederate politicians specifically cited the protection of slavery as
the primary or sole cause for secession. (3)
It is true that were one to ask the average soldier North or South why
he fought, it is unlikely that he would specifically mention slavery, but protecting
it is unquestionably why Southern politicians commanded Confederate soldiers to
fight. The Lost Cause was only about state’s rights so far as the right to own
slaves was concerned. The Confederate government was, to quote Alexander
Stephens, Vice President of the CSA, “based… 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 normal condition.”(4)
The war was a terrifying sacrifice, particularly for
Southern whites, of whom 258,000 gave their lives. Nearly half of Southern white
men of military age were gone by 1865. These men deserve to be remembered in
cemeteries and the homes of their descendants. Their words and deeds deserve to
be remembered in our histories. To be sure, they were considered by many to be heroes
of their time, but the cause for which
they sacrificed was to preserve the ugliest element of our history, an element which
must never be forgotten, but deserves no glorification. No civic space ought to have a statue memorializing
the Confederacy any more than Russia ought to have statues of Josef Stalin, Japan
of Hideki Tojo, Germany of Hitler, Iraq of Saddam Hussain. These men fought against our government and
killed other Americans in order to preserve the “right” to own other Americans.
This purpose is clothed in with words such as “limited government,” “rights,” “sovereignty,”
even “freedom,” but it all comes down to the perceived sovereign right to strip
that freedom from others. As to the Confederacy’s
supposed status as a bastion of small government, the exigencies of the war
prompted the Confederacy to adopt a system of War Socialism in which it nationalized
industries. It also created America’s first welfare system, an income tax, and
permitted the Confederate army to seize supplies from southern farms as needed.(5)
Some 30 years after the war ended, the United Daughters of
the Confederacy was born with the stated purpose to “tell of the glorious fight
against the greatest odds a nation ever faced, that their hallowed memory
should never die.” Some of its efforts were laudable. It provided aid to wounded
veterans and recorded the memories of the men and women who lived through the
conflict.(6) However, while it did not
invent all the historical lies of the Lost Cause, it successfully popularized
the myth. Closely tied with the KKK, it
published at least two pro-KKK books for children(7), and over time funded the
construction of more than 700 statues glorifying the Confederacy. A few of them
even depict “loyal negroes” – one in Arlington Cemetery shows a male slave marching
to war beside his owner as a female slave weeps, holding a white child. Another in Harper’s Ferry, the site of John
Brown’s failed anti-slavery uprising, “honors” Haywood Shepherd, a black man
who was killed by John Brown’s men with a fictitious biography which claims he
fought against abolition, when in fact he was an unfortunate bystander. (8) In
the 1950’s, it organized women to protest against desegregation as part of Senator
Harry Byrd’s (R-VA) “Massive Resistance” campaign. (9) Today, the official statement from the UDC is
that it “totally denounces any individual or group that promotes racial
divisiveness or white supremacy,”(10) yet it cannot pretend that this was true
in the past, and it was in that time when it funded the construction of these
monuments. Finally, the UDC today and throughout its existence has lobbied governments
to adopt public school textbooks which preserve the myth of the “Lost Cause,” a
myth whose adherents will assert hasn’t a thing to do with white supremacy, but
a myth nonetheless, which no honest person can claim to be historically
accurate.
It is my opinion that freedom of speech is absolute. I would
not, for instance, seek to ban “Lost Cause” propaganda, but for the State to use
it in public school textbooks is abhorrent. I would not seek to ban the display
of confederate monuments or battle flags on private property, preserved battlefields,
museums, or cemeteries, but when state and local governments display them on
main streets and civic facilities, those governments are choosing to glorify the
fight to preserve slavery and to perpetuate a lie of happy slaves, kind
masters, and a noble cause for secession.
These statues are not, themselves, history. They are symbols intended to
conceal the truth of our tragic past. Taking them down is not an act of erasing
history. Taking them down is an act of preserving it.
Notes and references
11. As
Mark Twain famously put, there are lies, damn lies, and statistics. The 1860 census lists but a small percentage
of the Southern population as slave-owners. However, only heads of household
were counted as such. When accounting for household size, we can see the
percentage of Southern whites who lived in slave-holding households. Specific figures in the link:
22. See the following excerpt from historian Joseph Glathaar’s “General
Lee’s Army”
“Even more revealing was their attachment to slavery. Among
the enlistees in 1861, slightly more than one in ten owned slaves personally.
