Why Southerners Still Honor the Confederacy

150 years after the start of the Civil War, Confederate nostalgia has waned. But there is much the New South can still honor.

Mr. Frum has written an attack on those who commemorate the Confederacy.  He terms it “treason in the service of slaveholding” and cites Nietzsche -- never a good sign for anything but Conan movies.  In point of fact, the South has mostly let the Confederacy go, keeping only its most anodyne impulses; moonlight and magnolia and Grey Ghosts.  But it is the comments to Frum’s piece that inspire me to write.  They are the usual South hating we have come to expect from the same party that was fine with the South until slave holding and segregation ended, and it unforgivably began voting Republican.  There can be no American conservatism that does not incorporate its Southern branch.  This requires rejecting its racial component and adopting or accommodating its classic conservative aspects.

Frum hails from Canada -- a nation shaped by the view that 1776 was treason in the service of slaveholders -- so his upbringing may account for some of it.  After all, Samuel Johnson famously noted that it was those who hold slaves who bleat the loudest for liberty  To quote Frum, what choice do we have -- recently celebrating that slave-holder Washington’s birthday -- but pride or shame?  I jest but Frum’s view is widely held in New England.  The post 1960’s cultural forces are also inordinately anti-Southern as pre-1960’s culture was inordinately pro-Southern.  The South’s refusal to be ashamed abashes its foes.

The attachment to the Confederacy and to the larger idea of “southerness” is but a portion of that region’s greater insulation form the anomie and up-rootedness of modernism and post-modernism.  This is a shared component of both black and white southerners.  Some of it was captured in this article from the New York Times discussing blacks returning to the South and the Southern concept of home in the 1970’s.  A quarter of a century later, the same themes on African-Americans returning to the South, echoes the view that it “feels” like home.

So what is it that keeps the memory of the Confederacy alive after 150 years, and along with it, the unique place of Southerness in the consciousness of those inhabitants of long ancestry here?  The proposition that it is some love of slavery or even segregation misses the mark by a wide margin.  As noted by many, Chicago is more segregated than Atlanta.  Virginia elected a black governor before New York or Massachusetts did, I would add, with more success.  Currently, the only two Governors of Indian (subcontinent) descent are Southern and will be commemorating Civil War events.

The key aspects of Southern nostalgia are the resistance to commercial relations as the basis for civil society, cultural cohesiveness, the American dislike of control by a distant and hostile capital coupled with the martial pugnacity of the underdog.  The Confederacy stands, among these folks, as a place where their views on criminal justice, God, family and country would be respected.  It has cultural resonance quite apart from the actual Confederate Constitution which nobody reads or cares about.

This song – I’m taking this from the Democratic Underground of all places --  was very popular in the 80’s.   A YouTube video captures the full flavor here.   The key aspects of southerness have to do with criminal justice, music, and food according to Hank Williams, Jr.

Canada and Europe have, to American eyes, an inordinately deep memory of World War I.  The South has one of the Civil War for similar reasons.  The loss of life was incredible.  The ability of the South to keep fighting is a marvel.  It is a source of pride and rightly so.  I write but a two minute walk from the first casualty of the war.  The Virginian militia rushed to colors here in Fairfax feeling under attack.  Their captain died in the first hours of that long war.

You cannot live and travel around the South for any length of time without being stunned by the number of battlefields it contains.  Last week, I visited clients at Manassas (First, Second and Third).  As I drove to North Carolina on another trip I passed the Stonewall Jackson shrine (holds only his arm shot off at Chancellorsville); the Capitol of the Confederacy in Richmond, including Petersburg.  As I entered North Carolina, the welcome sign stated “America’s Most Military Friendly State.”  You won’t see that in New York even during Fleet Week.  The agricultural heritage of the South coupled with a battlefield seemingly near every farm shapes the culture.  As late as the 1950’s many farms were powered by men and mules.  In fact, the South’s choice of mules (a stubborn animal) was commented on by such historians of the South as Eugene Genovese in a theory debunked here.  When Al Gore boasted he learned how to plow a field with a mule from his father he was not lying.  In that time and place a lot of votes could be garnered by a man who could plow a straight row with a mule.

