So Mississippi is celebrating Confederate History Month

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And Dave Neiwert has an excellent ongoing series of blog posts to celebrate in his own way.

Be a good history lesson in light of all of the lost cause apologists we seem to have here.

Speaking of which, where has Proud been?

Strange Fruit

Some of you may recall that today, April 1, is more than just April Fools Day -- it's also the first day of Confederate Heritage Month, as recently declared by Mississippi's governor.

Now, I know a lot of Southerners like Gov. Bryant would just as soon we mostly devoted our excursions in Confederate history and its lingering heritage to sipping mint juleps and treating ourselves to multiple viewings of Gone With the Wind and other similar renditions of history -- you know, the kind that promote the old

"Lost Cause" mythology and which has been widely adopted in the decades since the war by Confederate apologists who successfully revised the history of the Civil War. It's also worth noting that Mississippi rather pointedly does not celebrate Black History Month.

So it seems to me that we should indeed begin celebrating Confederate Heritage Month, broadly, as a national project, so that we can finally begin teaching all of our children, inside the South and out, its REAL heritage: the heritage of slavery and why it was maintained, the heritage of a treasonous Civil War fought not for abstractions such as "states rights" but truly for the maintenance of slavery, the heritage of night-riding Ku Klux Klansmen, of thousands of lynchings of black people, of Jim Crow rule, and public-institution segregration, and of the vicious, desperate and cruel campaign to maintain all of that during the Civil Rights struggle.

It was about slavery

It is one of the oldest, hoariest, and most reliable tropes wielded by defenders of the Confederacy: the Civil War wasn't about slavery, it was about "states rights." That's what they actually used to teach us in high school as part of our standard education.

It is a lie. All anyone has to do is go back and survey the original declarations of secession by the various Southern states -- as well as the many speeches on behalf of secession by various Confederacy advocates -- to get a clear understanding of what motivated them.

It was slavery. And white supremacy. And very little else.

That Peculiar Institution

While many defenders of the Confederacy are content to simply argue that the Civil War wasn't about slavery, it was about [insert historically inaccurate excuse here, i.e., "states rights," "foreign trade," "federal tyranny"], others try a different tack: Hey, slavery really wasn't so bad in reality -- thus, neo-Confederates Douglas Wilson's and Steve Wilkins' obscene attempt to make it out to be a benevolent institution. Wilson's and Wilkins' book Southern Slavery, As it Was is inordinately popular on the far right, especially among the home-schooling crowd.

As the SPLC explains, the book "selectively interprets slave narratives and rehashes pro-slavery arguments of the mid-nineteenth century to argue that the practice was benign, sanctioned by God and was used as a 'pretext' by Unionists to prosecute a war fought over the 'biblical meaning of constitutional government' in an effort to suppress Christianity."

Many others try to soft-pedal the memory of what slavery was about, even beyond the morally bankrupt concept of owning another human being. Slaves were well provided for, they say. And they love, as Bundy rather infamously did in 2014 in Nevada before a bunch of reporters, to suggest that their current impoverished state is actually worse than slavery.

All of which adds up to the obfuscation of the realities of slavery, and what it actually meant -- and why its devastating and toxic legacy remains with us today.

How Poor Whites Got Suckered

It's one of the great historic puzzles: How was it that poor Southern whites, who had the most to lose by seceding from the Union and declaring war against the North, came to agree to do such a thing?

The question survives today: How is that the white Southern working class, which has been rendered economically bereft by its deep embrace of conservatism, its rejection of unionism, and the cultural backwardness of which its citizens are aggressively proud, can continue to support a politics that makes their lives miserable?

Lyndon Baines Johnson knew the answer to that, according to Bill Moyers, who recalls that LBJ told him, in 1960: "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."

The First American War Criminals

War crimes are largely a 20th-century phenomenon, but there were some antecedents. Probably the first known war criminal was Peter Van Hagenbach, an overzealous knight bailiff who was put on trial for his tyrannical acts in 1474 by the Holy Roman Emperor and beheaded.

But the first American war criminals, most likely, were the Confederates who ran the prisoner-of-war camp in Andersonville, Georgia. They set a standard for misery that foreshadowed the greatest horrors of the 20th century.

'The River Was Dyed'

One of the cornerstones of Confederate mythology is the notion that Southerners were more "gallant" than their crude Yankee enemies, and thus more honorable fighters. Of course, we have already seen the limits of that gallantry in the horrifying mass war crime that was Andersonville.

Those limits were also on display at a notorious incident that in fact was an important precursor to Andersonville -- namely, the Battle of Fort Pillow. The most observable limit there was that if the Confederates indeed had any reserves of human decency and gallantry, they simply did not exist at all in their treatment of black people.

