The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. It could scarcely be otherwise, since it is to history that we owe our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations.
- James Baldwin, "Unnameable Objects, Unspeakable Crimes"
Two days had passed since the Charlottesville uprising, and President Trump had something to say.
The president strode to a podium in the lobby of Trump Tower and faced a press corps that he has cast as the enemy of his nascent administration. Immediately, Trump was peppered with questions about his response to the white supremacist rally in Virginia, which culminated with a car attack that claimed the life of Heather Heyer and injured 19 of her fellow counter-demonstrators.
In the course of justifying his deliberate response to the tragedy, the president defended the peaceful nature of the torch-wielding neo-Confederates who gathered in Charlottesville to protest the planned removal of a Robert E. Lee statue from a public park. The land had once borne the name of the famous general who commanded the mighty Army of Northern Virginia, but has since been rechristened Emancipation Park.
"There were people protesting very quietly the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee. I'm sure in that group there were some bad ones," Trump observed.
It was unclear where in the "master race" morass the peaceniks positioned themselves. Perhaps they were drowned out by the mob of people alternately screaming, "Blood and soil!" and "Jews will not replace us!" Or maybe they were stationed in the rear of the Tiki Torch Brigade, behind the Confederate and Nazi flag bearers.
After applying a fresh coat of whitewash on the aims of the protesters, the lecturer-in-chief proceeded to offer the nation a history lesson.
"George Washington was a slave owner," Trump declared. "So will George Washington now lose his status? Are we going to take down statues to George Washington?"
"You're changing history," the president cautioned to those who dare to deconstruct monuments to the Confederacy. "You're changing culture."
The president's words were a salve to the aspiring Nazis, cosplaying militiamen, and self-appointed guardians of white culture who secured what they sought in Charlottesville: affirmation and validation. Trump's comments also served as the latest salvo in a struggle that has lasted more than 150 years: the war for the legacy of the Civil War.
Hostilities commenced when the ink dried on the terms of surrender at Appomattox Court House. The defeated South experienced a radical reconfiguation of its social order. Previously enslaved blacks were now empowered; they were afforded access to the ballot box and protected by the Union Army.
For a brief period, black politicians represented the South in government. Hiram Revels of Mississippi became the first African American to be seated in the US Senate. Black men won office in local and state elections as well, buoyed in part by a prohibition that disenfranchised former members of the Confederate Army and government.
But in the garden of Reconstruction, the vile weed of racism remained rooted in the soil. The pressures of physical resistance in the South, fatigue in the North over the continued military occupation of the repatriated southern states, political scandals emanating from the White House, and an economic recession combined to buckle the resolve of President Grant. In the 1870s, Reconstruction gave way to Redemption. The white power structure reasserted itself. And the South rose again.
In Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War, author Nicholas Lemann articulates the philosophical position of the disciples of Redemption:
"Whites there had in mind instead a social compact under which Negroes would not formally be slaves anymore, but under which they would be unable to vote, hold office, or have legal rights- in which they would be completely powerless, subject to the will of whites without any protection or recourse, even when that will was expressed in individual violence and sexual violation." (28)The socioeconomic and political progress of Reconstruction were erased and replaced with a social structure that bore a striking resemblance to the antebellum order.
Lynchings became commonplace, a penalty designed to maintain the racial hierarchy. These extrajudicial killings routinely doubled as social events. White spectators gathered to watch a violator of the race codes pay his or her penance: death by hanging.
Gradually, the number of lynchings decreased as segregation was codified under what would be called Jim Crow laws. In Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the Supreme Court recognized the legality of these legislative acts.
In a society that demanded black folks "know their place," socioeconomic advancement proved a dangerous and delicate dance. Financial success meant potentially challenging the color line, and thus endangering oneself. Failure was expected, perhaps even demanded as validation of the wisdom of segregation.
The key to survival in the South was instilled at a young age. Richard Wright shared the lesson his mother imparted to him in "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow:"
"She would smack my rump with the stave and, while the skin was still smarting, impart to me gems of Jim Crow wisdom. I was never to throw cinders anymore. I was never to fight any more wars. I was never, never, under any circumstances to fight white folks again."In Black Like Me, author John Howard Griffin interviewed an elderly gentleman who cut to the crux of the dilemma. "They put us low," he lamented, "and then blame us for being down there and say that since we are low, we can't deserve our rights," (40).
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As the white redeemers secured dominion over the physical space of the South, they opened a second front in the pages of our history books. It was not enough to re-establish the societal hegemony of the white race in the present. They had to win the war for the past, too.
Southern sympathizers took to the task in earnest. The war, they argued, hadn't been waged to perpetuate slavery. The Confederate states were simply protecting their autonomy from an overbearing federal government. They exercised their democratic right to secede from the Union, and were invaded as a result. In time, the Civil War would be rebranded "The War Between the States," or the "War of Northern Aggression."
This grand reconception of the origin of the Civil War has come to be known as the Lost Cause. Like all myths, it defies the primary historical evidence that places slavery as the primary driver of the South's secession. The constitution of the Confederate state of Alabama was nearly a carbon copy of the US Constitution, with the exception of a special section dealing with slavery; the first statute in this section asserts: "No slave in this State shall be emancipated by any act done to take effect in this State, or any other country."
