Dear Conservative Friend (Confederate History)

Dear Conservative Friend,

So I hear that the governor of Virginia has declared April to be “Confederate History Month.”  In this, Virginia joins several other states in an official celebration of Southern heritage peculiarly centered on the most inhospitable and least charming half-decade of that region’s complex history.  Virginia’s declaration was notable for its omission of any mention of slavery.  Pundits on both sides of the cultural divide were predictably incensed.  You can imagine.

I’m sure you’ve been shaking your head at knee-jerk Yankee liberals who find any praise of the Confederacy to be anathema.  As a matter of fact, I’m right there with you.  There’s a lot to respect in the drama of the Civil War, and on both sides—obviously, or people wouldn’t be so drawn to it.  No one who reads much about the period can come away without admiring aspects of the Southern effort during those darkest days of American history.

It may be hard for some conservatives to believe this, but even liberals value things like honor, valor, and fortitude.  Those are the first qualities of the first thing we think of when think of the Confederacy, which is the Confederate Army.  In these virtues it was without peer.  There has never been a military force—perhaps never a large organization of any kind—so ably led and so willing to endure so much.  We will argue about the reasons why this army was in the field, but there is no getting around the fact that (mutatis mutandis) it is surely the most committed and most skilled fighting force the world has ever seen.

And my northern friends are too quick to reject the Confederate military out of hand as a weapon devoted to the defense of slavery.   It’s pretty well-established that the average Southern soldier seldom had slavery on his mind, and certainly not as his primary motive for fighting.  Southern citizens cast their lot with secession and found their home states invaded by what was then (spiritually but also legally, from their POV) a foreign foe.  The Southern soldier fought for home and family, motivated mainly by a desire to turn back the invader and to be, as Jeff Davis famously put it, Left Alone.

But the mistake too many people make is to take the skill and honor shown on the battlefield by Lee and Jackson and the rest as a microcosm of the Confederacy itself.  It’s easy to do; Shelby Foote did it for three thousand magnificent pages.  Focusing on dramatic battles and colorful leaders takes us away from precisely the issue that is at the heart of the whole secession crisis, and the one that the Virginia declaration so stupidly overlooked.  Jeff Davis wanted to be left alone, but he and his fellow secessionists were never so self-deluding to pretend that the crisis at hand was anything but centered around slavery.

Indeed, they welcomed the focus.  Consider the words of the Confederacy’s first Vice President, Alexander Stephens, in his “Cornerstone Speech” on March 21, 1861, when it was all getting started:

“The prevailing ideas entertained by [Thomas 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. This idea, though not incorporated in the constitution, was the prevailing idea at that time. …

“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.”

Stephens goes on for some 5,000 words, but the gist is here:  the Confederacy was to be a new nation designed, from the ground up, to preserve the supremacy of white men and sidestep America’s creeping tendency towards equality.  There are still those today who try to argue that Southern secession was about abstract constitutional principles, States’ Rights and whatnot.  Stephens, Davis, and the rest of them never made that mistake.

The only Right that mattered enough to force some States’ secession was the right to maintain slavery.  This had been the issue for decades—there had been near-secession crises before, always about the extension of slavery to new territories or the right of northern states to restrict Southern travelers’ human property.  The break of 1861 came in direct response to the election of Abraham Lincoln, who was widely regarded as an abolitionist candidate.  Secession was all but accomplished even before he took office, all in anticipation of the actions it was feared he would take to limit the spread and maintenance of slavery.  Southerners saw in the new President a bogeyman of their own greatest anxiety, the loss of a way of life based on the subjugation of one part of mankind by another.

And this is the other place where apologists for the Confederacy get it grandly wrong:  the idea that secession was a legitimately democratic choice made by some Americans in pursuit of their own vision of liberty.  I’ve several times been in discussions where apologists asserted that that vast majority of Southerners supported secession, and that therefore it should have been allowed to pass peacefully.  “Vast majority” is the misnomer here, for close to half (some 47 or 48%) of all human beings living in the secession states were themselves held in slavery.  The choice for secession was made by a much smaller number of people—albeit the ones with political power.  Indeed, not even all white Southerners supported secession, and a great deal of effort was made to sell poorer, non-aristocratic Southerners on the big break as the remedy for the coming changes that would force them to treat blacks as their human equals.

And then, the war.  In some ways the war saved the Southern cause by giving it a narrative of heroism nicely removed from the narrative of human bondage that stood behind it all.  As I said, it’s still possible to admire the courage and the honor shown in that struggle they understood by different lights, and even to understand that the people involved understood it by different lights.  What is not possible is to believe that they were actually right. 

April 12 is the anniversary of Fort Sumter, with its sesquicentennial next year.  In the present political climate, it possible to worry that someone—some new Timothy McVeigh or John Wilkes Booth, some neo-Confederate partisan—is going to take the occasion for something very stupid.  I certainly hope not.  Among other offenses, it would be a crime against the decency of men 150 years ago who, while wrong, at least did not squander the wisdom of hindsight.

I don’t hate the South.  I love it.  I'm a Southerner with long roots; my ancestors to a man wore gray.  I’ve read my Foote and my D.S. Freeman, and most of the rest.  I know the South, and I know the War better than most Southerners.  I love the South, and I know the South was wrong.

And it doesn’t matter that they believed they were right.  Who doesn’t, after all?  We can admire their tenacity and their aplomb, admire their beards even, but we cannot look back longingly and take their valor to excuse the moral stain and physical horrors of slavery.  They did believe they were right.  They were brave and honorable.  Salute them, but don’t forget that we, for all our modern decadence, do know better.  No amount of nostalgia can erase the fact of our national sin, and it doesn’t matter that it took a bloody war to win this knowledge.  Even had it come with something worse—a harsher war, a longer Reconstruction—we would be fools to pretend to honor the past by willfully forgetting its crimes.