We watch a lot of old movies in this house. It's an odd thing--you're watching these people live these lives in these places, and yet you know that, as a black person, they would have most likely thought of you as subhuman. It's something to watch The Heiress, and know that in both the time it was filmed, and the time it takes place, you were a less-than. Half of me is watching
Dave Chapelle has that great bit where he goes back in time with a white guy and sees Thomas Jefferson writing the Declaration of Independence, and when he finishes he looks at Chappelle and says, "Get me a sandwich, nigger!" I remember watching George Will talk about "the mood of Americans" in the 1950s, and being seized by the notion that he wasn't talking about the "mood" of a single person I would have known in 1950. We exist in this country's history--and then we don't.
When I watched Ken Burns' The Civil War, I remember feeling like the doc had a Southern slant, because he seemed caught up in the romance of the war. The whole time I'm getting that, and yet trying to put myself in that time--but in that time, I am property, or something in between. Nothing romantic there.
Now, I'm about halfway through Battle Cry Of Freedom, and it has to be said that the Confederate cats have a kind of swagger to them, that the Union guys can't match. Maybe it's just the notion of the rebel, but Lee, Forrest and Jackson seem to carry so much more with them than McClellan, Burnside or even Grant. They have that old European notion of feudalism and chivalry working for them. It's a mask, of course, but a very effective one. Maybe this is just how American history is told. But I don't find Battle Cry to be slanted in the least.
I am getting some sense of what Southerners mean when they say "It wasn't about racism." It was not. But it was inextricably linked to white supremacy. The most revealing section on race in the book is this part where a Southerner is defending slavery and basically says that by giving the South a class of servants bound for life, all white people get to be aristocrats. Even white people who don't own slaves, get to be larger than somebody. I think that's what they lost--the right to aristocracy, whether you were born in a one room shack or not.
The whole epoch is disorienting. Lee was, by most accounts, opposed to slavery, and fought for the South because he couldn't countenance turning against his home state. And yet when marching to Gettysburg he enslaved free blacks, and had them sold South. I can not read about the Confederacy, the way I'd read about the aristocrats in the French Revolution. I can't get drawn in by the daring of Forrest's raids, or Lee's genius. Stonewall Jackson has the coldest, most determined eyes I've ever seen. And yet we know what they were set on. I can't go all the way in. I can't get out of my own damn skin.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
Half of you is watching future Big Valley matriarch Barbara Stanwyck scheme her way through Double Indemnity.
TNC -- dead perhaps wildly racist white actresses are not monolithic. Double Indemnity starred Barbara Stanwyck who played Phyllis Dietrichson.
Okay, I will now read further.
Meant to italicize Double Indemnity only. I will not try it here.
Right. Thanks guys.
I am with you, TNC, on your love of classic films. On Saturday, on the Turner Classic Movie channel, there was a Bette Davis film fest, and I was LOVING it. But while I was watching -- and enjoying -- Bette in the films, Jezebel and the Little Foxes, where she is surrounded by servile black slaves and/or servants throughout, I was constantly stepping outside of myself and wondering -- had I been living during the timeframe of the films, would I (like the slaves in the films) be toting Bette's cotton or serving her coffee? Or asking myself while Bette's character -- a selfish southern belle in Jezebel -- is agnozing over the loss of her beau (Henry Fonda) in a palatial mansion, where did the slaves sleep, in shacks in the back of the mansion? It is thoughts and questions like these that constantly interupt the flow of the movie for me. I can't help it. (I must say though that Bette Davis, the real person, was one of the few actors in Hollywood, during this era, who was sympathetic to the plight of blacks and to black performers. I have read about events that she attended in support of black people and other acts of support she showed towards the black community.)
It is a weird and somewhat uncomfortable experience that I go thru each time I watch one of my favorite old movies, especially since I am constantly assaulted with how negatively and stereotypically blacks were portrayed -- the typical archtypes of the mammy or the buck-eyed coon is repeated over and over again. I have friends and relative who refuse to watch certain films of a certain era -- Gone With The Wind, for instance -- for this very reason. While I certainly understand their point-of-view, I appreciate the art of filmmaking too much not to allow myself the pleasure of watching these great films and performances -- even those that have may contain images/messages that offend me (or my race).
Would I deny myself the joy of reading Mark Twain's Huck Finn simply because Huck calls Jim a nigger throughout the book?
Killing words. Not much to say. Just been thinking that about the time we have our fourth black president, perhaps that will be when we are healed. Working on it. Getting there.
Wow. This, to me, explains a lot of the perplexing "it wasn't about slavery, it was about Tradition" meme. Or at least makes it possible to understand the thoughts behind that claim.
Your comment about "being seized by the notion that he [George Will] wasn't talking about the "mood" of a single person I would have known in 1950." Brings to mind an argument I have with people who wish to argue that some point in the past was a more moral time. I argue that we have as a nation been making moral progress. The fact that my great-grandfather could slap a black man of the sidewalk in Memphis TN for failure to yeild the right of way and show proper defference, with no repurcussions, is a greater moral failing of a culture in my mind than any loosening of sexual mores that is suposedly taking place. It is really amazing to me when I have this argument with an African American and fail to convince them that the opresion of minorities is a moral issue!
I'm with you on that one. It angers me when people like George Will point backward nostalgically and act as if we're some sort of decadent group of people because suddenly straight white males control only 90% of everything instead of all of it.
And it really pisses me off when my fellow southerners play that whole bullshit "it's not about racism" game. Yes, it is and was and always will be about racism, until you get over yourselves and recognize that Robert E. Lee wasn't the Marble Man and that whichever one of Stonewall Jackson's men accidentally shot him was a damn hero. There's nothing wrong with being ashamed of what your ancestors did--it's a great way to become a better person.
I am not ashamed of my ancestors actions because I am not responsible for them. We all have ancestors who committed unspeakable acts. Accepting the responsibility for the actions of our ancestors makes us all guilty. I reject the doctrine of original sin.
"I reject the doctrine of original sin."
This is a common American response, interesting to me in part because I suspect it may be a reaction to the burden of American history.
A good point on the "it wasn't about slavery" front I heard the other day (I think on NPR, but I can't remember): there was apparently a lot of angry rhetoric in the North directed against abolitionists for "breaking up the Union." In other words, Southern slavery was seen by many Northerners as a sustainable part of the national makeup, even if not practiced or necessarily condoned in the North.
That complexity was part of what I loved about Ride with the Devil. I think for a lot of people the Civil War (and Confederate nostalgia) is about Tradition and tribal loyalty. For me the fact that the tribe they're loyal to and the tradition they cling to included slavery makes it all poison. But for them the slavery is something they can just mentally bleep over in their heads.
I can't help but think, though, that the ability to mentally gloss over slavery depends on thinking of African Americans as less than fully human (or at least less than fully American).
Of course any political nostalgia requires the same mental gymnastics regarding gays, women, and the bulk of the workforce. A couple of years ago on Labor Day, my wife raised her beer and said, "This is for all the men, women, and children who died to bring us the 40-hour work week." It brought me up short because it sounds like a joke, but it's truth.
I think for a lot of people the Civil War (and Confederate nostalgia) is about Tradition and tribal loyalty. For me the fact that the tribe they're loyal to and the tradition they cling to included slavery makes it all poison. But for them the slavery is something they can just mentally bleep over in their heads.
Yeah, there's a lot of romance to the Tradition and Code of Honor. Especially if you start forgetting what a price that Tradition demanded.
Glad to see someone else loves that movie. Ang Lee got a good performance out of Skeet Ulrich (!!!) and a decent one out of Jewel. It like it because it's a.) a good movie and b.) about one of the corners of the Civil War that doesn't get talked about so much.
"It wasn't about racism." It was not. But it was inextricably linked to white supremacy.
Yes. I think that's a really essential balance of two seemingly conflicting thoughts.
I am getting some sense of what Southerners mean when they say "It wasn't about racism." It was not. But it was inextricably linked to white supremacy.
I am having a hard time wrapping my head around the notion that these two, in this instance, (heck, maybe in any instance) are mutually exclusive. Doesn’t the notion of an ‘inherent right to the good life’, or, more-explicitly, a better life than non-whites, suggest the opposite?
I would suggest that the essence of 'white supremacy' becomes most clear in the fugitive slave laws (and the apparatus necessary to make those laws effective).
We aren't just talking about slaves and slaveholders, we are also talking about a society increasingly built around the need to keep slaves from seizing (or running to) freedom.
Harriet Tubman had a $40,000 price on her head -- not an insignificant sum in the Antebellum period. That price reflected Southern apprehension that she was a danger to society. It also represents a very small portion of the resources devoted to cultivating a police state.
.... Nb. Tubman certainly had a degree of "swagger."
"Now, I'm about halfway through Battle Cry Of Freedom, and it has to be said that the Confederate cats have a kind of swagger to them, that the Union guys can't match. Maybe it's just the notion of the rebel, but Lee, Forrest and Jackson seem to carry so much more with them than McClellan, Burnside or even Grant. They have that old European notion of feudalism and chivalry working for them. It's a mask, of course, but a very effective one. Maybe this is just how American history is told. But I don't find Battle Cry to be slanted in the least."
