The following message was presented to about 200 attendees of the Confederate Memorial Day Service at Springwood Cemetery in Greenville, South Carolina, Sunday, May 1, 2011.
The Greenville camp of the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) and the chapters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy held Confederate Memorial day on Sunday, May 1. The official date is May 10 in commemoration of May 10, 1863, the day Stonewall Jackson died, but we pick a convenient Sunday near the 10th. Just a few days prior to that Sunday some SCV members were alarmed by things they read in The Greenville News.
One concern was a County Council person who stated that we just ought to forget about the “Civil War.” Another was Jesse Jackson’s claim when he spoke to Southside High School April 11, one day before the sesquicentennial celebration of the firing on Fort Sumter, that a third of Southerners owned slaves. Where did he get such a large figure?
He probably got it from sources like James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom (1988) in the Oxford History of the United States series, considered by many to be the definitive single volume on the “Civil War.” With no documentation and no corroboration at all McPherson claims that a third of whites in the South owned slaves (he actually states two thirds were non-slaveholding). The statistic bothered me when I first read it in 1988 since I had always seen a lesser figure.
A few years later (1991) I heard J. Steven Wilkins of the Thomas O’Benton SCV Camp in Monroe, Louisiana, give a lecture titled, “Slavery in the South.” He stated that according to the figures published by the government in the 1860 Census, of the “5.3 million whites in the South, only about 300,000 were slaveholders.” Doing the math yields 5.7% —a figure substantially less than 6%.
Wilkins has debated the cause of the War publically and written a volume on Lee, Call of Duty: The Sterling Nobility of Robert E. Lee, and one on Jackson, All Things for Good: The Steadfast Fidelity of Stonewall Jackson. At least in this case his scholarship is obviously more trustworthy than McPherson’s. McPherson and Jesse Jackson both seem to be trying to make the South look as racist and as guilty as possible.
But SCV members might be more alarmed by David von Drehle’s article, “The Way We Weren’t,” in the April 18 volume of Time. He has been with Time magazine since 2006 and now serves as one of two editors-at-large. He is not just a contributor. We can take his word as the view of the magazine. The cover of the issue draws attention to the article with these words, “Why We’re Still Fighting the Civil War.”
On the page where the article begins the caption, “The Civil War 1861-2011,” precedes the title. Right below the title appear these words, “North and South shared the burden of slavery, and after the war, they shared in forgetting about it. But 150 years later, it’s time to tell the truth.” Von Drehle claims that “Americans have lost . . . clarity about the cause of the Civil War” and that slavery was “the once obvious truth” of the war.
He says some strange things and is blatantly offensive to anyone like SCV members who love their Southern Heritage. He states that the war started in 1854 in Kansas after the Kansas-Nebraska Act, not at Fort Sumter in 1861. He refers to Jefferson Davis’ Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government (1881) as “a strange and rambling book” (it was actually published in two volumes—”books”). He says that Edward Pollard’s The Lost Cause (1866) was “highly selective and deeply misleading” but that it “was immediately popular in the South because it translated the Confederacy’s defeat into a moral victory.”
Von Drehle mocks Pollard’s book by insisting that it “required a massive case of amnesia”—forgetting that the real cause was slavery. He scorns that “the distortion and occluded memory that shaped the Lost Cause story is found now only on the academic fringe.” In other words scholars all now believe that the real cause of the war was slavery and that the South was fighting to keep African-Americans enslaved. Von Drehle piously quotes Lincoln’s words “with malice toward none, with charity for all,” and then concludes, “The path to healing and mercy goes by way of honesty and humility. After 150 years, it’s time to finish the journey.”
The article is obviously the man’s best effort at convincing the modern world that all past views of the war upholding anything but slavery as the cause and the liberation of blacks as the purpose, are false and now ought to be condemned. In fact he joins the bandwagon in taking a shot at Virginia’s Governor Bob McDonnell for not mentioning “slavery” in his last year’s Confederate-History-Month proclamation.
Of all I have read with von Drehle’s mentality who fired at McDonnell, however, the most offensive was a 2010 Rice
University graduate, Patrick McAnaney, who was the Student Association’s President. In The Rice Standard, the university’s electronic daily magazine, he criticized McDonnell’s proclamation shortly after it was published claiming, “I do not believe that it is appropriate for our society to honor Confederate history or display the Confederate flag.”