Because the Confederates -- led by none other than Nathan Bedford Forrest himself, the later founder of the Ku Klux Klan -- simply ignored the ordinary laws of war by massacring nearly every black soldier they found in the garrison.

War By Other Means

Officially, the Civil War is considered to have ended on April 9, 1865, when Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at the Appomattox Court House. However, the truth is that it really only ceased being a war of battlefields and armies, and in short order shifted into another phase -- one of war waged by terrorist violence.

That war -- call it the War of Reconstruction -- was won decisively by the South.

Lee's was only the largest of the Confederacy's scattered armies, and it was several more weeks, and at least one more battle (Palmito Ranch), before the rest of the armies joined in the surrender and the fighting ceased. Even then, the bloodshed was slow to stop, as marauders and other violence-prone remnants of the war committed random acts of murder and robbery around the countryside.

But it was the Ku Klux Klan -- whose name, ostensibly, was an adaptation of the Greek word Kuklos, for "circle," suggesting a closed family by adding "clan" -- that came to represent the new war that Southerners intended to wage, now that their "gallant" army had failed to defend the institutions of slavery and white supremacism, as promised. It was a war by other means -- assassination, lynching, targeted violence, mass terrorism -- and it proved to be very effective indeed.

Carpetbaggers, Scalawags, and the Liars Who Named Them

The Confederacy and its murderous offspring, the Civil War, produced a lot of phrases that remain with us even today. Terms like "carpetbagger" -- which today is the dismissive phrase for any opportunistic outsider who exploits local misfortunes for the personal benefit -- and "scalawag" (which we think of as just a nogoodnik) came out of the South during Reconstruction. And they were both used to disguise the ill intent of the violent racial terrorists who seized control of the South during this period.

I'll update as he releases more.

[AURaptor 1,137]

Feel better now?

[AUDub 11,426]

That you've graced my thread with your presence? Loads.

[AURaptor 1,137]

WDE !

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Another post is up.

Crying "Bloody Shirt"

There's another well-used phrase that has its origins in the Reconstruction period, like "carpetbagger" and "scalawag" -- and like them, devised for the purpose of obfuscating the campaign of eliminationist violence that white Southerners unleashed on freed blacks and the whites who sought to help them.

"Waving the bloody shirt":

"the demagogic practice of politicians referencing the blood of martyrs or heroes to inspire support or avoid criticism."

...In American history, it gained popularity with an incident in which Benjamin Franklin Butler of Massachusetts, when making a speech on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, allegedly held up the shirt of a carpetbagger whipped by the Ku Klux Klan.

Stephen Budiansky, as we noted in the previous installment, described in his amazing book The Bloody Shirt: Terror After the Civil War the fate that befell a white "carpetbagger" -- that is, an educator who had the temerity to attempt to organize schools for black children -- named Allen Huggins was brutally whipped within an inch of his life by the Ku Klux Klan.

[homersapien 11,812]

Won't read any of that in school texts.

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Won't read any of that in school texts.

Nope. Grade school history education sucks. I was taught all of that lost cause trash.

[japantiger 4,077]

Good for MS...last time I checked, they were still a sovereign entity and could celebrate pretty much anything they wanted to...in spite of this obscure blogger's POV.

[TitanTiger 20,708]

Good for MS...last time I checked, they were still a sovereign entity and could celebrate pretty much anything they wanted to...in spite of this obscure blogger's POV.

No one said they couldn't. Just pointing out the inanity of it.

[homersapien 11,812]

Good for MS...last time I checked, they were still a sovereign entity and could celebrate pretty much anything they wanted to...in spite of this obscure blogger's POV.

"POV" ???

[channonc 466]

Point of view.

[Mikey 16,781]

My father's side of the family was very prosperous before the war, with a large plantation in southeast Texas. In an oddity from those times, many of the plantation's ledgers and records from before and through the war years are still intact and also many letters sent to and from male family members that were off fighting. A cousin has the originals in her possession.

There is no doubt that their primary purpose in fighting was to maintain their slaves. This is plainly stated in a number of the letters. The plantation raised cotton, corn, rice, beef cattle, horses and...slaves. Every year-end balance sheet and inventory places the value of the 60-odd slaves behind the real estate but ahead of cattle and crops. There is a record of one transaction in which a working male slave was traded for 400 acres of good farm land.

So no, I never bought into the "states rights" idea. My own ancestors clearly stated that other difficulties, tariffs and so forth, could have been worked out. Slavery was the one issue that was not negotiable by either side.

Point of interest: They sunk every asset they had into winning that war, including the lives of some promising young men. In the end they had nothing left. By the time I came along we were working class people like everyone else. 12,000 acres of rich Texas farmland and all the rest was "Gone With The Wind". Two generations would pass before my father became the next family member to graduate from college.