TNC: No, Southern elites did have a swagger that the Northern elites did not. It was not simply a mask; it was how several of them lived their lives. George Fitzhugh, a contemporaneous proslavery writer, wrote about it a lot. Southerners saw the North as heartless, disinterested, over-industrialized capitalist monsters who did not understand the importance of "saving" black people from the harsh world--hence "benevolent" planter paternalism. (Actually, Fitzhugh is interesting because in some of his writings he suggests that whites should be slaves, too). Fitzhugh wrote a book called CANNIBALS ALL! and he talked about the heartless North and their lack of refinement. "The old European notion of feudalism and chivalry" was not old to them--many of the planter class pictured themselves as neo-feudal lords. It was their way of living and was just a much a mask to them as my liberal, humanist, secularist, overeducated, bougie, blipster.... self is to me (hehe). Remember the North was a place for bourgeois-mercantilist mores, whereas the South was the place where people aspired to be the feudal "Big Daddy" (like Tennessee Williams' character in CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF). When you are done BATTLE CRY, check out some primary documents in the decades prior to the Civil War--there, you will find some planters really trying to get that chivalric swagger on!
Thanks for this. And yeah, I'm headed to some primaries next. Some slave narratives/diaries/letters and maybe Cannibals All! You have to understand people--even if you think they're wrong.
I wonder how much that paternalism was really there, and was just a convenient mask for 'don't take away our low-cost labor force,' though. It's clear that was the myth-- passed on almost unchanged to Margaret Mitchell and probably millions like her-- but were any of them really sincere? It reminds me of the 'women don't know their own minds' aspect of the abortion debates, and I suspect a lot of them of insincerity too.
There were probably just enough of them to allow the insincere ones cover. The paternalistic ones were the useful idiots of their cause.
Well I think this is hard to answer. Enough of it was there so that when slaves were free they begged for the life of the old plantation (of course this is due in part, too, to the fact they were embroiled in a new context of freedom that made many of their heads spin.) Enough of it was there so that when master's died, slaves genuinely mourned. Now a good Gramscian might say that this was part of the psychological hegemonic operation of slavery... and it might be. But there is no doubt that some slaveowners, mainly planters of 20+ slaves, fashioned themselves feudal-type overlords and treated their black slaves (and white underlings) accordingly. The fact that they might be afraid of losing their "low-cost labor force" never deeply struck a chord in many of them because slavery was part of the fabric of their lives (very much like cotton is to ours--sorry for the bad pun but there is a correspondence there) as it had been throughout the republic. They never thought it was going to be taken away until it actually was after the War. And what did they do then, post-War? Get a REALLY low-cost labor force with chain gangs and sharecropping. In fact, David Brion Davis--the leading historian in slave historiography--makes the case that the masses of Southerners did not really fear abolitionism because it was so fringe and because the courts always ruled in their favor in the 1850s. (He suggests that Britain's response to the Southern slave regime was really what the South was worried about because of the economic sway it had in direct trade with the South and in international markets coupled with the fact that Britain was by and large washing its had free of slavery. See Davis' INHUMAN BONDAGE. Of course , this is Invisiman now, Britain was washing its hands of slavery as the first step towards colonialism and imperialism--WHAT'S UP EAST AFRICA? INDIA? Y'all wanna speak English? Well you gonna anyway!)
But really it is hard to tell masks from reality in any circumstance... I do take your point, though.
Yeah, and when do you wear the mask so long it becomes part of you? Hard to separate that out.
I think this is an interesting point. Any enormous social change is going to be hard, in the short run, on people whose plans are disrupted by it, and with respect to abolition, the people whose plans were disrupted included both slaves and slaveholders. A bit of personal ancient family history: My 93 year old grandfather recalls an elderly black guy named Mr. Potter who used to come by his house when he was a child in the 1920s, to talk to HIS grandfather (my great-great grandfather, the "GGG" for short) and sometimes ask for work or money. Mr. Potter had apparently been a slave in the GGG's house when the GGG was a kid, and after the civil war ended, he followed the GGG when he moved North to go to college, and pretty much followed him around, did odd jobs for him off and on, and got occasional financial help from him for the rest of his life. I guess he had never done anything his entire life but work for one family, and that was his one marketable job skill, so he kept at it. According to my grandfather Mr. Potter and the GGG were genuinely fond of each other. He also said he felt bad for the guy because it was so hard for him to find work. I don't know if Mr. Potter was happier with his life after abolition (I sure hope so), but I can imagine other people like him who basically wound up out on their butts with no livelihood and absolutely no life skills for coping with freedom, who would feel like they got the raw end of the deal.
@Lee / not able to nest comment,:
Slavery by another name sub title: The Re-Enslavement of Black People in America from the Civil War to World War II. Written by WSJ chief Book by Wall Street Journal bureau chief D. Blackmon. I've just ordered the book, after hearing the NPR/On point interview w/ the author (sorry TNC to drop so many 'other' names). I've never seriously considered reparations; but not every black person made the great migration. But the story Lee tells below, was still very much plausible **several generations** after the emancipation proclamation. At the very least social security payments for those ex post 'slaves' who are not able to document their employment should be considered. There are some troubling parallels to the more recent law and order lock up coinciding with black political empowerment, but I'll stop here.
If I remember right only about 40,000 families actually owned enough slaves to be called big planters. Less than 1 percent of the population. An aristocracy that small is going to develop an air of gentility and a batch of customs and manners that are particular to it, and is also going to look down it's nose on everyone that isn't them. But it's my opinion that the manners and the refinement are a mask that hide a much darker opinion of human life. There is a brutality to southern life during the period that seems to lurk just below the surface of civility shown by the caning of sumner.
I'm also not entirely sure but I think that anytime a majority of means is held by a minority as small as the old southern aristocracy resentment is bound to spring up. I mean sure life is good if you're at the top of the pyramid but what about those who were free and poor?
Well, the pyramid is one reason you develop the mythology --- if you are inherently better than the other humans around, if you are noble and they are vulgar/peasants/plebes than of course it makes sense that you are rich and they are poor, that they spend their lives serving you, so that you may devote your time to noble pursuits and have finer things, because only you are capable of appreciating them. If you can get the plebes to buy in, you're golden. (The things hangover a long time. The caste system persists in India; the phrase "jumped up" persists in British English.)
And it helps with the brutality, too --- compassion is to feel with, literally. But these people are not like you, they cannot understand the world as you understand it; they do not feel as you do. It is therefore frequently sensible and necessary to deal with them through brute force, as it is the only thing those people understand....Then there's the whole code of honor which highly values physical courage, strength, the ability to mete out violence, and in which the appropriate response to insult is always to threaten violence, and one must be willing to enact that violence in order not to be seen as cowardly.
According to Battlecry of Freedom, about 1/3 of southerner's owned slaves. I think it was 20% in the upper slave states, and 37% in the deep South (I don't have the book at hand at the moment). IIRC in the deep south, more than half the population was black. I saw the claim made recently by the Son's of Confederate Veterans that only 6% of Southerner's owned slaves -- in fact seeing that rather startling claim is what prompted me to go back and read McPherson. The 6% canard is demonstrably untrue, but figures like that are how southern racists justify their belief that the war was started over slavery.
oops -- should read "justify their belief that the war was *not* started over slavery."
It would be interesting to get a chart of slavery by the numbers. I wasn't talking about the numbers of southerners that owned slaves but rather the numbers that owned enough human property to be called big planters. Of course the civil war started over slavery. I wasn't trying to make the point that it didn't. I also wasn't trying to justify a horrible way of life that makes its living off of the sweat of other people. Just trying to point out that a very small percentage of southerners fell into the large scale planter class and because of their position they were able to dictate to the rest of southern society. If anything and this is just my opinion the south resembled a classic ponzi scheme ran for the benefit of an elite planter class at the expense of everyone else.
The 40,000 number represents the number of southerners who qualified as planters and owned more than 20 slaves.
Talking about this subject is incredibly painfull. The very idea that one person can own another person makes my stomach do backflips. It's disgusting and repellent but there you go.
Breakdowns can be found
here
and here.
Read the pronouncements made by each state as it seceded. It was about slavery and nothing else, and slavery requires a racist moral framework. More interesting is the question of the attachment of poor whites to a system from which they barely benefited. Read a classic on the Southern mentality: Cash, "The Mind of the South". A brilliant pre-war meditation which talks about white males as "the man at the center". Ideas about honor (and violence) and the superiority of every (white) man were forged in the rough and tumble, socially insecure rural south before the war. These feelings were made worse by the experience of defeat..
Also, to hell with Southern swagger, I admire more the men who led the third charge at Cold Harbor.
. I guess the men who led the charge were hero's, I cant bring myself to call them fools but I am absolutely convinced that the officers that ordered the third charge should have been court-martialed. Same foolishness that sent regiment after regiment into the barb wire in WWI. This was murder. History is way too kind to the officers who order their own troops into certain death hoping that the third time is the charm. Talk about masking reality with romance.