This compared favorably to the Confederacy as a whole, in which one in every
twenty white persons owned slaves. Yet more than one in every four volunteers
that first year lived with parents who were slaveholders. Combining those
soldiers who owned slaves with those soldiers who lived with slaveholding
family members, the proportion rose to 36 percent. That contrasted starkly with
the 24.9 percent, or one in every four households, that owned slaves in the
South, based on the 1860 census. Thus, volunteers in 1861 were 42 percent more
likely to own slaves themselves or to live with family members who owned slaves
than the general population.
“The attachment to slavery, though, was even more powerful.
One in every ten volunteers in 1861 did not own slaves themselves but lived in
households headed by non family members who did. This figure, combined with the
36 percent who owned or whose family members owned slaves, indicated that
almost one of every two 1861 recruits lived with slaveholders. Nor did the
direct exposure stop there. Untold numbers of enlistees rented land from, sold
crops to, or worked for slaveholders. In the final tabulation, the vast
majority of the volunteers of 1861 had a direct connection to slavery. For
slaveholder and non-slaveholder alike, slavery lay at the heart of the
Confederate nation. The fact that their paper notes frequently depicted scenes
of slaves demonstrated the institution's central role and symbolic value to the
Confederacy.
“More than half the officers in 1861 owned slaves, and none
of them lived with family members who were slaveholders. Their substantial
median combined wealth ($5,600) and average combined wealth ($8,979) mirrored
that high proportion of slave ownership. By comparison, only one in twelve
enlisted men owned slaves, but when those who lived with family slave owners
were included, the ratio exceeded one in three. That was 40 percent above the
tally for all households in the Old South. With the inclusion of those who
resided in nonfamily slaveholding households, the direct exposure to bondage
among enlisted personnel was four of every nine. Enlisted men owned less
wealth, with combined levels of $1,125 for the median and $7,079 for the
average, but those numbers indicated a fairly comfortable standard of living.
Proportionately, far more officers were likely to be professionals in civil
life, and their age difference, about four years older than enlisted men,
reflected their greater accumulated wealth.”
33. Not all governments of the seceding states produced verbose
declarations of secession. Virginia, for
instance, issued two short paragraphs with no statement of explanation or
defense. However, many Southern state
governments felt inspired to make clear the reasons for their departure from
the union.
Mississippi got straight to the point:
“Our
position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the
greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which
constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the
earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical
regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear
exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the
world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization.”
South
Carolina’s declaration of secession begins with a lengthy explanation of the
formation of the constitution and its purpose to, among other things, protect
personal property, and then states:
“We
affirm that these ends for which this Government was instituted have been
defeated, and the Government itself has been made destructive of them by the
action of the non-slaveholding States. Those States have assume the right of
deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; [that being slavery]
and have denied the rights of property [slaves] established in fifteen of the
States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the
institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of
societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the
property [help slaves escape] of the citizens of other States. They have
encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those
who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile
insurrection.
Georgia’s
declaration of secession begins:
“The
people of Georgia having dissolved their political connection with the
Government of the United States of America, present to their confederates and
the world the causes which have led to the separation. For the last ten years
we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against [Northern] States
with reference to the subject of African slavery.” It continues on to cite the
failure of Northern states to return escaped slaves, and cite examples of their
opposition to slavery.
Texas’s
declaration of secession cites its previous status as an independent nation
which was then
“received
as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as
negro slavery… which her people intended should exist in all future time. …But
what has been the course of the government of the United States, and of the
people and authorities of the non-slave-holding States since our connection
with them?
“The
controlling majority of the Federal Government, under various pretences and
disguises, has so administered the same as to exclude the citizens of the
Southern States, unless under odious and unconstitutional restrictions, from
all the immense territory owned in common by all the States on the Pacific
Ocean, for the avowed purpose of acquiring sufficient power in the common
government to use it as a means of destroying the institutions of Texas and her
sister slaveholding States.”
This
paragraph refers to the “Free Soil” doctrine of Lincoln and the Republican
party, being an opposition to any new slave state entering the union as the
nation expanded.
44. Alexander Stephen’s “Cornerstone Speech” was a lengthy
explanation of the workings of the new Confederate government and how it
differed from the U.S. Constitution. In the following excerpt, Stephens
explains his disagreement with the principles in America’s Declaration of Independence.
“The prevailing ideas entertained by [Jefferson] and most of
the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution,
were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of
nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It
was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the
men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the
institution would be evanescent and pass away.”
He then
continues to explain:
“Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite
idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, 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 normal condition. This, our new government, is
the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical,
philosophical, and moral truth.”
55. War Socialism and Confederate Defeat, Chris
Calton 2017
66. Monuments to the Lost Cause, Cynthia Mills &
Pamela Simpson 2003
and
99. Mothers of Massive Resistance, Elizabeth McRae
2018
110. United Daughters of the Confederacy website
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