It’s possible that the commemorations of the Civil War’s 150th anniversary will help bring Americans, and our political factions, together. Possible, but not very likely. I’m all for the commemorations, don’t get me wrong. Considering the Civil War’s seminal influence on who we are as a nation, it would be kind of crazy to not commemorate it — even allowing for our usual national apathy toward history. What I’m hoping is that the commemorations will reflect that era’s complexity, and will tackle all its deep divisions.
Let me try to explain with a family story, similar to thousands of other Southern families’ stories. One of my great-great grandfathers was a scout for Lee’s army during the Civil War. He survived the war, came home to Spartanburg County, S.C., and lived a long life, proud of his contributions to the “Lost Cause.” Another great-great grandfather, this one from the Tennessee mountains, told his descendants that neither he nor any other man he knew in his area had wanted anything to do with “the planters’ war.” As far as he and his acquaintances were concerned, they weren’t about to leave their families to go off God-knows-where to fight for the Low Country’s “sissy planters” and their right to keep slaves.
Those opposing views of secession and the war sum up, in a nutshell, some of the divisions within the South at the time — divisions that most of the South’s Civil War romanticists seldom admit, much less study or “commemorate.”
What would be nice is a clear, honest look at the war and its complicated, divided loyalties, rather than the usual Gone With the Wind-driven drivel about the South’s “noble cause” and its slave-owning “aristocracy” — or, on the other hand, the Northern fables about that region’s “united front” against secession and slavery. We may not see much about it in the next four years, but it’s a plain, historical fact that many, many people in both the North and South hated the war and thought it was unnecessary, stupid, wasteful and even criminal. There’s a reason that desertions were rampant on both sides.
Northern citizens, many of whom, let’s face it, didn’t care about slavery or “the Union” any more than my great-great grandfather cared about planters’ slave problems, suffered terribly when men were taken from their jobs to fight the rebels. Riots against the draft system broke out across the North, culminating in a horrifying, four-day riot/killing-spree in New York City.
In the South, the divisions ran at least as deeply, with entire regions of some states resisting efforts to corral young men into the Confederate army. West Virginia was founded when much of Virginia’s mountainous area split from the state over secession. In Mississippi, Jones County became such a haven for deserters — complete with an armed company of men who fought Confederate troops that tried to arrest them — stories swirled that the county had seceded from both Mississippi and the Confederacy.
Throughout the region, white Southern women, whose husbands’ absence had left them severely impoverished and hungry, marched, rioted and fought the Confederate authorities that tried to keep them from food and clothing warehouses. In eastern N.C., Lumbee Indians rebelled against Confederates who tried to conscript them for forced labor. Of course, many white men went to war voluntarily, if not gladly, to defend the region against what they saw as an illegal invasion.
Problems arise when commemoration of a devastating war whose root cause was the practice of slavery — which is clear to anyone who reads the states’ actual declarations of secession — turns into a festival of clueless arrogance, such as last December’s “Secession Ball” in Charleston. Now, organizers of Charleston’s commemorations say they’re dismayed that very few African-Americans are attending the events. I guess it never occurred to the organizers that for most Southern blacks, the post-Civil War South wasn’t exactly the promised land envisioned by abolitionists. In fact, for most blacks, the war became a mere prelude to the poverty, violence and horrors of the decades-long Jim Crow era. Those kinds of nasty experiences get passed down, don’t you know.
History is always more subtle and complex than memory. History involves dealing with the facts. Sad to say, but official sesquicentennial Civil War events have so far been too long on memory and its myths, and too short on the war’s intricacies and contradictions. Remember our history, but make it our real history, not some magnolias-and-moonlight at Tara fantasyland.
This article appears in Apr 19-25, 2011.