It's funny - I've recently started reading Julius Caesars' Conquest of Gaul. And it's a fascinating read - Caesar was plainspoken, articulate and describes his battles, his decisions and his movements perfectly. It's brilliant in that it really brings you into the mood, and the moment. But there are times I feel completely disconnected from his entire telling. The ease with which men are brought together to wage war on others, the trading of hostages so that they can kill each others' innocents if they don't follow through on a promise are surprising enough, but Caesar regularly acts in retaliation against an unsubmitting or untrustworthy tribe by destroying their entire crop and their villages (if they hid away from fear of Caesar's vengenace) or by killing all the men and selling the women and children as hostages.
The worst part about the whole thing? It's casual. Caesar talks about it in passing as if it's the obvious and natural decision to destroy half of a tribe and sell the rest into slavery. I enjoy the hell out of the book, but I'm always a little stunned and disturbed by the brutal violence of the era.
So yeah, you're not alone, and I don't think it's a color-of-your-skin thing. The reality of what these people represented will always keep you just a little outside the range of really getting into their character, and I think that's true of any historical figure who can be tied to history's more horrible stories.
This is one of the things I love about the HBO/BBC Rome series. It's such an effective character-based melodrama, and is so good at sketching in the background cultural details without having to explain them, that you get really involved with the main characters, their concerns make sense to you, you know which ones you want to succeed... and then you see something that makes it clear that their whole way of life depends on exploitation and casual brutality, and that even the most admirable and idealistic among them will never even begin to question those things. The acting and directing is (usually) incredibly effective at playing those scenes straight from within the characters' frame of reference, and without hammering the moral home, it makes you wonder what you're taking for granted now.
Ancient warfare was literally butchery on a large scale.
The horror of the modern age is that we can kill 50,000 at the push of a button, before breakfast, then congratulate ourselves on our moral superiority over coffee.
When you have ICBMs, your hostages can go about their every day lives up to the final second of slaughter.
In the end wars are over resources, but no one goes to war saying "We want to take their stuff," you can't spur masses to action with that theme. A tribal group can be spurred to attack for profit, but national groups don't see individual profit from war. So you give big themes, causes and principals to uphold. And you sell young men full of testosterone on the glory and adventure of fighting for your cause. Then, when enough of them have died, we record states rights/abolition, workers revolution/communist agression or weapons of mass destruction as the official reason and call it history. The degree varies, The Spanish American War And Mexican War are classic worst examples of war obfuscated, WWII and Gulf War I examples of war with more clarity, but all wars get ugly on both sides no matter the theme, no matter the real reason.
Mark Twain had an interesting take on the romantic medievalism of the South... he pinned it on a mania for Sir Walter Scott and the romanticism of his writing. There's a quote at:
http://www.twainquotes.com/SirWalterScott.html
Oddly enough, Scotland didn't get around to abandoning feudal land tenures until 2000!
It's no accident that Twain named the sinking riverboat in Huckleberry Finn after Scott.
It's important to keep the urban/rural divide in mind, also, when looking at Confederate defenses of black slavery. Southerners were deeply committed to the Jeffersonian vision of rural, self-sufficient farmers as the backbone of true democracy and freedom. By starting from white supremacy as an assumed truth, Southerners developed a sense of being better Americans *because* of slavery - it promoted free white agriculture, which was argued to be an inherently better way of life than menial "wage slavery" in a Northern city. In this way, even the poorest hardscrabble Southern farmer was elevated to a higher standing within the basic tenets of the American creed.
Thus, we have the rebellion as a conservative movement to defend the gains of the American Revolution (in Southern eyes).
And it is this urban/rural division, much more than the argument over slavery, that has persisted ever since and defined much of American politics. Go back and look at the presidential election maps of 1900 or 1916, and you'll see exactly the pattern we see in elections now, only with party labels reversed. The south and mid/mountain west remain, right down to today, wedded to the Jeffersonian republican vision. Rural agrarianism, cultural traditionalism, and strong tribal patriotism continually reinforce each other within this subset of the American polity.
That is the basis of romantic Confederate nationalism: "we are/were superior practitioners of the American democratic ideal." In its origins, it was strongly aided by racism economically, but it does not require racism socially, because what it looks down upon more than anything else is urban cosmopolitan democracy and corporate (read: dependent) employment.
Slavery WAS certainly practiced in the northeast. New York City was one of several northeastern states that participated in the slave trade. (A few years back The New York Historical Society museum did an excellent exhibit on the prevalence and impact of slavery on New York City.)
Sorry if my above comment appears out of context, but I am responding to the below statement below:
Exitr said: In other words, Southern slavery was seen by many Northerners as a sustainable part of the national makeup, even if not practiced or necessarily condoned in the North.
When judging people from history, how much do you factor in the culture they come from? How do you judge Caesar for his lack of mercy, when for the pre-imperial Roman's mercy was something to inflicted, not given? Though, whenever I indulge in such relatavism, I have to ask myself why I have a much harder time extending such understanding towards my countrymen.
Is it because we come out of the same soil, and I know better, and therefore so should they? And perhaps I'm seeing more commonality in backround than there is? Is it because they reflect poorly on me? Or is it simply that Caesar's enormities are simply less real to me than, say, Jefferson Seissions harsh words for crying children.
Well, the Legions took a break from tromping around Europe for about 1500 years, and even Mussolini was only able to get them up and running again for a couple years. The threat they pose to people isn't as close, in time or space, as the threat posed by slavery and racism. I think that makes it a little easier to take the long view. I don't think I've ever asked anybody from France about this, and look at one conqueror as being relatively better or worse than another. And there were degrees of enlightenment; even Julius Caesar was a bit more merciful than Scipio Aemilianus. Gaul still had a population when Caesar was done with it.
I don't feel particularly ashamed or proud of any of them, even though they're my (very distant) forebears. They're all just part of the story.
Nostalgia my ass. Rich white southerners only wanted to preserve their way of life at the expense of all others be they black, poor whites, latinos or even the other sections of the country which wanted to move past slavery as a foundation for labor in the emerging industrial economy.
Southern poor whites lived in what amounted to a state of economic slavery. I am NOT equating their experience with enslaved blacks, but there was no upward mobility, schools sucked, there was no infrastructure to speak of, universities were well behind their northern counterparts and the west was fast expanding. One of the great tragedies of slavery was what it did to poor whites. They fought and died to preserve a society that was screwing them too. I think the song "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" by The Band captures this tragedy in the story of the poor man who fought in the war, lost his brother, and after the end of the war celebrates Robert Lee, but remains bitter about the North's victory. He started with nothing before the war and ended the war with less.
There is no justification or reason to glorify who those southern generals were or what they fought for. They were fighting for a fast evaporating mirage of gentility and glamor. And, it's that same mirage people try to preserve today in the mythological history written about these men. To buy into it is to buy into the whole concept of white supremacy.
Southern poor whites lived in what amounted to a state of economic slavery....And, it's that same mirage people try to preserve today in the mythological history written about these men. To buy into it is to buy into the whole concept of white supremacy.
@Josh; simply because I've recently began to travel to Dublin/Ireland quite a bit w/ work and from hearing about the Irish connection to American blacks-(esp. during the last election) I've looked more into this and I can't find any more scholarly sources, but I've read several accounts of the Irish actually being enslaved in America/ The Caribbean by the English, and that practice only discontinued because it lowered the prices the English could get from their African slaves. cf cromwell connaught proclamation may 1654, wiki, Irish publicationfor Irish slavery memorial. I think it will be a long time coming before any American middle/HS history book ever refers to white people (in America) as slaves. It was always a token number of indentured servants if they were mentioned at all
IIRC Frederick Douglass mentioned his Antebellum travels in Ireland. He was well-received. David Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, had a section on early antebellum black-Irish fraternization in the North. And then there's a book title I recall: "How the Irish became white"
Our power structure and its policies are still largely the product of what was openly called the “Southern Strategy”.
"When I watched Ken Burns' The Civil War, I remember feeling like the doc had a Southern slant, because he seemed caught up in the romance of the war."
It absolutely had, in effect, a Southern slant because the most memorable, engaging character Burns cast in the film was the pro-Southern historian - his name escapes me. He was a descendent of Forrest and proud of it. The guy has also been busted on racism in various of his writings. The biggest problem with Burns doc is that it had that perfunctory wrap-up on the failure of reconstruction by a black female historian from Columbia - who was credible but not a "memorable character", which is as key in docs as it is in fiction films - who kind of administered an antidote to the romanticism of the war, and then he went on to show vintage film footage of all the old vets at some 50th anniversary. Which does the viewer walk away remembering ?
On "Southern swagger" - yeah, the SS had it too. Very cool...
I'm pretty sure you're thinking about Shelby Foote, though I don't think he was a descendant of Forrest. He was certainly an admirer. I don't know how pro-south he is, nor do I know about the racism in his own work. Not saying it ain't there. It's just a new one on me.
Foote tries really really hard not to be pro-South, TNC. He works at being objective, I think. But there's still that love of the cavalier.