The homogenization of Northern Virginia is bemoaned by a lot of people -- black and white -- who have been here since birth.  I was sworn into the Virginia bar on Robert E. Lee’s birthday.  The Confederacy performs three tasks.  First, it is shorthand for the will of the South to resist homogenization.  Second, the very fact that Lee and Jackson and the other southern myrmidons are still lionized in and of itself shows resistance to that homogenization.  Third, it is part of the martial heritage which the United States retains and prevents it from sliding into the pacificism and surrender of so many other Western nations.

The most popular southernism revolves around the Stars and Bars and not the “Bonnie Blue Flag.”  It is not the flag of the Confederacy that is waved but the battle flag.  Jefferson Davis may be big this year, but usually it is Robert E. Lee and soldiers who are remembered.  And that is because the ground from one end of the South to the other is soaked with the blood of those who fought for her.

I agree with U.S. Grant as David quotes him on the cause being unworthy of a great nation.  I also think that a state formed on secession and slavery is based on such a stupid principle it would have died shortly afterward but the fact that it was put to the sword means no one ever had to find out.  Instead, the South has the Army of Northern Virginia led by Robert E. Lee that will be a legend wherever American men still fight.  It has the naval firsts of the Hunley and the Merrimack.  It has the General and the Shenandoah.  It has Stonewall’s Valley campaign.  You can’t kill a legend.   William Faulkner explained the feeling in Intruder in the Dust.

For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two oclock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it's all in the balance, it hasn't happened yet, it hasn't even begun yet, it not only hasn't begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armstead and Wilcox look grave yet it's going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn't need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago....

The current Democratic Senator from Virginia and Obama supporter, is a well-known advocate of this view.  I have always disagreed with the Webb-Calhoun position on state sovereignty and agree with the Hamilton-Lincoln position but it was a competing vision of the country from the beginning that, because of slavery, was going to have to be settled by arms.

It is this armed resistance against mighty industrial odds that is the essence of Confederate nostalgia, such as it still is.  Whether it be in songs or reenactments,   or political sloganeering (Southern by the Grace of God!) the forlorn fight of an outnumbered people echoes through the ages.  The band Alabama noted the poverty of the South, its conservatism, and the fact that love of it did not mean everyone was pining for segregation. (“Ain’t nobody look’n back agin.”)

In fact, at the Lincoln centennial, shortly after the turn of the last century a friend of his had to correct the record on a (Frumian?) claim that playing Dixie at his centennial was treasonous.  Just as that tune was captured by Northern armies so was the rest of the memorabilia of the Confederacy.  Its heritage, purged by the civil rights era, should belong to us all.  There is an incongruity to moderns being more hostile to the Confederacy than the men who actually bled against it.  Grant let them return to the farm and gave them their horses.  The Confederacy was recognized by international law as a belligerent.  This made early attempts to prosecute privateers as pirates problematic. While civil war veterans yet lived in the early twentieth century, the Union began returning captured battle flags to their regiments as did some states.  This was once one of the most popular American poems.  Governor Wilder, grandson of slaves, touched on this theme in his civil war proclamation.

While the South is less Confederate supporting than ever, some Northern opinion is more anti-Southern than ever.  Tony Horowitz, no conservative, but a Cracker Jack reporter covered a lot of this ground in the sometimes hilarious, often poignant Confederates in the Attic.  Virginia tends to do that to you.  The new South celebrates Robert E. Lee and Martin Luther King.  It would be lost without either.  A conservatism that spits on its ancestors is no conservatism at all.  From the Confederacy, the New South has fashioned a usable past, one that strengthens -- not weakens -- modern America.  Despite the assertion that the South clings to the Confederacy a noted news source reports that this year, as in the 146 years since the end of the “late unpleasantness” it again failed to rise.

Tweet