HERITAGE
Now that the presidential campaign is speeding along with all
the joyful noise and unpredictability of a woodchipper, it seems
unlikely we will encounter any more surprises as unsettling as
the great Confederate flag controversy. The crux of the argument,
of course, concerns whether the flag should continue to fly over
the South Carolina capital as a testament to the courage of Confederate
soldiers during the Civil War, and Southern "heritage"—or
whether it should be removed, as the symbol of a racist and treasonable
insurrection.
The
fight seemed to all but poleaxe the two leading Republican contenders—in
the way that only irresolvable local issues can flummox national
politicians. Governor George W. Bush resolutely, steadfastly refused
to express an opinion on the subject, invoking the principle of
states' rights (a principle that seems to fade away with the morning
dew when a state starts making noises about, say, legalizing marijuana,
or gay marriage.) Meanwhile, the flag issue all but derailed Senator
John McCain's straight-talk express, leaving the former war hero
to pronounce himself firmly on both sides.
As
is so often happens when real leadership is absent, the flag controversy
has continued to fester. It has, at least, had the happy side
effect of recreating the old civil rights-era coalition of African-Americans
and white businessmen—one of modern America's more effective
agents for change. At the same time, it has only led the flag's
defenders to dig in their heels—and to resort to some shameful
distortions of our history.
One
of the worst offenders has been a publication edited by a Senator
McCain advisers, Richard Quinn. The journal in question is the
Southern Partisan Quarterly Review which—in between
defending slavery, vilifying Abraham Lincoln and the Rev. Martin
Luther King, Jr., and bashing gays—has picked up the old
saw that the entire Civil War was not fought over slavery but
over states' rights, and the preservation of the "Southern way
of life."
There
is in itself a long heritage of writers and scholars defending
"traditional" Southern life—not all of it dishonorable. And
the reasons over why the Civil War came to pass will probably
be debated for as long as our nation endures. Just a few years
ago, an animated, Indian-American shopkeeper on "The Simpsons"
was spouting the old Marxist line that the war was fought primarily
for economic reasons. Yet I would submit that the real reasons
behind the war lie as much in what W.J. Cash called the mind of
the South, as in anything to do with economics or states' rights.
That is to say, the Civil War was fought over slavery. And it
was not fought over some abstract defense of Southern rights,
so much as it was over the South's frustration that it could not
convince the rest of the United States to acquiesce in its "peculiar
institution"—an institution that it always suspected in its
own heart was at least untenable, if not immoral.
The
proof of this lies in the very denial, defensiveness, and projection
now permeating the "heritage" argument—just as it invariably
seeped into all arguments in defense of slavery, and of the Jim
Crow system that replaced it. It was more than coincidence, for
instance, that the stars and bars first began to fly above Southern
capitols in the mid-1960s. The supposed reason was the centennial
commemoration of the Civil War—but the real point was to
send a message to the growing civil rights movement.
Any
objective reading of the mountains of speeches, letters, diaries,
newspaper articles and editorials written by the South's leaders
prior to the Civil War reveals the same, ferocious denial. As
the secession crisis neared its climax, they turned out more and
more pamphlets defending slavery as an institution that benefited
blacks and whites alike; one crucial to the South's "higher" civilization,
and endorsed by the Bible, the Constitution, and all science and
nature.
Gone
was the old attitude of Washington, Jefferson, and other Founding
Fathers from the region that slavery was an unfortunate legacy,
an embarrassing holdover from colonial days that should be allowed
to die a natural death. Instead, many of the South's firebrands
even clamored for the resumption of the Atlantic slave trade—as
a means of driving down the cost of human flesh, and giving every
Southern white man a chance to obtain the plantation owner's way
of life.
Such
is the implacable logic of injustice. The more disagreeable slavery
became to white Americans, the more harsh and odious became the
methods necessary to preserve it.
By
the time of the Civil War, whites expressing abolitionist sentiments
in the South were routinely punished with floggings and jail terms.
Meanwhile, in the North, many whites who cared little about slavery
itself were alarmed by the gangs of armed bounty hunters that
the Fugitive Slave Act allowed to rampage at will through their
towns and cities, abducting both runaway slaves and legally freed
blacks. They were offended when pro-slave majorities in Congress
installed a "gag order" against even debating the issue of slavery
in the District of Columbia—or when a South Carolina congressman
beat a Massachusetts senator unconscious on the floor of the Senate.
They wondered what had happened to their own local sovereignty
when the Supreme Court made it illegal to ban slavery in federal
territories; or when Missouri "border ruffians" poured into Kansas
in 1854, launching a reign of terror and installing a state constitution
that made simply criticizing slavery a crime.
And
yet, the legal right of Southerners to own slaves was never seriously
threatened before the Civil War. Even after the Republican victory
in the 1860 elections, abolitionists remained a decided minority
in the North. Lincoln made it clear again and again, in the months
between his election and his inauguration, that his first priority
was to preserve the Union. He made his famous insistence—"If
I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it;
if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and
if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I
would also do that."—in August of 1862, after the Civil War
had already been raging for nearly a year-and-a-half.
Southerners did fear Northern abolitionist conspiracies—and
it seemed as if their worst nightmares had come true when it was
learned that John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry in 1859 was backed
by a group of prominent Bostonians known as "the Secret Six."
Yet the collective shiver that ran through Dixie in the wake of
Brown's raid was more the product of deliberate political fear-mongering
than any objective concern. Brown's raid, after all, was ineffectual,
was condemned in much of the North, and was quickly suppressed
by federal troops.