His two great heroes. Abraham Lincoln. The Emancipator. And the horseman Nathan Bedford Forrest. The first Grand Wizard of the KKK. Foote can't get out of his skin either.
That sounds about right. He didn't strike me (in the film at least) as denialist. Just shockingly romantic. We all have limits, though. I imagine for a guy, raised as Foote was, it was difficult to confront the fact that all that romance was built on white supremacy.
TNC, have you watched much of the Joss Whedon space western Firefly or the movie Serenity? The show positively swims in Lost Cause poetics -- the main characters are former "browncoats", the losing side in a noble rebellion against the imperial Alliance. The "romance of the war" -- with pretty clear references to the American Civil Ware -- motivates many of the main characters.
While the movie contains a canny subversion of the show's savage Indian stand-ins, none of it ever addresses the use of secessionist rhetoric (aside from having Joss say "of course, they weren't fighting for slavery" in the DVD commentary).
Any way, if you haven't: it's weird in a way you might like.
I second the recommendation to watch Firefly and the movie Serenity - it is a must see for any Sci Fi Fan.
In fact, "Firefly" makes a repeated point of showing Mal Reynolds' distaste for slavery, and slowly the series reveals (and the movie drives home) that it is the "Feds" who are practicing slavery.
In other words, it's the Lost Cause minus the messier stuff.
Shelby Foote was the name of the charming, voluble Southerner who tilted Ken Burns doc to "romance of the South" - which for some weird reason totally eludes me. (Maybe its just the ensuing hundred plus years of encoded white supremacy enforced by violence and terror.)
Referring to nostalgia and romanticism isn't meant to deny the ugly side of the south. It's to point out a real flaw with nostalgia and romanticism themselves.
We're at an irritatingly romantic phase in our culture right now. People who aren't trying to flee the modern world into a purer, more religious past are trying to flee into a purer, pre-capitalist, pre-pollution past.
It's all hogwash, of course. Religious purity didn't prevent racism and sexism, and feudal peasants just caught diseases from animal dung rather than from modern chemicals. (And of course no one even talked about national health care for them.) The big emotional nationalisms of 19th century Europe didn't end all that well, either.
The past sucked in so many ways that it's hard to list them all. It astonished me that people who thought and felt the way we do now managed to live through the past at all, much less leave so many accomplishments behind them. P.J. O'Rourke points out that you don't even need to look at the whole past to come to that conclusion. Just think about the dentistry.
Word.
TNC - just saw your note on Foote. Here's a clip from the UK Guardian obit, for lack of anything more exhaustive:
"Few historians today share Foote's blindness toward the considerable role of blacks in the war. He scorns northern extremists, blames the abolitionists for provoking the war, and has a fondness for the murderous cavalry exploits of Nathan Bedford Forrest, whose granddaughter he met as a boy, and who permitted him to swing Forrest's sabre above his head. He did not mention that the notoriously racist Confederate general became one of the founding fathers of the Ku Klux Klan.
"Foote did not hesitate to affirm that he would have fought for the south; when he used the term 'southerner' he meant 'white southerner'. "
I remembered that anecdote about Forrest and confused him as the descendant of Forrest. Also, some years back, Noah Griffing, then a columnist for the SF Examiner had a telephone encounter with Foote - who didn't get that the "articulate" fellow from the West Coast interviewing him was African-American - and the conversation was "interesting" to say the least. I think guys like Foote get too much of a pass...certainly from Burns.
I guess this is an appraisal of the book. It's amazing to hear any historian claim that "abolitionists provoked the war." The South immediately began secession when Lincoln won. That makes me sad.
Clip from Roger Ailes when Foote died:
According to one account of a telephone interview between Foote and a writer Foote didn't realize was an African-American,
Foote defended his writings about Black soldiers, reported [San Francisco Examiner writer Noah] Griffin, and "during our phone conversation, he slipped into the Southern patois, referring to them as 'nigra,' then all the way to 'nigger soldiers.'
Griffin wrote an article based on the conversation, and an editor insisted he call Foote for confirmation on the "nigger soldiers" quote.
"He confessed that it was 'deep in his bones,' " wrote Griffin about the conversation that followed.
Incidentally, I think that it's completely fair to point out that, apparently, Foote's history is influenced by "deep in his bones" racism (born in Mississippi in 1916) - as evidenced in his stubborn dismissal of black soldiers - that he had a profoundly pro-Southern bias and that he was clearly racist, as he essentially acknowledged to Griffin - and also note that he was probably a well-intentioned person, a great dinner companion - who tried to write his best. I'll add that I'm suspicious of his affection for Abraham Lincoln - that's too neat of a trick when it's "balanced" by admiration for Forrest. That's like a WWII buff saying they admired in WWII both Eisenhower and...not Rommel, which I could comprehend, but Eisenhower and...uh... Himmler. Not buying it.
I'm not trying to condemn Foote to hell, but just be realistic and not filter what his views were objectively just because he was a great raconteur and an engaging writer. I also don't have any more respect for someone who says they'd have fought for the South than for someone says they would have fought for the Nazis. Again, one might objectively recognize that a person born in a particular time and place, to what was a common station in life, would likely have fought for either one. But in retrospect to affirm that - given benefit of hindsight and reflection - one would have fought for either regime is disgusting IMHO.
brucds, I think you're being way overaggressive in your attacks on Foote here. Whatever his personal views were, one does not come away from The Civil War: A Narrative with the impression that Forrest was a saint, that abolitionists "provoked" the war, or that blacks were uninvolved. It's fine to note that Foote's personal charm shouldn't hide his very Southern roots and apologias for said same. Just keep in mind that the end product was a very good piece of work. If you take the time to read it, you'll find that his admiration for Lincoln is quite geniune, backed by considerable and lengthy explication of the political genius of Lincoln's machinations.
Similarly, his admiration for Forrest is, within the bounds of the book, limited to Forrest's military skills. IIRC, Foote mentions *and* condemns Forrest's massacre of blacks late in the war. His bias comes through in that he doesn't focus on that episode, or any of Forrest's other failings - Foote hits it with a paragraph or so and moves on.
As a historian, he's just not the asshole you want to make him out to be.
I agree, Grunthos. I reread Foote's Narrative every 7 or 8 years. He tries to be objective, not an asshole as you say, but has too much baggage to get to where I want him to be. Watching the struggle is a reason to read him. It's a fascinating documentation of the waning culture that is still there in his bones.
I haven't read him - but based on his appearance in "The Civil War" - which was apologia pure and simple - I won't waste my time since I'm not obsessed with reading every POV on the Civil War. I think I stated clearly that he's "not the asshole" you claim I'm making him out to be ("charming", "great dinner companion") but he WAS a racist as Noah Griffin found out to his chagrin. I'm also dead certain that he's not the historian that you make him out to be...a great writer perhaps, but an "unreliable narrator." And I'm not really interested in his psyche.
I'll add that anyone who casually uses "nigger" in conversation with me, as Foote did with Noah Griffin, would register on my asshole meter. Not necessarily "evil", but definitely asshole.
"I'm also dead certain that he's not the historian that you make him out to be."
I'm sorry, your take is pretty superficial. But no need to argue that here, TNC and others can read him if they want and make up their own minds. At however-many-gazillion pages, it's not a work for light reading in any case.
Grunthos isn't kidding. My multi-volume edition is over 4,000 pages.
And brucds, anybody rational agrees that Foote was an asshole in the conversation with Noah Griffin.
But that's not a justified criticism of his writing. To close him off because he's been a bigot would mean you'd have to close off most of Western literature. Do I not read Shakespeare? Do I not read Mark Twain? Do I not read F Scott Fitzgerald? Do I not read Ezra Pound? But that's tangential.
A large reason I read him is to sense what's underground, that thing that Foote is trying to keep away but just can't because of when he was and who he is. To catch that scent is powerful. After reading him, I'm more adept, more wary, better at catching the underground in other writers.
That's using Foote in a way he didn't intend. In a way, he is a test of my own prejudices. I've read him 5 or 6 times. Each time I read him, I come with a different perspective, having read more between. I find more passages, more inclusions or exclusions, that tell me how I am different now. Mostly because I didn't catch the scent right there before. Good lesson.
I knew a guy who fought for the Nazis. (He's dead now.) Perfectly normal. He could have been anyone, from anywhere, and his politics weren't extreme. He just got drafted, and he didn't have the resources or knowledge of the world to get out of it. I suspect he didn't enjoy it very much, but then the people drafted to fight for the Allies probably didn't either.
My father had cousins who fought for the Nazis...one of them ended up in Siberia after being captured Stalingrad, and my dad corresponded with him for years after he was released back into East Germany. An essentially decent man dealt a hard hand so far as I could tell from what I was told by my father. I remember helping my dad wrap packages of sugar and coffee that we sent to the family for years. BUT, my point was "to affirm that - given benefit of hindsight and reflection - one would have fought for either regime is disgusting IMHO." Which is what Foote apparently did.