He went on, “Simply put, the Civil War was about slavery. When running for president, Abraham Lincoln said that slavery was immoral and that the institution should be abolished.” Note the reference to Lincoln. Von Drehle referred to him as well. Indeed almost everyone who brands the South with going to war to keep slavery piously appeals to him.
McAnaney thinks very highly of Lincoln but not of Lee. “Many Southerners often defend the leader of the Confederate Army, General Robert E. Lee,” he says, “But his ultimate legacy is that he was the man who led the armed struggle to keep African-Americans enslaved.” Finally he insists, “We should not honor what the Confederacy stood for and we should never proudly wave Confederate flags. . . . As a nation, we must create a shared vision of what the Civil War meant to our society. That begins by condemning those who would honor the memory of the Confederacy.”
WHY OBSERVE CONFEDERATE MEMORIAL DAY?
Well, there was everyone at Confederate Memorial Day on May 1, and The Greenville News, Time magazine, The Rice Standard and other popular media had been responding to the 150th anniversary of the war by condemning the South for defending slavery and congratulating Lincoln and the North for rising above their part of the guilt of slavery and for fighting to end it. What could possibly be appropriate for celebrating the day if these things were true? Why were we having Confederate Memorial Day?
In my opinion the correct answer to the question can begin by our reading the panel on the north side of the 28-foot Confederate monument on Main Street beside Springwood Cemetery. The inscription reads,
Nor shall your glory be forgot
While fame her record keeps,
Or honor points the hallowed spot
Where valor proudly sleeps.
Nor wreck, nor chance,
Nor winter’s blight,
Nor time’s remorseless doom,
Can dim one ray of holy light
That gilds your glorious tomb.
Notice the vocabulary of the poem: glory, fame, honor, valor, holy light, glorious tomb. It was chosen for the monument by the Ladies’ Memorial Association, and the monument went up in 1892 in “honor and memory of the Confederate Dead.” No doubt nearly all of these ladies had lost a son, husband, father, brother or cousin during the War Between the States. They had lived through the terror of the War and the utter horror of Reconstruction. Their hearts had bled; they had seen their country bleed. They believed their dead were worthy of the dignified words. I and the majority of those in attendance at the Memorial Day believed it too.
More of the answer comes by reading the opposite side, the south side, of the monument. Its panel says,
All lost, but by the graves
Where martyred heroes rest
He wins the most who honor saves,
Success is not the test.
The world shall yet decide
In truth’s clear far-off light,
That the soldiers
Who wore the gray and died
With Lee—were in the right.
“Were in the right.” “Were in the right.” Those ladies believed their men who had fought and died “were in the right!” They believed, and most of us at the service also believed that the South was “right” in its cause during the War Between the States. What? Was slavery right? Was it right to fight to keep black people in America enslaved and suppressed? Don’t we have to admit that the Confederacy’s Vice President, Alexander Stephens, wrote: “Our new government[’s] . . . foundations are laid, its cornerstone 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”?
Yes, we admit it, but that attitude about blacks is not the issue. It was common to North and South, and Stephens and the Confederacy cannot be condemned for it without condemning Lincoln and the North. Listen to Lincoln: “There is a natural disgust in the minds of nearly all white people, to the idea of an indiscriminate amalgamation of the white and black races.” “Make them [Negroes] politically and socially, our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this.
“I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races—that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”
Statements like these are readily found in Roy P. Basler’s, The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (1953) and similar works on Lincoln’s speeches and letters. These blatantly racist statements prove that Northerners were no less guilty than Southerners for their view of blacks. Therefore the wording on the Confederate monument and the Cause for which “the soldiers who wore the gray and died with Lee” fought were wrong only if the war was actually about slavery and the soldiers were really fighting to defend it.
How can we know? Are von Drehle and McAnaney correct? Do McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom and The Greenville News properly condemn the Confederacy for going to war to suppress black American’s? McPherson seems obsessed with proving that the Cause of the South was to defend slavery. In 1994 he published What They Fought For and then in 1997 For Cause & Comrades, both analyzing hundreds of letters and diaries in an attempt to answer the questions suggested by the titles. But he certainly did not demonstrate that Confederate soldiers thought they were fighting to continue slavery, which should have been easy enough to show if the evidence favored his, von Drehle’s, and McAnaney’s conclusion.
WHY DID CONFEDERATE SOLDIERS FIGHT?
But even though McPherson’s books are not convincing, he still had a good idea—find out what the fighting soldiers themselves said. It seems to me that the one way to evaluate properly the monument’s claims for the Confederate dead and their cause, and hence to settle the whole issue, would be to bring them back to life and ask them!