In
fact, many of the South's leaders—particularly those in the
congressional delegation and state government of South Carolina—were
badly disappointed when Brown's foray into Harper's Ferry did
not immediately lead to secession. By December of 1859 they were
actively weaving their own plot to sunder the Union. Their conspiracy
centered around a book: The Impending Crisis of the South:
How to Meet It, by one Hinton Rowan Helper. Helper was, ironically,
both a North Carolinian and a ferocious racist, whose argument
against slavery was based on the claim that it hurt the South's
small white farmers. Helper's book was vociferously denounced
throughout the South—and endorsed by 68 congressmen from
the fledgling Republican party, including Ohio's John Sherman.
Sherman
would soon claim that he had endorsed the book without actually
knowing what it said. This may well have been true. Throughout
his long and successful career in the House and Senate, Sherman
seems to have often been gloriously unaware of what was done in
his name, including such major pieces of legislation as the Sherman
Anti-Trust Act and the Sherman Silver Act. Or he may have simply
been trying to withdraw his endorsement because, thanks to a Democratic
party split, he had a chance to be elected Speaker of the House.
The
South's congressional delegations made it plain that they would
try to block the ascension of any man who had endorsed The
Impending Crisis. William Porcher Miles, a pro-secession congressman
from Charleston, announced that South Carolina's legislature should
go one further, and pass legislation that would force its representatives
to resign from the House, should Sherman be elected Speaker. Yet
as Steven A. Channing traces in his prize-winning Crisis of
Fear, Secession in South Carolina, Miles was playing an even
deeper game. Correspondence between the congressman and South
Carolina's governor, William Gist, discloses that Miles and others
considered seizing control of the House chamber if Sherman were
chosen, and "ejecting the speaker elect by force."
Governor
Gist replied that he preferred "a bloodless revolution," or at
least one that "should begin in sudden heat & with good provocation
rather than a deliberate determination to perform an act of violence
which might prejudice us in the eyes of the world."
These
qualms aside, Gist made it clear that he would support whatever
Miles chose to do: "If however, you upon consideration decide
to make the issue of fire in Washington, write or telegraph me,
& I will have a Regiment in or near Washington in the shortest
possible time."
Here
is an opportunity for the alternative historians—a Civil
War that begins with a coup on the floor of the House, backed
by a regiment of South Carolina militia rushed to the capital.
As it happened, the plot fizzled when Sherman failed to win election.
Instead, South Carolina's leading politicians set themselves to
wrecking the Democratic party—something they succeeded in
doing the following year at its national convention, conveniently
held in Charleston. The result was the election of Lincoln, secession,
and the most terrible war in America's history—a war that
would end with John Sherman's brother, William Tecumseh, burning
his way through South Carolina.
So
much for claims of outraged states' rights. Yet the question remains:
Why were so many leading Southerners so eager to wreck the Union
and risk a war that was always at best a desperate gamble? Some
did believe that slavery would eventually be snuffed out if the
North's population and wealth continued to outstrip the South's.
Others were honestly repelled—just as the Southern "agrarians"
of the 1930s would be—by what they saw as the vulgarity and
the hypocritical wage-slavery of Northern, industrial culture.
Yet
the awful effects of a slave society must have been obvious to
any intelligent Southerner who chose to see. As in any cruel and
authoritarian system, slavery was nearly as degrading to the oppressors
as it was to the oppressed. To get some idea of just how bizarre
a society slavery had created, one need only read Mary Chesnut's
revulsion at living on her father-in-law's South Carolina plantation—surrounded
by slaves who were her husband's half-brothers and -sisters.
Even
before the Civil War the South was the poorest section of the
country, riven by violence and disease. Public institutions of
all sorts, including schools, were almost nonexistent. There was
little industrialization—something that would make a telling
difference in the war. The effect of slavery on the land itself
was readily apparent, as the cotton economy, supported by cheap
labor, encouraged the wasteful exploitation of the soil.
The
South's leaders could not all have failed to see what slavery
was doing to all their people. They simply could not see how to
do without it. They thought, instead, that they could switch flags
to compensate for their lack of vision—and ended up leading
hundreds of thousands of brave young men to their deaths.
Is
this flag, then, an appropriate memorial to the South's heritage?
A real leader might make the argument that the South's Civil War
dead are already well-commemorated by the white, stone monuments
in every Southern town, or by the thousands of re-enactors who
trace their every step and battle.
A
real leader might argue that if South Carolina is really not satisfied
with the Stars and Stripes or with its own, beautiful, blue palmetto
flag, so redolent of the Revolution, that it should perhaps design
a new flag. A flag that would honor the rest—and the proudest—part
of the South's heritage. That is to say, a flag that would honor
all of those Southerners, black and white, who took part in another
war, a different kind of war. One with blessedly fewer casualties
but one that nonetheless brought a greater triumph, the rarest
kind of triumph, which is to say a victory over the crimes and
hatreds of the past. A flag that need be only the simplest of
ensigns, carrying upon it and thereby affirming the words of the
Rev. King from the depths of Birmingham jail: "One day the South
will recognize its real heroes…One day the South will know
that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch
counters they were in reality standing up for the best in the
American dream and the most sacred values in our Judeo-Christian
heritage, and thus carrying our whole nation back to great wells
of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in the
formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence."
©
2000 Copyright Forbes Inc.