But why disgusting? It reminds me ....there's a very old This American Life episode, which features a plantation tour that does this living history experience, where the visitors pretend to be slaves escaping on the Underground Railroad. And everybody but everybody thinks beforehand that, had they been born at that time, of course they'd have resisted, they'd have been brave enough, they'd have helped people escape. But even within the context of the game, the visitor cast in the role of overseers, of slave catchers, find themselves performing the job with enthusiasm....to say, if I'd been born at that time, likely I'd have had the prejudices of that time, because I recognize some remnant of those prejudices in me now, seems to me more honest and wiser, less self-flattering, then too suppose you'd be among the few that would resist. You seem to be saying that it's disgusting to imagine yourself as someone who could believe these things. But the vast majority of people did believe these things, then. It's arrogant to assume you wouldn't have.
C - apparently you either didn't read what I wrote or you didn't understand it.
Okay. Would you be willing to explain it more? You seem to be to be saying that, to acknowledge a thing is evil and admit that, had one been around at that time, and knowing what one's own personality is like, one would likely have participated in it, is disgusting.
To me, that seems like suggesting that acknowledging one's own capacity for evil is disgusting. I didn't know Foote myself. I haven't studied his works or his life. But from everything that's come up about him here, he seems to have been an intelligent man, one who admired the romance of valor, a lover of the South, and a racist. If that description is at all accurate, then it makes perfect sense to me that, had he been born 100 years before he was, he'd have been a Confederate.
Unless by hindsight you mean, "knowing that something was evil, and saying you'd be willing to do it anyway" --- a contemporary Foote, time-machined back to the war with contemporary knowledge, and volunteering for the gray. If that's what you meant then I yeah, sure, that's disgusting. But to say "if I'd have been alive then, I'd have been a Confederate," seems to me more the first case than the second. Am I misunderstanding you, still?
C I wrote, "one might objectively recognize that a person born in a particular time and place, to what was a common station in life, would likely have fought for either one. But in retrospect to affirm that - given benefit of hindsight and reflection - one would have fought for either regime is disgusting IMHO."
So the point isn't "who one might have been" in some past context where most people were "X", but "given the benefit of hindsight and reflection" to assert that one would make that choice is problematic, at best. I'm assuming some moral and philosophical distance. I would never make the statement, "I would have fought for the Nazis", because "I" am not a person caught in the maelstrome of Germany in the 1930s. There ARE, presumably, people who - "with benefit of hindsight and reflection" - would make the statement "I would have fought for the Nazis" - like, say, David Duke - and it means something beyond the banal - i.e. the unfortunate determinism of time and place and the fact that most people who fight a war don't really "choose" sides. When a contemporary historian like Foote makes such a statement, I take it as, indeed, a "statement", beyond stating of the obvious that most Southerners of their era were swept into the Confederate cause.
Excellent piece. I teach an American Lit class every fall and I always begin with "Autobiography of a Slave," (Frederick Douglas) because it is essentially the best novel written among the earliest American works in existance. We always begin with a highly-charged discussion of racism that usually lasts close to 90 minutes.
Two characteristics emerge always: That the southerners were motivated by greed, profit, and an arrogant sense of being pre-ordained to maintain a higher standard of living than their Yankee counterparts, which included the fantasy notion that their women were to always be put on some bizarre pedastal, and that the men saw their roles as supporting, protecting and defending their honor--which gave them a convenient built-in excuse to fear and loathe black men.
Secondly, that they conveniently used slaves in order to achieve this--a free work force, built upon the widespread and almost universally-accepted white supremicist dogma that was manifested overtly into Jim Crow and covertly into all other forms of discrimination, prejudice and racism--just as Hitler robbed and killed the Jews in order to finance German imperialism. Scapegoat Economics.
So the either-or notion that slavery was either predicated upon economics or racism is essentially invalid; the two are not mututally exclusive. Racism, sexism and machismo were all part and parcel of the southern male identity that shaped southern policy and social belief for a long, long time.
Coates,
You are reading some good stuff but I have always relied upon DuBois's "Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880" as the best work on Reconstruction. His final chapter "The Propaganda of History" is an Atom Bomb decimating the problem of historiography in the US. What you are describing about slavery's boost to white consciousness, DuBois called the "wages of whiteness".
I feel like we might be too far down in the thread to mention this, but this topic is really of interest to me. I never know how to handle the context of primitive ideas on civil rights. F. Scott Fitzgerald is one of my favorite writers, but he was a homophobe--to what extent am I supposed to let that bother me?
That one is really very minor compared to what I'm about to bring up. I know I've brought it up here before, but I think it's worth mentioning in this thread. Andrew Jackson probably had the most to do with how America looks right now pre-Lincoln. However, looking at what he did, how is he not the same as Hitler? I mean, seriously. He expanded America (lebensraum, anyone? Also, is that the right spelling?), systematically killed and forced relocation of a minority, rose from working class roots, etc.
There's a cliche that goes with this I guess: The winners get to write history. And it's hard for me to get my head around the idea that my morality is partially shaped by literal wars that were fought long before me.
The Burns documentary is a sprawling, incoherent mess. I was baffled by all the praise it recieved.
There are plenty of great documentaries, ("The Prize," "Shock of the New," "Eyes on the Prize") but this clearly isn't one of them.
TNC, you should check out David Blight's "Race and Reunion: The Civil War and American Memory," an invaluable piece of historiography in dealing with race; white supremacy and its role in the construction and maintenance of the history as social memory school of thought/movement. In short, he does a magestarial job of elucidating exactly how crucial a reconnoitered, romantic white supremacy was and would become in terms of the forging of a national memory after the Civil War, not only in the South ("Gothic" or otherwise) but the entire country (much as would happen after WWs I and II).
Another hell of a read is Alexander Saxon's "The Rise and Fall of the White Republic," especially the way he takes down Jacksonian so-called democracy.
"I'm sorry, your take is pretty superficial. "
I'm sorry but your apologetics are superficial. I pointed out pretty specifically why Burns doc felt tilted Southward. And gave good reason to believe that Foote is a very, very flawed narrator. This isn't a "take" - it's a fact that he revealed himself via an encounter with a reporter that I doubt you were aware of. It's also, according to a reasonably reliable obituary, the attitude of most Civil War historians - actual historians, as opposed to novelists-turned-amateur-historians - that Foote's history is seriously flawed. And that these flaws are, in effect, a feature of his Southern POV. Not surprising...
If your idea of reliable history is Shelby Foote, although I haven't read the man I dare say the preponderance of what I do in fact know about him and his place in the enormous body of Civil War historical narratives suggests I'm not the superfical one.
I was aware of his racism, although not that particular interview - a sad fact about the man that gives me little joy. I reject your conceptualization of my posts above as "apologetics." And I am not, and never was, arguing that Foote's take was the first and/or only thing one should read on the subject. But it is well written, there is a lot of material in there that is well thought-out, incisive, and valuable, and your rejection of it out of hand does you no service.
Cherry-picking from obits to buttress your pre-formed damnation of the man's work as useless isn't helping you, either. We could turn to the NYT, for example:
Carrying readers from Fort Sumter to Appomattox, the work was greeted by most reviewers in the spirit of the New York Times Book Review contributor who called it "a remarkable achievement, prodigiously researched, vigorous, detailed, absorbing." Others used words like "monumental," "comprehensive," and "even-handed." In The New York Review of Books, C. Vann Woodward complimented the author on capturing the "intimacy of combat" with his "impressive narrative gifts and dramatic purposes."
Responding to the observation that it took him five times as long to write the war as its participants took to fight it, Mr. Foote pointed out that "there were a good many more of them than there was of me." Inspired by the works of Tacitus, Thucydides, Gibbon and, more surprising, Marcel Proust, Mr. Foote's own specially prized writer for prose style, psychological insight and the sweep of his vision, he created a history as written by a novelist, with due bows to a line that included Tolstoy, Stendhal and Stephen Crane.
In treating North and South evenhandedly and covering the campaigns in both east and west, Mr. Foote accepted the historian's standards of evidence without the baggage of footnotes, for which he was faulted by some academics, who also criticized his sketchy attention to politics, economics and diplomacy. But most were grateful. Louis D. Rubin Jr. summed up in The New Republic: "It is a model of what military history can be."
Your sweeping generalizations about CW historians would not be supportable with regard to most any serious take on the subject - like every other historical field, there's a lot of controversy. But, again, to you this is something simple, there's a good side and a bad side, and we can just toss Foote in on the bad side and be done with it.
Would that history were so easy.
You're actually making superficial generalizations in response to some specifics - the fact that he didn't indulge in footnotes, that he admitted he could care less about any serious historical context for the war, i.e. politics and economics, and that he compared his historiography to that of a novelist. Perhaps it's too "sweeping" to suggest that these aren't small matters from the perspective of serious historians.
