[NOTE: IT IS INDICATIVE OF A DEEP AND FRIGHTENING FAILURE IN OUR CULTURE THAT THIS SHOULD HAVE TO BE EXPLAINED.]
It should
be transparent to any educated person that the revisionist fan of the Confederacy is on par
with the Holocaust denier. But from my experience as a college professor,
I have learned that we are not educating people very well, or maybe some people don't want to be educated. I don't know, but here
goes.
The official declaration of causes of secession for Georgia, Mississippi, Texas, and South Carolina are on line here.
[Note that the "ordinances of dissolution" by the other states are very
short and give no explicit reason for secession; Arkansas, Virginia,
North Carolina, and Tennessee all seceded after Lincoln called
for troops in reaction to the original secessions, and were conceived
by their authors to be taking sides in a war already about slavery for
the same reasons given by the original seceding states.] Please open
the link above and then hit "control f" and then type "slavery" in the
window, and read what
the authors of the catastrophe thought. You can also read the
transcript of some of the secession debate in the South Carolina
legislature
archived here.
After all the verbiage about rights, you will see that the main reason
(explicitly stated as such) was the southerners' fear of being part of
a country where non-slave states were in the majority (due to the entry
of new states into the Union). In this context, the secessionists
warned that states had to secede before slavery was made illegal by the United States.
The background of all of this was Bleeding Kansas (good book here, wikipedia article here),
the incredibly vicious civil war in Kansas over whether slavery would
be legal in the new state. The ultimate 2 to 1 electoral defeat of the
pro-slavery "border ruffians," was the trigger to secession of the
southern states
Prior to secession a text of New Orleans preacher Benjamin Morgan
Palmer's vile, yet incredibly influential, "Thanksgiving Day Sermon"
(archived here)
was widely distributed throughout the slave states. In it, he argued
that the threat to slavery mandated secession. After going on about how much Jesus
likes slavery this horrible person actually has the evil temerity to argue that the "providential trust" God has placed in South was,
"to conserve and perpetuate the institution of slavery as now existing." Sadly, as history was to show, the citizens of the slave owning states were all too ready to listen to Palmer's satanic sophistry.
Please also consider the Confederacy's Vice President Alexander Stephens infamous, "cornerstone" speech (archived here) which stated that the new confederacy "rest[ed] 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." In
reference to this "great truth," he went on to say, "This, our new
government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this
great physical, philosophical, and moral truth." Has Lady Philosophy's name ever been invoked with more vanity and evil?
Some
apologists for the Confederacy at this point in the argument change the
subject, saying that even if the elites' reasons for seceding were
primarily and
almost exclusively focused on slavery, the common soldiers' were not
(most of them did not own slaves), and
moreover that the cause of the common soldier in the Confederacy was
somehow grand and noble. First, it should be noted that this response is somewhat incoherent, unless one can specify what the common soldier's cause was.
Second, the response is antecedently implausible, evincing the same kind of naivety as pre Frankfurt School/Gramscian Marxists who were confident that the working classes would refuse to fight in World War I because the ideology of the war was so much against their interests. Like the common soldier of World War I, all the evidence suggests that the vast majority of non-slaveholding Confederate Soldiers enthusiastically embraced the pro-slavery ideology that caused the civil war.
One might ask how we could possibly identify the governing ideology and relevant views taking as common sense by soldiers of the Confederacy. First, note that such a rhetorical question assumes that the objective study of history is impossible (unsurprisingly, this selective skepticism, that is setting such ridiculously high standards for historical knowledge that disagrees with one's prejudice, is also the trademark argumentative strategy of the Holocaust denier). Second, note that the same historical techniques used to understand the thinking of the average World War I soldier have been used to understand the thinking of the average Confederate Soldier. And it ain't pretty.
Harvard historian Monica Goodling's excellent
book on this issue (you can order it here)
presents the result of her research into letters and diaries of soldiers on both
sides (illiterate soldiers during this period dictated their letters home). The norm she discovered is that the average Union and Confederate soldier overwhelmingly explicitly saw slavery as the primary justification for
fighting. Interestingly, poor Southern whites explicitly viewed their position of state enforced superiority to
black people as what they were fighting for. Goodling shows that morale initially stayed high in Confederate troops, even after the Union started racking up victories. However it dropped precariously when manpower issues forced the Confederacy to try to put slaves (those willing to fight were to be freed for their service) on the front lines at the end of the war. At this point the white Confederate soldiers tended to see the fight as not worth making, since their prerogatives over the slaves were so badly slighted by having to fight alongside them. The hundreds of thousands of
African American Union soldiers by the end of the war did not have this
effect on Union morale, because the abolitionist cause was the cause of the average Union
soldier.