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Thanks for sharing that, Mikey.

[homersapien 11,812]

Point of view.

I know what he meant.

I was questioning the implication it was subjective opinion instead of objective fact.

[TexasTiger 13,559]

My father's side of the family was very prosperous before the war, with a large plantation in southeast Texas. In an oddity from those times, many of the plantation's ledgers and records from before and through the war years are still intact and also many letters sent to and from male family members that were off fighting. A cousin has the originals in her possession.

There is no doubt that their primary purpose in fighting was to maintain their slaves. This is plainly stated in a number of the letters. The plantation raised cotton, corn, rice, beef cattle, horses and...slaves. Every year-end balance sheet and inventory places the value of the 60-odd slaves behind the real estate but ahead of cattle and crops. There is a record of one transaction in which a working male slave was traded for 400 acres of good farm land.

So no, I never bought into the "states rights" idea. My own ancestors clearly stated that other difficulties, tariffs and so forth, could have been worked out. Slavery was the one issue that was not negotiable by either side.

Point of interest: They sunk every asset they had into winning that war, including the lives of some promising young men. In the end they had nothing left. By the time I came along we were working class people like everyone else. 12,000 acres of rich Texas farmland and all the rest was "Gone With The Wind". Two generations would pass before my father became the next family member to graduate from college.

Insightful. Thanks for sharing.

[quietfan 233]

Point of view.

I know what he meant.

I was questioning the implication it was subjective opinion instead of objective fact.

http://www.cc.com/video-clips/63ite2/the-colbert-report-the-word---truthiness

[Mims44 1,958]

Won't read any of that in school texts.

Makes me wonder what schools you went to.

Or maybe it's just a matter of generations, late 90's to early 2000's the bigger of OPs points were covered.

[telling tiger 156]

State education officials have a tremendous influence and control over what textbooks and what some of us with brains would call prejudice over the content of inclusions in course content. No way in hell would we have ever let southern schools teach our children.

Not an indictment of teachers, an indictment of the indoctrination attempts by more fringe nut conservative states.

Texas is infamous for this BS, as just one example.

http://www.pbs.org/w...ok-changes/954/

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/11/17/texas-textbook-inaccuracies/19175311/

[channonc 466]

Point of view.

I know what he meant.

I was questioning the implication it was subjective opinion instead of objective fact.

Sorry Homer, I read your comment in the literal sense. My fault!

[aujeff11 6,243]

States rights and slavery do not have to be mutually exclusive. The federal government and states have battled it out many times on the "states rights" battleground ever since the founding. Slavery, segregation, Roe V Wade, etc are just a few of the cases where states dug deep to defend their beliefs. The slavery issue no different than Roe v Wade. Roe v Wade was an abortions issue; however, as long as the states continue to fight the federal government for state rights such as legalizing abortion restrictions and waiting lists, the whole case is a state rights fight as well. So no, technically, if somebody wants to proclaim the civil war was caused by states rights, they are not wrong and I'll never suggest otherwise.

Similarly, if somebody wants to suggest that WW1 was started by a single assassination, I won't claim the person wrong, as the assassination was clearly the SPARK at a time when war was already inevitable.

[maxwere 82]

<p>Historical op ed. Only time he goes back to original text is the NYT <img alt="" class="bbc_emoticon" src="http://www.aufamily.com/forums/public/style_emoticons/default/tongue.png" />. One guy you'll never hear mentioned in public school curriculum is Lysander Spooner.</p>

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/aDfWCX5O-oo" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

[homersapien 11,812]

Won't read any of that in school texts.

Makes me wonder what schools you went to.

Or maybe it's just a matter of generations, late 90's to early 2000's the bigger of OPs points were covered.

I went to school (K-12) in the 60s

[homersapien 11,812]

Point of view.

I know what he meant.

I was questioning the implication it was subjective opinion instead of objective fact.

Sorry Homer, I read your comment in the literal sense. My fault!

It was too subtle. The downside of brevity.

[channonc 466]

Point of view.

I know what he meant.

I was questioning the implication it was subjective opinion instead of objective fact.

Sorry Homer, I read your comment in the literal sense. My fault!

It was too subtle. The downside of brevity.

Normally I catch that sort of thing. But I missed this one.

Carry on!

[AUloggerhead 2,356]

Good for MS...last time I checked, they were still a sovereign entity and could celebrate pretty much anything they wanted to...in spite of this obscure blogger's POV.

I'm not sure if a full month is necessary but I suppose this falls under the category of "state's rights." More appropriate would be the observance of Confederate Memorial Day, April 26th, to commemorate the lives lost during the Civil War. Confederate Memorial Day led to the establishment of Memorial Day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederate_Memorial_Day