But there's Louis D. Rubin...also a novelist, literary critic and historian who was pretty open about his romance with the Confederacy and the South in general, who grew up in the South in the same era as Foote - just a few years his junior - and taught at a Southern university so I guess the points I made don't matter. Rubin's is obviously a perfectly reliable last word on Foote. Foote may be a "model of what military history can be", but that's an inherently superficial rendering of the history of the Civil War era, which is what I understood the subject of these comments to be. I'm not rejecting Foote "out of hand" - if I was a Civil War buff I'd read him. I'm not, so I don't see any compelling reason given what else is out there that doesn't rest on deep biases, romanticism and nostalgia for a (thankfully) dead culture.
It's worth considering whether you guys are going to convince each other. At some point, it might be worth agreeing to disagree.
The word "persevering" comes to mind. Excellent try. I gave up after the second attempt.
RL - stop and think about your "second attempt". It was an admission that Foote's value - to you - was the sense that he wasn't a reliable narrator but you were fascinated by that fact and found it useful. I don't have that kind of time on my hands... And I'm as struck - and annoyed - by the "perseverance" on display here as you are.
If you want to see a great perspective on the Civil War rent "Gettysburg" and "Gods and Generals" which Ted Turner financed. Great movies.
Jeff Daniels plays the historic figure Joshua Chamberlain who led a regiment of Maine soldiers at Gettysburg. His regiment was the end of the Union line. He held that line and led a famous bayonet charge. Certainly one of the single most important moments in the Civil War.
Later in the war when Lee surrendered to Grant Chamberlain was selected to preside over the parade of the Confederate infantry as part of their formal surrender at Appomattox Court House on April 12.
Contrast the egalitarianism of the Maine bred Chamberlain with some of the southern figure.
Hate to belabor this but...
From the WaPo obit of Shelby Foote: "he didn't bother with footnotes and touched only vaguely on larger themes of the war's origin and ramifications.
"Mr. Foote answered his critics by saying: 'My hope was that if I wrote well enough about what you would have seen with your own eyes, you yourself would see how those things, the politics and economics, entered in. I quite deliberately left those things out. My job was to put it all in perspective, to give it shape. Look at Flaubert: He didn't criticize Emma Bovary as a terrible woman; he didn't judge her; he just put down what happened.'"
Pretty stunning. This guy was clearly - even in his "history" - writing as a novelist..not a historian.
I'm a northern white who lived in Virginia as a child, endured the taunts of "yankee" from my playmates who liked to re-fight the Civil War in neighborhood battles.
But I never really got what the South was about, despite many, many visits to the South over the years, to battlefields galore -- until another routine vacation down to Wilmington, NC. a few years ago. I don't know what switch was finally flicked on in my head, but as the spouse and I walked through the historic district one night, admiring the old houses and reading the plaques on each house or store, I suddenly realized in a completely emotional level what was before me.
Every brick in the sidewalk, every plank on the old houses, every nail, every shingle, every pane of glass, all the plaster on the walls inside, and the lathe strips the plaster was bonded to... every single thing that represented the output of the economy of the old South was made by a slave.
We took a tour of an antebellum mansion in town. The owner at the time of the war was a physician, and the house in town was where his family lived when the weather was too oppressive at the plantation (rice) up river. I remember seeing the impression of a human hand in the plaster in the attic, put there in the 1850's or so when it was still wet, and realized I was seeing the handprint of a human being who's life was spent in bondage to a healer, supposedly.
There's a lot of beauty in the externals of the old South, in the images and style of that culture and society, but underneath it all is something that is simply ugly.
I've never been able to go back to the South since without seeing the romantization of cruelty and the cynical justifications for slavery that were quite explicitly made back in the day, as something that we still have not entirely purged from our national spirit.
I'm reminded of this every time Pat Buchannan opens his mouth, actually.
Look up the Wilmington race coup of 1898. You'll never look at Wilmington the same after learning about it.
I feel like people who don't know much about the Civil War say that is was about slavery.
Then people who know a decent amount about the civil war say "actually, it wasn't about slavery".
And people who know a lot about the Civil War are like, "yeah, that shit was about slavery."
It's kind of like the Iraq war. You can make a good argument that it wasn't about oil, but without oil, the war never happens.
This is so true.
As a Civil War buff, I know that it wasn't about slavery.
As a person who understand how God works, I can totally see how it was all about slavery. No good Christian would have expected that society to last forever, anyway. And I mean to say, that one way or another, slaver was going to come to an end...
Grant's Memoirs are incredibly readable, and a great antidote to the Southern swagger. He's very down-to-earth and unassuming, and without his being terribly hostile about the Southerners, you get this very clear picture of them as self-important schmucks. Really worth reading.
(There's very little about race or slavery in the Memoirs; I don't know how good or bad Grant's personal politics were. But if you want to clear your mind of the fog of Southern glamor, you can't do better than Grant.)
I have always been a fan of Shelby Foote. When I was stationed on a high endurance cutter I spent my free time reading his entire works. With that being said, there are a tremendous amount of holes in his history, if taken from the African-american perspective.
The other thing that I wanted to comment on was the fact that the Southern generals, and indeed, most of the southern officers did exude a great deal more "swagger" than their northern counterparts. The very picture heading this blog post is of Thomas Jackson whom I happen to share a birthday with, and was perhaps the greatest general on either side. Can you imagine a Union general employing himself as an artillery instructor at the Virginia Military Institute, because that is exactly where Stonewall was at the start of the Civil War?
The truth of the matter was that the most distinguished officers from the Mexican American war were almost exclusively from the south. Adding to the disparity, the southerners were sending their best and brightest to West Point Military Academy, whereas it was semi-passé in the early part of the 19th century for Northerners.
Robert E. Lee is the only West Point cadet to graduate without having ever received a demerit. The south wasn't the only faction to take notice of him, however. Lincoln personally tried to get Lee to lead the Army of the Potomac before the firing on Fort Sumpter, but to no avail. Some people think that the lines were drawn around that time, but I think that given military personalities and interactions it is likely that it was decided after so many a good man scaled the wall at Chapultepec.
Ta-Nehisi,
If you want to understand the connection between slavery and republicanism in the South (as well as for Free Soil northerners), then you need to read Edmund Morgan's AMERICAN SLAVERY, AMERICAN FREEDOM, as well as my advisor's book -- POWER AND POLITICS IN A SLAVE SOCIETY: ALABAMA, 1820-1860, by J. Mills Thornton. Thornton for the first time explained to me why small, yeoman southerners (who were mostly Democrats) joined with(mostly former Whig) great planters in secession. As a lifelong Massachusetts Yankee, he for the first time adequately explicated the Southern mind (his tone is elegiac and tragic, and even includes bits from the Caesar mentioned above in his conclusion.
Eugene Genovese's ROLL, JORDAN, ROLL: THE WORLD THE SLAVES MADE is romantic and in many ways flawed (totally ignores the yeomanry, e.g.), but still worthwhile (Genovese's also interesting for the fact that he and his wife, Elizabeth Fox Genovese, went from being doctrinaire Stalinists to Catholic Neoconservatives).
You also might be interested in Marcus Rediker's excellent recent book THE SLAVE SHIP, which views the slave-ship as the origin of the industrial, capitalist factory.
Also, on an older topic, T-N, you mentioned that the 19th C. seemed a lot more politically violent to you than the current era. That's true in some ways, though much of that political violence was ritualized and descended from Anglo-American (as well as other western European, esp. French) crowd/mobbing traditions that were the only effective popular political expressions in these hierarchical, ancien regime societies. However, every example you provide is in fact from the period between the end of the Mexican War and the beginning of the Civil War, probably the most chaotically politically violent period in US history. This is not to say that the 19th C. did not see more popular political violence than the 20th, merely that extrapolating from the 1850s to the rest of the 19th C. is not exactly good history.
Can you imagine a Union general employing himself as an artillery instructor at the Virginia Military Institute, because that is exactly where Stonewall was at the start of the Civil War?
Wasn't Sherman the head of a Louisiana military academy? [quick google] Sure was. (Sherman's Memoirs, sadly, are much less great than Grant's. His life was fascinating, but his writing is dry.)
Agree with you on both recommendations. Read Grant's Memoirs, appreciated his perspective and understood the man better. A book to be read again. Could not get through Sherman. Which is exceedingly rare for me. The human story of Grant's concern for his family, Mark Twain, and that odd, sad picture of a dying Grant writing on the porch still resonate.
Sherman had swagger. Tecumseh proved it when he burned the old grand bastion Atlanta. But Sherman was far from the best example of a Union officer with swagger.
The best the Union had to offer wasn't even in within the context of the southern mold. I could make an argument that Joshua Chamberlain was the one Union officer that stood out the most, and he wasn't ranked highly enough to have considerable or broad influence. (You may recall, however, that he was chosen to receive the official surrender as a Colonel.)
At the start of the war Joshua Chamberlain was far from the southern aristocratic war monger. He was a professor just the same, although not at USMA. He taught rhetoric and studied theology and was so moved by whatever cause he took a leave of absence to join despite having no prior experience in the implements of war.
But what else would you expect from the grandson of revolutionaries? Those Maine men were the equivalent of Army Rangers in the days of the Civil War. Besides, you had to have swagger to lead a charge in the defense of Little Round Top with no bullets.
The south just had way more of those types of fellows, though.