The best thing about Goodling's book is that it does not rely entirely on
after-the-fact memories or writings by officers, but rather rests upon a trove of documents concerning the non-rich people doing the vast majority of the
killing and dying. On the Union side, the soldiers were way ahead of
the northern political establishment in explicitly viewing the fight in
terms of abolition, rather than just preserving our country. Over a
year prior to the Gettysburg Address the common Northern soldier (to his great credit) saw the fight as a fight to end slavery, and
throughout the war common Confederate soldier (to his immense shame)
saw it as defending slavery. Again, while it is true that most of the
Confederate soldiers did not own slaves, the
psychic benefit derived by having a whole race of others treated vastly
worse than themselves was both explicit governing ideology and common sense to the soldiers.
Note that nobody is saying that all the Confederate soldiers were fighting for slavery. Most soldiers in most wars fight for their buddies. But just as most American soldiers early in Vietnam believed that we were there to defend a free people against communist aggression, and most German soldiers early in World War I believed ardently in the reasons given by German elites for their aggression, there is very strong historical evidence that most Confederate soldiers internalized the reasons given by their elites to fight. That these reasons involved defending a society where the poorest white soldier got to feel superior to a whole race of people he interacted with, made it that much easier for the white soldiers to internalize the reasons. To believe otherwise is naive and contradicts Goodling's evidence.
In Minima Moralia Adorno asks himself how many times he heard
casual comments in pre-World War II Germany that implicated genocide.
He agonizes at how many times he did this, said nothing, and continued
to be polite. Those who lie about slavery and the Confederate Flag are
morally equal to Holocaust deniers, and the rest of us have a moral
obligation to treat them as such.
Why
am I incensed because some of my students and ex-students go in for the
canards about the glorious cause of the Confederacy and lies about the
Confederate Battle flag? Here's one of many reasons. The person in the picture to the left of this text is Michael Donald.
He was lynched by the Ku Klux Klan in 1981 in my childhood Alabama. My
high school friend Ellie Dees' father Morris brought a lawsuit against
the Klan on behalf of Donald's mother. For his pains, Dees' office was
bombed and snipers shot at him. Donald's family's life was
ruined, and Mr. Dees has had to have twenty-four hour a day armed
guards because of the violent people that waive that symbol of slavery
and apartheid.
As a child, I watched one of the last large scale Klan marches in Montgomery, Alabama. The ubiquity of the Confederate Battle Flag among these racist terrorists told me all I needed to know about it. Nothing I have learned since (e.g. that its modern mass resurgence as a symbol began when George Wallace flew it from the roof of the Alabama statehouse as a symbol (that everyone got) against desegregation on the day Bobby Kennedy visited; that pro-segregation politicians in the south in the 1950's signalled this by flying the flag, etc.) contradicts what I learned that horrible day. None of the historical evidence presented here contradicts what I learned on that day. The flag symbolizes slavery and apartheid. It symbolizes a society that institutionalized rape by the elite. It symbolizes the mass murder, terrorism, and torture necessary for maintaining slavery and then apartheid. It symbolizes the cause of Michael Donald's murder.
In this regard, the moral obtuseness of the student waivers of that flag is astounding and despicable. What kind of person would think that the psychological trauma at giving up a not-so-noble myth
about the supremacy of his heritage is any way comparable with the pain
and destruction (still) caused by
slavery and Jim Crow?.
To have truth and reconciliation after hundreds of years of slavery and a hundred years of Apartheid you need truth.
Until we have truth, the American South (my home and the home of my
people) will continue to be last in every meaningful measure of
people's health. Until elites decide they would rather live as equals
in a better society than be on top of a bad one, we will continue to be
last in everything. Until those of us who are not elites decide we
will no longer get a psychic charge from feeling superior to those
lower down than us, we will continue to be last. Those of us moving
our state past this dysfunction (black, white, latino, asian, rich,
poor, everybody of good will) can only do this if we follow Adorno and
stand up for truth, even when it requires rudeness, even when we think
it may not matter. It does matter.