Well, we can’t do that but we can follow McPherson’s lead and read what they said about the Confederate Cause before they died. And we will find that none of them stated they went to war to perpetuate slavery! Here are some well-known samples:
Robert Stiles, lieutenant of artillery in the Richmond Howitzers, in 1903 wrote: “What now of the essential spirit of these young volunteers? Why did they volunteer? For what did they give their lives? We can never appreciate the story of their deeds as soldiers until we answer this question correctly.
“Surely it was not for slavery they fought. . . . The great conflict will never be properly comprehended by the man who looks upon it as a war for the preservation of slavery.”
John S. Wise was a young V.M.I. cadet who fought at New Market 15 May 1864. He was the son of Virginia’s governor before the War. His family had 40 slaves. He lamented the early grave of his mother, who died at age 33, noting that her diligent care for their negroes—whom he calls “gentle and affectionate creatures”—contributed to her death. He wrote in 1901, “It [slavery] was a curse, and nobody knows better than I the terrible abuses which were possible and actual under the system. Thank God, it is gone.”
Theo. F. Davidson, lieutenant in the 39th North Carolina Regiment in his history of the unit mentions “the ardor with which the non-slaveholding portions of the population flew to arms at the call of their respective States.” He observes: “It will perhaps be many years—beyond the generations now living—before the popular delusion that the war between the States had its origin in the existence of Negro slavery, will be dispelled.”
Randolph H. McKim, staff officer under Brigadier-Gen. Geo. H. Steuart and later Chaplain in the 2nd Virginia Cavalry under Col. Munford, Gen. Fitzhugh Lee’s brigade, in 1910 wrote, “And now I turn to the consideration of a grievous reproach often directed against the men who fought in the armies of the South in the Civil War. When we claim for them the crown of patriotism, when we aver that they drew their swords in what they believed to be the cause of liberty and self-government, it is answered that the corner-stone of the Southern Confederacy was slavery, and that the soldiers who fought under the banner of the Southern Cross were fighting for the perpetuation of the institution of slavery.
“That is a statement which I wish to repudiate with all the earnestness of which I am capable. It does a grievous injustice to half a million patriot soldiers who were animated by as pure a love of liberty as ever throbbed in the bosom of man, and who made as splendid an exhibition of self-sacrifice on her behalf as any soldiers who ever fought on any field since history began.
“. . . I am chiefly concerned to show that my comrades and brothers, of whom I write in these pages did not draw their swords in defense of the institution of slavery. They were not thinking of their slaves when they cast all in the balance—their lives, their fortunes, their sacred honor—and went forth to endure the hardships of the camp and the march and the perils of the battlefield. They did not suffer, they did not fight, they did not die, for the privilege of holding their fellow men in bondage!
“No, it was for the sacred right of self-government that they fought. It was in defense of their homes and their firesides. It was to repel the invader, to resist a war of subjugation. It was in vindication of the principle enunciated in the Declaration of Independence that ‘governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.’
“Only a very small minority of the men who fought in the Southern armies—not one in ten—were financially interested in the institution of slavery. We cared little or nothing about it. To establish our independence we would at any time have gladly surrendered it.”
Of course, von Drehle and the modern Yankees (now a mentality rather than a region) claim these soldiers wanted to cover up the real issue and to justify what they did. But the Ladies Memorial Association would not agree, nor do today’s southern loyalists. It is not reasonable to think that over 94% of the South’s white population would go to war for the right of less that 6% to own slaves.
But it is indeed reasonable to believe Stiles, Wise, Davidson, McKim and others who claimed that the South went to war to protect itself from the invading Northerners, to preserve the Constitutional Right of Self Government (or States’ Rights) and to establish the same kind of independence from tyrannical government that its ancestors sought in the Revolutionary War.
Does the “path to healing and mercy go by way of honesty and humility”? What still needs to be healed? Who lacks mercy? The only thing I can see is the vicious attack the arrogant Yankees are still making against the South—its true heritage, the actual Confederate Cause. We still, as Lee said, just want to be left alone.
Leave our history alone, von Drehle. Stop “condemning those who would honor the memory of the Confederacy,” McAnaney. Stop trying to make us stupid. We do not need you, North. We once tried to get away from you and your offensive arrogance. You wouldn’t let us go! Now stop trying to rob us of our beloved Confederate Legacy—we will have our Confederate Memorial Day!