I believe Chamberlain was a Major General when he received the surrender. At least a "breveted" temporary Major General.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Chamberlain
In any case the man had style.
As for the quality of northern officers if you look at some of the photos of Philip Sheridan he has that same crazy quality some of the southerners had. So did Sherman to a lesser extent.
I preferred Sherman because right from the beginning he realized the war was going to be a long, bloody mess and that there was no glory in it.
It's unfortunate that GW Bush got that fake southern bravado thang going instead of looking to the past of his New England ancestors.
Two Points:
1) The claims that Lee opposed slavery are dubious at best.
2) In the 1990s, Transition published a critique of Ken Burns' Civil War series called "All In The Family" that saw the documentary as pro-Southern.
Agree with you on both recommendations. Read Grant's Memoirs, appreciated his perspective and understood the man better. A book to be read again. Could not get through Sherman. Which is exceedingly rare for me. The human story of Grant's concern for his family, Mark Twain, and that odd, sad picture of a dying Grant writing on the porch still resonate.
One thing I'd add--calling saying Lee "opposed slavery" isn't the same as calling him an abolitionist.
Ta-nehisi--
On Lee, I'd suggest reading Lee Considered. Lee's image has a whole lot of cruft built up around it -- there's a fantasy of him as the bestest kindest noblest most bravest man in the whole world that comes out of the romanticization of the South. Nolan's book does a nice job of going through contemporary information to clear away some of the clouds of glory -- while Lee probably wasn't any worse on slavery than most Southerners of his class, there's very little evidence that he actually opposed it.
For example, from a letter he wrote right before the end of the war:
Fair enough. "All accounts" was too much, and takes it to far. I should have written that sentence differently. I was focused on the broader point I was pursuing. Every phrase won't be precisely calibrated.
lizard! you're a civil war buff! i should have known it, and yet i didn't.
worse than that--shameful admission--i just don't tend to think that women will catch the bug to begin with. great--displaying my sexism on a thread about racism.
and yet the author of "march", geraldine brooks, talks about how long it took her to catch the bug from her husband--how dull she thought it was.
until suddenly she got obsessed too. it really is an equal-opportunity disease.
TNC—
The tension you describe—almost the schizophrenia, really—in watching and enjoying an old movie while knowing that you would not be accepted into its world (or, possibly, even by its creators) is a visceral manifestation of our living in a present where the good and the bad of the past are intractably interwoven; and it is a refutation of the simplistic line of thinking that says, That was then and this is now, The times have changed. (Of course it is true that the then and the now are different, but also that the then formed and continues to inform the now.)
There may be a temptation just to avoid those movies, or even to condemn them categorically. (Maybe along the lines of stereotypical Jewish reluctance to buy German cars.) But maybe a lot of them are good movies, and perhaps some are even beautiful works of art, and aren't they a part of your cultural inheritance, as an American? So there's no easy way out of the tension without dismissing one or another part of oneself.
Perhaps a similar tension is in owing some sort of debt, intellectual or otherwise, to a person who would reject you. I've wondered, for instance, about the Jewish philosophical students of Heidegger, who was a member of the Nazi party. Hannah Arendt, for one, was apparently even his lover. How can you understand your relation to him, in a case like that? Either to apologize for him—to say that on some level he wasn't REALLY a Nazi—or simply to vilify him, and to say you owe him nothing as a teacher or as a lover, both seem disingenuous to me. Humans are messier than that.
Many of us can look to our own ancestors, immediate or distant, for another model of this tension. Even if we grew up with both parents, how many of us can say that all of our ancestors would approve of all of our other ancestors? Or even of us, given our being mixed of them? And whether we're talking about a biological ancestor, or an old author we admire, or an ancient philosophical or religious teacher, or a framer of the Constitution, how do you recognize someone who is in a real and important sense your father, honor what he gave you, yet knowing that he would reject you?
There is a minor character in the Mahabharata—the vast, ancient Indian epic—names Ekalavya. He wants to train under the great teacher Drona to be an archer, but he is of low caste and Drona won't have him as a student. So while Drona is training Arjuna and the other great heroes of the epic, Ekalavya sets up a clay version of Drona in the forest and starts his own disciplined training regimen, and is eventually revealed to be able to match or better even Arjuna at archery. His story is complex and subtle, and how he ends up perhaps less encouraging, but it remains striking to me that he does not simply make Drona's rejection of him mutual and train himself, but in a crude way makes Drona his teacher despite the rejection, and manages that way to match even the best of Drona's "accepted" students.
And I wonder if we aren't always so crafting our teachers, and if we all don't owe some great part of ourselves or our good fortunes to such tainted forces.
What makes the story of Ekalavya even more sad is the episode when he cuts off his own thumb. Arjuna feels threatened by him, he convinces Drona to intercede for him. Even after being rejected, Ekalavya reveres Drona so much that he cuts off his own thumb as payment for Drona's "teaching". The moral complexity in what is a minor episode in a vast work is simply astounding.
The degree of moral uncertainty in the characters in the Mahabharata never ceases to amaze me. The protagonists all too often make the wrong decisions, many times for selfish gain. The antagonists in some respects play by the rules. In the end, everyone, good and bad goes to heaven. What a work that can show so many facets of humanity.
First - This blog is amazing - the posts themselves are great, but any time I take the time to read the comments, I am always rewarded. This has to be the smartest, most informed group of readers on the internet.
Second, as slanted as Burns' Civil War documentary was, there was one gem I've never forgotten - a quote from a Southern soldier who was asked after capture why he fought when neither he nor any of his family owned slaves - he said something to the effect: "Because the Northerners came down here and were shooting at us".
I thought of this many times as we began our adventure in Iraq and Cheney was telling us that we'd be greeted as liberators. You shoot at people, they generally feel the need to shoot back.
I've read very little about the Civil War, because as a transplanted white southerner (lived elsewhere until I was 13, now 54) I think I've always been so turned off by the glorification of it all that the whole subject was taboo for me. So this is an entirely un-informed opinion - but knowing what I know, it is inconceivable to me that there were many white southerners at the time of the Civil War who were not racists under any conceivable definition of the word. [But apparently there were Southern abolitionist organizations - an interesting guy named Moncure Conway - http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A22595-2004Aug21.html.]
Something this entire string made me think about that I haven't seen discussed - wasn't at least part of the point of the Jim Crow laws was to convince poor southern whites that it was in their best interest that blacks be subjugated - "You may be poor and white but at least you are not black" - and in turn, that served what was left of the southern "aristocracy" because they could play poor blacks and poor whites against each other - a twofer, so to speak. Hence no real unionization in the South, etc. In other words, it has always been in the best interest of the southern aristocracy to exploit racism for their own ends. And there is a long tradition (touched on in a comment above) of the paternilistic attitude of the wealthy towards blacks, coupled with disdain for "white trash" who were so vehemently racist. As a child (in the '60's), I picked up on a subtle signal of this - the side of the family who thought they were somewhat high class, they would never have used the "n" word - they used the more genteel "nigra". But in my experience, they were more racist and obsessed with race than my redneck relatives who used the "n" word freely.
When you run out of giant historical narratives, there's a giant cultural analysis that sorts out a lot about differences in white southern and white northern cultures. Check out "Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America" by David Hackett Fischer.
The swagger you're seeing is the same Cavalier culture that backed the Stuarts in the English Civil War, and loved horses and swords and hats with giant feathers and lace cuffs and the whole dashing style thing--and found large plantations a remarkably good way to pretend to own large estates in the mother country.
It's a different breed than all those stiff, starched New Englanders in solid plain fabrics from Thanksgiving pageants and the Scarlet Letter.
Both are different from the fiesty, ready-to-live-off-the-land, too-quick-to-grab-their-rifles borderers who filled in the eastern mountains.
Albion's Seed doesn't exactly make any of the early white settler traditions look like the good guys: it's more that it lets you notice that the rats arrived with different markings, and you can still see the difference at work.
If anybody's looking for primary sources regarding that Southern "swagger" (or the tribes of Southern whiteness), one that might be worth reading is Lanterns on the Levee, which is the memoirs of William Alexander Percy—an image if ever there was one of genteel Southern aristocracy. And I think something like an uncle figure to the young Shelby Foote, who has been mentioned quite a bit in this thread.
Percy calls himself a "planter's son," and though living after the end of slavery, does so on his family's old land in the Mississippi Delta, and makes a defense of sharecropping. He is an exemplar of patronizing affection for blacks and vitriolic loathing of "white trash," at one point saying of the poor whites of the Mississippi hill country that they are inferior to the blacks, whom they loathe, and he blames them for the lynchings and the Klan activity that gave all the South such a bad name. (He in fact recounts the tale of his father and his aristocratic planter brethren running the Klan out of the Delta, and though reserving some exception for Forrest and some "original" Klan, clearly has nothing but contempt for his contemporary white trash Klan.)