Mississippi's Declaration of Secession began with the following pronouncement:
"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 pointed to the Northern states' abdication of their constitutional responsibility to return runaway slaves to their Southern masters as a reason to withdraw from the Union.
Yet, the lies that obscured the truth about the war paled in comparison to the intellectual gymnastics Lost Causers undertook to explain the behavior of slaves during the conflict. In this effort, the redeemers had to negotiate a challenging paradox: how to paint the behavior of Civil War-era slaves in a positive light while simultaneously justifying the barbaric treatment of emancipated black citizens in the Jim Crow era.
In The Negro: The Southerner's Problem, Thomas Nelson Page endeavored to make a case. He spoke glowingly of the slaves who were left to tend to the plantations of their masters. "No race ever behaved better than the Negroes during the war," Page crowed. "Many a master going off to the war intrusted his wife and children to the care of his servants with as much confidence as if they had been of his own blood," (21-22).
In Page's telling, the Union's triumph created a breakdown in the social order. Black men in particular, once loosed from the shackles of slavery, constituted an existential threat to the white race. Page expounds on this point at length:
"Then came the period and process of Reconstruction, with its teachings. Among these was the teaching that the Negro was the equal of the white, that the white was his enemy, and that he must assert his equality. The growth of the idea was a gradual one in the Negro's mind. This was followed by a number of cases where members of the Negro militia ravished white women; in some instances in the presence of their families," (95).The portrait of white men as the saviors of their race and protectors of their women is a familiar one to those of us who have endured a screening of The Birth of a Nation. Fears of miscegenation had existed since colonial times. The thought of race-mixing infuriated those who viewed whiteness as a formative part of the American identity. Of course, these anxieties only applied to sexual relationships between white women and black men.
Page's vision of the relationship between blacks and whites in the South was surgically constructed to benefit the institution of slavery and the white men who profited from it. The only way to "tame" the black male was to treat him like an animal. Once cowed, he would behave. However, emancipation had reverted him to his original, uncivilized state- a brute who was unable to control his sexual impulses.
It did not matter that Page's low opinion of emancipated black men served as the most convincing indictment of his absurd apologia. If black men were unable to control themselves around white women, why would a master have entrusted his plantation and his family to his slaves? If the institution of slavery had the salutary effects Page claimed, why did they immediately disappear once the war had ended and the practice was banned?
Page's argument was not meant to convince posterity; it was crafted to justify white supremacy. It does seem fitting, though, that such an irrational social structure would rest on an intellectual foundation made of sand.
The selective memory extended to remembrances of the war. In an op-ed that was published in the New York Times, historian David Blight recounted the ways in which Lost Cause revisionism infected Civil War memorials. "The Southern dead were honored as the true 'patriots,' defenders of their homeland, sovereign rights, a natural racial order and a 'cause' that had been overwhelmed by 'numbers and resources' but never defeated on battlefields," Blight wrote in "Forgetting Why We Remember."
To commemorate their victory in the struggle to define the Civil War, the redeemers commissioned statues and icons of their Confederate heroes. It should come as no surprise that "largely, Confederate monuments were built during two key periods of American history: the beginnings of Jim Crow in the 1920s and the civil rights movement in the early 1950s and 1960s," as Caroline Talleman reported in an article for Town and Country Magazine.
Rebel soldiers and political leaders were shrouded in the fog of romantic nostalgia. The pervasive suffering of the Confederate army, exacerbated by incompetent generalship and a lack of military discipline, was forgotten. Robert E. Lee, a vicious slave owner who took up arms against the Union of his own volition, was recast as a reluctant warrior who abhorred slavery. He was also regaled as a military genius of the first order. The graveyards of Gettysburg tell a different story.
But these statues did not simply exist to paint a rosy picture of an ugly period in our nation's history. They were prominently placed as visual reminders of the failure of Reconstruction and the re-establishment of the racial hierarchy that relegated black citizens to second-class status. Despite the outcome of the Civil War, black folks in the South lived as a defeated and conquered people.
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This brief tour through the historical wreckage of the Civil War exposes the tragic ignorance of President Trump and those who follow down the same logical path he advanced in his press conference. For a group of people who seem intent on wallowing in a state of constant grievance, the president and his followers have exhibited a stunning incapacity for empathy during this ongoing travesty.
This is not an issue of sparing people's hurt feelings. The battle to rid the public square of Confederate monuments is not an effort to erase history, but to reclaim the past. These statues do not further our understanding of the Civil War. They pervert it. And the aggrieved white men who rallied at the Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville are not fervent defenders of history. They view the world Lee sought to preserve not as a tragic mistake, but as a prototype for the white ethno-state they yearn to create.
It is past time that we deconstruct Lost Cause mythology and cut through the cloud it has created in our collective memory. Let's aggressively confront our past rather than passively celebrate it. And let's appreciate the Confederacy as it was, not as Southern sympathizers and architects of Jim Crow imagined it to be.
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