Percy was a poet, and much of the book is beautifully written, especially as he waxes romantic about the South generally and about his own Mississippi Delta in particular. His profound condescension to blacks, and the way he sums up the cultures of other ethnic groups in the Delta in order to commend what he sees as their strengths and to criticize what he sees as their weaknesses, can be hard to take. (He says, for instance, that the Italians showed up with a healthy Mediterranean work-ethic, but that their children inherited none of it and instead adopted the degenerate mores of the poor whites.) He is not the stereotype of the hateful Southern racist—he says those people are the white trash—but he surely seems to be no believer in equality, either. But it does make for an interesting window into old Southern culture(s), and suggests a kind of complexity to it/them that I was mostly ignorant of until stumbling onto this book.
The only group he seems to have unqualified praise for is Jews, and apparently because he sees them as being cultured and refined in a manner similar to himself— making all other whites look "stodgy and unintellectual" by comparison, or something like that. In expressing this praise, he speaks of one old, unsuccessful Jewish merchant, who arrived from Russia with nothing, and who yet recommends a poet and speaks passionately of poetry. In fact it seems that much of Percy's sense of his own aristocracy, and of the (dying, as he sees it) Southern aristocracy, comes from such a sense of refinement of culture, or of a sort of poetic sensibility.
There is an additional nuance in the suggestion—steadfastly denied by some, and not obvious from the book—that there is a great deal of evidence, including many first-person accounts, that Percy was gay. And that some of the black men of whom he spoke with such patronizing affection were his lovers. This is discussed some in Rising Tide, John's Barry's excellent account of the Mississippi River flood of 1927, but the Percy book may be worth reading if the subject interests you.
The Confederate mythology is key not just to understanding the Civil War but also the racial battles of the 20th century -- because Southerners were steeped in that mythology through at least the late '60s. My father went to public high school in Baton Rouge and graduated in 1969. The school was called Robert E. Lee High School (it still is though I think the demographics have changed), and the mascot, of course, the Rebels. That's not so interesting, right? Lots of institutions in the South are named for Lee. But what I've always found interesting is that if you look at the high school yearbooks from those years -- this is 1969, post-"Summer of Love", the Freedom Rides, MLK and RFK have already been killed, etc. -- they don't have prom kings and queens. Instead the various members of the prom court are named after various Confederate generals and their wives, and all the girls are wearing hoop skirts.
BTW, TNC, have you read W.J. Cash, "The Mind of the South" (1941)? It's not academic history by any means -- it's sort of journalism-cum-history -- but for a brilliant, impressionistic survey of the white Southern sensibility it's never really been matched.
on swagger:
it is worth remembering how thoroughly the north destroyed the south, as a matter of warfare.
the devastation to the south's military, economic, and agricultural basis was extensive. southern cities were starved out, made uninhabitable, partially reduced to rubble. the military superiority of the north, in the final year of the war, only continued to grow and grow. by the end, the military superiority of the northern forces to the southern forces was nearly as great as between a modern first-world army and third-world army.
my point is not to say "pity the poor slave-holders"--far from it.
my point is rather that swagger, on the part of the victorious north, would have been unseemly and inhumane. it would have been the opposite of magnanimous. it would look to us now, in retrospect, ugly and intolerable.
look: we northerners beat the crap out of them. not in the first years of the war--there they handed our asses to us several times. but towards the end of the war, we just beat the living snot out of the south. go blue! we were beating them, and victory felt unbelievably great. yess! gettysburg! yesss! vicksburg! woo-hoo, score! yes, marching through georgia, take that, suckers! and we could have kept beating them like a red-headed step-child, if one of our number had not stepped forward and said:
"with malice towards none. with charity for all."
and suddenly we sobered up. suddenly the fun of kicking someone's ass was replaced by the sad realization that these too were human beings, these were our compatriots, these were our fellow americans.
and we set the swagger aside, to do the hard work of binding up the wounds.
so when you see a lack of swagger in the north, remember how unbecoming it would have been, how inhumane. the starchy dignity, the restraint in victory, is largely a matter of decency on the part of people who were the overwhelming and undisputed victors.
and when you see swagger in the south, remember that's all they had left. the swagger of people who had been defeated in every serious respect, but were nevertheless allowed to keep some scraps of dignity.
Looking for something else this a.m., found this from 2005 about a push to re-name 3 parks in Memphis - Confederate Park, Forrest Park and Jefferson Davis Park - Al Sharpton even came to town and made some good points - why do we honor, in public spaces, people who were terrorists? (the parks' names haven't changed):
Monumental Battle
Answers to the Confederate parks controversy aren't inscribed in black and white.
http://www.memphisflyer.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A9940
Some Northern generals did have "swagger." In many cases, the swagger was not supported by military competence or success (think Hooker, Pope, McLellan, for example).
A somewhat facile--but not wholly inaccurate--analogy is with the English Civil War; the South represented the Cavaliers and the North the parliamentary "New Army" (aka roundheads). The latter did not stem from a long-standing military tradition, instead they created a disciplined, modern army that had uniform standards and equipment. The leadership did not live to fight, but instead took war seriously and ensured that they won.
The North did this. The most successful Northern commanders (Grant, Sherman, and Thomas) did not "swagger," they fought to win.
"When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?" -- John Ball, 1381 (Interestingly, he seems to have shared the fate of Nat Turner)
Ball's sermon got picked up again by Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers in the 1650s -- the sentiments have, evidently, a notable longevity.
Perhaps it is fair to say that abolitionism wasn't about race either, but about hierarchy and social structure -- with slavery so abhorrent because of its power to seduce the whole range of society from the second rung up.
@ Tom S.
I think the analogy is not coincidental, particularly given the uncanny longevity of roundhead ideology. Extending on Albion's Seed, and echoing Rediker's Many Headed Hydra, there's a fair argument that the American Civil War was a continuation of the European Civil Wars of two centuries before.
I'd venture that there's a pretty strong intellectual and theological connection between abolitionist and Leveling sentiment. This is perhaps easiest to see in the home country with Wilberforce and his Quaker allies -- not least because the British activists were led by hyper-articulate elites. But it is also significant in looking at the abolitionist tradition in the U.S.
It's interesting the Vermont had the highest per capita casualty rate amongst Northern states in the Civil War. It was also one of the "burned-over districts" of religious revival that helped fuel many of the antebellum reform movements. It's also notably that the remarkable Union commanders seem to have had a particularly high mortality rate -- Lyon and Reynolds come to mind immediately... and the fact that they shared a fate with "Stonewall" Jackson (a Southern shooter's "own goal") may be of some significance.
As to swagger, something about the belief that "by works a man is justified, and not by faith only" (James 2:24). It kind of takes the swagger out of you.
An interesting point on Chamberlain and the 20th Maine, by the way. It wasn't that the regiment 'swaggered' but rather, it seems, that it was lucky. It served on the fringes of Antietam, and -- it appears -- was under some form of quarantine due to smallpox for some period before Gettysburg.
As such, it was one of the few Union regiments that had 'seen the elephant' without being shattered and/or weakened by an influx of raw recruits.
Which raises one of the less romantic realities within the Civil War -- some significant portion of Southern small-unit battlefield effectiveness seems to have resulted from the Southern reluctance to replace casualties within a regiment, with the result that they tended to march to battle as small but cohesive units. Union units, by contrast, tended to retain paper strength, but, one suspects, their unit cohesion was damaged by the influx of replacements. (And here the 20th Maine would be an exception proving the rule.)
The most revealing section on race in the book is this part where a Southerner is defending slavery and basically says that by giving the South a class of servants bound for life, all white people get to be aristocrats.
Ta-Nehisi,
V. S. Naipaul had a lot to say about this in his wonderful book "A Turn in the South."
Fantastic post, man. I used to feel the same way watching old movies sometimes, which is weird because I am the type to get completely absorbed into a flick. I feel like it's related to assimilation (I'm a brown immigrant) .. like, you're trying to empathize with and join this society or group, and you find yourself liking them, almost like a geek wanting to be part of a high school clique; but then you stop and wonder, how do they look at me really? do they not want me? like, for example, say hypothetically that i'm a kid who finds himself really diggin hip hop ('i see you bobbin your head') but then i wonder if the hip-hop kids and the artist would reject me. it comes up sometimes and not just in the context of race.
I may have rambled here.
Fantastic post, man. I used to feel the same way watching old movies sometimes, which is weird because I am the type to get completely absorbed into a flick. I feel like it's related to assimilation (I'm a brown immigrant) .. like, you're trying to empathize with and join this society or group, and you find yourself liking them, almost like a geek wanting to be part of a high school clique; but then you stop and wonder, how do they look at me really? do they not want me? like, for example, say hypothetically that i'm a kid who finds himself really diggin hip hop ('i see you bobbin your head') but then i wonder if the hip-hop kids and the artist would reject me. it comes up sometimes and not just in the context of race.
I may have rambled here.
This post upthread expresses this far, far better than I have.
I like to add that Stonewall Jackson was opposed to slavery as well. He was a deeply religious man from the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia, which was not a heavily slaved area, and he actually though the Civil War was God's way of punishing the South for the South's transgressions against God, i.e., slavery. His understanding was that as a Virginian his role was to defend his State, which he saw as his role in God's plan.